Hats off to the faculty members who received teaching awards this year.

2020-2021 Founder’s Day Teaching Award
David Parnell, Associate Professor of History
 
2020-2021 Distinguished Research/Creative Activity Award
Jack Bloom, Professor of Sociology
 
2020 Distinguished Scholarship/Creative Activity Award
Dr. Tin-Chun Lin, Professor of Economics
 
2020-2021 Board of Trustees’ Teaching Awards
Olatunde Abiona, Associate Professor, Computer Information Systems
Natasha Brown, Assistant Professor, Communication Arts
Frances Daniel, Associate Professor of Psychology
Melynie Durham, Clinical Assistant Professor, Radiological Sciences
Eunjoo Kim, Clinical Assistant Professor of Special Education
Anja Matwijkiw, Professor of Philosophy
Margaret Pollak, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Xiaofeng Wang, Associate Professor of Mathematics
Alicia Wright, Senior Lecturer, Communication Arts

Cara Lewis earns IU Presidential Arts and Humanities funding

Congratulations to Cara Lewis, associate professor in the Department of English. Her proposal, submitted to the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Research, Creative Activity, and Scholarship of Teaching grant program, has been selected for funding in the amount of $37,000. The proposal was for Hindsight/Foresight: Visual Art and the Contemporary Novel after Critique. 

Academic Advising Counsel meets with Valparaiso University 

Recently, the Professional Development Committee of the Academic Advising Counsel for IU Northwest hosted a virtual Advising Exchange with counterpart colleagues at Valparaiso University. The purpose was to create a professional development experience to share best advising practices and create a partnership between local professional and faculty advisors. During the exchange, professional and faculty advisors discussed professional adjustments to COVID-19, university support for academic advising, best practices in advising, and professional development opportunities. The initiative was spearheaded by Kourtney Ross, Committee Chair and Director of Student Academic Advising and Success/Student Services Generalist.

The Advising Exchange part II is scheduled for Summer 2021. The ultimate goal is to create a regional advising conference and support the professional development of advising professional in Northwest Indiana. 

Brian O’Camb guest lectures to Italian graduate students

Brian O’Camb, chair and associate professor in the Department of English, was a recent guest lecture to Italian graduate students at the University of Bergamo. His lecture was titled, "Textual and Critical issues in the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry." The lecture was built on his continuing study of Old English literature and art. 

Accolades for Francine Birgans

Francine Birgans, adjunct faculty of the School of Business and Economics, was recently published in the Woman to Woman Magazine (April issue) in the Navigating Business section. She also recently received the Community Hero award with "The Counselor is in with Eric Harwell" for hosting free events to help small businesses improve and flourish. Additionally, Birgans is the new marketing chairperson with Diverse Women in Business Initiative, has a new radio show/podcast called, “Candid Conversations in Business with Francine Birgans,” and was a grant winner from First Financial Bank.

James Wallace earns his Ph.D.

Congratulations are in order for Director of Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs, James Wallace, who was awarded a Ph.D. in Urban Education Studies on May 15 from IUPUI. His dissertation was entitled “An Examination of the Bachelor’s Degree Experiences of African American Males Post-Incarceration.

Wallace is now a triple IU degree holder. He received his bachelor’s degree in general studies from IU Northwest in 2009 and his master’s degree in Library Sciences from IUPUI in 2011.

Anja Matwijkiw’s international presence

In March 2021, Anja Matwijkiw, professor of Professional Ethics & Human Rights for the Philosophy Program, and adjunct professor for the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, was asked to present at the inaugural Jean Monnet Module, an EU-Western Balkans Cooperation on Justice and Home Affairs.

She, along with a professor from the University of Salerno (Italy), were the keynote speakers for a session focused on Protection of Fundamental Human Rights: Philosophical Stakeholder Remarks [About Values]. As a result of Matwijkiw’s presentation, the organizers have asked her to contribute to a book. She is also a partner in the EU-Western Balkans Cooperation and will be collaborating with a number of individuals at University of Salerno.

