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$500,000 Grant Will Equip Coastal Zone Management Program

As climate change makes storms stronger and sunny-day flooding more prevalent, educating the next generation of coastal zone managers becomes even more important.

������Ƶ created its graduate-level Coastal Zone Management program in 2020, and a $500,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in August 2023 will provide new resources to enhance research opportunities, said Peter Straub, professor of Biology and Coastal Zone Management.

“Coastal resilience is very important now with climate change,” Straub said. “The biggest concern on the shore is flooding. Besides storm floods, we are now getting a large number of flooding days per year that have nothing to do with storms. They are just high tides that have been reaching up because sea level is rising.”

Amanda Norvell, ������Ƶ’s dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, thanked NOAA and New Jersey Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez for their support through the Congressional Directed Spending program.

“In addition to allowing us to update critical technical equipment to advance research in areas such as mapping of offshore reefs and monitor coastal storm damage, these resources will also support educational outreach programs that we hope will inspire our local students to see how they can contribute to future solutions,” Norvell said.

The upgraded equipment will primarily go to support the master’s program, and the educational outreach will focus on creating a “pipeline into STEM” for K-12 students, Straub said.

“We want to catch kids early, get them excited about science and teach them a little bit about climate change and some of the things facing us,” Straub said.

He added that ������Ƶ wants to focus the outreach on local schools, like those in Atlantic City, and ones that serve underrepresented communities. 

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Hemp Growing Class Tries to Dispel Stigma of Cannabis

In the back of ������Ƶ’s 1.2-acre Sustainability Farm is a section some call “sin corner.”

Just a short distance from a row of 20-foot-tall hops vines and next to a line of tobacco plants is a 62-foot-long plot surrounded by a fence and a locked gate.

On the other side of the fence are something only a few universities in the country have cultivated outdoors -- hemp plants. In this case, about 150 of the plants are flourishing -- reaching heights of 10 feet or more.

“When it comes to universities, I would definitely say we stand out by doing what we are doing right now,” said Rob Mejia, a teaching specialist in ������Ƶ’s Cannabis Studies program.

Hemp is a botanical class of cannabis sativa grown specifically for industrial or medicinal use. The plants have little to almost no THC — the major psychoactive component of cannabis.

It was September 2023, and the second year ������Ƶ grew the plants. That year's crop is part of its Cannabis and Hemp Research Initiative (CHRIS), which was created in 2021 to conduct agricultural and nonmedical cannabis and hemp research. That fall was also the second time Valentina Fiero, a 2021 ������Ƶ graduate with a degree in Science and Environmental Science, had taught a class in hemp cultivation.

Her class visited the farm to walk among the plants, examine and feel the leaves, smell their sweet, fruity aroma and get a first-hand experience of what it takes to grow the plant.

“I had never seen a harvest like that. I didn’t even know that ������Ƶ had its own hemp farm,” said junior Alyssa Mims, from Mays Landing. “Going out there and registering what (Fiero) taught us and looking at it for myself, I think it was the best way to learn about the plants.”

Fiero also hopes the class and the outdoor hemp site can remove some of the stigma surrounding cannabis and promote that it can be grown more sustainably outside. Mejia said a frequent cannabis complaint is the plant’s odor, hindering opportunities to grow it outdoors. One of the hemp farm’s research components was the installation of sensors around the plants to measure the odor and compare it to other fragrant crops grown outdoors, such as garlic. Mejia said that some data was collected from that year, but more will need to be collected from the following year’s crop.

The crops in “sin corner” are for university research purposes only. The hemp is harvested, which includes drying and storing of the fiber material and the collection of seeds. The remaining parts of the plants are placed in the farm’s compost pile at the end of the growing season.

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N.J.’s First-in-Nation Holocaust Education Mandate Celebrated

Without a crucial meeting at ������Ƶ, the Holocaust and Genocide Education Mandate in New Jersey may not be in place today.

That’s according to Irvin Moreno-Rodriguez, the then-interim executive director of the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center. He was one of several people who spoke to an audience on April 15, 2024, at ������Ƶ’s Campus Center Event Room to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the mandate.

Moreno-Rodriguez said that early in the 1990s, members of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education met at ������Ƶ, and they weren’t convinced about advocating for the mandate that would require all K-12 public schools in the state to provide instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides.

“There was one member, Holocaust survivor Margit Feldman, who stood up at the meeting,” Moreno-Rodriguez said. “Margit told the members, ‘If you do not seek a Holocaust education mandate in New Jersey, you will be murdering my family twice.’”

The commission then voted unanimously to seek the legislation, which was eventually signed into law in 1994 by then Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman and Gov. Phil Murphy sent recorded messages praising the success of the mandate in educating New Jersey’s youth about the atrocities of the Holocaust and other genocides for the past three decades.

