For the Record, July 17, 2026

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

Recent honors, presentations, publications and grants include the following:

Honors

Jane Case, associate professor and assistant director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, has been selected to serve as a UD Honors College Faculty Fellow for the 2026-27 academic year.

Amish Trivedi, assistant professor of English, has been named poetry editor of Practicing Anthropology, which hosts expansive content on the practice of anthropology in the world.

Presentations

Sheng Lu, professor and graduate director of Fashion and apparel studies (FASH), and Emilie Delaye, FASH graduate instructor, presented at the United States Fashion Industry Association (USFIA) Washington Trade Symposium on July 15, 2026, and at the USFIA Board of Directors meeting on July 16, 2026, in Washington, D.C. During the presentations, Lu and Delaye shared their coauthored study with USFIA on U.S. fashion companies' evolving sourcing and supply chain strategies in response to tariffs and other macroeconomic and regulatory factors.

Zoubeida R. Dagher, professor in the College of Education and Human Development's (CEHD) School of Education, presented "Citizen science as a context for engaging preservice teachers with the cognitive-epistemic and social dimensions of science" at the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Dagher's participation was sponsored in part by a travel grant from UD's Center for Science, Ethics and Public Policy. Dagher specializes in science education.

Myae Han, professor in CEHD's Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, gave a keynote presentation titled "The power of play: Insights from human development for early childhood education" at the Korean Association for Early Childhood Education and Care's conference in Seoul, South Korea, in June 2026. Han also gave a keynote presentation titled "The hidden power of play: social-emotional growth and well-being" at the Society for Constructivist Early Childhood Education's virtual conference in May 2026. Han's research focuses on the relationship between play and child development, among other areas.

Publications

"Caesar Rodney, Slavery and Enslavement Research Report," released by the city of Wilmington, Delaware, Department of Land Use and Planning, details people and families enslaved by patriot Caesar Rodney. The report was authored by public historian and UD alumna Nicole Belolan, who received a Ph.D. in American civilization in 2017 and an M.A. from the UD Winterthur Program in Material Culture in 2009, and was written in collaboration with Debra Campagnari Martin, historic preservation planner for the city of Wilmington. Martin initiated the project in response to concerns raised by the public in 2020, and it seeks to move to the foreground those who have often been omitted from the public record. By researching public archives and primary documents, the authors are constructing a database of persons enslaved by Caesar Rodney to aid their descendants in genealogical searches.

Grants

A software company founded by Guru Singh, a 2015 graduate of the Professional Science Master of Biotechnology program, recently received $8 million in funding to help automate life sciences laboratories. Scispot offers AI-based operating solutions connecting lab instruments, samples and other lab information management systems. The company's long-term vision is to create "self-driving" labs where routine coordination, data analysis and reporting run automatically. The solutions are currently used in more than 100 labs in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, diagnostics and genomics fields.

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