Matwijkiw’s current collaborative projects include her affiliation with several universities in South America. Currently, she is the Chair for the U.S. Working Group on Foreign Policy for the Research Program on Corruption Associated with Transnational Organized Crime. She was invited by Professor Hector Olasolo of the University of El Rosario (Columbia). Matwijkiw submitted her first report in May for Research Program 70593. This took the form of a proposal for a joint research study.

Jack Bloom, expert witness for the World Heritage Fund

In 2020, Jack Bloom, professor of Sociology, adjunct professor of Minority Studies, and adjunct professor of History, was invited to be an expert witness for the World Heritage Fund, which is a division of UNESCO, concerning the question of whether the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland should be designated a World Heritage Site. This request was a result of Bloom’s book, Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution: Solidarity and the Struggle Against Communism in Poland. 

In addition, Bloom was also invited by a group in Poland to record a lecture on racism in the United States, as part of a series focused on right-wing movements in the world. This opportunity came to Bloom as a result of his book, Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement. This book, which has sold more than 11,000 copies, won second prize of the C. Wright Mills Award, and received an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Publications by Axel Schulze-Halberg

Recent publications by Axel Schulze-Halberg, professor of Mathematics and adjunct professor of Physics, from 2020 and 2021:

• Schulze-Halberg, Closed-form representations of iterated Darboux transformations for the massless Dirac equation, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 36 (2021), 2150064
• Schulze-Halberg and A. Ishkhanyan, Inverse-root and inverse-root-exponential potentials: Darboux transformations and elementary Darboux partners, Phys. Scr. 96 (2021), 025206
• Schulze-Halberg, Higher-order Darboux transformations for the Dirac equation with position-dependent mass at nonvanishing energy, Eur. Phys. J. Plus 135 (2020), 863
• Schulze-Halberg, Generalized Schrödinger equations with quadratical energy-dependence in the potential: Darboux transformations and application to the Heun class, J. Math. Phys. 61 (2020), 083502
• Schulze-Halberg and A. Ishkhanyan, Darboux partners of Heun-class potentials for the two-dimensional massless Dirac equation, Ann. Phys. 421 (2020), 168273
• Schulze-Halberg and A. Ishkhanyan, Exactly-Solvable Quantum Systems in Terms of Lambert-W Functions, Few-Body Syst. 61 (2020), 12
• Schulze-Halberg, Higher-order Darboux transformations and Wronskian representations for Schrödinger equations with quadratically energy-dependent potentials, J. Math. Phys. 61 (2020), 023503
• Schulze-Halberg, Arbitrary-order Darboux transformations for two-dimensional Dirac equations with position-dependent mass, Eur. Phys. J. Plus 135 (2020), 332
• Schulze-Halberg and M. Paskash, Wronskian representation of second-order Darboux transformations for Schrödinger equations with quadratically energy-dependent potentials, Phys. Scr. 95 (2020), 015001

Publications by Iztok Hozo

In 2020 and 2021, Iztok Hozo, professor of Mathematics, published five articles (with various co-authors) in peer-reviewed scientific journals:

• “Evaluation of omics-based strategies for the management of advanced lung cancer”: JCO Oncology Practice
• “Evaluation of the US governors’ decision when to issue stay-at-home orders”: Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice"
• Meta-Analysis of mutual information applied in EBM diagnostics”: Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice
• “When are randomized trials unnecessary? A signal detection theory approach to approving new treatments based on non-randomized studies.”: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
• “Certainty of evidence and intervention's benefits & harms are key determinants of guidelines’ recommendations.”: Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice

Interestingly, the article “Estimating the mean and variance from the median, range, and the size of a sample” published in 2005, written with co-author Stela Pudar-Hozo and published in peer-reviewed BMC Medical Research Methodology is approaching 5,000 citations.