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Research Looks to Examine Police-Community Relations

Police-community relations remain at the forefront of important discussions, news headlines and research. ������Ƶ has partnered with local police departments through a U.S. Department of Justice $702,956 grant, and data is now being collected to examine and raise awareness about this topic. 

The EPJETS project (Enhancing Procedural-Justness of Encounters Through Substantiation) is an initiative with the University and the Atlantic City and Pleasantville police departments that will assess whether releasing body-worn camera footage of police-citizen interactions, using procedural justice script, and providing citizens with evidence of why agencies conduct traffic stops at certain locations (identified through Risk-Terrain Modeling) improve police-community relations and affect citizens' attitudes toward police.

The data started being collected in October 2022, and since then, there have been a total of 250 random traffic stops. 

"What is unique about this program is we are sharing the interaction footage with the people who are stopped," said ������Ƶ Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Nusret Sahin, the lead investigator on the project.

Stopped drivers are given a code, and through customized software for this project, they can then view their interaction with the officer that pulled them over.

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������Ƶ Biology Professor ‘Inspired’ to Create Music Album

You might think it’s a little unusual for a scientist to also be a singer/songwriter.

But for ������Ƶ Biology Professor Matthew Bonnan the two professions don’t seem that far apart.

“I enjoy being inspired by art,” the Hammonton resident said. “Art is just as important as science because it’s all part of what makes us human, and it’s all part of what draws us together.”

That sense of togetherness is one of the goals that Bonnan is trying to achieve with the release of his new album of 12 original songs titled “Once Upon Deep Time.” Bonnan has used his primary field of paleontology to tell a story through music about how sound connects us to the past.

“There is some science content in there, but it’s not supposed to be a K-12 lesson,” he said. “It’s supposed to get people to stop for a moment and go, ‘I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.’ Maybe that encourages some people to look into things further.”

The lyrics of the first single, “Dinosaur Songs,” mention how birds are actually living dinosaurs that have unique anatomy features like a wishbone that appear nowhere else except in birds and dinosaur fossils, Bonnan said.

The sounds those birds make are a reminder of the ties to dinosaurs in our past. And that theme of connectivity is intertwined in each of the 12 songs. Bonnan said all the songs focus on the evolution of hearing “because well, you hear music.” And the album is a way to put music out in the world for everybody to hear and “spread this message of community,” he said.

“As a scientist, I’m trying to do my part to remind people that we have a lot more in common than we don’t, and that it’s kind of magical when you look around and realize that every living thing you have a common ancestor with,” Bonnan said.

Bonnan reached out to ������Ƶ Physics Professor Neil Aaronson, who maintains the ������Ƶ Acoustics Lab and is the music director of the student a capella singing group.

“I wanted to involve students who aren’t your typical STEM students. I’m already reaching them,” Bonnan said. “This was a way to reach students in other disciplines like the arts.”

In addition to getting music students involved, Bonnan teamed up with Professor of Art Michael McGarvey’s “Design for Community Partners” class to create animation videos for the music.

Videos for a few of Bonnan’s songs are already posted on his .

“It’s just a whole different perspective, a whole other way to engage students and talk about things,” Bonnan said of his music. “I know this is going to come back in really good ways into my classes when I start teaching again.”

������Ƶ Dives into Prohibition History with National Geographic

Stephen Nagiewicz, an adjunct instructor of Marine Science at ������Ƶ, tucked a sketch of a shipwreck between the pages of a logbook for safe keeping. He knew the amber flasks poking up like gravestones on the seafloor were all that remained of a story worth telling, but how the details would be uncovered was still a mystery. 

Thirty-five years later, he got a phone call that would end up deploying multibeam sonar, an ROV, divers, a film crew with cameras in the air and sea, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to reconstruct the ship and its secret role in prohibition for a season 6 episode of National Geographic’s docuseries “Drain the Oceans.”

Mallinson Sadler Productions, based in England and Scotland, was looking for marine archaeology experts who could take them to a shipwreck with ties to illegal smuggling of alcohol. James Delgado, a maritime archaeologist known for his investigations of the Titanic, Monitor, Arizona, Conestoga and more than 100 other wrecks, pointed them in the direction of Atlantic City and gave them his colleague Nagiewicz’s name.

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Galantino’s Fulbright Work Focuses on Cancer Rehabilitation 

Mary Lou Galantino, distinguished professor of Physical Therapy, finds a purpose and passion in global health. Through Fulbright Scholar opportunities, she has found a way to make an impact on a large scale in countries that need it greatly. 

"If I imagine a meaningful legacy … well, helping communities create change within the scope of Fulbright opportunities - that rounds out my entire career as an academic, researcher and clinician. And a human being, actually," Galantino said. 

Becoming a Fulbright Scholar is a competitive process. The first step is applying and sharing specific expertise and skills to share with people in other regions of the world. If selected, the candidate is placed on a roster for a 5-year duration and shared globally. Then the country has to select you, and it is a joint appointment by the U.S. government and the host country.  

Galantino was selected as a Fulbright Scholar during 2013-2018, leading her to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, twice, where she holds a visiting professor appointment. Her first project focused on HIV research and curriculum evaluation and development, but from this experience emerged findings of other curricular and clinical areas that needed to be assessed and upscaled. She also delivers various lectures in the Master of Science in Pain graduate program and consults on various research at the university.

"One area was interprofessional education - which the School of Therapeutic Sciences has implemented as a result of the training I provided in 2014 and 2017," Galantino said. "They now have an integrated full interprofessional engagement, simulation and engaged projects as part of their physical therapy bachelor's degree program alongside other health professions across the university and medical school. While Wits does not have a DPT program as we do in the United States, much deliberation revealed the need for boots on the ground in the rural areas and throughout South Africa."

"The rural areas of South Africa are where the students grow the most because they have to venture into unchartered territory and critically think how they will achieve rehabilitation goals with various indigenous cultures- With just their hands through manual therapy and few equipment resources," she remarked. 

In 2019 she submitted a second application, but the pandemic precluded her from visiting in 2020 when accepted. This past September, she traveled back to the university for a second Fulbright Scholar round which focuses on threading cancer rehabilitation throughout undergraduate curricula and developing foundational course training for clinicians. In addition, conducting research in palliative care was part of her conversation with key oncologists, physicians and rehabilitation specialists.

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Research Explores Maternal Mortality Gap between Black and White Women

Black women in New Jersey experience seven times the rate of pregnancy-associated death compared to their white counterparts. Additionally, Black women experience 3.5 times the rate of infant death compared to white women. These troubling statistics are ones that Associate Professors of Sociology Christina Jackson and Betsy Erbaugh began addressing in research related to First Lady of New Jersey Tammy Murphy's Nurture NJ campaign, specifically the need for a maternal and infant health center in Trenton.

Partnering with ������Ƶ and Kean University's Watson Institute, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) administered a grant in spring 2022 to conduct a landscape analysis and collect data from Black women and other women of color about their vision for the center and reproductive journeys in Trenton.

Erbaugh and Jackson, serving as project PIs, have conducted community-engaged research across New Jersey, particularly in Vineland, Atlantic City and Atlantic County, over the last 7-10 years. The Sociology and Anthropology program is known for conducting similar, collaborative work. Sreelekha Prakash, assistant professor of Health Science, and Alysia Mastrangelo, professor of Physical Therapy, have also been tremendous assets to the project, contributing their proficiency in health science research.