LANIER ARCHAEOLOGISTS looking to the past to ENLIGHTEN THE FUTURE. Page 6 A Light for the Future: Partners in Discovery pg 14 Community: Empowering Hands to Serve pg 24 RESEARCH & SCHOLARSHIP MAGAZINE Faculty: Connecting to History pg 28
4 10 1514 6 4 New Office of Research & Grants 6 Snapshots of the past: Lanier Center for Archaeology 10 The road less traveled: Pharm.D.Ph.D. pathway 28 Connecting the dots: Dr. Tim Johnson 32 Professors ‘write the book’ 14 Partners in discovery 18 Diversity, Equity & Belonging 24 Empowering the hands of service 38 A kickstart to critical thinking 42 Wind tunnel expands student opportunities DOCTORAL PROGRAMS FACULTY SCHOLARSHIP A LIGHT FOR THE FUTURE STUDENTS On the Cover: Items from the Lanier Center of Archaeology artifact collection representative of the type found over the years at the Kourion Urban Space Project in Cyprus, one of six excavation sites in the Near East where Lipscomb’s Lanier Center has access. See story on page 6
24 381832 28 42 20 RESEARCH & SCHOLARSHIP MAGAZINE Vice President of Public Relations Communications& Kim Chaudoin Senior Managing Editor Janel Shoun-Smith Writers Kim JanelChaudoinShoun-Smith Photography Kristi Jones Design Will Mason ISSUE NO. 1 Produced by the Office of Public Relations & Communications. LipscombNow:Discovery is published by Lipscomb University®. Go to lipscomb.edu/now to read more. Postmaster: Send changes of address to LipscombNow:DiscoveryLipscombUniversityOneUniversityParkDriveNashville,Tennessee37204-3951©2022LipscombUniversity.AllRights Reserved.
I have had the pleasure of serving as Lipscomb University’s chief academic officer for 25 years. It has long been a goal of mine for this institution to continually strengthen and grow our academic community. What you will read on the pages that follow are a small sampling of the scholarly work that takes place every year at our university. In this edition you will learn more about the Office of Research and Grants that was announced this spring (page 4), how the Lanier Center for Archaeology is discovering new insight into Christianity by looking at the past (page 6), the impact of the Lipscomb-Vanderbilt University Pharm.D.-to-Ph.D. Pathway Program (page 10), how one engineering professor is working to create a more inclusive STEM industry (page 20) and much more. I hope you enjoy learning more about the exciting things that took place in our classrooms and laboratories last year and about what is on the horizon for this institution.
academic LEADERSHIP
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W. Craig Bledsoe Provost 2 :
Research is the firm foundation of teaching excellence
Welcome to the first edition of Lipscomb Now: Discovery. I am pleased to share this new publication with you that highlights the interesting and exciting things happening in student and faculty scholarship and research at Lipscomb University.
Since it’s beginning, Lipscomb has been known for its academic rigor and for preparing our students at the highest levels to be successful in whatever they pursue after college. Seven years ago, we made a commitment to broaden our academic program by entering the ranks of research institutions across the country. This move reflected growth in the number of doctoral and graduate programs that, then and now, meet the needs not only of our students but also of our communities. It also opened the door to new learning opportunities that are impacting the lives of our students in profound ways. At Lipscomb we value research, not only as a transfer of knowledge into our world, but also as a firm foundation for the teaching of our students every day in the classroom. Students work one-on-one with faculty in scientific bench research, social science, business analysis and hands-on engineering projects to name a few such endeavors. In addition to the hands-on learning opportunities for our students, research informs in-class curriculum and teaching is upto-date based on our faculty’s continued scholarship.
This year we developed Lipscomb Impact 360, our vision and strategic plan for carrying the university’s critical work into the future. In this strategic planning process, the advancement of student-centered research quickly emerged as a priority. We intend to amplify national awareness of Lipscomb’s unique educational experience that shapes lives of character through rigorous academics and transformative experiences. We will extend our reputation for preparing learners with knowledge created through research, transferred through teaching and experiential learning and contributing to the common good through service to others.
The recent establishment of the Office of Research and Grants, which you can read about on page 4 of this issue, is a direct result of the growing success of our grant writing efforts and awards as well as the goals emerging from the strategic plan. Establishing this office provides an essential foundational piece that fully supports studentcentered research while fostering and supporting faculty research. We are committed to developing and maintaining research programs that will foster opportunities for growth, continual improvement and success for students, faculty and the university alike. Dr. Candice McQueen President, Lipscomb University
In the 2021-22 school year, Lipscomb
A vision ‘to stand in the front ranks’
And, in the words of James Harding, they always intended that Lipscomb should “aspire to stand in the front ranks of the great educational institutions of the world.”
The advancement of student-centered research is a priority in our strategic plan for the future.
Our vision at Lipscomb University is to lead as a top-tier, nationally recognized institution that will excel in teaching, learning and research.
Over the last few years, research has been a growing aspect of the Lipscomb community as we have challenged our students with a rigorous academic program that propels the institution to the front ranks nationally. In 2015, Lipscomb University broke into the ranks of national colleges and universities as it was classified for the first time as a research institution. Since that time students engaged in graduate studies as well as undergraduates are increasingly interested in research, as is evidenced by the tremendous growth in participation in our annual Student Scholars Symposium throughout its 11-year history. As we continue to excel, we are a beacon for Christian higher education, setting a nationally recognized standard of excellence.
faculty have*: 70PUBLISHEDScholarly Articles AUTHORED,21EDITED, OR CONTRIBUTED TO Books 371 AT ACADEMIC CONFERENCES ANDGATHERINGSPROFESSIONAL Presentations *As reported to the Office of the Provost in 2021-2022 school year. 3lipscomb.edu/now
From our very founding, more than 130 years ago, David Lipscomb and James A. Harding shared a vision for a great educational community that would provide students a rigorous academic education along with Bible studies and opportunities for spiritual growth. This, they believed, was a complete education that would produce graduates who were prepared with wisdom, knowledge and purpose to serve their community and the world.
Since coming to Lipscomb, Saakian has helped Lipscomb procure grants from the: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services; Kern Family Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; Tennessee Department of Transportation; National Science Foundation; Nissan North America; Tennessee Higher Education Commission; National Historical Publications & Records Commission; Scarlett Family Foundation; Lilly Endowment Inc.; Tennessee Department of Education; and others.
In response to ever-increasing research endeavors and the campuswide emergence of a desire to advance research at Lipscomb, President Dr. Candice McQueen announced the establishment of the Office of Research and Grants this past spring.
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Having broken into the ranks of national colleges and universities classified as research institutions in 2015, Lipscomb continues to grow in the area of research. Most recently, the work of the Lipscomb Impact 360 strategic planning process has solidified the goal to grow into a more comprehensive research institution, said McQueen, upon creation of the new office“Thestructure.establishment of the Office of Research and Grants is a direct result of the growing success of our grant writing efforts and awards,” said McQueen. “Establishing this office provides an essential foundational piece that fully supports student-centered research while fostering and supporting facultyTheresearch.”firstleader on board is Robyn Saakian (pictured at right), formerly advancement’s director of grants and now the new director of research and grants. Saakian’s management has led Lipscomb to attain approximately $14 million in public and private grants for academics and research in the past five years. Prior to joining Lipscomb, Saakian spent more than a dozen years in Washington, D.C., overseeing international development-related grant programs for two national nonprofit organizations that were funded primarily by federal grants and foundation dollars.
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The new department brings the university’s grant pursuit function, formerly housed in the Office of Advancement, into the Provost’s Office along with the university’s other major research components: the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the Student Scholars’ Symposium.
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In addition, the new office will work to create a future University Research Council, which will recommend to the provost policies and procedures to enhance the university’s ability to realize its potential in research and creative and scholarly activities.
Initially, Lipscomb’s Office of Research and Grants will continue Saakian’s work partnering with faculty to develop and submit funding proposals, but will also bolster processes related to post-award management and compliance of externally funded grants, said Saakian. This work includes developing and communicating new policies, implementing a new grants management system, hiring new staff for post-award accounting and training efforts for faculty and student researchers.
Grant-funded, donor-funded and institutionally funded research and scholarship have all grown at Lipscomb over the past 15 years, fueling four new doctorate programs, a pathway program for pharmacy students to earn a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, faculty partnerships with some of the nation’s top institutions, a University Research Professor designation for faculty, the annual campuswide Student Scholars Symposium and countless bench science opportunities for students at Lipscomb and elsewhere to learn the art of the scientific method and discovery.
“Students work one-on-one with faculty in scientific bench research,” he said. “They partner with faculty in social science and business analysis, they carry out handson engineering projects under the guidance of faculty and in-class curriculum is informed and updated based on our faculty’s continued scholarship.”
“Over time, the goal is to develop a one-stop shop for faculty to be supported in their research endeavors,” said Provost Dr. W. Craig Bledsoe. “The establishment of this office shows how much we at Lipscomb value research, not only as a transfer of knowledge into our world, but also as a firm foundation for the teaching of our students every day in the classrooms.
“This office provides an essential foundational piece that fully supports student-centered research while fostering and supporting faculty research.”
– Dr. Candice McQueen
Lipscomb University President
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“There are people on campus who have such a passion for academics and intellectual development,” Saakian says. “There is a spirit here of investigation and exploration—brilliant faculty who know the opportunities grants and research can bring to the scholarly pursuits of their departments and their students.”
Since the beginning of 2017, the Office of Advancement’s grant services have helped bring in almost $6 million in private grants and more than $8 million in public grants from state and federal agencies to fund various academic and scholarly endeavors at Lipscomb. These grant funds have pumped $4.3 million into Lipscomb’s programs to enhance leadership in the community and $3 million to enhance racial diversity within various fields in the local workplace.
Lanier Center for Archaeology provides a snapshot of Mediterranean life in the period of the early church Looking to the past to discover new insight into Christianityonfocus PROGRAMSDOCTORAL 6 lipscomb now: discovery
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This 4th century cooking pot is typical of the artifacts used in the Lanier Center’s focus of study: the Near East during biblical times and the early Church. 7lipscomb.edu/now
A story that takes up just a few biblical verses for Christians to read today, had far more impact on the Cypriots at that time as magicians on Cyprus often tried to use blindness to stop people from speaking. Paul was showing the power of Jesus by reversing this curse that was most likely said against him. Christians today can learn from these snapshots of life in biblical times, thanks to the ongoing work of archaeologists, including those at Lipscomb University’s Lanier Center for Archaeology (LCA), which houses doctoral and master’s programs in archaeology of biblical times and the Near East.
Formerly housed at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas before moving to Lipscomb in mid-2020, the Lanier Center is led by internationally renowned archaeology scholars Dr. Steve Ortiz and Dr. Tom Davis. With enrollment of 21 students anticipated for this fall, the competitive Ph.D. program is believed to be the largest program focused on Near East archaeology in the nation, said Davis. Ortiz’ and Davis’ scholarly work has not only been published widely throughout the field, it also contributed to the ESV Archaeology Study Bible. Most recently Ortiz was published as the cover story of Biblical Archaeology Review. The article describes finds at the Tel Gezer excavation site in Israel, where Lanier teams have dug for the past 10 years. May 2022 brought new milestones for the Lanier Center as it launched its first excavation since the COVID-19 pandemic halted international travel and graduated Lipscomb’s first Ph.D. awardee, Lucas Grimsley, a southern California native now adjunct teaching at Azusa Pacific University.
Davis first worked at the site as a graduate student in the 1980s. The experience of his excavation team was documented by National Geographic in a story about the excavated bones of two adults and an infant child killed hen Barnabas and Paul traveled to the island of Cyprus during their missionary journeys, they encountered Elymas, the magician. Because of his opposition to their spreading the Gospel, Paul struck Elymus blind.
– Acts 13:11
The first LCA excavation since moving to Lipscomb is the Kourion Urban Space Project (KUSP), a multinational effort in the Republic of Cyprus seeking to better understand the transitional period of the 4th century AD when Christianity replaced the traditional Roman religion, paganism, as the dominant religion of the island. Davis, associate director of the Lanier Center, is the principal investigator on the project and Grimsley serves as the field director. Eleven students contributed to a 20-person team that went on the Kourion dig in May.
“We know what they were eating, where they were storing their material, how they set up their kitchen. This exact moment was captured, the morning that the quake hit, because they never came back to disturb it,” he said.
Kourion is of particular interest because a series of earthquakes in the 4th century served as a catalyst for the shift from paganism to Christianity, and because disasters with no warning provide an “exact moment in time and in archaeology you rarely get to see that,” said Davis.
And now behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you and you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time
Immediately mist and darkness fell upon him and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand.
in the earthquake. The male wore a ring inscribed with “Chi Rho, ” the first two Greek letters in the term “Christ”; an alpha and an omega representing the first and the last letters flank the symbol. That indicates this is a Christian sign.
“In the early 4th century AD, Kourion was a vibrant Greco-Roman city containing a civic center, bathhouse, theater, stadium and a large pagan religious complex dedicated to the deity Apollo Hylates but had no public church buildings,” said Grimsley. Then the earthquakes hit. “Included in this destruction was the pagan temple of Apollo. During the rebuilding of Kourion the inhabitants did not repair or rebuild Apollo’s temple, instead they began to build “Paganismchurches.”hasnoanswer for why quakes occur: ‘It is the judgment of the gods.’ Christianity has an answer: it’s both judgment, but it’s a mercy. It’s a gateway for a Christian family. In the 4th century, they didn’t fear death in the same way we do. They saw this as: ‘Ok, I’m now in the presence of Christ’… they had a faith answer to why death happens and why destruction occurs.”
