Rohit Agarwal (Business) published the article “An investigation into the relationship between Covered Call ETF and Investor Attention” in the May 2025 Journal of International Finance and Economics. He also presented research papers at the IABE Conference in San Diego in June at the SC Upstate Research Symposium in April. He received a Scholarly Start-Up award from USC Upstate.
John Barnett (Library)has been appointed the new editor of The Southeastern Librarian, the official publication of the Southeastern Library Association.
Chris Bender (Chemistry) presented a poster co-authored with Stephen Bismarck titled “Addressing Unanticipated Barriers to STEM Teacher Preparation Through Curricular Innovation” at the 2025 Noyce Summit in Washington, D.C., in July.
Matt Brisebois (Exercise Science) gave a presentation and served on a panel at the 2025 American Orthotic & Prosthetic Association National Assembly in Orlando, Florida, in September. His presentation focused on exercise recommendations and modifications for amputees and prosthetics users. He also presented at the American College of Sports Medicine Conference in May in Atlanta, Georgia, on microRNA responses to serial and integrated concurrent exercise.
Logan Camp-Spivey, Ryan Crawford and Monique Jones (Nursing) presented the poster “Simulation-driven CPR training: An innovative approach to AHA BLS certification during a nursing summer teen academy” at the 2025 South Carolina Nursing Education Simulation Alliance Conference.
Virginia Cononie (Library) is participating in and representing USC Upstate in Leadership Greer class of 2025.
Mahesh Dawadi (Physical Chemistry) and two of his students presented their research “Temperature Effect on Keto-Enol Tautomerization of Curcumin in Binary Solvent and its Application in Fabric Dyeing” at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in June.
Shirleatha Dunlap and Felicia Jenkins (Nursing) co-presented “Hope and Empowerment Transformation: Changes in our Nursing Program from HRSA Nursing Workforce Diversity (NWD) Support” at the American Association Colleges of Nursing Health Resources Service Administration Summit in June.
Lindsay Grainger (Nursing) authored the article “Improving Dementia Symptoms Through Personalized Music” which will appear in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Gerontological Nursing. She also presented her research on dementia and music at the 13th World Congress on Nursing & Health Care in Paris, France.
Leigh Hall (Communication) presented “How Can Faculty Use OER Materials to Tailor Online Courses to the Needs of Students?” at The Teaching Professor Conference in Washington this past June.
Charles Harrington (IDS) published the article “Artificial Intelligence and Native-Owned Business: Innovation, Sovereignty, and Sustainability” in the September 2025 issue of the International Journal of Business & Management Studies. He also co-authored the article “Social Innovation, Transformation Management, and Adaptive Leadership” in the June 2025 issue.
Araceli Hernández-Laroche (Modern Languages) was recognized in July by the PMLA for co-authoring the paper of the month entitled, “The Theories and Methodologies of Public Humanities.” She also published the paper “National Hispanic Heritage Month” in the open-access Cambridge University Press Public Humanities Journal.
Tina Herzberg (Education) co-authored the article “A Survey of Teachers of Students With Visual Impairments to Explore Experiences of Students With Visual Impairments in High School Mathematics Classes” in the July-August issue of the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness. She also presented three sessions, including one entitled “Understanding How Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments Learn and Teach Image Descriptions: A Study of Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Implementation” at the Tactile Reading Conference in Amsterdam in early June.
Lisa Johnson (Women’s & Gender Studies) gave an opening keynote lecture in June at an international conference on Critical Neurodiversity Studies hosted by the Institute of Medical Humanities at Durham University in England. Her talk explored new ways of understanding representations of borderline personality disorder in Adrian Lyne’s 1987 film “Fatal Attraction” from a neuroqueer feminist perspective.
Polinho Katina (Advanced Manufacturing) edited two textbooks on AI: “Humans and Generative AL: Tools for Collaborative Intelligence” and “Convergence of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Generative AI.”
Alex Lorenz (German) published the article “Confronting the crisis in German Studies with German as a technical language” in the “Handbook of German as a Technical and Foreign Language.” He also was a guest speaker at the Global Student Mobility Conference 2025 in Penang, Malaysia. His topic was “Current Trends in International Student Mobility to the United States and Pathways for Comprehensive Universities to Attract International Students.”
Jodie Martin (Child Advocacy Studies) led the Child Protection Training Center’s first series of in-person, full-day community trainings. The sessions offered professionals practical and experiential learning opportunities to strengthen their ability to support children and families.
Benjamin McCraw (Philosophy) published the book “Internalist Virtue Epistemology: A Stoic Model.” In June 2025, he was appointed as research associate with the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kristi Miller (Nursing) is a co-author of the article “Policy Recommendations to Address the Nurse Educator Shortage: Nominal Group Technique” in the July 2025 edition of Journal of Nursing Education. She also is a co-author of “Psychometric Analysis of a Nursing Informatics Competencies Survey” in the May 2025 edition of the journal Computers, Informatics, Nursing.
Andrew Myers (American Studies) authored the article “Thomas Bomar of Spartanburg: An African American Builder of Cotton Textile Mills in the New South” in the Journal of the South Carolina Historical Association.
Lee Neibert (Theatre) played the titular role in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” this summer at Warehouse Theatre’s Upstate Shakespeare Festival. He was joined by Upstate junior Robert Penninger, who played the King of France and Curan in the production.
Gimantha Perera (Industrial Engineering) published three conference papers and presented on all of them at the American Society for Engineering Education Conference (ASEE). He also won the Best New Career Author Award in the industrial and systems engineering division of ASEE.
Nolan Stolz (Popular Music Studies) published the book chapter “Mutually Exclusive Two- and Three-Part Forms in Heavy Metal Songs” in “The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition.” Since April, his music-films “Gravitation” and “Standing Waves” played at film festivals in Charlotte, North Carolina; Cleveland; New York City; Newark, New Jersey; and Niagara Falls, New York.
Justin Travis (Psychology) co-authored the article “Herzberg at work: The remove vs. in-person tale” in the journal Current Psychology. He also chaired the session “Transforming Data Into Insights: Practical Visualization and Storytelling for I-O Psychologists” and presented the master tutorial “Pragmatic Programming 2.0: Tutorial on Reproducible, Readable, and Re-Usable Code for ML” at the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology in Denver, Colorado, in April.
Griffin Woodworth (Popular Music Studies) published his first book, “Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity,” in May.
Transformational Gifts
Two significant grants this year will support students’ education and career development:
Shirleatha Lee, dean of the Mary Black College of Nursing, helped secure a $2 million Bedford Falls Foundation grant in July that will provide 108 scholarships annually over the new four years. This fall 48 lower-division nursing majors received $2,500 scholarships, while 60 upper-division majors received $5,000 each. The grant also will provide emergency assistance to students facing unexpected hardship and will fund support resources such as tutoring, skills workshops and faculty training.
A $4.9 million grant from the Mellon Foundation is supporting internships for students in select humanities majors. Tanya Boone, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, worked with Carolyn Webber (Communication), the principal investigator for the project, to secure the grant.