Moreno-Rodriguez, who is also a member of the state Commission on Holocaust Education that sponsored the event, reminded everyone that passing the mandate was not easy. There were several delays, including threats from the Turkish government and concerns from school administrators and educators, that almost railroaded the legislation.

But since it became the first of its kind in the country, the mandate has been an unquestioned success.

“The core mission of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education is to promote Holocaust and genocide education in the State of New Jersey for all students,” said Doug Cervi, the executive director of the commission and a 2002 ������Ƶ graduate. “As Elie Wiesel said, when you hear a witness you become a witness, which is why educating our students about the Holocaust and genocide is so important.”

������Ƶ has been one of its strongest supporters through its Holocaust Resource Center, led by former director Gail Rosenthal, who died last year, and continued by Moreno-Rodriguez. The center was one of the first to be hosted by a public college when it opened in 1990.

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20th Annual Symposium Celebrates Civil Rights, Social Justice

Following an emotional statue unveiling in Atlantic City, ������Ƶ continued paying tribute to civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer with the 20th annual Human & Civil Rights Symposium in the Performing Arts Center on Oct. 10, 2023.

The symposium included a performance of gospel songs by the ������Ƶ Freedom Singers, led by Beverly Vaughn, professor of Music; a video compilation of previous symposiums; poetry recitation by ������Ƶ faculty and a keynote address by California’s first Black Secretary of State, Shirley N. Weber.

Weber’s address emphasized how much Hamer and her legacy informs how she serves the people who elected her to office. Weber, a daughter of former sharecroppers in Arkansas, said that the people who most inspired her were the people who embodied Hamer’s hope for a better tomorrow.

“So often, I'm asked by so many people, ‘Who motivated you? Who was the person that you looked up to, and how did you become the highest-ranking Black woman in elected state office in California, one of the largest states in the Union? I give them famous names sometimes, but most of the time, I don't: I give them the names of people who helped me, folks that they would never meet who remind me of the Fannie Lou Hamers of the world. Folks who said to me, ‘Little girl, you’re going to be someone when you grow up,’ and they gave me a little gift in church on Sunday because they read about me in the newspaper. 

“Because I had a community that believed in me, folks like Fannie Lou Hamer who fought for us, all those kinds of things, put together somehow nullified all the negative things I had in my life.

"(Against) all the poverty, racism and discrimination, our family developed these buffers for us so that we grew up believing, in spite of what we had, that we could always be somebody.”

Voting rights and social justice were frequent topics at the symposium. The audience was encouraged to not only acknowledge the past but to use it as a source of inspiration during our current climate surrounding civic engagement.

“It is so marvelous that, in 2023, we are allowed to intermingle freely amongst one another, vote, hold high power positions in society, be educated and choose our own paths because there was once a point in time when these things were forbidden for African Americans. Although tremendous progress has been made toward human and civil rights, the fight is nowhere near done,” Vanessa Bauwah, president of the Unified Black Student Society, shared in her remarks.

“Because of leaders like Mrs. Hamer, we are able to utilize our rights as lawful citizens to vote for candidates that fight for social, economic and environmental policies that benefit our communities. I hope that, through the symposium, you will gain impactful knowledge and inspiration to become a catalyst of social change in your community, state and country.”

President Joe Bertolino emphasized how Hamer’s legacy on campus aligns with ������Ƶ’s mission of educating tomorrow’s future leaders.

“If we, as an institution, are going to deliver on that mission of valuing diversity and inclusivity, we must be proactive in promoting civil rights and social justice,” Bertolino said. “I have been privileged to be a social justice educator for almost 30 years, long before the term ‘social justice’ became a buzzword in the political sphere. To me, social justice can best be described as ensuring that we treat one another with dignity, respect, kindness, compassion and civility, and to do that, we must recognize that not all of us come from the same place, with the same experiences or from the same starting point.”

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Return of Coast Day Brings Lifelong Memories to Students

Juan Aponte admitted he’s “not an underwater kind of person.”

“What lurks under the water, it kind of frightens me,” said the Atlantic City High School senior.

But after seeing how a remotely operated submersible can take video of a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, his perspective might be changing.

Aponte and several of his classmates spent the morning of Oct. 20, 2023, at Coast Day, an event coordinated by Susanne Moskalski, associate professor of Marine Science, and held at the John F. Scarpa Academic Center. Students from Atlantic City and Egg Harbor Township high schools checked out a variety of displays and exhibitors focusing on the theme of coastal change, conservation and resilience. The students also listened to a lecture about sea level rise, had the opportunity to take part in a craft with shells and even learned how to cast a fishing rod.