In addition, the skeletal remains of four individuals who were trapped and crushed by falling wall blocks from the earthquakes were found huddled together in one of the rooms. Currently, Grimsley is part of a team planning ways to implement the field methodology, how to excavate and how to collectPreliminarymaterial. reports on the discoveries unearthed at the Kourion site have been reported to the Cypriat Department of Antiquities and are pending publication, and some articles drawing from Kourion data have been published in European journals including the Journal of Archaeological Science, Buried History and Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Chypriotes
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“That ring shows us that before the churches were built there were Christians in the community who were not afraid to show their identity, to show their faith,” Davis said.
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As the only foreign university to hold a dig permit at Kourion, Lanier Center archaeologists began digging in 2012 in hopes of learning how the social and ideological changes impacted daily life for the elite and the non-elite, how the city was structured preand post-earthquake, what new contributions Kourion could make to the field of disaster archaeology and how the process of rebuilding the city reflected the social fabric before and after the Thedisaster.LanierCenter dig has uncovered a well-preserved structure: a large two-story upper-class home that collapsed in on itself preserving many of the artifacts of the home as a result of the earthquake, said Grimsley. The excavation has uncovered numerous coins, a glass plate imported from Egypt, sculpture fragments, painted plaster and mosaic floors among other findings, he said. These finds have fueled several Lanier students’ research projects so far, said Davis, including one on how glass and light is viewed in the ancient world, a study of mosaic floors in churches compared to secular buildings of the time and one about how rubble from previous destruction was used to rebuildThebuildings.sitehas the potential to make a real contribution to earthquake science, said Davis. It could expand our knowledge of how the buildings themselves were destroyed and how the earthquake affected the decay of the structures over time and archaeological site formation.
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“The only place where we will ever learn anything about the Bible that’s new is Artifacts such as these spur and inform students’ primary research projects, such as one project exploring the use of glass in the ancient world.
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The Lanier Center for Archaeology offers a Doctor of Philosophy in Archaeology of the Ancient Near East and a Master of Arts in Archaeology and Biblical Studies. It plans to begin offering an undergraduate minor in fall 2022. Learn more about the Lanier Center for Archaeology at lipscomb.edu/lanier-center. (top) studentPh.D. HeslerKatherinesifts the soil along with Dr. Tom Davis a director of the Kourion Urban Space Project, a projectmultinationalinCyprus. (middle) AmbassadorU.S. to Cyprus Judith Garber pastexcavationKourionLipscomb’svisitedthisMay. (bottom) Center director Dr. Steve Ortiz provides opportunities.aton-campusartifactbothdoctoralinstructionhands-ontostudentswiththecollectionandon-sitedig
Lipscomb students are able to participate in excavations in Israel at the Tel Burna excavation site, where Ortiz serves as co-director, through a partnership with Ariel University. The same partnership allows students to work firsthand at the ongoing recordation project of the West Wall of the Cour de la Cachette in the Temple of Karnak, Luxor, Egypt, where Dr. Mark Janzen, associate professor, and Egyptologist, serves as a project coordinator.
The Lanier Center boasts a collection of about 1,100 artifacts and a collection of sherds, a fragment of a pottery vessel found on archaeological sites, numbering in the thousands, said Barbosa.
In the 2021-22 school year, the Lanier Center had 19 doctoral students and four master’s level students enrolled, said Marcella Barbosa, curator and collections manager. Doctoral students are expected, and master’s students are highly encouraged, to participate in excavations every year. Something made practical and accessible for Lipscomb students as the Lanier Center administrates six of its own excavation sites, a luxury many other programs do not have, said Barbosa.
In addition to the Korion site, the Lanier Center leads projects with the Nuri Pyramids Expedition in Sudan and the Ilibalyk Expedition in Kazakhstan. Next year, Lipscomb students will be able to join the Abila Archaeological Project on the Jordan/Syrian border. Dr. Dave Vila of John Brown University invited the Lanier Center to excavate the Abila site which will provide insight into the region’s transition from Roman Christianity to Islam, said Davis.
“As Christians we believe our faith is grounded in real historical real events,” says Grimsley. “I think it’s important for us to understand the context in which these events took place. Doing so helps us to ground our faith historically and helps us connect with Scripture. It helps us understand the history behind Christianity and how God works through the world.”
through archaeology,” said Davis, “and that’s why it is fundamentally important for a Christian university.”
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Pharmaceutical sciences faculty have now engaged with more than 100 students in mentor-guided research projects at Lipscomb.
Dr. Scott Akers (left), executive director of thesciencespharmaceuticalresearchcenter,workswith Kangjun Li , (Pharm.D. ’21) (middle) and Vivian Truong , (Pharm.D. ’21) (right) who are both now pursuing their Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University.
mbarking upon a journey to establish a College of Pharmacy at Lipscomb University, academic leaders made an auspicious decision in hiring Dr. Scott Akers in 2007. His rare blend of experience in both clinical practice and research in the pharmaceutical sciences set the university on a path to create a program rarely found in pharmacy education.
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The road less traveled
As a graduate from the College of Pharmacy at the University of Tennessee in 1991, Akers took the road less traveled by his peers and pursued a post-graduate pathway that combined clinical experience with pharmaceutical sciences research. After participating in a session on Pharm.D. pathways to biomedical research at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) conference in 2006, Akers saw a unique opportunity to address the need for more Pharm.D.-trained research scientists by collaborating with Nashville’s Vanderbilt University to engage Lipscomb’s student pharmacists in research.
The Lipscomb-Vanderbilt University Pharm.D.-toPh.D. Pathway Program has, to date, resulted in several Vanderbilt adjunct appointments for Lipscomb’s pharmacy faculty, collaboration on numerous research grants, more than $1.3 million in research funding and more than 80 works of published scholarship that span drug discovery, preclinical drug development, first-in-human trials and clinical research studies.
Lipscomb-Vanderbilt Pathway Program guides aspiring pharmaceutical scientists
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Among those students is a cohort of 10 student pharmacists who have actively participated in the Pharm.D.-to-Ph.D. pipeline. Seven so far have gone on to pursue a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical and pharmacological sciences from nationally recognized graduate research training programs at Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina.
From a Lipscomb perspective, the benefits of the program not only unlock new research training and career opportunities for students but also enhance the institution’s research reputation and environment, said Akers.
Training grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Students entering the pharmacology graduate program via the pipeline are in high demand by research mentors, are successful in securing competitive research fellowships and awards at the national level and complete their Ph.D. degree in approximately four years compared to the national average of five and a half“Weyears.benefit from having a diverse cadre of trainees that include Ph.D. students; MD/Ph.D. students; and Pharm.D./Ph.D. students,” said Barnett. “As students learn from each other, this diversity in background and pathway contributes to a rich learning environment.”
MENTOR-GUIDEDSTUDENTS$1.3MINRESEARCHFUNDING80+WORKSOFPUBLISHEDSCHOLARSHIP100+INVOLVEDINRESEARCHPROJECTS
“The hands-on experience at Lipscomb just spurred my interest in research even more and ultimately helped me choose my graduate mentor, Dr. Neil Osheroff at Vanderbilt,” said Dr. Elizabeth Gibson (Pharm.D. ’15), who earned a postdoctoral fellowship at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital after earning her Ph.D. and now works at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Jersey.
“It fostered a sense of independence so that when transitioning to Vanderbilt I was quickly able to achieve autonomy in the lab,” said Murphy.
Vanderbilt has been effective in leveraging the success of the program to secure an additional training line for a pharmacology graduate student on its NIH T32 Pharmacology 11lipscomb.edu/now
Whilecurriculum.studentsare engaged in research at Lipscomb, Akers and Barnett meet with them each year to evaluate their ongoing interests and help them identify a potential mentor at Vanderbilt before they complete their final year in the pharmacy program. By the time a student graduates, they are admitted directly into the pharmacology graduate program at Vanderbilt with at least 33 hours of graduate coursework transferred into the program, said Akers.
Learn more about ProgramLipscomb-VanderbiltthePathwayatbit.ly/LUVUPathway.
The degree partnership program has been recognized nationally as Akers and Barnett were invited to speak about the program at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Research Symposium in Long Beach, California, in 2018, he said. Most existing pharmaceutical sciences graduate programs either recruit pharmacy students directly within their own pharmacy program or compete amongst each other for a limited pool of pharmacy graduates who are completing research fellowships or are already employed within the workforce, said Akers.
Lipscomb’s pathway program is operating more like an incubator model, he noted, expanding the pool of potential graduate students within the profession by cultivating these types of students early on in the pharmacy
The cross-institutional partnership with Vanderbilt’s department of pharmacology is proving to be a highly successful way of attracting more students towards this pharmacy career option, said Akers.
In addition to Gibson’s position in “big pharma,” the program’s first two graduates, Dr. Rachel Crouch (’08, Pharm.D. ’12), and Dr. Brittany Spitznagel (Pharm.D. ’16), ended up in academia, the former joining the Lipscomb pharmacy faculty and the latter joiningBothVanderbilt’s.Crouchand Akers have expertise in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics and have attracted grant money to carry out various studies in drug analysis and drug development (see page 15 for more details). Crouch now runs her own lab in Lipscomb’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center.
“I had some really great mentors at Lipscomb and at Vanderbilt, so I enjoy being able to give back and pass that along,” she said.
Of the three current alumni of the pathway program, all of them earned predoctoral fellowships, which are highly competitive, including Dr. Matt Murphy (’19), who is in the final year of his Ph.D. work at Vanderbilt and earned an American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship.
“I was able to rotate through Dr. Osheroff’s lab, prior to joining it, as part of my fourth-year pharmacy rotations. A majority of the coursework was completed, so I could focus on research without having a full course load to worry about.”
The degree partnership program has benefited both Vanderbilt, which does not have its own pharmacy program, and Lipscomb, which receives access to facilities and faculty at a Research 1 university, said Dr. Joey Barnett, professor of pharmacology and director of medical student research at Vanderbilt, who works alongside Akers to coordinate the dual degree pipeline, started in 2011.
There are several choke points that can stall doctoral students as they move through their studies, said Trace Hebert, interim dean of the College of Education and founding director of Lipscomb’s Ed.D. program. Students may not be able to find a research partner; they may have trouble developing a meaningful topic or lack the social network to carry out the project or obtain access to the needed data.
Lipscomb’s Doctor of Education, however, for the past decade, boasts a 91.4% rate of students who have graduated or who are now on track to graduate. Of the 158 students from underrepresented racial categories in the program over the years, 85.4% have graduated or are on-track to graduate, also well above other programs nationally.
“The collaborative model prepares students to engage in high performance teams, including when it comes to dissertation research,” he said. “This model mirrors how educational leaders actually operate in real educational environments and while conducting research.”
In addition, the client-based dissertation research model, “in which students conduct research on real-life educational topics for educational organizations with real research needs, removes many of the barriers to success that impact doctoral students across the nation,” he said.
Innovative collaborative and clientbased dissertation research model fuels Lipscomb’s 90%+ completion rate for doctoral students.
According to a research initiative launched by the Council of Graduate Schools, 10 years after beginning their doctoral studies, only 56.6% of students have completed their degree.
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In graduate schools nationwide, students stalling out and not completing a doctoral degree is so common, they even have an abbreviation for it: ABD (All But Dissertation).
91.4%Ed.D.PROGRAM10-year completion rate 85.4%DIVERSESTUDENTSINTHEEd.D.PROGRAM10-year completion rate 12 lipscomb now: discovery
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When Lipscomb first established its Ed.D. program, discussion about these choke points for students working independently took place on the front end and resulted in a collaborative program model and a client-based dissertation research approach that has proven highly effective in keeping students on track to graduate, said Hebert.
Students working in groups on their dissertation allows students to support each other through the lows, Hebert said. “Because it’s a team, because they are pulling each other along and pulling each other through the lows, that leads to a more than 90% completion rate,” he said.
Revamped Doctorate of Ministry centers on congregational leadership
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Dr. Carlos Gupton (’82), hired as the new director of the program in December 2020, developed the curriculum focused on equipping exemplary Christian leaders with deep spiritual formation and advanced leadershipCertainlycompetencies.God’sChurch is struggling, facing complex moral quandaries, declining attendance and often controversial changes, Gupton admits, “but that doesn’t mean we should abandon it. I think the established church is on the frontline of God’s mission.”
Gupton: ‘Congregations are where the faith, hope and love of Christ guide us through all the transitions of our lives’
With church leaders facing ever greater cultural, economic, emotional and strategic challenges, Lipscomb’s Hazelip School of Theology felt the time was right to strengthen the congregational emphasis of its Doctor of Ministry program. This past school year debuted a revised curriculum centered on spiritually grounded congregational leadership within the context of today’s cultural issues.
Nie sets up enough MOUs to provide about 12 research studies per cohort, and students are grouped together based on their research preferences and interests. Nie has a database of more than 90 organizations that have contracted with the doctoral program for research over the decade.
The overlay of the congregational focus did not change one of the doctorate program’s greatest strengths: that all courses are taught through a missional lens, as many Lipscomb Bible faculty have extensive experience and scholarship in this area, said Gupton. Learn more about the D.Min. program at bit.ly/LipscombDM
“That removes one of the biggest obstacles in doctoral education. When students get to the research stage, they already have a willing client, who is ready to work with them, and who is eager to see their research-based findings and recommendations to their organization,” he said.
