The Spring 2023 issue of Mosaic is now available in the Digital Library. For those with visual accessibility needs, an optimized, accessible PDF is also available on the same page.

In this issue, learn more about the many technologies and services available in the Digital Scholarship Lab, catch up with a Falvey Scholar, celebrate a milestone with Performance Studies, and hop in the wayback machine to see Villanova’s on-campus radio station though the decades.

Thanks to the many departments across the Library for sharing news, and special thanks to Distinctive Collections and Digital Engagement for hosting the digital version of the publication.

Announcing the 2023 Falvey Scholar Award Winners:

Olivia Hall

Title: “Integration of Design and Interdisciplinarity in Engineering Education: Development and Assessment”

Faculty Mentor(s): Deeksha Seth, PhD, College of Engineering

Madeline Scolio

Title: “Modeling the Relationship Between Surface and Air Temperature and Implications for Urban Sustainability and Well-Being in Philadelphia”

Faculty Mentor(s): Peleg Kremer, PhD, Samer Abboud, PhD, Kabindra Shakya, PhD, Yimin Zhang, PhD, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Zachary Boyer

Title: “Synthesis and Evaluation of the Structure Activity Relationships of Antibacterial Functionalized Dihydropyrimidine Derivatives”

Faculty Mentor: Matthew O’Reilly, PhD, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Rohan Biscuitwala & Thomas Haas (Joint Project)

Title: “Savor the Flavor: The Mediating Role of Emotions on the Relationship Between Flavor and Behavior”

Faculty Mentor: Aronte Bennett, PhD, Villanova School of Business

Grace Lundell

Title: “War, What is it Good For?: The Effect of Military Conflicts on Trust in the EU”

Faculty Mentor: Deborah Seligsohn, PhD and Ryan Weldzius, PhD, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Becca Jacobson

Title: “Identifying Factors that Promote or Inhibit Disability-Related Discussion in Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms”

Faculty Mentor: Christa Bialka, PhD, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bronwyn Mogck

Title: “Body and Soul in Medicine”

Faculty Mentor: Helena Tomko, PhD and Angela DiBenedetto, PhD, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Join us on Friday, April 28, at 10 a.m., in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner for the 2023 Falvey Scholars Research Presentation and Awards Ceremony. At the event, award recipients will give short presentations on the content and findings of the research involved in the writing of the thesis or in the creation of the project report. You can also view via livestream as well: https://vums-web.villanova.edu/Mediasite/Play/0b78a4f3822a4eebaecb01ad3fe85b941d

The Falvey Scholar award is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. It is a collaborative initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The winners of the Falvey Scholar award are selected from a pool of candidates that will be generated by applications submitted by a senior Villanova University student or a group of students working on a senior project together with the recommendation of the advisor to the senior thesis or capstone project completed for academic credit.

Digital copies of the winning papers are maintained in the Digital Library.

By Kallie Stahl

Attention faculty and Villanova seniors: Falvey Scholar Award nominations are now being accepted. The Falvey Scholar Awards are given each spring semester to individual or group projects of seniors who have completed exemplary (and publicly presentable) scholarship or research during their undergraduate careers at Villanova. The awards traditionally have an emphasis on work that has required substantial use of scholarly literature of the sort provided and supported by the library.

Villanova faculty:

• Faculty can nominate students until Sunday, March 26 at 11:59 p.m. by using the link provided on following page: http://library.villanova.edu/about/projects/falveyscholars/
• Once nominated, students will be asked to apply in order to be considered for the award by using a link on the same page. Faculty mentors who plan to nominate should encourage students to apply.
• Please consider nominating a student who exemplifies the awards criteria.

Villanova seniors:

• Villanova seniors, if you’d like to be considered for the Falvey Scholar award urge your faculty mentor to nominate you by forwarding them the nomination link provided on following page: http://library.villanova.edu/about/projects/falveyscholars/
• Students MUST be nominated by a faculty mentor before applying in order to be considered for the award.
• The deadline for faculty nominations is Sunday, March 26 at 11:59 p.m. The deadline for student applications is Sunday, April 2 at 11:59 p.m.

The Falvey Scholar award is an annual program established by Falvey Memorial Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony on Friday, April 28, at 10 a.m., that will include presentations by the award recipients on the content and findings of the research involved in the writing of the thesis or creation of the project report.

Digital copies of the winning papers are maintained in Falvey’s Digital Library. If you have questions, please contact: libraryevents@villanova.edu

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff and faculty.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the last of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholar Summary

Mai Khuc ’22 COE

• Project Title: “Cost Estimation Tools for Data Center Two-Phase Cooling with Vapor Recompression-based Heat Recovery”
• Faculty Mentor: Aaron Wemhoff, PhD, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
• Hometown: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Other Honors: Selected for Big East Poster Competition, Academic Excellence Award for the College of Engineering, Tau Beta Pi, Pi Tau Sigma, National Grand Challenge Scholar Program

Describe your research in your own words.
Data centers consume approximately 2% of all U.S. electricity, so efficiency improvements can yield large financial and environmental benefits.

