Arizona State University is proud to announce that Lekelia “Kiki” Jenkins, associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society has been selected as one of the 125 American Association for the Advancement of Science IF/THEN Ambassadors.

IF/THEN, a national initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies, seeks to further women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by empowering current innovators and inspiring the next generation of pioneers. Kiki Jenkins Download Full Image

“I am excited, grateful and humbled to be a part of this program because I know so many other deserving women who are also doing inspiring work. This ambassadorship will be the biggest platform I have ever had to help young women succeed in science,” said Jenkins, who studies the human dimensions of marine technologies to create sustainable ocean uses and the role of dance in science communication. "If we train a young woman to use technical AND interpersonal career skills, then she will have the savvy to custom-craft a career in STEM that is fulfilling, impactful and lasting.”

“We firmly believe that if we support a woman in STEM, then she can change the world,” said Lyda Hill, founder of Lyda Hill Philanthropies. “The goal of IF/THEN is to shift the way our country — and the world — thinks about women in STEM, and this requires changing the narratives about women STEM professionals and improving their visibility.”

To achieve this goal, AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors connect with students in person and through various media platforms. The ambassadors are contemporary role models who represent a diversity of STEM-related professions in the United States, from entertainment and fashion to sports, business and academia.

"I also desire to be a role model for African American girls interested in marine science,” Jenkins added. “I was the first African American woman to get a PhD in marine science from Duke University and all too often I have been the “first and only” throughout my career. African American girls need to know that marine science is an option for them and that if they pursue this field, they will not be alone.”

“AAAS is deeply committed to advancing education and opportunities for girls and women in STEM,” said Margaret Hamburg, chair of the AAAS board of directors. “This partnership enables us to reach more deeply into STEM education and help advance STEM careers for women and girls. It will help us to elevate the voices of women working in STEM fields and to inspire the next generation of girls and women in science.”

In October, the ambassadors will participate in the IF/THEN Summit in Dallas to take their outreach to the next level by learning from each other and receiving resources and coaching in science communication and effective STEM storytelling. The IF/THEN Collection, a digital asset library of photos and custom content, will be created as a tool to increase the number of accurate and powerful images of real women and girls in STEM. The robust collection can be accessed by media, educators and nonprofit organizations as they develop and share inspiring content and curriculum.

Arizona State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are pleased to announce the joint appointment of Maysa Jalbout as visiting scholar and special adviser on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The announcement is made in advance of the 74th U.N. General Assembly in New York where world leaders and international organizations will gather to discuss global issues, including progress on the SDGs. 

As a global leader with a deep commitment and expertise in supporting the most vulnerable people in the world in multiple sectors, Jalbout will work with the leadership of ASU and MIT to channel their talent, resources and technology toward thoughtful and deliberate SDG strategies, initiatives and partnerships. Maysa Jalbout's top priority will be to develop concrete ways in which to serve the education needs of displaced populations worldwide, underserved and disadvantaged communities, and under-skilled and underemployed youth. Download Full Image

Jalbout’s top priority will be to develop concrete ways in which to serve the education needs of displaced populations worldwide, underserved and disadvantaged communities, and under-skilled and underemployed youth. Jalbout will cast a wide net of potential partners including governments, the private sector, foundations and civil society organizations. 

“I am thrilled at the chance to work alongside the incredible talent of two of the world’s most innovative universities. It is an opportunity to think, learn and experiment in ways very few positions offer,” said Jalbout. “I believe that universities can solve some of the greatest global challenges of our time, and that ASU and MIT are leading the way.”

“Maysa is a unique leader who has been able to work effectively across multiple cultures, organizations and continents to drive successful educational outcomes,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow. “We’re looking forward to her strategic counsel on ways that ASU and MIT can further collaborate to meet our mutual goals of transformative impact and contributing to the U.N. SDGs.”

“Making a better world through education is at the core of the mission of MIT. We are continuously searching for new meaningful ideas, approaches and tools. We are delighted to welcome Maysa and look forward to collaborating with ASU”, said Professor Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning at MIT.

Jalbout has more than 25 years of experience advocating for the rights of vulnerable populations, advising global leaders, building organizations and partnerships, and exploring the use of human-centered technology to address development challenges. She is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and serves on the boards Generation and the International Baccalaureate Organization. She founded the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education and the Queen Rania Foundation and headed the government of Canada’s education policy in developing countries.