Several clients, such as the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, have partnered with Lipscomb multiple times. Nie works to offer a variety of research topics from across the nation and is also considering some international opportunities for future doctoral students.
Nationwide, the Doctor of Ministry is the degree of choice for practicing congregational leaders who want to function at the highest level in their current ministry post, said Today’sGupton.ministers face common strategic quandaries such as how to deal with ineffective staff or under-staffing, conflict between faith leaders and inability to facilitate change due to lack of agency in the leadership systems of the congregation, he said.“A lot of models for ministry governance come out of the corporate arena and are re-engineered for a congregation. These models are helpful, but lack theological direction and spiritual vitality,” said Gupton. “We need to integrate the theological and spiritual with strategic congregational leadership.”
Each year, Alice Nie, assistant professor and the research coordinator for the doctoral program, seeks out local school systems, public and private schools, higher education institutions and other educational organizations that are seeking answers to problems. The organization and Lipscomb then enter into a memorandum of understanding with those organizations to partner in conducting the research project, well before the doctoral cohort students becomeTheinvolved.MOUprovides a structure, formality and “a weight of responsibility on all parties,” said Hebert.
In the 2021-2022 school year, 65 doctoral students were working on dissertation projects. Examples of research topics include assessing the effectiveness of the Tennessee Governor’s Educational Literacy Summer reading pilot program; a Fisk and Vanderbilt universities bridge program to doctorates in STEM; and a middle school newcomer program at LEAD Cameron, a Nashville charter school.
“One of the objectives of any College of Education should be active engagement with the education community,” said Hebert. “Our doctoral program has been effective at this by both meeting the research needs of local organizations while also training and graduating hundreds of doctoral students who now serve in a wide variety of teaching and leadership roles in school systems, higher education, and education support organizations.”
Learn about the Ed.D. program at bit.ly/LipscombEdD
Some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions call on Lipscomb scholars to solve problems and enhance today’s world through research. Dr. John Hutson is testing silicon carbide devices that could be used for everything from “orbital vehicles to lunar rovers to a moon base to space suits,” said Hutson.
PARTNERSHIPS $401K+CONTRACTSANDVANDERBILTSUBGRANTSAWARDEDTOTHEPHARMACEUTICALSCIENCESRESEARCHCENTERINTHEPASTFIVEYEARS
When Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Arthur Witulski, research professor of electrical engineering, needed someone familiar with running tests at heavy ion accelerator facilities, he knew who he could call on with that rare expertise.
Dr. John Hutson, a Vanderbilt University graduate who had been a member of Vanderbilt’s Radiation Effects and Reliability group, is working just a few miles from Vanderbilt as a Lipscomb associate professor in electrical and computer engineering in the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering.
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Once completed, the new silicon carbide devices could be used for everything “from orbital vehicles to lunar rovers to a moon base to space suits,” said Hutson, noting that these new components will reduce the weight of space-bound cargos. “If you can operate at higher voltages, you don’t need as much current, so you can design electrical systems with less wires and less weight.”
Having worked at Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest defense and aerospace contractors in the U.S., as a reliability and systems engineer before coming to Lipscomb, Hutson is one of a relatively small handful of people who has extensive hands-on experience carrying out the kinds of tests that Witulski needed: firing high-energy ions at electrical equipment designed for outer space.
Partners
Lipscomb faculty’s partnerships with institutions both near and far bring new insights and knowledge to our world
Witulski has a grant from NASA Goddard Spaceflight to develop silicon carbide power components for NASA lunar surface applications to create a more lightweight battery that can operate more reliably and effectively in the atmosphere of space, where heavy ions combined with very high voltage can cause permanent damage, sometimes actually blowing holes in power devices.
Vanderbilt University, also located in Nashville, is one of Lipscomb’s biggest partners, with Lipscomb faculty holding dual positions at Vanderbilt, a Pharm.D.-to-Ph.D. Pathway Program (see page 10) in drug discovery and development, numerous research subawards to Lipscomb and interprofessional practice opportunities for Lipscomb health scienceWhenstudents.Dr.Chad Gentry came to Lipscomb’s pharmacy faculty in 2012, he began a partnership with Vanderbilt’s nursing program to establish an interprofessional practice program at Nashville’s Clinic at Mercury Courts, where he serves as lead clinical pharmacist.
In 2019 Gentry was honored by Vanderbilt and state and national organizations for his work developing the Mercury CourtsGentryModel.also paved the way for a growing Lipscomb partnership with Nashville’s Meharry Medical College when he was appointed as a health policy fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Center for Health Policy, and later Lipscomb University joined the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance. That partnership flourished and today Lipscomb includes Meharry dental students in its Grand Rounds program, an annual course that gives health science students from various disciplines an opportunity to work as an interprofessional team on patient case studies, said Dr. Abbie Burka, associate professor of pharmacy practice and director of interprofessional education at Lipscomb.
Akers and his students are evaluating the cyclopeptide’s pharmacokinetic profile in preclinical animal models, and Crouch and her students are exploring how specific enzymes in the liver metabolize the peptide, work that recently earned Crouch a new investigator award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
Over the intervening years, Lipscomb pharmacy students have joined nursing, medical and social work students at the clinic to learn the ins and outs of team health care, and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grants have funded the development and study of the Mercury Courts Model, operating an interprofessional collaborative practice model of primary care.
Hutson is just one of Lipscomb’s faculty who have been called on by some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions to help solve problems and enhance today’s world through research.
In the coming school year, Burka and Dr. Regina Stokes Offodile, professor and interim chair of the Department of Professional & Medical Education at Meharry, will begin a pilot longitudinal study to pair Lipscomb pharmacy students and Meharry medical students to interact and learn together throughout their four years of study.
Akers is a co-investigator on two multimilliondollar research grants awarded by the American Heart Association to Drs. Dan Roden and Bjorn Knollman at Vanderbilt to evaluate novel drug therapies in patients experiencing heart arrhythmias. Vanderbilt called on Akers’ expertise in quantitative drug analysis and pharmacokinetics to evaluate drug exposure of these drug molecules in patients and to explore the relationship of drug levels with clinicalAkersoutcomes.andDr. Rachel Crouch (’08, ’12), assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and a trainee of the Lipscomb/Vanderbilt pathway program, are also collaborating on a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project with Vanderbilt’s Dr. Jeffrey Johnston who synthesized a variant cyclopeptide produced by a fungus to test its therapeutic effects on cardiac arrhythmias.
Lipscomb faculty’s work and connections with Vanderbilt have led to partnerships with institutions far beyond Nashville’s borders as well.
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Dr. Scott Akers, executive director of the pharmaceutical sciences research center and associate dean of research in Lipscomb’s College of Pharmacy, leads a center of excellence in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics that has partnered with Vanderbilt physicians and scientists to accelerate drug molecules through preclinical and clinical stages of drug development.
Among the latest was “Compensatory post-diuretic renal sodium reabsorption is not a dominant mechanism of diuretic resistance in acute heart failure,” published in European Heart Journal in 2021. Cox’s work with heart failure patients at Vanderbilt has led to various clinical trials to investigate drug treatments for companies such as Astra Zeneca and Cumberland Pharmaceuticals as well as a recently started five-year, NIH-funded trial at Vanderbilt and the Nashville Veterans Association to monitor and dose diuretics in hospitalized patients with heart failure.
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Dr. Shaun Stauffer, a former Vanderbilt professor now at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Therapeutics Discovery reached out to Akers and Crouch to support the preclinical development of two novel molecules for treating COVID-19.
Dr. Hannah Stolze, associate professor of supply chain management and director of the Center for Transformative Sales & Supply Chain Leadership, may be working with the university farthest afield from Lipscomb’s Nashville campus. She is working with two professors from the University of Canterbury in Christ Church in New Zealand, as well as another professor from The Ohio State University, as a guest editor for a special edition of the Journal of Business Logistics focused on transformative supply chain research, to be published in 2023.
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“The transformative space examines the impact of business on human flourishing,” explains Stolze, who is also a Fulbright Scholar.
That research, “Structure-Based Optimization of ML300-Derived, Noncovalent Inhibitors Targeting the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 3CL Protease,” was published in 2021 in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
“The forthcoming edition promises to have a tangible positive impact on corporate decision-making,” said Stolze. “All of the articles included in this edition will outline empirical research studies, with data
“This is a more holistic approach that also takes a look at impact, not only on the customer but also on employees.”
Dr. Jeremy Townsend (right) has authored, co-authored with his exercise science and nutrition students, or contributed to 40 articles published in peer-reviewed journals since 2016. Here then-student Megan Jones (’20) assists him with taking tissue samples.
Stolze and her fellow guest editors first published a paper in the Journal of Service Management on food deserts that became exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. That piece was the first article on transformative supply chain research published in that journal, said Stolze.Asanoutgrowth of that, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, which Stolze and her guest editors are all members of, were invited to become guest editors of an edition of the association’s journal focused specifically on the topic.
Dr. Zac Cox, who has a dual role as a Lipscomb professor of pharmacy and inpatient clinical pharmacist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has worked with Yale University’s Dr. Jeff Testani on 13 published articles exploring various drug therapies for patients hospitalized with acute heart failure. These works have been referenced in the European Society of Cardiology’s and the American College of Cardiology’s international guidelines for heart failure treatment, said Cox.
As the research coordinator for the Master of Exercise and Nutrition program, Townsend involves both Lipscomb’s graduate students and its student-athletes in sponsored research to test the effects on performance of various products such as post-recovery nutrition drinks or probiotics.
collected from real-world companies and the results being reported or used by those companies.”
Whether it’s partnering with scientists just down the road or collaborating with researchers across the globe, Lipscomb’s faculty are called on by academia to bring their particular expertise and perspective to endeavors to discover new and valuable knowledge for our world.
Dr. Zac Cox has worked with Yale University faculty on 13 published articles involving patients at Vanderbilt Medical Center.
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Dr. Rachel Crouch (middle), who won a new investigator award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, works with Caithlyne Guevarra , P3, (left) and Christine Hunter , P4 (right) in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center.
For the past two years, Dr. Jeremy Townsend and his students ( Jaclyn Morimune (’19) is pictured here) have conducted research on the effect of gut microbiome on gastrointestinal function during resistance exercise.
“Sports health and nutrition is a huge market, and there is so much bad information out there on social media,” said Townsend. “We don’t want any athletes to suffer due to misleading information.”
Dr. Jeremy Townsend, assistant professor of kinesiology, also works with various private companies, such as Deerland Enzymes and Liquid I.V., to test the effect of specific dietary products on the health and performance of collegiate athletes.
Since coming to Lipscomb in 2016, Townsend has authored, co-authored with his students, or contributed to 40 articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
In addition, Townsend has earned grants from the company Renaissance Periodization for the past two years to conduct research on the effect of gut microbiome on gastrointestinal function during resistance exercise. The goal is to minimize gastrointestinal (GI) stress while maximizing GI function to help athletic performance and recovery, he said. He and his student team have analyzed stool samples to determine factors that contribute to having GI damage during exercise and will compile data to determine what are red flags for GI distress based on the athlete’s diet and other factors.
These are just the latest achievements in the long journey he began about 50 years ago as an indigent child, heeding his mother’s insistence to focus on God, school and self-control.
Water was a constant need as he grew up in poverty in Ghana. It became the subject of his study as he fulfilled his mother’s educational dreams for him, and it is the focus of his chemistry research and mission today as he works to develop water filtration systems, including low-cost versions for disadvantaged areas.
For more than 23 years Opoku-Duah has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in chemistry and hydrology in four different countries, published widely in high-impact scientific journals, earned several academic and research grants and fellowships and served as a Christian missionary in Africa, Europe and North America.
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In addition to Opoku-Duah’s new appointment for the 2022-2023 school year, his first book, an autobiography, was released this summer, and he was recognized for his service on an international disciplinebased committee recommending fellowship funding.
There’s a continuously flowing theme throughout the life of Lipscomb’s new Paul B. Langford Endowed Professor in Chemistry Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah: water.
As a seven-year-old boy from the ancient Ashanti tribe in the West African country of Ghana, Opoku-Duah walked two miles to the river every morning before school to collect drinking water for the day. The small village where he was born and spent the first 12 years of his life lacked basic water service, a fundamental human need for health and well-being that remains a challenge for 10 percent of the world’sHispopulation.inspiringjourney from an impoverished child to a chemistry scientist is told in his book, Transcended: The Story of an African Science Professor Changing Lives in America.
Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah is working to bring clean water and ‘living water’ to the globe
His experience is highly fitting to fulfill the role named for Langford, who for nearly half a century inspired and mentored Lipscomb students who dreamed of entering medical professions or pursuing careers in chemistry.
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One recent application was the removal of toxic microsystems released from blue green algae in the drinking water in St. Mary’s Lake in Celina, Ohio. The other was in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where perfluorooctanoic acid, a subtype of a byproduct compound from making Teflon, had been discharged into the Ohio River.
Opoku-Duah, along with a partnering chemical engineer, developed technology that cleans dirty river water using UV lamps, a more feasible solution in Africa. The UV radiation breaks the oxygen into atoms that become very active radicals that kill bacteria and viruses by breaking into the cell wall in the DNA nucleus. Once all of the bacteria and viruses are killed, the water is filtered and clean enough to drink in about an hour.