I started out by learning about data centers, their operations, and their energy usage. I have never had a chance to learn about air conditioning systems in my engineering class before, thus Falvey Library was a great resource for me to get started.

After modeling the heat recovery system in Aspen Plus simulation software, I once again relied on the Library to learn about financial terminology, such as capital cost as well as payback period and how to calculate them. I also looked up different case studies to compare my analysis with other researchers’ work. After getting my capital cost and payback period, I used different sustainability metrics to evaluate these systems’ performance from an environmental perspective.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research?
The resources from Falvey Library have helped me tremendously throughout my career at Villanova, especially over this project where I tried to estimate the capital cost of a data center energy recovery system.

The online library has a wide variety of both physical and electronic books, journal articles, and conference papers for me to learn more about data centers, their energy consumption, as well as different heat recovery options. My project also has environmental and business aspects, such as sustainability metrics and capital cost estimation, thus many large databases in different fields that Falvey has have allowed me to access the top-quality papers in multiple disciplines.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?
Those resources could not have been used to their full potential if not thanks to the most friendly and supportive librarians that I met. I was fortunate enough to meet Alfred Fry, Science and Engineering Librarian, during my first semester at Villanova when he came to two of my classes to teach us how to most effectively utilize Falvey’s resources.

Those tips that Alfred has taught us have been extremely helpful for me, especially for this research since I was looking for a very niche field. I have also had the opportunity to work with both Alfred and Linda Hauck, Business Librarian, personally, and while our meeting was not directly related to this research, I have learned a lot from their guidance during these sessions and applied it to my project, specifically their advice on how to properly use engineering and economics resources.

What’s next for you?
I am now working as an Energy Engineer in the Albany, N.Y., office of Ramboll, an engineering consulting firm based in Denmark. While I won’t be working directly with data centers, it is still working to use energy most efficiently.

Erica Mallon ’22 CLAS, 2022 Falvey Scholar (Photo by Andrew McKeough)

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the sixth of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholar Summary

Erica Mallon ’22 CLAS

Project Title: “Dsk2 interacts with polyubiquitinated substrates to reciprocally induce sedimentation”

Faculty Mentor: Daniel Kraut, PhD, Associate Professor, Chemistry

Hometown: Madison, Conn.

Other Honors: Alpha Epsilon Delta Health Pre-Professional Honors Society; Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society

Describe your research in your own words.

My research concerns the role of the Dsk2 shuttle protein in proteasomal degradation as well as interactions between Dsk2 and polyubiquitinated proteins, which reciprocally induce sedimentation. The purpose of my research is to provide further understanding of the role of Dsk2 in the cell. The proteasome is the major molecular machine in the cell responsible for protein degradation. Shuttle proteins are important but not necessary for protein degradation to occur: they help to escort polyubiquitinated target substrates to the proteasome to be degraded, and it appears that the role of the shuttle proteins can change dynamically under differing cell conditions.

The first goal of my research was to ascertain the importance of shuttle proteins on the unfolding ability (the rate and efficiency of protein degradation) of the proteasome by removing and subsequently adding back in the shuttle proteins to the assay conditions. I found that removing Dsk2 from the proteasome resulted in decreased efficiency of degradation for mixed K48/K63-linked substrates, and adding back in purified Dsk2 could restore the efficiency. Additionally, while conducting this research, I found that the Dsk2 shuttle protein actually induced aggregation of polyubiquitinated proteins and caused them to come out of solution.

After further investigation, I found that Dsk2 and polyubiquitinated proteins reciprocally induce sedimentation, and sedimentation levels are dependent on the substrate’s ubiquitin chain. Additionally, Dsk2 can undergo liquid-liquid phase separation, which is enhanced by polyubiquitinated substrates.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?

During my freshman year’s Research Methods course, we attended workshops in the Library, during which the Library staff taught our class how to use Falvey’s resources, such as the databases and citation tools, in order to conduct background research for a class assignment.

Learning how to navigate the Library’s online resources was very helpful in many of my future classes when I have needed to conduct research and acquire reputable journal articles. I used the knowledge all throughout my college career, especially while writing my thesis and conducting background research for my current research. The staff was very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable, and their guidance has been extremely useful to me for this project and my overall academic experience at Villanova.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research?

The Falvey Memorial Library resources were an integral component of my research for my thesis. The databases tool was one which I frequently used to browse articles while writing the introduction of my thesis.

For example, ScienceDirect (Elsevier) and PubMed were two databases which I frequently explored when looking into background information about the proteasome and shuttle proteins. I was also able to use the “Search Everything” tool for general background articles and Zotero as a citation tool for all of my research.