“I’ve learned a lot of new things so far, about windmills, horseshoe crabs and the submersibles. They were really cool to see what it was like underwater,” Aponte said. “It’s been very fun to see new things and get out of the classroom and actually learn interesting things about what’s going on below the water.”

That’s exactly what Moskalski hoped would happen with the “public education and outreach event” that returned to ������Ƶ after a three-year hiatus due to COVID-19.

“In the Marine Science program, all of our professors have a particular research expertise. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we know,” she said. “We would like to not just keep that to ourselves. We want to be a good neighbor and make good relationships with Atlantic City to share what we know.”

“Using Coast Day to share that knowledge in a fun and interesting way is very important,” said Amanda Norvell, the dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. 

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Art Majors Work with Pros in Gallery’s Visiting Artist Program

Senior Visual Arts major Onyx Alamgir admitted she was a little intimidated at first.

She was one of about 40 ������Ƶ students given an opportunity to include their work as part of an exhibition with two professional artists in the University’s Art Gallery last March.

“I thought German artists, oh my, this is clearly more advanced,” said the Egg Harbor Township native. “But they were the most chill and sweetest artists to collaborate with.”

The visiting artist program was put together by Ryann Casey, the gallery’s exhibition coordinator, and Mariana Smith, an associate professor of Art and the chair of the Visual Arts major. The idea was to not only bring outside artists’ work to the gallery, but to also have the artists live near campus for an extended period and give students a sense of what it’s like to be a working, professional artist.

“For us, the visual arts are much more effective if you can get someone into the space and work with students hands-on,” Casey said. “We would like to do more programming like this every semester to make sure that students are having access to people outside of faculty and adjuncts.”

Smith mentioned that she knew artists Elizabeth Gerdeman and Michael Hahn, who are based in Lepizig, Germany, and that led to their latest exhibition “Dwell & Dusk: The Incredible in the Mundane” to be installed in ������Ƶ’s Art Gallery for the spring semester. Their work has a distinctive focus on the environment and climate change.

“Mariana knew that our work was very site-specific and how that would work with the idea of bringing artists on location and then working with students,” Gerdeman said. “We want to get the students more involved with their daily environments, both here at ������Ƶ, but also how that translates into their daily lives away from campus.”

The artists had been on campus for three weeks, lecturing in classes and holding workshops where they challenged the students to create original artwork that would be included in their exhibit.

Gerdeman helped the students create viewfinders, which are paper cutouts that are illustrated or painted on. They are then placed in an outside environment and photographed. The result is a striking synergy between the three forms of art.

Hahn worked with several students to create pollinating insect sculptures using found materials. After the exhibit closed, the sculptures had a new home in ������Ƶ’s Sustainability Farm.

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Faculty, Students Evaluate Grantmaking for Postpartum Equity

A group of ������Ƶ faculty and student researchers are working together with the NJ Birth Equity Funders Alliance (NJBEFA) to evaluate philanthropic grantmaking for postpartum equity.

This initiative was born from a previous project faculty members of the team worked on addressing research related to First Lady of New Jersey Tammy Murphy's Nurture NJ (NNJ) campaign, specifically the need for a maternal and infant health center in Trenton.

Once this work was completed, the NJBEFA wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of their grantmaking through additional ������Ƶ collaboration, resulting in grant funding for "Participatory Evaluation and Mutual Accountability for Equity in Postpartum Support" in the summer of 2023.

The team includes Betsy Erbaugh, associate professor of Sociology; Sreelekha Prakash, associate professor of Health Science; Alysia Mastrangelo, professor of Physical Therapy; and Christina Jackson, former associate professor of Sociology at ������Ƶ. Prakash brings a clinical, public health, and epidemiology background, while Mastrangelo has a physical therapy/women's health and community wellness background.

Both Prakash and Mastrangelo said they felt the best part of this initiative is working with community partners to improve health outcomes and expand on maternal and infant health equity research.

Student researchers include Emma Rodriguez and Damaris-Anne Spring, both Sociology majors, and TES and Social and Behavioral Sciences alumna Diana Madrid, who majored in Psychology. Madrid is currently a grad applicant in Social Work.

"I think this project is important because it has equipped me with valuable hands-on research and community engagement experience as we uplift the voices and stories of Black women in their efforts to combat the Black maternal and infant health crisis," Rodriguez shared.

Spring reflected on how this experience has impacted her on both a personal and professional level. “By joining the research team, I knew it would be a great start for my career path because I would acquire a deeper knowledge of the way race and gender play into how people are perceived, not only from a legal point of view but from a medical point of view as well,” she said.

When asked why this research is so important, Prakash said, "In New Jersey, health care access and minority health outcomes are not the best, even in such a diverse state, since there are many racial and financial disparities. Our work is important because it focuses on improving gaps and works toward better health outcomes with on-the-ground organizations, universities, health providers, philanthropy and state government."