“My mother was a very strong Christian who insisted her children always focus on three things: God, school and self-control,” said Opoku-Duah. “Her strict rules changed my life; even though she had no formal education, she knew the value of education. I was determined to go to Hiscollege.”mother, grandmother and six sisters sacrificed much of what little they had to help pay for him, the family’s only male child, to attend a regimental British mission high school in the city. That was where he had access to clean drinking water for the first time in his life and learned from his American Peace Corps biology teacher how dirty water made peopleHesick.holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Ghana, a master’s degree in water chemistry from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. with post-doctoral research in environmental hydrology at Durham University in England.
Opoku-Duah has published results of these studies in two journals and has submitted a book chapter on the results of these projects.
Opoku-Duah has been a Lipscomb faculty member in chemistry since 2019 and currently serves as chair of the Department of Biochemistry & Chemistry. He was the 2022 recipient of the university’s Award for Faculty Excellence in STEM. His research focuses on development of new and cheaper water filtration technologies. In addition to his administrative duties and his hydrology research, he also works with students on research studies, including a study on the antioxidant and antiviral properties of herbal teas that was published in the Journal of Nutritional Health and Food Engineering. Lipscomb’s Dr. Matt Vergne, associate professor in pharmaceutical science, and students Markous Boushra (‘21) and Matthew Khalil (‘21) were co-authors of the article.
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Read more about Dr. Opoku-Duah and purchase his autobiography at bit.ly/Opoku-Duah Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah (left) with Dr. Paul B. Langford (right), the namesake of the new endowed professorship.
He also has a grant proposal pending with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture to study nutrient loads in selected Middle Tennessee rivers and streams using advanced analytical instrumentation. Results would be used to update watershed-based plans and delist recovered streams.
For almost two decades, the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering has incorporated into its academic offerings multiyear, hands-on, humanitarian service projects, including trips to disadvantaged communities in locales such as Honduras, Ghana, Malawi and Guatemala, for installations. In 2020, the NSF tapped that expertise with a $200,000 grant to Dodson to conduct surveys and interviews with engineering students and alumni, and engineering professionals, who both have and have not, worked on such projects and to develop a model for how best to include such experiences within an engineering curriculum.
NSF looks to Lipscomb engineering professor to create a more inclusive STEM industry
The goal of the study, “The Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion,” is to discover how such projects instill a perspective that is more open to embracing diversity, and if such perspectives could have a long-term effect on the professional engineering workplace toward a more inclusive culture, said Dodson.Theengineering field, long documented as a male-dominated field, has been striving to draw more women and underrepresented minorities to the industry, but research has shown that merely recruiting a more diverse workforce is not resulting in retention of those engineers in the field for the long-term, Dodson said.
So when she came to Lipscomb University and began pursuing her engineering major, not only was her perceptual bubble burst in the classroom, but also out in the world.
“It was the first time I saw people drastically different from me. I worked with them and realized we aren’t all that different,” she said. “We have the same goals, hopes and dreams for our lives and our families. Since then, I’ve been trying constantly to understand the perspectives of others, which has led me into my current research involving diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“When I got involved in Lipscomb engineering missions, that was really the first time I saw a different perspective of the world,” said Dodson, who not only found herself as one of the few females in the engineering program, but also worked on a hands-on humanitarian engineering project to install a clean water system for a disadvantaged community in Guatemala.
Now, as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Lipscomb, Dodson still reflects on those experiences for both her instruction in thermal fluids and as fuel for her three-year, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research project to explore how humanitarian service projects impact engineering students and thus the engineering industry’s workplace culture.
worldaBuildingbetter
Dr. Kirsten Heikkinen Dodson (pictured at right), isn’t afraid to admit that her childhood occurred in a cultural bubble.
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“Whereas other studies have focused on the direct impact to the student, this study extends longitudinally, examining long-term effects, as well as outwardly, investigating secondary or indirect impacts” on the engineering industry itself, Dodson wrote.
Over the next year, Dodson and her team of students will complete interviews with both engineering students, who will show the impact of humanitarian engineering projects on student development and formation, and engineering professionals, who will provide contrast to the experiences of Lipscomb University students and alumni.
“That is a really challenging aspect for a lot of engineering students. Engineers often want to be given a problem and solve it without incorporating this social aspect,” Dodson said. “These client-based humanitarian service projects provide easy ways to bring that social aspect into the engineering process, which is highly valuable to the profession.”
So far, survey responses of Lipscomb’s engineering alumni have shown the existence of values that past literature have identified as positively impacting engineering students, such as empathy, professional identity, emotional intelligence, community engagement and social responsibility, said Dodson.
“The research team, which includes four engineering and education students, will compare results from this study to secular and other religious universities. Since faith and religion were found to be significant factors in the respondents’ reasons for serving, it could provide useful information as to why students get involved in humanitarian engineering projects,” she said.
Dodson’s study asks, would it be more effective to focus on the workplace culture and create a model of an inclusive environment to mold inclusive engineers?
“A variety of projects and initiatives have been designed to increase diversity by providing guidance and support to underrepresented groups to better overcome challenges in their engineering career,” Dodson wrote in her latest published article for the 2022 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference.
(left) The majority of Dodson’s havehumanitarianengineeringprojectsbeencarriedout in Guatemala, where she works with locals to install water distribution systems for remote villages.
Dodson has presented and published her results so far at the 2021 and 2022 ASEE conferences.
Over the past couple of decades, the engineering field as a whole has moved toward a more client-based approach, emphasizing client needs and how they may impact a particular project or goal.
(right) Incorporating handson humanitarian engineering projects into the curriculum means a lot more than one international trip, said Dodson. Students work on campus on designs and client communication for years before installation. During the construction of a wastewater treatment system at Village of Hope in Ghana, the engineering team, including Dodson, also led educational activities with high school students at Hope College. Students made water bottle rockets and learned about energy and aerodynamics.
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“This project shifts the focus from removing the burden on underrepresented groups to eliminating the barriers from the workplace itself.”
Business faculty nurture case research in The PhD Project network Vice Provost for Health Affairs
The Lipscomb trainings, including an online version in summer 2021 that trained more than 100 people and an in-person version this summer in Rhode Island, prepare them to successfully submit case studies to be published in academic journals.
researchconversationnationalonethics
As part of a nationwide effort to develop a more racially diverse generation of business school faculty nationwide, a Lipscomb College of Business professor has spearheaded training and development sessions on writing case studies for underserved doctoral graduates.
Having recently completed a three-year term as the first Black male president of the international Society of Clinical Research Associates and serving as the first Black board member of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection, Lipscomb’s Vice Provost for Health Affairs Dr. Quincy J. Byrdsong has found his expertise in the historical evolution of research ethics in great demand over the past few years, particularly since the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Family Process journal was founded in 1962, and is widely considered to be the preeminent publication of its kind in the field of family research and therapeutic intervention. In addition, Turner was appointed as co-chair of the Family Process Journal’s 60th Anniversary Celebration and Symposium held in September 2021 with the theme “The Heart of the Matter: Systemic Imperatives to Address Health Disparities and Racism in the Time of Covid.”
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Dr. Andy Borchers, professor and associate dean of accreditation and assessment, and an active leader of the Society for Case Research (SCR), was tapped by the national nonprofit, the PhD Project, to assist in its efforts to enable research opportunities for recent Ph.D. graduates.
Quincy Byrdsong leads the
BELONGING&EQUITY,DIVERSITY,
SCR, which works to improve case research, writing and teaching, has held three of its own conferences at the Lipscomb campus, the latest in July 2021.
Throughout 2022, he has been called on to make presentations on equity and justice at organizations such as Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, the International Association of Clinical Research Nurses, at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network IRB Directors’ Forum, the University of Chicago and the National Council of University Research Administrators, to name a few. Also in 2022, Byrdsong’s educational modules in clinical research will be featured in the new Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program for Clinical Research. The modules are the first for the CITI program specific to clinical research. for FUTURETHE
Turner rounded out the 2021-2022 school year by giving a guest lecture at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, one of the best-known and most highly regarded training facilities for family therapists in the United States. This October, he will co-host with Dr. Richard Hughes, Lipscomb scholar in residence, the Lilly Fellows Program’s 2022 national conference on the theme “Implicit Racial Bias and the Academy.”
The PhD Project was founded by the KPMG Foundation, Citi, AACSB International and Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) in 1994 to work to increase diversity in the business world. For the past year and a half, it has turned to SCR to prepare more faculty from underrepresented groups to write case studies, one of the principal ways of engaging business students nationwide, said Borchers, who also serves as editor of SCR’s Journal of Critical Incidents.
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One of the nation’s top research journals in family science has selected Dr. William Lofton Turner, distinguished professor and special counsel for diversity, equity and belonging, as guest editor for a special issue focusing on health and mental health disparities in diverse and underserved populations.
Distinguished professor selected as guest editor, conference co-chair
McClure Center for Faith and professorshipnewestablishedSciencewithendowed
In December, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences celebrated the opening of the McClure Center for Faith and Science, which will serve as a place for students to explore the relationship between the Christian faith and scientific inquiry.
To achieve the AACSB accreditation, a school’s blend of faculty members should consist of 90% of faculty who are scholarly and professionally qualified, said Dr. Ray Eldridge, dean of the college. Faculty qualifications include doctorate degrees “emphasizing advanced foundational discipline-based research” and “ongoing, sustained, and substantive academic engagement activities consistent with the school’s mission-linked research,” said Eldridge. As of June 2021, 84% of Lipscomb’s full-time and part-time faculty had contributed to a total of 53 peer-reviewed journals and 330 intellectual contributions within the past five years.
The McClure Center for Faith and Science held its first lecture in April. Center for Public Scholarship Rep. Mark White (left), and Kenyatta Lovett (right), hosted the Emerging Leadership Symposium in July.
New center for Public Scholarship hosts symposium
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“We are deeply committed to civic engagement as a way of teaching, learning and producing scholarship that addresses the most crucial challenges facing communities today,” said Dr. Steve Joiner, dean of the college.
Boost in research helps business college achieve AACSB accreditation
The McClure Center for Faith and Science is named in honor of Brenda and Dr. Robert McClure, a gastroenterologist in Columbia, Tennessee, who made the lead gift to establish the center and who has played an integral role in developing the college’s faith and science initiative which launched in 2018. This spring, Dr. John Lewis, associate professor in biology, was named the Robert W. McClure Endowed Professor in Faith and Science. Lewis holds a bachelor’s in wildlife and fisheries science from Tennessee Technological University, a master’s from Auburn University’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and a Ph.D. from Texas A&M’s Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. He has been published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Wildlife Research, Rangeland Ecology and Management and the Journal of Mammalogy
The symposium included four panels of subject experts and leaders wrestling with real-world challenges and opportunities facing rural areas in Tennessee and surrounding states. Topics included public-private partnership strategies for local leaders involved with the Ford Motor Company’s new electric vehicle and battery manufacturing plant in Haywood County, regional collaboration and navigation of federal assistance, interstate partnerships and housing challenges after a natural disaster, the global impact of foreign investments on local economies and educationto-workforce challenges for school districts.
The Lipscomb University College of Business became accredited by the AACSB in February, placing it among the less than 6% of the business schools worldwide endorsed by AACSB. A boost in research and scholarship by faculty was a major component of reaching that goal.
ADVANCESLATEST
In April, the McClure Center held its first annual McClure Lecture on Faith and Science featuring Dr. Ed Larson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor, speaking on the topic, “The Scopes Trial in History and Folklore.” Larson examined the landmark Scopes Trial that took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 that is also the topic of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Summer for the Gods.
Lipscomb University’s College of Leadership & Public Service, recognized across Tennessee for producing servant leaders in multiple sectors and venues of public service, has launched the Center for Public Scholarship, which held its first major event,the Emerging Leadership Symposium, this summer.
In addition to the godly service provided each year, today’s faculty are building on those service relationships to answer on-the-ground, applicable questions such as:
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• Is there a better way to teach students behind prison walls?
Lipscomb’s longtime community engagement results in answers to questions about the most effective ways to help and inspire LIGHTA for
Student stipends for counseling interns in local primary care clinics since 2018 221 Scholarships to future teachers grant-fundedthroughpipelineprogramssince2017
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By using the scientific method and their scholarly expertise, Lipscomb faculty are determining the most effective and impactful ways to serve and benefit both its surrounding community and the world at-large.
• Is it possible to keep a business afloat while also serving the holistic needs of employees who are trauma-survivors?
Asking handsempowerquestionsthethattheofservice
• Can we build a better teacher by training and licensing current teaching assistants?
Dr. Lauren Pinkston fought human trafficking in Southeast Asia with the United Nations and other grassroots organizations. Today she brings her expertise to Lipscomb and to the national Freedom Business Alliance.
• Can we improve the health and safety of at-risk people by having a mental health counselor available within a few feet instead of a few miles?
Since its founding, Lipscomb University has been reaching out the hands of service to those in its surrounding community. What started with one man’s devotion to nursing the most vulnerable during the cholera epidemic of 1849 ballooned into an average of 60,000 service hours per year carried out by students in the last decade.
“We want to show these organizations how to move forward with assurance that their businesses will remain profitable,” she said.
