For the Record, Dec. 5, 2025

For the Record provides information about recent professional activities and honors of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent appointments, presentations, media appearances, publications and honors include the following:

Appointments

Patricia Sloane-White, chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies and professor of women and gender studies, anthropology and Asian studies, has been elected to serve a three-year term on the Association for Asian Studies Southeast Asia Council (SEAC). The AAS Councils operate within the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). Created in 1970, these councils represent the interests of scholars working in their respective geographical areas. The council serves as the major policy body for the Association of Asian Studies, providing liaison between the Board of Directors and the members at large. The Southeast Asia Council oversees the following organizations within the AAS: Burma Studies Group, Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA), Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL), Indonesia-Timor Leste Studies Committee (ITLSC), Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group, Philippine Studies Group, Thailand/Laos/Cambodia Group, Transcultural and Translation Studies Group (TTSG) and Vietnam Studies Group. Sloane-White's election to this position recognizes her distinguished contributions to Southeast Asian studies and will enable her to play a key role in shaping the direction of regional scholarship within the AAS.

Presentations

Benjamin James, assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development's School of Education, gave an invited presentation for the International Comparative Bi-/Multilingual Education Research Group (ICBERG) EduTalk series in November 2025. The title of his presentation was "Exploring Linguistic Capital and Social Reproduction in Elite Bilingual Schools Across the Globe." James specializes in language and literacy education as well as teacher preparation for educators working with multilingual learners in K-12 schools.

On Dec. 4, 2025, Sheng Lu, professor and graduate director of fashion and apparel studies, spoke at the Trade-Labor Connections in the New Global Order Conference hosted by the Cornell University Global Labor Institute (GLI) in New York City. In the panel "W(h)ither trade and labor in the new era of global trade?," Lu discussed the impact of shifting U.S. trade policy on labor issues in the garment sector. Other panelists include Ambassador Katherine Tai, former U.S. trade representative (2021-2025), Stephen Vaughn, former acting U.S. trade representative and general counsel for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, and Kelly Fay Rodríguez, former special representative for international labor affairs, U.S. Department of State (2022 - 2025).

Media appearances

Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing and psychological and brain sciences, was interviewed on the key to finding holiday happiness on PHL17 Morning News on Nov. 26, 2025. In addition his research was cited in a Nov. 30, 2025, article in Forbes, entitled "How to Increase Happiness: Ask Questions, Make Connections."

Publications

Thomas M. Powers, director of the Center for Science, Ethics & Public Policy and associate professor of philosophy and the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, is part of a group of international researchers who recently coauthored "Roadmap for Responsible Robotics", published in IEEE Robotics and Automation. The result of several years of work, the document outlines actionable steps to ensure that robotic systems coevolve with human societies, promoting human agency and humane values rather than undermining them. Designed for diverse stakeholders-researchers, policy makers, industry leaders, practitioners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society groups-this road map provides a foundation for collaborative efforts toward responsible robotics. The roadmap is the outgrowth of a seminar held in September 2023 at the Leibniz Center for Informatics, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. The seminar brought together researchers from the fields of robotics, computer science, social and cognitive sciences and philosophy to chart a path toward improving responsibility in robotic systems.

Karin Grävare Silbernagel, professor of physical therapy (PT) in the College of Health Sciences; Stephanie Cone, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering; Hayley Powell Smitheman, an alumna of the biomechanics and movement science doctoral program; and Merve Karapinar, assistant professor of physical therapy, at Süleyman Demirel University, who was a visiting researcher in Silbernagel's lab, published "Effects of an exercise program on calf muscle characteristics in patients with Achilles tendinopathy" in the November 2025 issue of Physical Therapy in Sport, pages 127-133.

Jaclyn "Megan" Sions, associate professor of physical therapy; Gregory Hicks, Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and associate vice president for clinical and translational research; and Jenifer Pugliese, clinical research manager, published "Adverse Events in the MASH Randomized Controlled Trial with Detailed Reporting of Musculoskeletal and Connective Tissue Disorders Events" in the journal Physical Therapy, November edition, Volume 105, Issue 11. The research team believes the UD-led MASH clinical trial is the first clinical trial to assess the efficacy of a tailored physical therapy intervention matched to an at-risk subgroup of older adults with chronic low back pain and coexisting hip pain and muscle weakness.

Sheri Silfies, associate professor of physical therapy, coauthored "Innovative Compact Vibrational System with Custom GUI for Modulating Trunk Proprioception Using Individualized Vibration Parameters," which was published in the journal Bioengineering in October.

Michele Lobo, professor of physical therapy; Julie Orlando, a doctoral student in the biomechanics and movement science (BIOMS) program; and Zainab Alghamdi, an alumna of the BIOMS program, published "Enhanced Play Education for Parents Can Positively Impact Development in Infancy: A Randomized Controlled Trial" in the journal Pediatric Physical Therapy in September. Lobo's Babies Excelling Strategically Through (BEST) Play curriculum, funded in part by the Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund, aims to help parents understand how to make small changes in what they intuitively do every day to support their baby's development.

