Three research projects and one theatre performance from the University of Pittsburgh were selected to be featured at the ACCelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival in Washington, D.C. this past April.

“While most think of the ACC as only an athletics conference, the ACC Academic Consortium aims to promote academic excellence and provide opportunities for collaboration between faculty, students and administrators from the 15 member institutions,” said Joseph J. McCarthy, vice provost for undergraduate studies at Pitt.

The four Pitt teams were:

The World History Center’s Digital Atlas Design Internship Program. In the semester-long internship, undergraduate students learn GIS and web design skills, and complete a research project of their choice using QGIS and ESRI StoryMaps. Each student’s project will be incorporated into a larger project, the World Historical Gazetteer: a linked open data global index of historically important place names and information. The World Gazetteer is expected to be completed in late 2019.

The Personal Mobility and Manipulation Appliance (PerMMA) and Strong Arm were both developed in the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), which are a part of the US Department of Veterans Affairs as the Center for Wheelchairs and Associated Rehabilitation Engineering.

“It’s Who You Know,” a hybrid recommender system to connect students with informal social networks of Pitt researchers is a Personalized Education Grant project, supported by the Office of the Provost, that aims to connect students with researchers with similar interests. The project, out of the PAWS Lab, will test the concept of an online system that can curate and filter vast amount of information to result in “personalized education, career pathways, and research collaborations for [students], faculty and future students.”

Directed by Cynthia Croot, associate professor and head of performance in the Department of Theatre Arts, Recoil is a Pitt-created theater piece that “explores the complexities of gun ownership, violence, and protest through the voices through young people” using real first-person accounts.

Daniel Balderson has been named co-winner of the 2019 Richard Finneran Award for his book about an Argentine author titled “How Borges Wrote.”

Balderson is a Mellon Professor of Modern Languages in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

The award is given by the Society for Textual Scholarship to recognize the best edition of book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language.

Balderson’s book is “the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borge’s creative process.”

The Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) has named Lina Dostilio CUMU’s first research fellow. During a five-month appointment, Dostilio, associate vice chancellor for community engagement at the University of Pittsburgh, will work to establish a cross-city research agenda on the effects of hyperlocal engagement on community capacity. Over the course of the fellowship, Dostilio will work to create a space for dialogue and collaboration on data, instruments, policy, and strategies.

“This project is interested in how universities honor the existing capacities of the communities they engage and how hyperlocal efforts may influence those capacities over time. Examples of the kinds of capacity we are exploring are community readiness for change, civic engagement and social connectedness, among others,” said Dostilio.

“There’s never been a more important time for institutions to be authentic about their responsibility and capacity for place-based engagement and service. Lina’s scholarship on hyperlocal engagement will help to define CUMU’s research agenda and move this important work forward,” said Bobbie Laur, CUMU executive director.

A University of Pittsburgh research team recently received a $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new brain-computer therapy method to help people with autism.

The team is led by Murat Akcakaya, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, and Carla A. Mazefsky, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology in Pitt’s Department of Psychiatry.

They will develop social interaction scenarios in virtual environments while recording EEG responses simultaneously in order to detect patterns that represent changes in distress levels. The virtual scenario will then present audio or visual cues to help remind them how to handle stress. The project will also develop new machine learning algorithms and neuroscience methods to identify EEG features associated with emotion regulation to classify between distress and non-distress conditions, and to distinguish among different distress levels.

Pitt’s campus-wide commitment to sustainable practices once again led to a first-place finish among universities in the most recent Sustainable Pittsburgh Challenge. The University has participated in and won its division in four successive Sustainable Pittsburgh Challenge competitions (formerly known as the Green Workplace Challenge).

Pitt finished with 1,097 points — more than double second-place university finisher Carnegie Mellon’s 444 points — with transportation contributing the largest number of points across all categories. 

Aurora Sharrard (pictured), director of Pitt’s Office of Sustainability, was among the Pitt representatives at the March 21 awards celebration.