Finally, the Library building itself was my main working location when writing and creating figures for my thesis. As one of the best spaces for quiet study on campus, Falvey’s individual study desks on the 3^rd floor were ideal for when I needed to get a lot of work done on my thesis.

What’s next for you?

I will be doing a year of service with AmeriCorps next year as a way of giving back to the community, and then I hope to attend dental school.

Will you continue this research direction?

This summer, I returned to my research lab and continued working on my project before handing it off to a new lab member.

Alec Henderson ’22 CLAS, 2022 Falvey Scholar (Photo by Andrew McKeough)

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the fifth of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholar Summary

Alec Henderson ’22 CLAS

Project Title: “Mapping Habitat Suitability of the American Chestnut in Pennsylvania: Can we Restore this Foundational Tree to our Forests?”

Faculty Mentor: Jennifer Santoro, Visiting Instructor, and Peleg Kremer, PhD, Assistant Professor

Hometown: Havertown, Pa.

Other Honors: Villanova Presidential Scholarship, Gamma Theta Upsilon, Phi Beta Kappa

Describe your research in your own words.

My project focused on trying to model where suitable American chestnut habitat is in Pennsylvania. The American chestnut tree was once a widespread and important tree in eastern hardwood forests but has been brought to near extinction by an invasive chestnut blight. There are ongoing field experiments to try to restore American chestnuts to the forest, but they need to better understand what environmental factors make up “good” American chestnut habitat. I compared known locations of surviving trees with a bunch of environmental factors to model where patches of suitable chestnut habitat are in Pennsylvania.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?

On top of their many resources, the Library has been a fantastic location to work on this project. A quiet environment surrounded by people that I knew could help if I ran into problems carrying out my research made writing this thesis a lot more doable.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research:

This project would not have been possible without Falvey’s access to a wide variety of databases and academic journals. This project required considerable literature review and background research. Because of Falvey’s resources, I never found a necessary paper I couldn’t access.

What’s next for you?

After graduation I flew up to Sitka, Alaska, to work as a wildlife interpreter intern at the Alaska Raptor Center for five months. I plan on heading to graduate school, but will take a year or two to work.

Will you continue this research direction?

American chestnuts will always be a part of my life after this project. I don’t know if I will continue doing chestnut research, but I will certainly keep in touch with the restoration status of this charismatic tree I have spent the past three years researching. I’m sure that I will continue to use the species distribution modeling techniques I used in this project in my future research and in graduate school. I have really enjoyed carrying out this modeling and am excited to apply it to different species in the future.

Nicole Garcia ’22 CLAS, 2022 Falvey Scholar (Photo by Andrew McKeough)

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff and faculty.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the third of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholars Summary

Nicole Garcia ’22 CLAS

• Project Title: “Metal-catalyzed synthesis of isoprene polymers with optimized isomer distribution” Catalyst for synthetic rubber formation
• Faculty Mentor: Deanna Zubris, PhD, Professor of Chemistry
• Hometown: Long Island, N.Y.
• Other Honors: Villanova Presidential Scholarship; O’Malley Scholarship (Chemistry Department); the G.N. Quam Medallion for Chemistry (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences); Villanova Undergraduate Research Fellowship; and the American Chemical Society Undergraduate Award in Inorganic Chemistry

Describe your research in your own words:
My research focuses on polyisoprene, which is the main component of natural rubber, and coming up with a sustainable, high efficiency way to synthesize it in the lab, due to a lack of natural rubber resources due to climate change and increased demand of medical personal protective equipment from the Covid-19 pandemic. I made 30 different polyisoprene samples using varying reaction conditions and analyzed the content of each sample to determine what properties synthetic rubber would have when being made using different temperatures, reaction times, and catalysts.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?
While this particular research project relied more heavily on Falvey’s databases, the Library staff have been so helpful to my academic career in general. I had the opportunity to learn about the databases we have access to as well as how to do scientific writing from a research librarian through a session as a part of the Chemistry Department’s Professional Development Seminar. The Library’s staff were also super helpful in previous research projects where I required articles that were not available at this Library, as they were able to get me access through Interlibrary Loan, something I would not have been able to achieve without the guidance of Falvey’s staff.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research?
I began my senior thesis with a literature review on what existing work had been done regarding synthetic polyisoprene. The Library databases were crucial for this step in two significant ways. First, SciFinder Scholar, which can be accessed through Falvey, is a search engine for scientific papers and patents. One of the key features is the ability to search by drawing a chemical structure. Additionally, the Library’s access to plenty of important chemistry journals, including American Chemical Society publications and Elsevier, allowed me to access existing knowledge on polymers as well as plan my own laboratory experiments using reported syntheses and characterization methods. Without this information that the Library resources gave me, I would not have been able to build my research project.