Karin Grävare Silbernagel, professor of physical therapy in the College of Health Sciences; Dawn Elliott, Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and associate dean for graduate and post-graduate education in the College of Engineering; and Justin Parreno, assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Lily Lin, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering, published "Early adaptive and late degenerative tendon response to overload in rat model of synergist ablation" in the September edition of The Journal of Physiology, pages 6979-6999. The work was coauthored by Hailey Bonelli, an undergraduate student majoring in biomechanical engineering, and Rita de Cássia Marqueti Durigan, associate professor of physiological sciences and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Analyses at the University of Brasília, who spent a year as a visiting researcher at UD. The research stems from an NIH-funded collaboration designed to improve understanding of tendon injury and recovery and may help guide future strategies for prevention and rehabilitation.

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor emeritus at the Department of Theatre and Dance, published recently in Lumina Lina (New York; Nr. 4, 2025) an essay "The victim never lets go of the crime - Nightmare Stories and their Endings." It analyzes two new books that were published almost simultaneously confirming this gesture: Gabriele Eckart's collection of stories Oh You (Könishausen & Neumann, Würzburg) and the experience report von Udo Jeschke The Nightmare of the GDR (Frieling-Verlag, Berlin). For decades, both authors, the political activist and the rebellious writer, have been shedding light on a period and its constraints that have been weighing on them for all time. Both authors come from Stasi households. They both painfully freed themselves from this environment. They know what they are talking about and how what happened has affected them forever. The texts are insightful because they raise questions that challenge answers that seem to be taboo: What fears and feelings did people under Communist rule in the so-called "German Democratic Republic" have? Haus describes how they suffered from depressive moods, general anxiety, mistrust, nightmares, irritability, contact difficulties, aggression and somatic complaints. Even more than 35 years after reunification, the long-term effects of political traumatization in the population of the new federal states are still unmistakable. More than twice as many East Germans as West Germans suffer from anxiety disorders, and the suicide rate is also higher in the East. Both publications gain their significance against this backdrop. According to recent research, a gradual easing of the consequences of trauma is not foreseeable, as the traumas experienced can set autodestructive psychological processes in motion that shape the biography of those affected for many years. "The victim never lets go of the crime," is a popular saying. Traumatization sometimes remains a lifelong defining moment of an unfortunate experience that is repeatedly restaged and manifests itself in autodestruction, self-neglect and new experiences of violence. The books provoke these controversial questions and urge people not to repress the nightmare of this time. Both the literary as well as the factual stories shake people up, remind them and preserve the lessons of the past for a free, democratic future. "Both books commemorate the crimes of that era, which serve as an eternal reminder: A regime that shot its citizens in the back just because they wanted to live in freedom; a regime that took children away from several hundred women and men because their lifestyle did not suit the party ideology; a regime that employed nearly 200,000 unofficial collaborators to spy on their fellow citizens, friends, work colleagues and family members," Haus summarizes.

Honors

Cpl. Jamel Howard of the University of Delaware Police and K9 Patti received a Meritorious Community Service - Team Award during the National Liberty Museum's Awards for Valor ceremony on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025. The National Liberty Museum Awards for Valor Program honors active duty first responders from the Greater Philadelphia Region for remarkable acts of heroism and for serving as role models in their communities. As part of UDPD's Community Resource Unit, Patti has completed more than 10,000 hours of socialization training and has become a critical asset on the UD campus - supporting the mental health and wellness of officers and staff, serving as a bridge to the broader community and responding to critical incidents to offer comfort to victims and witnesses.

The College of Engineering's Distinguished Professor of Materials Science Darrin Pochan has been named a 2026 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fellow, an honor that celebrates sustained and distinguished contributions to the advancement of materials research. Pochan was selected "for the design and discovery of new materials self-assembly mechanisms with peptides and polymers, significant advancements in soft nanostructure characterization and international leadership in the materials community." His laboratory designs molecular building blocks that naturally assemble into new kinds of materials, including gels and nanoscale structures that could support future advances in medicine and technology. Pochan is among 18 new MRS fellows who will be recognized at the MRS Spring Meeting and Exhibit in Honolulu in April 2026.

Tingyi Gu, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected to the 2026 Fellows Class of Optica. The class includes 121 fellows from 23 countries, selected for their outstanding contributions to optics and photonics research, business, education, engineering and service to Optica and the scientific community. Gu was honored "for resolving material, nanofabrication and systems challenges of silicon photonics with subwavelength design concepts and crystalline memory materials." Her work focuses on creating on-chip devices that use light to send, store and sense information more quickly and efficiently than traditional electronics. Optica, a leading professional society in the field of light science and photonics, will recognize the new class of fellows at conferences and events throughout 2026.

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