Dr. Lauren Pinkston, assistant professor in business as mission, not only guides students carrying out these valuable services, but now she is helping to guide a national organization devoted to nurturing social enterprises that employ victims of human trafficking or other trauma.
In January 2015, Lipscomb University launched its Business as Mission (BAM) program, teaching students how to establish a profitable business as a way to work for the common good and to fuel solutions to society’s toughest problems both locally and globally.
Lipscomb students alone annually raise thousands of dollars through on-campus micro-businesses to fund social enterprises and challenged entrepreneurs around the globe. BAM students and professors in particular provide consultations and professional development to entrepreneurs in challenging environments.
The Freedom Business Alliance is a national industry association nurturing companies that strive to provide a safe working environment to victims of trauma while also operating a sustainable business.
Pinkston is bringing her experience fighting trafficking in Southeast Asia, with the United Nations for a short time as well as several other grassroots organizations, to a qualitative research project to collect and analyze data on such social enterprises worldwide. The assessment will be used to establish a code of best practices for social enterprises, one that is based on empirical data, Pinkston said.
Freedom Business Alliance code of ethics
“Having worked in that sector myself, I know there are so many people with great intentions who don’t have the support or the guidance to hold themselves accountable,” said Pinkston, who also presented at this year’s U.N. Commission on the Rights of Women. “A lot of these types of business ventures are created as a means to an end – to rehabilitate survivors or people from group homes because they need a job to avoid moving back into exploitation. So there are a lot of people running these businesses who are not trained businesspeople.”
A common code of ethics for practices such as ethical employment policies, connecting employees with their home community and strategies for connecting with the Western market will not only help such organizations avoid legal pitfalls, but will also help them establish sustainable sales and income, said Pinkston.
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As a combination of business skills, faith and Kingdom mission, such social enterprises worldwide are changing the lives of at-risk populations and providing resources to disadvantaged communities.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has funded the initiative with a $3.6 million grant to not only enhance patient care for underserved populations such as victims of the opioid epidemic, immigrants and nonEnglish-speaking residents, but also to learn and test how integrated health care can best be implemented to help patients.
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Graduates of the Lipscomb Initiative For Education (LIFE) have spurred faculty to find innovative ways to teach challenging subjects.
His Behavioral Health Initiative is built on the idea that “by integrating counselors into traditional primary care physician offices, the counselor and the physician can collaborate onsite about how to best serve the patient and to provide the needed care right away,” he said.
These observations led Ribeiro to partner with Dr. Lindsey Miller, associate professor of pharmacy practice, on an ongoing study of burnout and well-being among pharmacy students and faculty on campus.
In addition, Ribeiro and Dr. Melanie Morris, associate professor in graduate counseling, have presented twice at the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision annual conferences on how to secure funding for, and a best practices toolkit for, training counseling students to work in integrated health care settings.
“We wanted to find people who already know and love education and are serving our kids in Metro but who didn’t necessarily for
Since 2018, Dr. Douglas Ribeiro, director of graduate counseling, has placed 144 of Lipscomb’s mental health counseling students as interns who treat underserved patient populations in medical clinics all over Nashville.
Five years ago, Dr. Ally Hauptman, associate professor; Dr. Kristin Baese, assistant professor; and Laura Delgado, program director; all in Lipscomb’s College of Education, surmised that current in-classroom teaching assistants would make excellent, more relatable teachers in Nashville’s ethnically diverse K-12 classrooms.
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In addition to hosting annual conferences on integrated health care best practices that have drawn more than 100 participants annually since 2019 (excluding 2020), the initiative has opened up relationships between Lipscomb’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences to implement additional studies on interprofessional education in the health sciences, said LipscombRibeiro.faculty from counseling, pharmacy, nutrition and nursing are all involved in carrying out an ongoing study of Lipscomb’s own students and faculty to explore how preconceived stereotypes can impede collaboration among the future health science
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Today 18 fellows have all begun teaching in Nashville schools, and the EA Fellows Program served as a model for a 2021 article published in Kappan, a publication of Phi Delta Kappa, a professional magazine for those involved in K-12 education. The creators of the pipeline highlighted the strengths of the paraprofessional pool; the program’s cohort model and assigned mentors; and the longevity of the graduates in MNPS schools as factors in its success.
“Oneprofessionals.ofthebigthings we have seen is that often mental health students were hesitant to step into a medical area, and felt that their skills were not appropriate for that setting,” said Ribeiro. “We saw that as they progressed through their clinical experiences, they became much more confident in their knowledge and their sense of value to the team.”
Dr. Ally Hauptman , one of the co-coordinators of the EA Fellows Program, meets with a fellow. The program was held up as a model in an education profession magazine in 2021.
Behavioral Health Initiative
The Tennessee Higher Education Commission agreed and has awarded more than $260,000 in Diversity in Teaching Grants to Lipscomb to create a pipeline for Metro Nashville Public Schools’ (MNPS) dedicated educational assistants (EA) already working in the district to become lead teachers in the classroom.
Diversity in Teaching
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Cecelia Ramsey, lecturer in French, wanted to honor those differences when she was preparing to teach elementary French to inside students to fulfill Lipscomb’s foreign language requirement for a degree. She found a solution in Dr. Kelly Kidder’s draft of a French textbook she developed during a sabbatical using literary themes to teach undergraduates elementary French. “So much in language textbooks is built around helping people become efficient
tourists,” said Kidder, associate professor with expertise in second language acquisition. “I was disillusioned with that approach to teaching French already, so I wrote a modern adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, a French classic.
have the opportunity they wanted to become teachers. So pulling from the educational assistant pool makes the most sense,” said Hauptman.
licensure exam and professional development and an assigned Lipscomb faculty mentor once teaching. Curriculum and community in a women’s prison Since it was established in 2007, the Lipscomb Initiative For Education (LIFE) has impacted 216 lives of both inside and outside students taking classes in the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center through the power of education. LIFE provides for-credit undergraduate- and graduate-level classes within the prison walls where traditional Lipscomb students come to study alongside inmates. This unique experience has also provided inspiration and fuel for professors who teach in the program and must craft their curriculum for “inside students” who often have no Internet and different life experiences from those of traditional students.
“The way I wrote the textbook was designed to make the best use of what we know about how people process language. So it is very accessible from the beginning,” said Kidder. Ramsey agreed. “On day one they were reading a chapter in a new language, and they were stunned that they could do it,” Ramsey said. “One of my best experiences at the prison was realizing just how empowering those moments are for them.”
“It’s a relatively untapped pool, at least in Tennessee,” said Delgado. “People are starting to recognize that if you are looking for ways to offer more diverse pipelines to the profession, going after current paraprofessionals of color is, in theory, a high return and a quick turn-around.”
“By using a narrative, it’s so much easier for students to talk about the characters’ relationships with family, etc. It allows for exploration of themes, without it being completely relegated to the student’s own experiences,” she said. With restrictions on the media equipment she could use in the prison, Ramsey was eager to experiment with Kidder’s unpublished textbook and pilot its use with the LIFE program.
A counseling intern and a Lipscomb health care director meet together with a patient, carrying out a form of integrated health care developed and modeled through Dr. Douglas Ribeiro ’s Behavioral Health Initiative.
The fellows model provides EAs with a scholarship to Lipscomb, tutoring for the
Kidder and Ramsey presented a paper on the development and effective use of the textbook in the unique instructional environment of the prison setting at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in fall 2021.
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Nationally known history scholar, Dr. Tim Johnson, explores lifelong military careers of Mexican-American War generals in forthcoming, first-of-its-kind volume.
Connecting the dots between two wars
ince his doctoral dissertation back in the 1980s, Dr. Tim Johnson has been kicking around a couple of ideas that are changing how historians see the Mexican-American War, one of the least studied conflicts in American history.
Johnson, one of Lipscomb’s first designated University Research Professors, who has appeared on The History Channel, on C-SPAN’s BookTV and on public television, is now working on editing his sixth book on the Mexican-American War that will explore both these phenomena that have appeared in his books throughout his career-long research.
Within a year of publication, Johnson’s biography of General Winfield Scott was added to the Professional Reading List for cadets at West Point.
Now, 25 years into his career, he is working on another book that will highlight two concepts he first noticed back at the very start: Scott’s pacification program carried out during the war and the impact the war had on a group of its young officers who went on to become the most famous leaders in the American Civil War.
His first major research project, a biography of Gen. Winfield Scott, turned into the first of five published books about aspects of the Mexican-American War. He’s been hailed as “one of the top specialists in studying the U.S. MexicanAmerican War.”
One of the themes that Johnson expects to see highlighted in the chapters is how Civil War generals emulated Gen. Scott’s pacification program: his attempt to diffuse any efforts of general uprising among Mexican civilians by treating the population with respect and civility. Scott’s approach to counter-insurgency is a pattern not noted in scholarship before Johnson’s work, he said.
Gen. Winfield Scott as a middle-aged general at about the time of the Mexican-American War. In 1814, at age twenty-seven, Winfield Scott became the youngest general in the army. Most Americans remember Scott as the aging, overweight Civil War general who proposed to President Abraham Lincoln what came to be known as the Anaconda Plan, a military strategy to defeat the South in the Civil War, but Scott was at the pinnacle of his career fifteen years earlier when he commanded a six-month military campaign to capture Mexico City. Johnson argues that the Mexico City Campaign was the “most brilliant military campaign that you’ve never heard of.” Scott considered political implications when he marched his army through Mexico in 1847, and he also took politics into account in devising his Anaconda Plan in 1861. 29lipscomb.edu/now
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Johnson conducted research in Yale University’s Beinecke’s Western Americana Collection for one of his books on the Mexican American War thanks to winning Yale’s Archibald Hanna Jr. Fellowship in American History. Prof. Samuel Watson of the U.S. Military Academy wrote that it “is a superb example of campaign history in the most holistic sense.”
“More than 200 future Civil War generals served as lower grade officers in Mexico in 1846-47. Their personal experiences as young officers would have certainly informed decision-making 15 years later when they commanded troops in the Civil War,” said Johnson.Toaddress this question, Johnson reached out to the leading Civil War scholars across the nation with a request to submit chapters. He has now curated the responses into a book with six chapters on Confederate generals, six chapters on Union generals and a foreward by Gary Gallagher, renowned Civil War scholar at the University of Virginia.
In addition to curating the chapters submitted by scholars at the U.S. Naval Academy, the University of North Carolina, the University of California at Los Angeles and Arizona State University, to name a few, Johnson is also writing the introduction.
In that piece, Johnson notes that one thing Lee and Grant did at the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse was to reminisce about each of their experiences in the Mexican-American War.
“This book is the first serious scholarly attempt to connect the dots between these two wars,” said Johnson. “Scholars have produced numerous biographies of prominent Civil War generals, but those biographies generally cover the pre-Civil War years with brevity and treat those years as simply an introduction to the main event.”
“Battle of Buena Vista,“ first published in Lives of the Presidents of the United States of America, From Washington to the Present Time in 1867, depicts General Zachary Taylor, on white horse, directing his troops during the battle in the AmericanMexican-War.
Today, Johnson hears more scholarly discussion of pacification and has seen Scott’s efforts referenced in a recent military history textbook, he said. “As a historian, you always hope that you can contribute to new knowledge and that others will take note and adjust the way they teach and the way they write, and the assumptions they make based on what you’ve produced.”
Ulysses S. Grant stands at left with another officer in this picture from 1845. Grant was a lieutenant in the 4th Infantry in Mexico. At the Battle of Monterrey in 1846, he volunteered as a dispatch rider and hung off of the side of his horse to protect himself as he rode through a hail of enemy fire. He also distinguished himself the following year at the Battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. This image is available at the University of Texas-Arlington.
Johnson believes that Scott’s ahead-of-its-time approach to counter-insurgency rubbed off on Gen. Don Carlos Buell and Gen. George McClelland, both of whom used similar pacification techniques during the Civil War. Both of these generals will be the subject of chapters in the forthcoming book. How to counter civilian insurgency “is an ongoing current issue today in military policy,” said Johnson, referencing the recent war in Ukraine. However, “pacification didn’t seem significant enough to look at prior to Vietnam.”
“Scott looked at Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. The French army entered Spain, pillaging and plundering and murdering, taking whatever they needed, and as a result, the whole Spanish countryside erupted in a guerilla war,” said Johnson. “That completely bogged down the French Army. They had to fight for every crossroad, every bridge, every town, every village, because there was resistance around every corner, because of the way the French had acted as invaders.
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– Dr. Tim Johnson on Gen. Winfield Scott
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“There was guerilla fighting in Mexico, but there was never a pervasive guerilla threat to the American Army,” said Johnson. As he wrote in his first book on Scott: “…he left law and order in his wake and not pillaging and destruction.”
“This book is the first serious scholarly attempt to connect the dots between these two wars.” “…he left law and order in his wake and not pillaging and destruction.”
“So what did Scott’s Army do? They bought all of their provisions from Mexicans. They purchased what they needed. They paid rent when they used private property to house soldiers. American soldiers were strictly disciplined and punished if they stole a chicken or pig or assaulted a civilian.
