Accolades

Pitt’s Center for Interventions to Improve Community Health (CiTECH) recently awarded more than $100,000 from the Office of the Provost for projects designed to improve behavior health outcomes in local neighborhoods. Learn about the four projects:

The CHURCH Project — which stands for Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health — will develop and pilot an intervention that takes place in the context of African American churches. “Because of issues like stigma, mistrust and absence of insurance, many Black people rely on informal church support for emotional problems, rather than visiting mental health clinics,” said John Wallace, the professor of Social Work and co-investigator. The goal is to increase the mental health awareness, knowledge and skills of the clergy, who then in turn can help parishioners. The project is a partnership between Pitt’s School of Social Work, faculty members in the Department of Psychiatry and leaders from Homewood Community Ministries.

Marlo Perry, assistant research professor in the School of Social Work, will collaborate with Wesley Family Services and the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth, and Families to pilot Intensive Family Coaching (IFC) with families of young children involved with the child welfare system. IFC is a home-based intervention that helps young children with emotional and behavioral challenges, as well as their caregivers who may struggle with discipline issues. The project also seeks to increase collaboration between the child welfare and behavioral health systems.

Child maltreatment can lead to mental health issues, trouble in school and other problems. Professionals in Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) work together to investigate abuse and provide resources for victims of child abuse and their families. But CACs in rural areas often have limited resources. Their teams have members from a variety of disciplines—police, advocates and child welfare workers. To help a team like this work more effectively, Elizabeth McGuier, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry, will work with the CAC in McKean County on the use of TeamSTEPPS, an evidence-based intervention to improve teamwork

The final project will focus on improving overall community mental health and reducing teen violence in the City of Pittsburgh’s Fineview and Perry Hilltop neighborhoods. Associate Professor of Social Work Mary Ohmer will oversee a training program that focuses on collective efficacy by facilitating trusting relationships between younger and older residents and increasing the residents’ ability to safely intervene to address neighborhood problems. Ohmer will be working with members of the Perry Hilltop Citizens Councils.

Pitt’s Center for Medical Innovation has awarded grants totaling $60,000 to three research groups through its 2020 Round-1 Pilot Funding Program for Early Stage Medical Technology Research and Development.

The latest funding proposals include:

• Virus-resistant wear-resistant textile by Paul W. Leu, associate professor of Industrial Engineering, Robert Shanks, associate professor of Ophthalmology; and Eric Romanowski, research director, Charles T. Campbell Laboratory of Ophthalmic Microbiology

• A system for removal of cell-free plasma hemoglobin in extracorporeal therapies by Nahmah Kim-Campbell, assistant professor of Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics; William Federspiel, professor of Bioengineering, and Ryan Orizondo, researcher in Bioengineering

• A biocontainment unit for reducing viral transmission to health care workers and patients by David M. Turer, Department of Plastic Surgery, UPMC; Heng Ban, professor Mechanical Engineering and Material Science; J. Peter Rubin, chairman, Department of Plastic Surgery, UPMC

The Center for Medical Innovation, housed in the Swanson School of Engineering, supports applied technology projects in the early stages of development with “kickstart” funding toward the goal of transitioning the research to clinical adoption.

A paper by Vanitha Swaminathan (pictured), a Katz Graduate School of Business marketing professor, and her then-Ph.D. advisee Christian Hughes has won the American Marketing Association’s 2020 Don Lehmann Award. The award recognizes the best dissertation-based article published in the Journal of Marketing or Journal of Marketing Research in the previous calendar year. 

The paper, “Driving Brand Engagement Through Online Social Influencers: An Empirical Investigation of Sponsored Blogging Campaigns,” co-authored by Gillian Brooks of the University of Oxford, was among the top three most-cited articles in the Journal of Marketing and among the journal’s most-downloaded articles in the past six months. Read a summary of the findings.

Swaminathan is director of the Katz Center for Branding. Hughes, now a marketing faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in statistics and her Ph.D. in marketing at Pitt.

Julia Santucci, a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has been named director of the Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership and Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum. Santucci brings more than a decade of national security and foreign policy experience to the role and has held positions with White House National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Department of State. The Johnson Institute aims to produce professionals with the highest standards of ethics and accountability.

