The Office of Human Resources (OHR) is pleased to announce that Mark Burdsall will hold the new position of assistant vice chancellor of consulting services. According to Vice Chancellor Dave DeJong, a new consulting services unit will be composed of the compensation, employee and labor relations and organization development departments.

Burdsall has served OHR and Pitt for 22 years, leading countless organizational transformations in schools and departments across the University to better utilize existing resources and measure the true needs of each unit to achieve their goals. Burdsall has previously held the roles of director of compensation and most recently director of organizational development. 

Jamie Hanson, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), is the recipient of the 2019 American Psychological Foundation Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award.

The Fantz Award recognizes young researchers in psychology who have accomplished basic scientific research or scholarly writing in perceptual-cognitive development and the development of selective attention, and have investigated and written about the development of individuality, creativity and free-choice of behavior.

Hanson’s research focuses on how children and adolescents learn about their environments, how early life stressors impact their developing brains, and how brain changes can result in negative outcomes. His program consists of working with families, collecting data, connecting with communities and sharing information about brain and behavioral development.

Allison Shertzer, associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Economics, recently received a three-year, $607,000 National Science Foundation grant to examine the evolution of real estate values and the standard of living in the U.S. over the period of 1880 to 1990.

Shertzer and her team will combine state-of-the-art methods in housing price index construction with newly digitized newspaper archives, with the goal of making important improvements over existing housing price series.

“We can't really understand what is happening in today's housing economy or make predictions for the future, unless we understand how the price of housing moved during booms and busts of the past,” she said. 

Tessa McCarthy, assistant professor in the School of Education, received the 2019 Alan J. Koenig Research in Literacy Award.

The award, which is one of the highest honors that can be given to educators of people with visual impairments, is granted to one person every two years. 

McCarthy, who teaches courses in the Vision Studies program in the School of Education’s Department of Instruction and Learning, focuses the majority of her research on the mechanical and pedagogical aspects of teaching Braille reading. 

The School of Education is one of a few dozen higher education institutions in the United States that offer degree and certification programs for educators in vision studies.

Read more about McCarthy and the Vision Studies program.

Samantha Ford joins the Office of Sustainability as sustainability projects coordinator. This new position expands the University-wide Pitt Sustainability team, providing greater support for the Pitt Sustainability Plan’s goals and strategy. Ford will help coordinate sustainability projects campus-wide, including leading the Pitt Green Office and Green Lab programs; supporting zero waste events and initiatives; and communicating Pitt’s leadership and innovation across the equity, environmental and economic spectrum of sustainability. 

Ford’s professional and educational experience includes environmental analytics, embodied energy of technologies, wildlife conservation and biophilic resiliency initiatives that benefit both people and the planet.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and psychology and is pursuing a master’s in sustainability at Chatham University. Before entering graduate school, Ford was a research associate in the Department of Family Medicine. 

Ford is excited to be part of the university-wide Pitt Sustainability team supporting the mission of balancing equity, environment and economics to ensure current and future generations can thrive. If you are interested in getting involved to further the culture of sustainability at Pitt or becoming a Pitt Green Office or Green Lab, please contact Ford at Samantha.E.Ford@pitt.edu.

Jodi Cardone has joined the Office of Planning, Design and Real Estate in Business and Operations as director of real estate administration. In her role, Cardone oversees the University’s real estate and leasing portfolio, including contract management and assessment of new development opportunities.

She joins Pitt from the UPMC Corporate Real Estate team and brings demonstrated experience in commercial leasing, property management and market analysis.

Lina Dostilio, associate vice chancellor for community engagement, published a new study in conjunction with her work as the inaugural fellow with the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), with support by the Kresge Foundation.

For the study, Dostilio focused on hyperlocal engagement, or “instances in which post-secondary institutions have strategically organized community engagement efforts to focus on a bounded area within a larger city or metropolitan region in ways that enhance the institution’s ability to form partnerships and advance community development.”

The benchmarking report examined the hyperlocal practices of 22 CUMU institutions with a total of 26 engagements across 33 sites—including Pitt’s Community Engagement Center in Homewood. 

The report also “catalogs the diversity of hyperlocal engagement strategies and investigates which areas of community capacity were of interest to hyperlocal engagements.” Read the full report.

“To me, the benefits of a hyperlocal engagement are the ability to have a sustained institutional platform for partnership, to be able to grow alongside community anchors, and to think together about how we dream and build the future," said Dostilio. "A university’s future is intertwined with the futures of its surrounding communities.” 

Dostilio’s research team included the following Pitt community members:

• Mary Ohmer, associate professor in the School of Social Work
• Kara McFadden (GSPIA '19), alumna of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
• Carrie Finkelstein, graduate student in the School of Social Work

Kenneth Jordan, Richard King Mellon Professor and Distinguished Professor of Computational Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, is part of the research team behind the paper “Molecular-Level Origin of the Carboxylate Head Group Response to Divalent Metal Ion Complexation at the Air-Water Interface,” published in the July edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper examines at a microscopic level the hydration of a model surfactant system. Surfactants such as soaps have one end that is attracted toward water, with the other end being attracted to oily substances.

The University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences turns 50 this year. 

The school began as one of the smallest schools on Pitt’s campus in 1969 and has grown to be one of the most prominent today.

“We are fortunate that the leadership in SHRS sees the challenges as opportunities to demonstrate our collective innovation in educational delivery. This is especially evident as we boldly move into the arena of distance education,” said Anthony Delitto, who has served as the school’s dean since 2015. 

Read more about the school over its half-century existence in the latest edition of FACETS, SHRS’s magazine.