Nearly half of physical therapy patients are age 65 and older. Older bodies often have unique needs for therapy, but they’re not necessarily treated with different approaches than younger patients. But to get better results, all it might take is a pencil and paper.

Sydney Schaefer, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is working toward developing more personalized solutions for neurorehabilitation (treatment for a nervous system injury) that are tailored to older patients. She and her research team are exploring inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions similar to current practices. Sydney Schaefer demonstrates visuospatial tests, which determine how well people can visually perceive objects and their features, that could help older patients with nervous system injures have more success with physical therapy. Photo by Erika Gronek/ASU Download Full Image

“We use tools and assessments that are already being used by clinicians, but we are using them in nontraditional ways that could innovate standard care,” Schaefer said.

By identifying and testing a number of cognitive domains — memory, language and attention, for example — Schaefer and her team found visuospatial tests are the best predictors of success for physical therapy outcomes. These types of tests determine how well people can visually perceive objects and their features.

“We know that specific parts of the brain are involved in visuospatial function, and our hypothesis is that similar networks are critical for learning motor skills, which are fundamental to the rehabilitative process,” Schaefer said.

A common visuospatial test involves drawing the face of an analog clock and setting it to a particular time specified by a clinician or experimenter.

Schaefer and the research team are studying the use of pencil-and-paper tests, and sometimes computer-based tests, to evaluate older adults’ visuospatial skills. Questions include visualizing an object’s orientation, mentally rotating an object to a different orientation and recreating the shape of an object by drawing or building it, sometimes from memory.

The results the team has gotten so far suggest that clinicians focused on cognitive and physical rehabilitation can improve patient outcomes by communicating more with each other.

“In clinical care, motor and cognitive issues are often treated separately,” Schaefer said. “Neural circuitry may have more overlap than originally thought.”

Their research suggests that treating visuospatial deficits may have downstream effects on improving motor rehabilitation. Cognitive testing prior to motor rehabilitation can inform how patients should approach physical therapy to yield the best results.

The team was awarded a National Institutes of Health R03 grant, which supports two-year research projects to help develop larger-scale ideas.

Schaefer says the grant reviewers were particularly impressed by the significance of the work because “it has the potential to offer an inexpensive solution to a major problem in rehabilitation research and can alter how new clinical trials in stroke rehabilitation and other forms of motor skill training are implemented.”

Schaefer’s research team is using the grant to identify which visuospatial test is most predictive of skill learning in older adults, including older adults with a history of stroke, through the development of predictive cognitive algorithms and approaches that can enhance the success of physical therapy treatment.

The team is also developing low-cost tests that can be widely implemented in clinical and community-based settings.

“The simplicity of using existing clinical tests in the cognitive domain to better understand motor-based outcomes was viewed as novel,” Schaefer said.

She attributes much of the project’s success to the wealth of clinical partnerships available through the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, the accessibility of the ASU campus research space for working with older adults and the quality of graduate students the school recruits.

Her graduate student, Jennapher Lingo VanGilder, earned a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award Fellowship to support her neuroimaging work, which has contributed to the success of Schaefer’s research.

Going forward, Schaefer’s team is exploring additional therapeutic solutions and whether enhancing visuospatial function through neuromodulation can enhance skill learning.

Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Arizona State University vice president for cultural affairs and ASU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. committee chair, is soliciting nominations for the 2020 ASU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Student Servant-Leadership Award. This year’s theme is “We are all connected.”

The ASU MLK Jr. Committee will present a Servant-Leadership Award to an ASU student at the MLK Breakfast on Jan. 23, 2020 at the Polytechnic campus.  Download Full Image

Servant-leadership is a practical philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening and the ethical use of power and empowerment.

The committee requests the help of the ASU community in identifying a student servant-leadership awardee. The student must be currently enrolled full time, exemplify the ideals of servant-leadership and have a track record of commitment through volunteer service. A candidate may submit his or her resume with this form. Letters of recommendation are acceptable, but no more than two. Self-nominations are encouraged.