The Hesselbein Forum, within the Johnson Institute, provides a variety of opportunities for fostering and growing leadership, including the Leadership Program in International Affairs, which was designed and directed by Santucci.  

Mostafa Bedewy, assistant professor of industrial engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering at Pitt, was recently given a nearly $245,000 EAGER award by the National Science Foundation to study a new scalable laser patterning process for directly growing tailored nanocarbons on flexible polymers.

The research will enable patterning functional nanocarbons needed for a number of emerging flexible-device applications in healthcare, energy and consumer electronics.

“The multi-billion dollar global market for flexible electronics is still in its infancy, and is expected to grow exponentially because of accelerating demand in many applications,” said, Bedewy, who also leads Pitt’s NanoProduct Lab. “Exploring potentially transformative carbon nanomanufacturing processes is critical for realizing cutting-edge technologies.”

Carli Liguori, a visiting instructor in the School of Education, has been named a finalist in the American Society for Nutrition Translation Award Program.

The award recognizes “outstanding early-career scientists and clinicians interested in translating their research to a defined audience to improve public health and/or health outcomes.”

Liguori was one of four finalists chosen from a pool of 70 applicants for the award. In particular, Liguori, along with fellow School of Education faculty members in the Department of Health and Human Development, John Jakicic and Renee J. Rogers, were recognized for their study, “Changes in Dietary Intake with Varying Doses of Physical Activity within a Weight Loss Intervention: The Heart Health Study.”

In the study they found that following a calorie-restricted diet resulted in roughly the same amount of weight loss, about 20 pounds, regardless of a person’s level of physical activity. The team also saw that participants’ level of physical activity did not affect their ability to keep their calorie and fat consumption within bounds.

The team was honored at a virtual event held by the American Society for Nutrition in June 2020.

Susan Whitney, professor of physical therapy in Pitt’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, recently provided recommendations to the U.S. Department of State.  She presented her expertise on vestibular disorders and concussions to the Standing Committee to Advise the U.S. Department of State on Unexplained Health Effects on U.S. Government Employees and their Families at Overseas Embassies.

Whitney provided guidelines and best practices on treating current patients/government workers and potential patients if this should happen again. This committee will be writing recommendations on how to deal with possible future incidents. The goal is to not have to pull workers from their positions in other countries if there are more episodes. 

Five researchers at the Swanson School of Engineering have received grants from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development through the Manufacturing PA initiative. The department has approved more than $2.8 million in grants to 43 projects that will “spur new technologies and processes in the manufacturing sector,” according to their press release.

“As engineers, we are applied scientists, and our singular goal in performing research is to produce public impact,” said David Vorp, associate dean for research and John A. Swanson Professor of bioengineering. “I am proud that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania saw the potential of these projects by our Swanson School faculty and their industrial partners to have benefit to their citizens.” 

The five researchers to receive funding at the Swanson School are:

• Kevin Chen, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for Femtosecond Laser Manufacturing of 3D Photonics Components in Nonlinear Optical Substrates for Electro-Optic Applications

• Markus Chmielus, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, for Improving 3D Binder Jet Printed Tungsten-Carbide Parts via Strategies to Increase Green Density and Strength

• Jung-Kun Lee, professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, for Smart Crucible: Monitoring Damage of Crucibles by Embedded Electric Resistance Sensor

• Albert To, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, for A Computational Tool for Simulating the Sintering Behavior in Binder Jet Additive Manufacturing

• Xiayun Zhao, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, for Pushing the Boundaries of Ceramic Additive Manufacturing (CAM) with Visible light initiated Polymerization (ViP)

New research from Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Catalysis and Catalytic Processes (Department of Energy) at Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, advances the field of computational catalysis by paving the way for the simulation of realistic catalysts under reaction conditions. The paper was published in ACS Catalysis and featured on the cover of the print edition.

Computational catalysis, a field that simulates and accelerates the discovery of catalysts for chemical production, has largely been limited to simulations of idealized catalyst structures that do not necessarily represent structures under realistic reaction conditions. 

The paper was authored by Raffaele Cheula, Ph.D. student in the Maestri group; Matteo Maestri, full professor of chemical engineering at Politecnico di Milano; and Giannis “Yanni” Mpourmpakis (pictured), Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow and associate professor of chemical engineering at Pitt.