Learn more about Tim Johnson and his books at bit.ly/TimothyDJohnson.
discoverdeliver i h NEW EXCELLENCE.KNOWLEDGE. Gain access to all the peer-reviewed published research by Lipscomb Health faculty and students. Explore advances in: Liver can cer Breast cancer Pain AcuteNutritionalmanagementsupplementsheartfailure Blockchain Interprofessionaltechnologyhealth care Diabetes prevention Digital health OUR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IS CREATING SOLUTIONS AND DISCOVERING NEW KNOWLEDGE FOR SOME OF TODAY’S MOST CRITICAL HEALTH CARE ISSUES. lipscomb.edu/health To search Lipscomb’s health science research published nationally and internationally, by department, author or year, visit lipscomb.edu/health-research
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onfocus FACULTY 19 Books
The story behind Strahan’s book is just one way that Lipscomb students and Lipscomb faculty authors have fueled each other in a reciprocal relationship that has spawned 19 books on faith, spirituality, the Bible and the Church in just the past five“Weyears.encourage and expect our professors to write scholarly works, because it cannot help but force you to consider new things and rethink your class presentations,” said College of Bible & Ministry Dean Dr. Leonard Allen (at right), author of Poured Out: The Spirit of God Empowering the Mission of God. “I think it greatly enhances what we can do for students.”
*As reported to the Office of the Provost.
Professors ‘write the book’ on faith, resilience and Scripture
Using his own book in his courses makes class discussions more immediately relevant, said written or edited by Bible faculty since 2018*
Bible professors lead the way in bringing book projects into the classroom to impact students
Since coming to Lipscomb in 2011, Dr. Josh Strahan (’04) (at left), associate professor in the College of Bible & Ministry, began to notice a shift in the way the younger generation viewed Christianity. It didn’t matter whether his students had gone to church their whole lives or not, it seemed that students often didn’t know the basics of Christianity and why those basics matter. His students’ demonstration of what sociologists call moralistic therapeutic deism, or the watering down of Christianity into a general moral wishful thinking, spurred him to write his book The Basics of Christian Belief: Bible, Theology and Life’s Big Questions, which was released in 2020 and is now used as a textbook in Lipscomb’s required Bible courses.
Strahan. “Students share what they find compelling, and they get a chance to challenge ideas, which is meaningful since the author is right there in the room,” he said.Dr. Holly Allen (at right), formerly a professor of Family Science and Christian Ministry, is now a retired adjunct who still teaches two classes shored up by a career researching educational psychology, intergenerational Christian formation, and children’s and family studies.
“The classroom reveals the questions that are important for students, the concerns they have, and the areas they enjoyed or topics they wanted to explore more,” he said.
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Students do role-playing and practice various methods for enhancing children’s spirituality such as: walking a labyrinth, participating in a Godly play story, writing a letter to God, praying in color, drawing a picture of God and reading children’s books and engaging with the question, “Who are you in thisHerstory?”most well-known work, Intergenerational Christian Formation: Bringing the Whole Church Together in Ministry, Community, and Worship, published in 2012 but due for a revision by 2023, also boosts engaging class discussion and students’ understanding of how they can maximize their role in church congregations, Allen said.
Upon arriving at Lipscomb eight years ago, she began exploring academic literature on resilience in children in order to revamp the Nurturing Spiritual Development course into a service-learning course where students had an opportunity to work with children who had suffered trauma.
“In teaching, I am prompted by students to think more deeply about particular ideas or justification for those ideas. That prompts me to be more focused in my studies and to search for more responsible responses. I think students propel my writing in many ways,” he said. “Doing that research and writing then informs what I do in the classroom, because now I have more informed responses that I can explore in the classroom.”
In delving into studies on resilience in children who suffered trauma, poverty or relocation as a refugee, she discovered that a primary thread running through them all was the conclusion that some type of spirituality helped protect children from the ill effects of trauma.That realization sparked her 2021 book Forming Resilient Children: The Role of Spiritual Formation as Healthy Development, which gathers much of the resiliency research she was reading into one source for her students.Nowshe uses the book as a textbook in her course using a “flipped classroom” model, where students read chapters from her book before arriving in class. It “has brought the class alive,” Allen says, as she now uses class time as more of a hands-on laboratory.
Dr. John Mark Hicks (at lower left), professor, is the college’s most prolific writer with six books published since 2019 and 10 books authored or coauthored by him before that. He says the nurturing relationship between students and faculty authors is definitely reciprocal.
That reciprocal relationship is certainly seen in his latest book, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation, which was sparked by his teaching of the undergraduate course called: God, Creation and New Creation.
“Students are keenly interested in how church leadership can look different. By the time they get to the chapter on intergenerational leadership, they are starting to see that churches need to involve all generations, building on the unique strengths and resources of each demographic,” she said.
The book’s format lays out God’s overall redemptive story from the first act of creation to the renewal of all creation in the new heaven and new Earth. The book was shaped by “years of trying to walk through the story of God theologically with students,” said Hicks.
“Students are sounding boards for ideas, how ideas are received and how they are heard,” said Hicks.Or,asHolly Allen says, “Writing informs my teaching, and teaching informs my writing.”
Lipscomb University faculty were busy putting pen to paper in the 2021-22 school year, exploring topics such as prayer, wisdom-based business operation, traditions, great ideas and the philosophical nature of morality. These books by Lipscomb faculty are now available online for purchase.
In the Great Stream: Imagining Churches of Christ in the Christian Tradition
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The authors offer an accessible analysis of these traditional views, reconstruct the various arguments for and against them, and offer an extended consideration of the historical emergence of the divide between these positions within the Christian tradition.
Dr. J. Caleb Clanton (Lipscomb Research Professor in Philosophy) and Dr. Kraig Martin—University of Tennessee Press, 2022 Since at least the time of Plato, religious explanations of the metaphysical foundations of morality have typically fallen into one of two camps: natural law theory, according to which morality is fundamentally explained by facts about human nature—facts that God is responsible for—and divine command theory, which holds that moral obligations arise directly from God’s commands or some other prescriptive act of the divine will.
Clanton is one of Lipscomb’s most prolific writers, having authored or edited several books, including: Restoration and Philosophy; Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition; The Philosophy of Religion of Alexander Campbell, winner of the Lester McAllister Prize; The Ethics of Citizenship; and Religion & Democratic Citizenship.
Dr. Leonard Allen (Lipscomb Dean of the College of Bible)—Abilene Christian University Press, 2021 All throughout the modern period, there has been a steady campaign for people to “think for themselves” without tradition’s distorting restraint. As a result, many Christians now blindly sip a watered-down faith, marketed as “no creed but the Bible.” Allen shows, however, that we are always traditioning—even if one doesn’t believe in tradition. In the Great Stream explores the Great Tradition and how it can be our ally providing weight, ballast and bearings to all those who seek to live out—and to pass on—the faith. According to a review by James L. Gorman in the journal Discipliana, “Allen urges Churches of Christ to rediscover and reclaim early Christian Tradition, following the examples of Robert Webber, J. I. Packer, D. H. Williams, and others… arguing that such rediscovery and rootedness is essential for any group who wishes to survive and thrive amid current challenges.”
Nature and Command goes on to develop and defend a theory that combines these two views—a metaethical approach that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.
Nature and Command: On the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality
Allen is the author or co-author of 14 books, including Poured Out: The Spirit of God Empowering the Mission of God; Answered By Fire: The Cane Ridge Revival Reconsidered; The Cruciform Church: Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World; Distant Voices: Discovering a Forgotten Past for a Changing Church; and Things Unseen: Churches of Christ in (and after) the Modern Age.
Lipscomb Faculty Reading Room
Great Ideas in History, Politics & Philosophy: A Reader
Speaking with God: Probing Old Testament Prayers for Contemporary Significance
Dr. J Caleb Clanton (Lipscomb Research Professor of Philosophy) and Dr. Richard Goode (Lipscomb Professor of History), editors—Baylor University Press, 2021 With the world at our fingertips through the internet, it can be paralyzing and overwhelming to take in all the information available. What’s needed is a way to tune out the noise and home in on foundational ideas that can help us better navigate the complexities of our highly interconnected age. This volume offers streamlined access to seminal passages from some of the most important texts in human history—the great ideas—that have influenced and enriched human experience, cultures and civilizations for centuries. Selections are drawn from a variety of key traditions and historical contexts, including ancient Greece, China, India and Rome; Judaism, early Christianity and classical Islam; medieval Europe; the Renaissance and exploration period; the early modern period and Enlightenment; and early U.S. Otherhistory.books by Goode include And the Criminals With Him: Essays in Honor of Will D. Campbell; Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance and Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will D. Campbell.
God’s people, past and present, know that the Lord of all creation listens to their prayers for mercy, help, forgiveness and justice. God’s people cry out to the heart of their God, sometimes through intense struggle and perplexity, and they expect an answer. There can be no less in a true relationship. They also celebrate their experiences of God’s faithfulness. There is no area of life outside the bounds of prayer.
Wisdom-Based Business: Applying Biblical Principles and EvidenceBased Research for a Purposeful and Profitable Business
The essays in this collection, written by biblical scholars, explore Old Testament prayers in order to enrich our understanding of Israel’s beliefs about and relationship with God. Equally important for each of the authors is the following question: Why do these prayers matter for the life of the Church today? Camp’s other books include Finding Your Way: A Guide to Seminary Life and Beyond; Living as the Community of God: Moses Speaks to the Church in Deuteronomy; and Praying with Ancient Israel: Exploring the Theology of Prayer in the Old Testament.
Dr. Hannah Stolze (Lipscomb Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Transformative Sales & Supply Chain Leadership)—Zondervan Academic, 2021 At its best, business is both purposeful and profitable, dynamic and gainful, commercial and rewarding. Far from being opposites, good business and good behavior go handin-hand, and biblical principles can align with best practices. Stolze draws principles from the Bible’s wisdom literature and from evidence-based research to create a framework for business that is oriented toward excellence and sustainability.AnyChristian who works in the marketplace or is training to work in the marketplace will benefit from this book’s practical guidance on how to reflect Christian values in their corporate tasks and strategies— and on how those values can be, not hindrances, but keys to Stolze’ssuccess.scholarly work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Operations Management and the Journal of Supply Chain Management 35lipscomb.edu/now
Dr. Phillip G. Camp (Lipscomb Professor of Bible) & Dr. Elaine A. Phillips, editors—Pickwick Publications, 2021 “Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy!” (Ps 86:1).
Dr. Kyle Brawner Assistant Professor of Biology
To read more about Brawner’s research go to bit.ly/LipscombBrawner.
In research centering on resistance to persuasion, a person’s internal counterarguments when presented with information that contradicts their viewpoint can be predictive of overall resistance. However, to date, a person’s innate tendency to counterargue is not assessed in experimental settings as a variable that could impact the resistance process.
Brawner was awarded a $25,000 grant from the 2021 Christian Scholars Foundation-Emerging Scholars Network for this continuing research.
Dr. Lindsay Dillingham (’05)
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Each year, Lipscomb University awards up to six grants to allow faculty to focus on research and scholarship during the summer. Past grants have benefitted the development of new courses, the writing of books and poetry, innovative research in chemistry and biology and programs to enhance Lipscomb’s relationship within the national and international community.
Lipscomb funds summer research to advance treatments for cancer, education and physics
Assistants: Mohraeil Endraws, Paul Agaiby and Mariam Bushra Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the leading cause of gastrointestinal morbidity and mortality among premature infants, affecting approximately 10% of this population.
Because current treatment options have not significantly improved the NEC mortality rate over the decades, a potentially promising approach would be to discover NEC biomarkers that can reliably identify cases of possible NEC in the very early stages, predict the severity and serve as novel therapeutic targets.
Brawner’s ultimate goal is to determine if changes in tryptophan (Trp) metabolites might be used to identify infants at high risk of developing NEC and if Trp metabolizing pathways can be targeted as an NEC treatment approach. His focus this summer is to determine if two specific candidates—aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) ligands and kynurenine—can serve as such biomarkers.
He and his student research team are performing cell culture experiments to determine if bacteria and bacterial products known to be involved in causing NEC lead to expression changes of Trpmetabolizing enzymes. Plans also include acquiring actual samples from NEC patients to see if the levels of Trp metabolites and enzymes that produce them are different compared to non-NEC samples.
“Identification of Biomarkers for Necrotizing StudentEnterocolitis”Research
A scale to assess individual differences in counterarguing tendency is the first step to exploring this potential variable. Two previous rounds of data collection aimed at scale development indicate there are four
Associate Professor of Marketing “Development of a Counterarguing Tendency Scale”
SummerAwardeesGrant
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In 2022, five faculty were awarded grants to conduct projects adding to humanity’s knowledge base in fighting cancer and illness in premature infants, education coaching for teachers of gifted students, the psychology of persuasion and quantum entanglement.
The ultimate goal is to find novel molecules that can be packaged and used as drugs in the future to aid patients in weight loss. Additionally, Owens is researching how VB could be used as an anti-cancer drug, especially in regards to treating cancer that has metastasized or spread, he said.
Dr. Emily Mofield Assistant Professor of Education “Coaching in Gifted Education: Tools for Building Capacity and Catalyzing Change” Coaching has become increasingly popular in school districts as a way to change teaching practices and impact student learning. As gifted programs offer enrichment within the regular classroom, the role of the gifted teacher often includes that of an enrichment coach who supports regular education teachers in meeting the needs of gifted students in their classrooms.
Mofield is working this summer to complete relevant research to include in her latest book Coaching in Gifted Education: Tools for Building Capacity and Catalyzing Change, co-authored with Dr. Vicki Phelps of Milligan University.