The ASU MLK Jr. Committee will provide a $1,500 scholarship to the awardee to be used toward his or her educational costs. This scholarship is available to ASU full-time undergraduate or graduate students. The winner must be a full-time student during the spring 2020 semester.

All applications will be reviewed and three finalists will be selected. Finalists will have 30-minute interviews with the committee on Friday, Oct. 18. Finalists will be contacted for their interview. The awardee must be able to attend the breakfast on Jan. 23.

Nominate yourself or another student.

Please submit this nomination by close of business on Tuesday, Oct. 1. Scan and e-mail to Michelle Johnson at mmjcap@asu.edu with the subject line: 2020 MLK Student Nomination – Last name of candidate.

Responding to steady growth in English and film and media studies programs and to Arizona State University's largest class of first-year students ever, the Department of English at ASU has added dozens of new teaching, research and administrative faculty to its ranks.

English houses six humanities areas of study in creative writing; secondary education; film and media studies; linguistics and applied linguistics; literature; and writing, rhetorics and literacies. In addition, the department is the site of the university’s Writing Programs — the composition courses taken by almost every first-year ASU student. This year, the number of those students has increased exponentially: Writing Programs has more than 800 more students enrolled now than at this time last year. New faculty in ASU's English department this fall (clockwise from top left): Sir Jonathan Bate, Emily Cooney, Andrea Dickens, Solmaz Sharif, Kyle Jensen and Kathleen Hicks. Download Full Image

It is into this vibrant and expansive environment that The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, English’s parent college, invested resources to meet student demand with increases in teaching faculty; in fulfillment of ASU's twin goals of both excellence and inclusivity, English has three new tenured and tenure-track faculty, one new online director, two new lecturers, 17 new instructors, 20 new teaching associates/assistants and five new faculty associates.

Meet some of English’s newest award-winning scholars, teachers and artists:

Sir Jonathan Bate, Foundation Professor (literature)

Sir Jonathan Bate joins ASU as a Foundation Professor of environmental humanities with a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Global Futures Laboratory and School of Sustainability. Coming from Oxford University, Bate is an international leader in green thinking and applied humanities, with scholarly expertise in sustainability as well as in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, biography and life-writing, contemporary poetry, visual culture and theater history. In 2015, he became the youngest person ever to be knighted for services to literary scholarship.

Bate spent part of the spring 2019 semester on the ASU campus as distinguished visiting professor, where he co-taught (with Professor Mark Lussier) the English course, “Environmental Issues in Literature & Film.”

A renowned Shakespearean and eco-critic, Bate has been a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge; King Alfred Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool; and professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, University of Warwick. He has held visiting posts at Yale and the University of California-Los Angeles and was previously provost of Worcester College and professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He is a fellow and former vice president of the British Academy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Emily Cooney, lecturer (Writing Programs)

Emily Cooney is a specialist in environmental rhetorics, place-based literacies and second-language writing pedagogy. With a focus on access and representation, she is at work with fellow writing teacher Courtney Fowler on a funded project designing and creating an interactive map of digital and technological resources for students on the Tempe campus. Cooney is employing a research method known as “multimodal,” which utilizes many ways of production, inquiry and “knowing” in order to reach desired goals. Her other work — on analyzing how global NGOs’ idealized representation of Indonesian rice farmers helps or hurts — is also informed by this methodology. Cooney holds a PhD in English (rhetoric, composition and linguistics) from ASU and an MA in English literature from the University of Charleston.

Andrea Dickens, lecturer (Writing Programs)

Andrea Dickens teaches a wide variety of Writing Programs classes and is particularly focused on working with students from diverse backgrounds and cultures in both first-year and advanced writing. Her research interests span rhetoric, religion, literature and creative writing; her book “The Female Mystic” (2009) looks at medieval women's textual legacies. Her current projects include approaches to writing across the curriculum and developing a rhetoric for the creative process. She is also at work on a book-length study of the work of Mechtilde of Hackeborn and has just completed a book of poetry. Dickens holds a PhD in theology, ethics and culture from the University of Virginia and master’s degrees in creative writing (Ohio State University) and religion (University of Virginia and Yale).

