News & Events

Sociology Associate Professor Daniel Herda published an article on Immigration Innumeracy in Canada in the journal Migration Letters.

Charlotte Berkes, associate professor of biology, and Jimmy Franco, department chair and associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, recently co-authored a journal publication titled Kinase Inhibitor Library Screening Identifies the Cancer Therapeutic Sorafenib and Structurally Similar Compounds as Strong Inhibitors of the Fungal Pathogen Histoplasma capsulatum, describing the discovery of novel antifungal molecules to combat Histoplasma capsulatum, a neglected fungal pathogen. Several former Merrimack College undergraduates contributed to this research.

The Imagined Immigration and the Criminal Immigrants: Expanding the Catalog of Immigrant-Related Ignorance is an article published by Dr. Daniel Herda and co-authored by Merrimack alum Amshula Divadkar ’17. In the article, Herda and Divadkar use original data from a sample of college students to examine the crime perception alongside nine established components of imagined immigration, comparing their extent and consequences for a hypothetical anti-immigrant policy.

Sociology Associate Professor Daniel Herda presented his research titled “Examining the Contexts of Intergroup Contact” at the annual meeting of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) virtual conference.

Michael DeCesare,professor and chair of sociology, was quoted in a Feb. 7, 2018, Boston Globe story about the ongoing search for the next president of Harvard University. DeCesare, who chairs a committee on university governance at the American Association of University Professors, said the school ought to pick an academic, to send a message to faculty that their work is important. “For Harvard to kind of reaffirm the importance of an academically oriented president would go a long way,” he said.

Mary McHugh,adjunct lecturer inpolitical science and director of the Stevens Service Learning Center, was quoted in an Oct. 20, 2017, Daily News of Newburyport, Massachusetts, story about the war chest Gov. Charlie Baker has amassed for a possiblereelection bid in 2018. “It’s hard to beat an incumbent,” she said. “Especially a popular one like Charlie Baker.”

Lauri Kurdziel, assistant professor of psychology, was recently quoted in the Boston Globe on the topic of naps and bedtime sleep for preschoolers. Kurdziel conducted research with two others entitled “Sleep-dependent enhancement of emotional memory in early childhood” which was published in Scientific Reports.

Michael DeCesare, professor and chair of sociology, delivered the keynote address April 27, 2017,at the State University of New York Voices Conference on Shared Governance in Suffern, New York. The conference examined the challenges facing governance leaders and members, and explore alternative solutions. DeCesare was also the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Kentucky AAUP (American Association of University Professors) Conference on April 8 at the University of Louisville, where he delivered a talk titled “Threats to Traditional Academic Governance.” DeCesare was invited to speak at both conferences due to his work as the chair of AAUP’s National Committee on College University Governance.

William Wians, professor of philosophy, served as co-editor of two recent volumespublished by the scholarly publishing house Brill. They are“Reading Aristotle,” a collection of original essays on the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (co-edited by Ron Polansky at Duquesne University), and “Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy,”volume 32 of a leading series in ancient philosophy (co-edited by GaryM. GurtleratBoston College).

Michael Mascolo, professor of psychology and academic directorof the Compass program, gave a talk, “A Primer on Personal Construct Psychology,” and presented a paper, “The Failure of Objectivity: The Intersubjective Origins of Psychological Knowledge,” at the 45th International Congress of Personal Construct Psychology July 6-9, 2017, at Concordia University in Montréal. He also published several papers in 2017. They include “A Person Is Not an Object: Rethinking the Psychological Analysis of Persons” and “Understanding Personhood: Can We Get There From Here?”and “How Objectivity Undermines the Study of Personhood: Toward an Intersubjective Epistemology for Psychological Science,” all in New Ideas in Psychology.