More than 100 southwestern Pennsylvania area businesses, nonprofits, municipalities, universities, and K-12 schools completed the 13-month-long challenge to integrate sustainability into their organizational culture.

Together, participants saved more than 80 million kilowatt hours of energy worth $6.27 million — energy sufficient to power 7,978 average Pittsburgh homes for a year — and more than 20 million gallons of water — enough to fill more than 30 Olympic-size swimming pools. In addition, participating organizations avoided a per-capita annual average of 200 pounds of transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Collectively, participants earned points for more than 2,200 sustainable actions including reducing energy and water usage, monitoring indoor air quality, implementing policies on supplier diversity and supplier code of conduct, creating a workplace sustainability team and encouraging carpooling and other alternative forms of transportation. 

Michael Kenney, an associate professor and program director of international affairs at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has been commissioned by the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism to contribute an academic paper to a comprehensive report on extremism.

Kenney’s contribution will explore the links between extremism and terrorism through a deep dive into the first UK-based proscribed Islamist group, Al-Muhajiroun. This is an extension of Kenney’s research into this organization, which is the subject of his recent book, “The Islamic State in Britain: Radicalization in an Activist Network.” Kenney’s paper will draw on dozens of interviews with activists and former activists, and hundreds of hours of direct observation of their activities over a period to several years.

His research focuses on Islamist extremism, terrorism and transnational organization crime. He serves on the editorial board of Terrorism and Political Violence, the leading academic journal in terrorism studies.

Margaret Larkins-Pettigrew, an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, will be honored with the Gateway Medical Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Larkins-Pettigrew, who is a former president of the society, is a Pitt alum. She received her Doctor of Medicine degree, a baccalaureate degree in nursing, and a master’s in public policy and international affairs from the University. She is currently the Edgar B. Jackson Chair for Clinical Excellence and Diversity, heads the Office of Community Impact, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion and is an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Case Western University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. She is also an assistant dean in the Office of Student Affairs at Case Western Reserve University and heads global health programs in her discipline. 

She is the founder of W.O.N.D.O.O.R. (one door), Women and Newborns, Diversity, Outreach, Opportunity and Research, an innovative program that educates global physicians, students, residents and junior faculty through local and international health care collaborations.

The Gateway Medical Society is a component of the National Medical Association, whose objectives are to promote the science and art of medicine and the betterment of public health.

Jeannette South-Paul, the Andrew W. Mathieson Professor Department Chair at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Family Medicine, was recently honored by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, First Lady Frances Wolf and Maj. Gen. Tony Carrelli at the fourth annual Female Veterans Day Ceremony in celebration of Women’s History Month.

South-Paul served in the U.S. Army for 21 years beginning with ROTC and retiring as a colonel. During her time of military service, she worked as an Army physician, her last duty station being at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Her research focuses on maternal-child health, particularly teen pregnancy.

Cassie Quigley has been named a 2019 Pennsylvania STEM Ambassador.

The PA STEM Ambassador Program aims to “shape the future of STEM education in the commonwealth targeting vital policy conversations to legislative leadership in the areas of STEM Learning ecosystems, computer science, state and federal policy for formal and informal education, and workforce needs.”

Quigley, an associate professor of science education in the School of Education, received this honor along with thirty-one other leaders across Pennsylvania.

“Because of my commitment to improve STEM experiences for our youth, being able to sit at the table with the decision-makers allows me to help influence the type of experiences students will have,” said Quigley. “My hope is that students will be positioned to be change-makers in their schools and society, and STEM education is one way to do that.”

Added Quigley, “For the past five years, I have been working with my colleague Dr. Dani Herro to help teachers shift their practices, and I have seen the results in the students.  Students are engaged, excited and informed about how to solve some of the most pressing problems in our world. Between this research, and the opportunity to work with Pennsylvania lawmakers, I am excited about the potential for our students.”

Quigley also has a new publication, “An Educator’s Guide to STEAM,” which will be released late in March 2019.