Read more about Watson’s work with the world’s eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world at bit.ly/LipscombWatson lipscomb.edu/now
At Emory, Owens showed that VB shuts off fat metabolism and exacerbates obesity in both mice and human subjects. Therefore, in settings of high fat consumption, VB is detrimental and causes weight gain, he said. Now he is working to find molecules that can increase fat metabolism. To find the new molecule, Owens is targeting several potential bacteria that have been shown to be beneficial in settings of weight loss but how they accomplish this is not understood.
Watson’s investigation this summer is based upon emergent spacetime research. Current research proposes that the connectivity of space emerges from the strength of the quantum entanglement between regions. Watson and the student researchers will work on understanding this relationship in order to codify the entangled connections between multiple “spacetime particles.” The purpose of simulating the connections will be to investigate how spacetime emerges as a function of particle number, coupling strength and connectivity density. The simulation may allow investigation into other emergent properties, e.g. pressure, internal energy, etc.
Owens was awarded a $26,000 grant from the Christian Scholars Foundation-Emerging Scholars Network for this continuing research. Part of this proposal will be done in collaboration with Dr. Ken Liu at Emory University.
underlying psychological subconstructs of an individual’s tendency to counterargue. In addition, the newly developed scale will be analyzed alongside two existing, closely related scales to demonstrate validity.
Though districts are using coaching as part of gifted programming more and more, there is not a resource that defines coaching in gifted education or provides the how-to steps for serving in this role. This book aims to provide example scenarios, coaching cycle guides with question prompts, and numerous tools to equip gifted education coaches for success.
Professor of “ComputationPhysicsSimulation of Quantum Entanglement Binding between Spacetime StudentRegions”Research
To date Dr. Dillingham has published nine journal articles focusing on the resistance to persuasion process. The outlets for her work on this topic include Journal of Applied Communication Research, Annals of Tourism Research and Western Journal of Communication.
“Entanglement may provide a means to draw regions together, but what makes them spread apart? The regions cannot overlap, does this imply a separation pressure between regions? These are a couple of the questions that I wish to explore in this project,” said Watson.
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Assistants: Jocelyn Howland and Soren Thompson
Read more about Owens’ tie to former Lipscomb biology professor Willis Owens at bit.ly/LipscombOwens.Dr.Michael Watson
Mofield also co-authored with Phelps Collaboration, CoTeaching and Coaching in Gifted Education: Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners which was recognized as the 2021 Book of the Year by the National Association for Gifted Children. Dr. Josh Owens (’16) Assistant Professor of Biology “Elucidating the effects of bacterially derived metabolites on metabolism” Student Research Assistants: Madeleine Enos (Langford-Yates Fellow), Carolyn Tran and Helana Khalif Previously, Owens discovered a novel molecule, Valerobetaine (VB), that is capable of inhibiting fat metabolism. He discovered VB during his doctoral studies at Emory University working with bacteria found in the human gut.
Start small. But most of all start.” – SIMON
Winners of the 2022 symposium explored subjects such as: the effects of caffeine on reaction time, code-switching in the MexicanAmerican community, breast cancer tumors, aerospace engineering, colonization of bacteria, tax policy and treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease, to name just a few.
In addition, it has also proven an effective vehicle to embed research systemically into the curriculum, as many faculty are using coursebased undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) to involve their entire classes and then pick the best work for presentation at the symposium, said Mhlanga.
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“I think it is more valuable to teach our students the way in which we discover new knowledge and not just what that knowledge is,” said Millimaki, who designed an experiment where students introduce a potential teratogen (an agent which causes malformation of an embryo) to zebrafish embryos.
Lipscomb University holds the Student Scholars Symposium, a spring event that showcases the scholarly research and creative work of 300 or more students, both undergraduate and graduate.
The symposium, which began in 2012 with just 48 presenters, serves to give many students their first experience carrying out a research project from defining a question to drawing a conclusion and then presenting the results in an academic conference setting.
Students researched which chemical to test—from fluoride to bitter leaf, from seizure
In the spirit of Sinek’s words each year
Sponsored by the Office of the Provost for over a decade, the event involves students from a wide variety of majors, programs and colleges across campus. It includes oral and visual presentations; readings and performances of original poetry, music and theater; and exhibitions of artistic and scientific work.
“To see a class working together collaboratively is amazing to witness. It doesn’t matter the college, department or major, all students come together to support and encourage each other at the symposium,” said Mhlanga.Fiveyears ago, Dr. Bonny Millimaki, associate professor of biology and director of the master’s in biomolecular science program, revamped her Developmental Genetics course from a traditionally observation-based lab to a hands-on application lab where undergraduates learn the steps of the scientific method by doing.
SymposiumScholarsStudent kick-start to critical thinking and a scholarly career Big. SINEK
“The variety of the majors represented and the variety of the works presented has continued to grow over the years,” said Dr. Florah Mhlanga, associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and founder of the symposium.
“Dream
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Dr. Florah Mhlanga
medications to BPS, a BPA alternative. Kelli Beiler, senior, and Haley Davis, senior, two of the winners in the 2022 symposium, chose toluene, a chemical that is released when wax candles burn.
The students’ experiment did not yield conclusive results, but snagging an honor at the annual symposium has little to do with the outcome of the experiment, said Millimaki.
(above) Students in Dr. Bonny Millimaki ’s Developmental Genetics course study the effects of teratogens on zebrafish embryos (at left) through the microscope with an eye toward presenting their conclusions at the Student Scholars Symposium. (top right) Tri Do presents his poster on the pharmacokinetic properties of a drug at the 2022 symposium.
(middle) MacKaleigh Lackey ’s (’22) presentation won her group at the symposium, and she went on to present her research on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 at the Society of Business, Industry and Economics national academic conference. (bottom) The symposium has grown from 48 to more then 300 presenters each year, lining almost the entire perimeter of Allen Arena.
“It’s not about what your data show. It is about how well you understand the experimental design and understand what your results actually mean. It is about learning the scientific process,” she said.
To advance the CURE model in Lipscomb’s classrooms, Mhlanga serves as the Lipscomb liaison to the National Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), a council that supports higher education institutions that promote undergraduate research and creativity.
See more symposium programs, abstracts and presentations at bit.ly/LipscombSSS.
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Since 1970, there has been a global decline in migratory birds approaching three billion birds. When considering potential human-induced effects, one that sticks out is artificial light at night (ALAN) which is increasing with urbanization along important migratory routes. This study aims to evaluate effects of ALAN on birds inhabiting green spaces adjacent to urban centers through banding data from Warner Park Nature Center (WPNC) in Nashville. I hypothesized that WPNC would see an annual increase in species abundance and richness during migration as ALAN increases, due to positive phototaxis of species within the migratory corridor towards Nashville’s urban center. Regression analysis showed that ALAN at WPNC was a significant predictor of species abundance during spring migration (p=0.025), but not during fall migration or the breeding season. Together, these results take one step closer to establishing the Warner Parks as a potentially essential stopover site near an urban area.
MMore on this project can be found at: Cavitt, T. B., & Pathak, N. “Modeling Bacterial Attachment Mechanisms on Superhydrophobic and Superhydrophilic Substrates.” Pharmaceuticals, 14, 977-994, (2021) doi: 10.3390/ ph14100977.
2022 Outstanding Presentations
(l to r)
Mar’a Harris, junior, and Dr. Jan Harris, associate professor, English and Modern Languages Mar’a Harris’ collection of poems, “The Moon Caresses My Face” engages with themes of womanhood, loneliness and religion. Moving between haunted tones and lighter interludes, Harris’ work tells the stories of different women. The poems explore the lives of biblical women and personify objects like the moon, to express feelings of abandonment, longing and loss. Her poems encourage readers to draw from their own experience and to search for hope when their lives and situations feel hopeless.
The Moon Caresses My Face
The Effects of Caffeine on Reaction Time and Muscular Power
The aim of this study is to determine whether caffeine has a significant impact on power and reaction time, and if it impacts caffeine trained vs. non-caffeine trained individuals differently. Subjects completed a vertical jump test to measure power in the lab. They were then tested for reaction time using 8 Fitlights. Individuals were then given 100mg of caffeine from a Celsius sports drink. Subjects waited for 20 minutes, and then repeated the tests. For the Vertical Jump test and for the Reaction Time test, respectively, there were no significant differences between caffeine trained versus non-caffeine trained when pre-test and post-test scores were compared (p > 0.05). In conclusion, caffeine does not affect people who are caffeine trained differently than those who are not. Light Pollution as a Predictor for Avian Population Changes During Migration Perri Haga, (’22), and Dr. Emily Stutzman, assistant professor and director, Environmental Sciences
Primary colonization is the first step in microbe-substrate interaction leading to bacterial attachment described via interfacial microbe-substrate interactions which exert both attractive and repulsive forces affecting biofilm growth and/or pathogenesis. Bacterial attachment could be determined by variant factors including bacterial sensing and surface chemistry. We address aqueous bacterial adhesion to an external substrate via adhesive and repulsive components. Interfacial interactions of the bacterial surface determined from the surface energies using DLVO theory may allow explicit prediction of the extent of bacterial attachment to different substrates. The adhesive forces may be calculated between a substrate and an interacting spherocylindrical, motile bacterium or spherical, non-motile bacterium. Consideration of the adhesive-repulsive equilibrium involved in bacterial attachment using the extended DLVO theory provides a quantitative, thermodynamic description of each bacterium’s mechanism of adhesion by integrating the adhesive and repulsive intermolecular interactions present between the bacterium, substrate and liquid medium. Application of the extended DLVO surface thermodynamics could identify the repulsive and attractive forces needed for persistent bacterial attachment to a substrate and may identify materials that would resist bacterial attachment reducing costs for industrial and biomedical applications.
Using extended DLVO theory to characterize primary colonization of bacteria Niyati Pathak, (’22), and Dr. Brian Cavitt, professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Kailey Best, junior, Isabel Creasey, (’22), Emily Hauke, (’22), and Dr. Ruth Henry, professor and chair, Kinesiology
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Each year, hundreds of Lipscomb students, both graduate and undergraduate, are offered the opportunity to work one-on-one with faculty on research projects. Many of these students choose to present their work at the Student Scholars Symposium. Below are submitted abstracts for a few of the research projects that earned students’ Outstanding Presentation Awards at the 2022 Student Scholars Symposium along with photos of the winners with Provost Dr. W. Craig Bledsoe Hauke, Creasy and Best
Beyond #MeToo: An Examination of Title IX Processes Ashley Berry, (’22), and Dr. Cayce Watson, associate professor, Social Work In America, a sexual assault takes place every 68 seconds. This shocking statistic speaks to the scope and magnitude in which these cases occur across the country. Moreover, women between the ages of 18-24 on college campuses are three times more likely to experience sexual violence. In fact, research suggests that one out of every five female college students will experience a sexual assault. Universities are responsible for educating, protecting, and providing resources to students under federally mandated Title IX requirements; however, many barriers including fear of retaliation, stigma, internalized shame, and punitive campus policies act as barriers to reporting and can further traumatize victims. This poster analyzed current literature regarding best practices for sexual assault survivors, presented a secondary data-informed SWOT analysis of Lipscomb’s Title IX programming, and presented recommendations to mitigate barriers and support student safety.
Developing Electronic Health Record Algorithms That Accurately Identify Patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Hannah Peterson, (’22), Kelsi Vela, P4, and Dr. Kamela Nola, associate dean of academic affairs and professor, Pharmacy Practice & Pharmaceutical Sciences
A Case Study of Children’s Spirituality and Trauma Gabriella Brandner, junior, and Dr. Holly Allen, professor (retired), College of Bible and Ministry During the fall 2021 semester, seven Lipscomb students spent one-on-one time with seven children for ten weeks in a private primary school’s after-school program. My child was a nine-year-old boy from a family currently experiencing trauma, participated in a variety of spiritual disciplines, such as walking a labyrinth, imagining a biblical passage, praying in color and Godly play. This presentation will discuss the literature regarding children’s spirituality, examine my child’s responses to various activities designed to nurture spirituality and discuss the value of fostering the childGod relationship among children in traumatic situations. Specifically, this presentation will share how the activities that we did together aided my child in developing his relationship with God, which ultimately will allow him to grow as a resilient individual.
One of the theological homologies the apostles articulated for Christian identity was believers as God’s “temple.” Availing ourselves of the fruits of archaeological and historical research—excavation, access analysis, epigraphy, ancient literature, etc.—with a comparative approach to ancient people groups, we have hard data with which we can partially reconstruct a conceptual framework around “temple.” This allows us to better understand the apostles’ use of “temple” as a compelling image that could be used to appeal to an ancient audience’s sense of reason. I propose three abstract principles of potentially special pertinence to the apostolic arguments vis-à-vis being God’s “temple.”