Kathleen Hicks, director of online programs

The complexities of running five online programs as well as building, teaching and maintaining dozens of online courses each year will now be managed by new Department of English faculty member Kathleen Hicks. Hicks brings expertise in instructional design and curriculum development — with specialties in program design, assessment of student learning and the development of microcredentials — from former positions at Grand Canyon University and with Dream Center Education Holdings. She has also previously taught composition in ASU’s English department.

Hicks continues in her associate editor role at The Steinbeck Review, a journal on the life and works of American novelist John Steinbeck that is published by Penn State University Press. She holds a PhD in English (literature) from ASU, a Master of Arts in English and American literature from the University of Texas at El Paso and a graduate certificate in instructional design from George Washington University.

Kyle Jensen, director of ASU Writing Programs and professor (writing, rhetorics and literacies)

ASU Writing Programs has new leadership this fall. Kyle Jensen takes the reins from the longtime director, Professor Shirley Rose, who assumed presidency of ASU's University Senate for the 2019-20 academic year. Jensen arrives at ASU from the University of North Texas, where he was on the English faculty and was director of first-year writing.

With research that explores modern rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, Jensen most recently published “'The War of Words’ by Kenneth Burke” (2018), a co-edited version of a lost work by an influential rhetorical critic, which Jensen and another scholar independently discovered in the Penn State library archives. The manuscript’s recovery and publication has been called “field-changing work” and a “remarkable feat” by scholars in the field. Jensen has written about this research for the general public as well, linking it to current political rhetoric in the editorial republished in Slate and The Daily Beast, “How the media encourages — and sustains — political warfare.”

Jensen is also the author of “Reimagining Process: Online Writing Archives and The Future of Writing Studies” (2015) and co-editor of “Abducting Writing Studies” (2017). He holds graduate degrees in English studies from Illinois State University (PhD) and Western Washington University (MA).

Solmaz Sharif, assistant professor (creative writing)

Poet Solmaz Sharif comes to ASU from Stanford University, where she was Jones Lecturer in creative writing. Her first book, “Look” (2016), won an American Book Award and was a New York Times “notable book” and a Publishers Weekly “best book of 2016"; it was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Sharif has been a visiting scholar at the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard) and has taught at Tin House and Kenyon Review writers workshops. She was also managing director of the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York, a renowned institution created to support literary and civic conversations among Asian American artists throughout the U.S.

Sharif has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts and poetry prizes from Princeton University and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing (poetry) from New York University.

Editor's note: This story is being highlighted in ASU Now's year in review. Read more top stories from 2019.

The members of the Desert WAVE robotics team from Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus are returning to school this month as the best-performing underwater autonomous robotics team in the country. In their rookie season, the all-female team placed third only to China and Russia in the RoboSub competition in San Diego in August. Desert WAVE poses with one of their biggest sponsors and supporters, Shebbie Jacques. Back row, from left: Samantha Ehrle, Rebekah Wagen, Whitney Foster, Bridget Koehl and Maria Espinoza. Front row, from left: Samantha Nieto, Paulina Garibay Jaquez, Shebbie Jacques, Diana Lee Guzman and Andrea Schoonover. Download Full Image

The 11-member team was launched last fall through a partnership between ASU and the Si Se Puede Foundation to encourage more diversity in engineering fields. According to the Society of Women Engineers, only 7.9 percent of college women major in engineering, math, statistics or computer science; and 32 percent of women switch out of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degree programs in college. And only 13 percent of engineers are women. Their mentors believe that ASU’s team is only the second all-woman team in the world; the first is Texas A&M. 

In two short semesters, the students of Desert WAVE (Women in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering) gained invaluable hands-on experience in how to design and build a robot, wire it and program it to perform tasks that simulate real-world military and environmental applications. 

And they proved that, 10 months later, they’re already world-class engineers.

Jessica Dirks, a sophomore double-majoring in robotics and human systems engineering, is a founding member of the team. She helped design and build the competition robot during what she described as a serious spring build season; sometimes she’d walk into a team meeting and the robot would have wires hanging out everywhere. But the team worked hard around class and job schedules to make steady progress through the summer on the robot and on their own skills.

“Six months ago, I didn’t know how to solder,” said Dirks, who started by designing parts for the robot with computer-aided design software.

“So there were a few times I went in and they taught me how to solder, which really boosted my confidence levels. And it was amazing to go in and see so many different women working on skills none of us had before and coming out so much stronger for it.”