Help Others by Donating to Fordham Clothing and Toy Drives

Members of the Fordham community can help make winter more joyful for those in need as the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice (CSJ) and Campus Ministry (CM) begin their annual holiday drives.

Here’s how you can help:

Coat Drive Nov. 30 to Dec. 11
(Westchester through Dec. 18)

Clean coats, mittens, hats, scarves and boots in good condition are urgently needed.

• Lincoln Center: Bins are on the Lowenstein Plaza and in Lowenstein 217 (CM)
• Rose Hill: Drop off to McGinley 101 (CSJ) or McGinley 102 (CM)
• Westchester: Bins located in the Main Lobby and Common Ground Cafe

Toy Drive Nov. 30 to Dec. 18
(Rose Hill through Dec. 11)

If you are unable to donate any items but would like to make a monetary contribution, you can write a check payable to “Campus Ministry” and send it to the following Campus Ministry Offices:

• Lincoln Center: Lowenstein 217, (212) 636-6267
• Rose Hill: McGinley 102 (CM), (718) 817-4501
• Westchester: Room 133, (718) 817-3420

Fordham Westchester Celebrates Successful First Year

Photo by Ken Levinson

Fordham Westchester and the Fordham University Association celebrated the campus’s one-year anniversary on Oct. 25. Friends and family were treated to live jazz, warmed spiced cider, prizes and tours of the campus, which was aglow from the colorful foliage surrounding it.

Recovery Act/Stimulus Funds Go to Biology Department

Three professors of biological science have received nearly $500,000 in research grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009/Stimulus Funds. They are: William Thornhill, Ph.D., professor of biology and chair of the department; Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., associate professor of biology; and Gordon Plague, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology.

Thornhill will direct a two-year, $265,000 project titled “Ion Channel Disorder Mechanisms,” which looks at episodic ataxia. The neurological disorder results in a periodic lack of coordination in humans that can come on suddenly and interfere with motor activities, such as walking. The condition is attributed to amino acid mutations in an ion channel that results in disrupted communication between neurons in the brain.

The funds, Thornhill said, will be used to test all 19 different mutations of episodic ataxia. The research will determine whether the disorder is the result of the ion channel not trafficking to the surface cell or whether the channel does not function properly once it is on the cell surface.

“We want to get to the causative problem of the disorder to be able to suggest targeted treatment,” Thornhill said.

Finnemann received a five-year, $99,074 grant to buy equipment that will improve the images visible through the Department of Biological Science’s laser scanning confocal microscopy system. Finnemann said the equipment is critical to the department and to her work on researching the causes of age-related macular degeneration, a major factor in blindness in aging populations. Finnemann’s project is titled “Role of avB5 Integrin in RPD Phagocytosis.”

Plague, an evolutionary biologist, received a two-year, $132,375 administrative supplement grant on his parent grant, titled “Experimental Evolution of Sequence Expansion in Intracellular Bacteria.” The parent project studies how the genome of the E. coli bacteria changes when it transitions from a free-living organism to a pathogen (living on a host). The stimulus money will help fund an assistant in Plague’s lab.

“Part of the federal goal was to create jobs and to retain jobs,” Plague said. “This enables us to keep a Fordham graduate working in our labs.”

All three awards came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

WFUV Upgrades Antenna, Reception

Now more people can hear WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org). Fordham University’s noncommercial public radio station improved reception by upgrading its main antenna over the past several weeks, making its signal stronger in Manhattan and parts of New Jersey. The antenna’s height and footprint were not affected by the upgrades.

Construction on the antenna caused 90.7 FM to be off the air from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays from Nov. 5 through Nov. 18. Regular weekend programming was uninterrupted. Throughout the construction period, listeners could hear regular programming online at wfuv.org via streaming audio, as well as on iPods and iPhones with the free WFUV application.

“This is something we’ve been working on for more than a year,” said WFUV General Manager Ralph Jennings. “The antenna upgrade is part of WFUV’s ongoing efforts to bring its broadcast signal to more listeners throughout the entire New York metropolitan area.”

WFUV is a non-commercial, listener-supported public radio station, licensed to Fordham University for more than 60 years. Serving nearly 300,000 listeners each week in the New York area and thousands more worldwide on the Web, and a leader in contemporary music radio, WFUV is “Rock & Roots Radio,” offering an eclectic mix of rock, singer-songwriters, blues, world and other music, plus headlines from National Public Radio and local news.

Marketing Professor Wins Award

Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D. Photo by Benbella Publishers

A paper co-authored by Associate Professor of Marketing Lerzan Aksoy won the Best Practitioner Presentation Award at the 2009 Frontiers in Services Conference from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 in Honolulu.

The paper, “Because Customers Want To, Need To, or Ought To: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Commitment on Share-of-Wallet,” examined the case of AXA Financial, a global financial services company. Applying advanced marketing science theory, the researchers examined the relationship between consumers’ commitment to AXA and their share of AXA’s financial service product offerings.

Aksoy’s co-presenters were Bruce Cooil, professor of management at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management; Timothy Keiningham, the global chief strategy officer and executive vice president of Ipsos Loyalty (and a co-author of Aksoy’s recent book, Why Loyalty Matters); and Bart Larivière, a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University.

This Month in Jesuit History…
Modern Teaching Method Causes Jesuit Education to Flourish

St. Ignatius Loyola

As the year 1549 drew to a close, the educational work of the new Society of Jesus was accelerating—despite the original intentions of the Society’s first 10 members. In their founding documents, St. Ignatius Loyola and his nine compatriots had ruled out becoming schoolteachers, preferring to remain rootless so they could go wherever their ministry was needed.

But they gravitated toward education—first, by establishing colleges to educate future members of the Society, and then by establishing a school for lay students in Messina, Italy, after their prowess had caught public attention. Students made rapid progress in the Jesuit schools, in part because of their so-called “Parisian method,” with its modern features such as classes of students progressing in a graduated system.

Just after the school opened in Messina, citizens of Palermo asked Ignatius to establish one there. The school formally opened in November 1549. The success of both schools prompted the Society to open many more in the next few years.