Archaeological Theology—An Instance of Further Exegesis in a Pauline Homology
Scott S. Huff, Ph.D. Candidate 2023, and Dr. Tom Davis, professor and associate director, Lanier Center for Archaeology
We may infer, namely, that ancient temples overwhelmingly meant 1) intersection between the presence and property of humanity and deity, 2) participation in the qualities (power, vitality, holiness) of a deity, and 3) a source of collective identity among a deity’s people.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) introduced a massive tax reform effort largely affecting U.S. based multinational corporations (MNCs). A primary goal of the legislation is to bring investment back to the U.S. by encouraging the repatriation of foreign assets. Many studies have analyzed current repatriation strategies, yet none seek to answer the critical question: did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 encourage incremental repatriation of foreign assets? I examine the baseline behavior of U.S. based MNCs prior to the implementation of the TCJA. This study continues with a comparison of pre- and post-TCJA repatriation strategies. Through analysis of foreign cash holdings, I determine whether enactment of the TCJA resulted in a significant increase in repatriation of foreign earned income by MNCs. 41lipscomb.edu/now
The objective was to develop an algorithm that can detect a highly sensitive and specific cohort of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) patients in the electronic health record (EHR) using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9), International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision with Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), and keywords. We developed 103 algorithms using different combinations of ICD codes, keywords, and exclusion criteria. The algorithm containing four or more counts of JIA ICD codes with the keywords “enthesitis” and “uveitis” and exclusion criteria of systemic lupus erythematosus, dermatomyositis, polymyositis and dermatopolymyositis had the highest PPV of 97 in the training set with an F-score of 87. This algorithm returned 1,131 JIA cases.
Repatriation Effectiveness of the Transition Tax within the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 MaKayleigh Lackey, (’22), and Dr. Marcy Binkley, assistant professor, Accounting, Finance and Economics
STUDENTS 42 lipscomb now: discovery
This summer, thanks to the 2019 donation of a wind tunnel and annual grants from the Tennessee Space Grant Consortium, two mechanical engineering majors, Summar Hill and Bibiana ZermenoMagana, are working to make the wind tunnel more valuable for future students, and potentially local industries, by designing a system to install and use a sting balance within the wind tunnel.
In the fall of 2020, a team of seven electrical and computer engineering students spent the 2020-21 school year installing the wind tunnel. They developed the computer data acquisition system as well as ensuring its safe and effective operation. The senior project provided students practice in data acquisition and controls, measurement and instrumentation, image processing and facility automation.
The 40-foot wind tunnel, donated by international engineering firm Jacobs Corporation, has already provided a wealth of hands-on, real-world learning opportunities.
Not many students get the opportunity to actually build a better education for those who follow them. For Lipscomb’s engineering majors in the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering, however, it just comes with the territory.
The 2022 Tennessee Space Grant Fellows are just the two latest in a string of students who helped install the tunnel, hook up the electrical instrumentation and make the tunnel operational for future use, said Dr. Fort Gwinn, associate dean of engineering who is overseeing the two students this summer.
Engineering college has the wind at its back Private donation and grant expands learning and discovery opportunities through wind tunnel.
During the 2021-22 school year, two Tennessee Space Grant fellows zeroed in on taking flow stream measurements so the college can characterize the airflow quality. “The top air speed was 170 mph and it was fairly uniform,” Gwinn reports.
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Jacobs Engineering Group, an international technical, professional and construction services firm with operations in Tennessee, donated the tunnel, worth $750,000, in order to strengthen its relationships with local universities by providing opportunities for hands-on education and research, said “LipscombArnette.University submitted a very comprehensive proposal,” said Arnette, “explaining their plan and outlining ways to further enhance the two-way relationship between Lipscomb University and Jacobs Engineering, which spans two decades.”
The tunnel will be used for predictive testing: models of cars, planes or machinery parts can be tested to see how they change, bend or break based on their shape under the influence of airflow, said Dr. David Elrod, dean of the engineeringThroughcollege.theuse of the college’s Innovation Lab, which includes four 3D printers, Lipscomb students will have the capability to build models, print them in 3D printed materials, and immediately test them in the tunnel, said Elrod. Students participating in Lipscomb’s competitive engineering design teams, which are or have created rockets, aircrafts, concrete canoes, steel bridges and all-terrain vehicles, could all make use of the wind tunnel to test prototypes and refine their designs.
“We focus on developing highly skilled engineers through the use of project-based learning inside and outside of the lab,” Elrod said. “These projects are not the standard cookie-cutter lab with prescribed steps and predetermined outcomes. We believe that connecting theory to real-world design problems increases learning outcomes and helps with studentPoweredretention.”bya 40 hp fan, the Jacobs wind tunnel was originally used for scale model testing of passenger cars and racecars and for wind tunnel technology development, said Steve Arnette, senior vice president at Jacobs.
“The wind tunnel allows Lipscomb to serve a unique role in encouraging aerospace research in the Middle Tennessee area through our membership in the Tennessee Space Grant Consortium,” said Elrod, a former aerospace engineer who spent much of his career at Jacobs. The tunnel will enhance potential research opportunities in product development for automotive secondary markets, studies for the racing industry and basic research in aerodynamics, he said.
The wind tunnel was demonstrated for participants in the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering’s summer enrichment program.
Bibiana ZermenoMagana , junior, works on the andcarrythethatacollege’sengineeringwindtunnel,donateddevicehasexpandedcollege’sabilitytooutexperimentstestprototypes.
Dr. Fort Gwinn , associate dean of engineering, works with Zermeno-Magana , junior, and Hill , senior, on their summer project to add a sting balance to the wind tunnel.
Working toward that goal, Hill and Zermeno-Magana are working this summer to install the sting balance, a device that measures the lift and drag on aerospace or automotive models placed in the tunnel. The sting balance was purchased through an additional grant from the Tennessee Space Grant Consortium, a group of 15 colleges and universities that are part of the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, supported by NASA and all member and affiliate institutions.
To learn more about the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering go to bit.ly/RBJEng
In addition, the wind tunnel allows the college to enhance its STEM outreach to a diverse future generation of engineers, said Elrod. Already, in the summer of 2021, recent high school graduates in the Lipscomb academic bridge program AERO were able to get a glimpse of the engineering career field through a demonstration of the wind tunnel.
The adaptive walls of the wind tunnel allow the device to change the size of the testing area and thus accurately simulate real-world aerodynamics in the laboratory. It can be used to study and test the aerodynamics of motorcycles, aircraft, flying drones and other aerospace vehicles, Arnette said.
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With their work this summer, and the work of a second senior design team this fall to develop the instrumentation for the sting balance, the wind tunnel should be fully operational by the end of 2022, ready to provide expanded student and faculty research opportunities by testing prototype models and conducting more advanced experiments, said Gwinn.
Mentor: Dr. Amanda Williams
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY University of Kentucky Undergraduate Research in Chemistry Regional Poster Competition
“The purpose of the fund is to be that lift, hopefully for a first-generation pre-med student at Lipscomb, to make it easier for them to work hard and be successful. That’s what this is all about,” said LaVelle, who established the scholarship with his sister in honor of their father, Dr. Herman G. LaVelle, who was the first in their family to go to college, thanks to financial aid through the G.I. Bill.
Ten students, all first generation students, are one step closer to becoming doctors and potentially changing their family’s future thanks to two donors who have funded scholarships for them to take a crucial study course for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT).
Mentor: Dr. Beth Conway
JOHNSON CITY, TENNESSEE Tennessee Collegiate Honors Council MadeleineConferenceEnos , senior, biomolecular science major “Hsp90 Chaperone as a Potential Regulator of Cytosolic p38 Activation During ER Stress” Mentor: Dr. Jay Brewster at Pepperdine University Emily Blankenship (’22), history “While I Weep” Mentor: Dr. Jan Harris
SNOWBIRD, UTAH Keystone Symposia: Micropeptides: Biogenesis and Function Nicholas Ryan, senior, biomolecular science major “E-Cadherin Escapes HD5 in Colonocytes.” Mentor: Dr. Amanda Williams Erin Lisk (’22), molecular biology “Antimicrobial Peptide, HD5, Increases Colonic Cell Death”
Sciences to give selected students the funds needed for the cost of the Princeton Review MCAT study course, normally a ticket price of $750 for Lipscomb students.
Honors College students, in particular, pack their bags to present their scholarly work at national conferences across the U.S.
Alexus Brown, senior, biochemistry major “To Explore and Inhibit Bacterial Pathogenesis via Biofilm Disruption.” Mentor: Dr. Brian Cavitt
New researchroadstudentsHonorsstudentsforMCATscholarshipestablishesdonationforstudycoursefirstgenerationCollegegoonthetosharetheiroutcomes
LaVelle Scholar Lily Dao , senior LaVelle Scholar Sam Attalla , senior 44
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Dr. David LaVelle and his sister, Soozie Lowry (’79), funded the LaVelle Scholars program, which allows the College of Liberal Arts & Lipscomb’s undergraduate sciences majors don’t wait for graduate school to start sharing their discoveries with experts around the nation.
Alexus Brown, senior, biochemistry major “To Explore and Inhibit Bacterial Pathogenesis via Biofilm Disruption.” Mentor: Dr. Brian Cavitt
lipscomb now : discovery
ORLANDO, FLORIDA National Collegiate Honors Council Annual ElizabethConferenceSass , (’22), civil engineering “Geotechnical Engineering Takeoffs for Drilling and Blasting” Meredith Comstock, senior, biology major “Neprilysin’s Regulation of PTEN in Triple Negative Breast Cancer”
Alexus Brown, senior, biochemistry major “To Explore and Inhibit Bacterial Pathogenesis via Biofilm Disruption.” Mentor: Dr. Brian Cavitt
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BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology National Conference Madeleine Enos (’22), biomolecular science “Hsp90 Chaperone as a Potential Regulator of Cytosolic p38 Activation During ER Stress” Mentor: Dr. Jay Brewster at Pepperdine University
Three of the 2022 Ward Research Fellows— Lexi Brown, biochemistry; Timothy Khalil, biology; and Gray Pullias, biochemistry and Spanish—were selected for the nationally competitive Vanderbilt Undergraduate Clinical Research Internship Program where they are matched with a physician and with a research mentor. They participate in medical rounds and are assigned a research project in one of a wide array of different specialties.
Seven undergraduate students had the opportunity to conduct research at Vanderbilt University, Meharry College of Medicine and internationally this summer thanks to the generosity of donors in the J.S. Ward Society.
To be selected, students are nominated and selected by members of the Health Professions Advisory Committee at Lipscomb.
• Associate Professor and Director of Biomedical Sciences
2022 Langford-Yates Summer Research Fellowship Program
The J.S. Ward Society comprises a group of alumni in the fields of science, those who have chosen a health science career and friends passionate about the health sciences. The society’s collection of science-focused scholarships are named for Dr. James Samuel Ward, a doctor and dentist who joined the Lipscomb faculty in 1893.
2022 ResearchWardFellows
The Langford-Yates Fellows program honors two icons of the sciences at Lipscomb University, Dr. Paul Langford and Dr. H. Oliver Yates. Fellows receive a stipend to participate in faculty directed research projects during the summer. Applicants are required to submit detailed research proposals and selections are made by a researchThiscommittee.year,faculty mentors worked one-on-one with Langford-Yates Fellows on these projects:
• Professor Dr. Stephen Opoku-Duah will work with biology majors Kierolles Shehata and Joseph Helmy, to study “Nutrient, Pathogen and Sediment Pollution Characterization and Mitigation in Mid-Tennessee Rivers and Streams.”
• Assistant Research Scientist Dr. Matt Vergne and biochemistry major Lindsey Reynolds will study “Intestinal Permeability Analysis by Liquid Chromatography with Tandem Mass Spectrometry Using MicroPlasma Collection Cards;” and
• Assistant Professor Dr. Josh Owens and molecular biology major Madeleine Enos will study “Elucidating the role of fat metabolism inhibition in breast cancer stem cells;”
• Professor Dr. Kent Clinger will work with molecular biology major Joy Osipchuk to study “Synthesis of Cyclopropanes” and with chemistry major David Saakov to study “Synthesis of Cyclopropane Fatty Acids;”
One of the fellows, Lucas Domberg, molecular biology, worked with Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Eric Grogan in applied research in pulmonology.Twoofthe Ward Research Fellows— Mina Ibrahim, biology, and Seth Meyer, biochemistry—conducted research at Meharry. Ibrahim worked with Dr. Amos Sakwe studying issues related to triple negative breast cancer. Meyer worked with Dr. Jermaine Davis studying structural mechanisms in chemo-resistant cancers.
Dr. Bonny Millimaki and neurobiology major Isabella Gaona will study “The effect of Topoisomerase II on zebrafish behavior and neural organization;”
The final fellow, Kaylee Wu, biology, traveled to India with a group led by Dr. Scott Guthrie in an international neonatology program.
• Professor Dr. Brian Cavitt will work with biochemistry major Sidney Hinson to study “Isolation of Fibronectin Binding Protein A and B for Thermodynamic Analyses of Adhesin’s Surface Energy;” and with biology major Angelica Sarcona to study “Isolation and Thermodynamics of sdr protein;”
OUR REACH GOES BEYOND THE CLASSROOM At Lipscomb, our innovative approach to education creates opportunities for students to learn by doing. For almost two decades, the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering has incorporated into its academic offerings multi-year, hands-on, humanitarian service projects, including trips to build student-designed bridges, water systems and solar power systems in disadvantaged communities in locales such as Honduras, Ghana, Malawi and Guatemala. That’s why the National Science Foundation awarded Dr. Kirsten Heikkinen Dodson a $200,000 grant to conduct a research project to discover how humanitarian service projects impact the worldview of engineering students and the long-term effects of these experiences on the professional engineering workplace toward a more inclusive culture. Read more about DR. DODSON and her research on PAGE 20 empowering researchTHE HANDS OF SERVICE THROUGH One University Park Drive Nashville, TN 37204-3951 Address Service Requested NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID NASHVILLE, TN PERMIT NO. 921 View this issue and more at lipscomb.edu/now