What’s next for you?
Next year, I will be working as a synthetic chemist for Johnson Matthey, a sustainable chemicals company, as a part of their graduate rotational program. This means I’ll have three eight-month rotations at different laboratories across the country and a potential year working abroad in the United Kingdom.

Will you continue this research direction or has it inspired you to new research interests?
While my specific work with polyisoprene is most likely drawing to a close, this research project will be passed down to a younger member of the Zubris research team. For me, this project as well as my previous research experience has led me towards the field of green chemistry, or creating more sustainable ways to produce chemicals and materials we use everyday. I will be conducting research in green chemistry at my job at Johnson Matthey and I know that all of the research skills and knowledge I have gained through this senior thesis project will serve me well moving forward into this new role.

Addison Drone ’22 VSB, 2022 Falvey Scholar (Photo by Andrew McKeough)

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff and faculty.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the third of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholars Summary

Addison Drone ’22 VSB

• Project Title: “50 Years of Sports Teams in Work Teams Research: Missed Opportunities and New Directions for Studying Team Processes”
• Faculty Mentor: Narda Quigley, PhD, Associate Professor of Management and Chair of the Department of Management and Operations, Villanova School of Business
• Hometown: Summit, N.J.
• Other Honors: Presidential Scholarship, Honors Program

Describe your research in your own words.
We conducted a literature review on sports teams studies over the last 50 years. We looked at what topics have been covered, what has not been covered, and how these outcomes/findings within sports samples can be applied to broader work teams.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?
I worked with the Library staff during both the research and within my academic career through my Competitive Effectiveness course. They made sure that I knew how to utilize the databases and helped me get started with research ideas.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research?
I utilized Falvey’s database library to conduct a thorough scan of the existing literature on the topic. Ultimately, we found over 250 applicable articles covering over 270 applicable studies.

What’s next for you?
Working postgrad at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, a Japanese investment bank, within New York City.

Will you continue this research direction or has it inspired you to new research interests?
While my professional career is within a finance field and not sports/management, this remains an interest that I will continue to foster as I enter my postgraduate career.

Christopher DiLullo ’22 CLAS, 2022 Falvey Scholar (Photo by Andrew McKeough)

The Falvey Scholars Program is an annual program established by Falvey Library to recognize outstanding undergraduate research. Now in its 20th year, the program is a collective initiative of the Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships. The recipients of this award are selected from a pool of candidates nominated by Villanova faculty and reviewed by Library staff and faculty.

This year, eight students received awards, their work reflecting the breadth and depth of undergraduate research at the University as well as the support the Library, its resources and staff, provide student-scholars.

This blog is the second of seven installments, which will introduce our scholars and cover their research in their own words. Look for additional coverage of the Falvey Scholars in the fall issue of Mosaic.

Congratulations to all of our Falvey Scholars, past and present!

Scholars Summary

Christopher DiLullo ’22 CLAS
Hometown: Farmington, Conn.
Other honors: 2022 CLAS Medallion Recipient, Department of Communication; Phi Beta Kappa; Lambda Pi Eta; and Sigma Delta Pi.

Project: “Media on Media: How Media Trade Publications View Streaming Services Compared With Legacy Media”

Faculty Mentor: Allyson Levin, PhD, Assistant Teaching Professor, Communication

Describe your research in your own words (as simply as possible):

My research was an examination of how the media industry has reacted to the evolution of the industry itself since streaming was introduced in 2007. This was performed through an analysis of the coverage of the media industry by media trade publications.

How did the Library’s staff impact your research and academic experience?

I worked with former Falvey Social Studies Librarian Deborah Bishov to develop a greater understanding of LexisNexis (now known as Nexis Uni), a resource I accessed through Falvey Library in order to collect all of the articles I used in my research.

How did Falvey’s resources and databases impact your research?

Falvey’s resources helped me immensely with the literature review portion of my research. Without Falvey’s subscriptions to various academic journals, I would not have been able to complete the comprehensive literature review that served as the foundation for my research. Furthermore, Falvey’s resource of LexisNexis is what helped me collect all of the articles included in my sample and overall population. LexisNexis made the article collection process of my research incredibly easy, and without using LexisNexis courtesy of Falvey, I would have spent countless more hours collecting each article included in my time frame individually from the trade publication websites themselves.

What’s next for you?

I have been admitted to a Master’s in Media Studies program at Syracuse University. However, I am still exploring options, and I hope to pursue a career in the media industry.

Will you continue this research direction or has it inspired you to new research interests?

I am interning at The Walt Disney Company for their Disney+ Content Programming team.

In the future, I would like to continue this research, although slightly changing the direction. I would love to analyze the evolution of the media industry through the eyes of the media-consuming public, potentially performing an analysis of content posted on social media to gauge this reaction. I would also love to analyze the programming developed by media companies since the introduction of streaming to understand how media channel programming has changed as a result of industry evolution.