Group: Faculty

Research Focus

My research focuses on the use of biometric technology in elections. Specifically, I examine the use of biometric technology in Ghana’s electoral system to continue the conversation about localization championed by technical communication scholars by arguing that localization must pay particular attention to user strategies because the success of a technology depends on how it meets user needs and the creative efforts users put into use situations. In this regard, localization, as I use it, refers to the extent to which users demonstrate their knowledge of use by adopting and reconfiguring the purpose of technology to solve local problems. For example, hit by several concerns that its electoral process is constantly marked by such electoral malpractices as over voting, impersonation and vote rigging, the Electoral Commission of Ghana adopted and localized the biometric technology to enhance the country’s electoral system. This reconfiguration of the purpose of the technology, though a positive move, reintroduced new challenges. For instance, during the process of use, the biometric performed poorly because it could not withstand the humid and dusty conditions.

Current Projects

■ My book project titled User Strategies in the Face of Technology Breakdown examines Ghana’s use of biometric technology in its elections to advance localization process.

■ I am collaborating with some colleagues to finish up a book chapter for an edited collection titled Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Topics, Theories, and Methodologies.

■ Collaborating with Godwin Agboka to examine resumes written by Ghanaians for Ghanaian audiences to identify differences between those resumes and those that are written for American audiences.

Select Publications

■ Dorpenyo, K.I. (2020). User localization strategies in the face of technological breakdown: Biometric in Ghana’s elections. Palgrave Macmillan Press: Switzerland.

■ Dorpenyo, K.I. (2019). Risky elections, vulnerable technology: Localizing biometric use in elections for the sake of justice. Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(4), 361-375.

■ Dorpenyo, K.I. and Agboka, G. (2018). Election technologies, technical communication, and civic engagement. Technical Communication Quarterly, 65(4).

■ Dorpenyo, K.I. (2015). Mapping a space for rhetorical-cultural analysis: A case of a scientific proposal. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 45(3).

Research Focus

I joined the faculty at Mason from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management where I was an Associate Professor of Information and Decision Sciences. Previously, I also served on the faculty at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. My research examines the intended and unintended consequence of innovation, and how access to the resulting information affects welfare at the interface between business, technology, and social issues; notably in the contexts of healthcare and entrepreneurship.

Select Publications

■ Greenwood, B. N., et al. (2020). Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (35) 21194-21200.

■ Greenwood, B. N., et al. (2018). Patient-physician gender concordance and increased
mortality among female heart attack patients. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(34), 8569-8574.

■ Greenwood, B. N., et al. (2018). Can you gig it? An empirical examination of the gig economy and entrepreneurial activity. Management Science 64(12), 5461-5959.

■ Greenwood, B. N. and S. Wattal. (2017). Show me the way to go home: An empirical investigation of ride-sharing and alcohol related motor vehicle fatalities. MIS Quarterly 41(1), 163-187.

Research Focus

The strongest aspect of my research program lies in its transdisciplinary nature. In over more than twenty years of active time in academia, I have developed an expertise in a variety of research fields. In many collaborations, I analyze multidimensional datasets and make sense out of this data, putting together arrays of disparate data pieces and generating testable hypotheses ready for experimental validation. With that, we are constantly building the forest out of individual trees.

My lab has discovered many biomarkers for chronic liver diseases, cancer and other illnesses, a biosynthesis of the melanin in human adipose, two novel properties of cell-free DNA, and a variety of novel functions for known biomolecules. Recently, my lab has entered a field of anti-aging research. We dissect major pathophysiological components of aging, namely systemic inflammation, insulin resistance, and organ fibrosis. Our work in personalized medicine has a particular emphasis on longitudinal monitoring and management of health in pre-symptomatic individuals, and augmenting the body’s homeostasis by non-pharmacological means.

Current Projects

■ Adipose depot as a metabolic stress buffer: Inducible Melanin Biosynthesis and production of miR-122 in Human Adipose to Abate Systemic Inflammation.

■ The development of wearable electrochemical sensor patch that will quantify oxiDNA in near real-time (every 30 minutes) to produce life-event awareness feedback for its wearers, thus, becoming a stepping-stone to permit a person to make fast, positive health regimen changes.

■ Mapping and mining cfDNA fragment ends to aid in the development of novel biomarkers reflecting pathological changes in chromatin marks, including the detection of neoplasms. Of course, “fragmentomics”-based diagnostic assays which, essentially, map and quantify short nucleotide fragments could, if necessary, be implemented as qPCR assays rather than as expensive NGS runs.

Select Publications

■ Stepanova, M., et al. (2015). Age-independent rise of inflammatory scores may contribute to accelerated aging in multi-morbidity. Oncotarget, 6(3), 1414.

■ Glebova, K., et al. (2015). Oxidized extracellular DNA as a stress signal that may modify response to anticancer therapy. Cancer Letters, 356(1), 22-33.

■ Kural, K. C., et al. (2016). Pathways of aging: comparative analysis of gene signatures in replicative senescence and stress induced premature senescence. BMC Genomics, 17, 1030.

■ Baranova, A., et al. (2019). Adipose may actively delay progression of NAFLD by releasing tumor-suppressing, anti-fibrotic miR-122 into circulation. Obesity Reviews, 20, 108–118.

Research Focus

My research is focused on improving our understanding of the key processes determining Earth’s climate and climate variability on a variety of timescales ranging from seasonal, to decadal, to much longer geological scales. In particular, I am interested in the climatic role of ocean general circulation, ocean-atmosphere interactions and cloud dynamics.

My research efforts acknowledge that, to fully understand, model and predict changes in climate characteristics that have a large impact on society (especially temperature and precipitation patterns), a fully coupled ocean-atmosphere perspective is needed“ one that accounts for changes in important variables such as the thermal structure of the slowly-adjusting ocean. Complimenting observations with theory, I endeavor to accompany complex simulations of climate phenomena with simple models capturing the essential dynamics required to explain unanswered questions within climate science.

Current Projects

■ Understanding cloud feedback and natural aerosol fingerprints to interpret past warm climate forcing and constrain tropical climate sensitivity.

■ Examining the links between Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability.

■ The Effect of Variations in Cloud Versus CO2 Radiative Forcing on Tropical SST Gradients, Atmospheric Circulation and Rainfall Patterns.

■ Characterizing and simulating ocean meridional overturning circulation during the warm Pliocene.

Select Publications

■ Burls, N. J., & Fedorov, A. V. (2017). Wetter subtropics in a warmer world: Contrasting past and future hydrological cycles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(49), 12888-12893.

■ Burls, N. J., et al. (2017). Extra-tropical origin of equatorial Pacific cold bias in climate models with links to cloud albedo. Climate Dynamics, 49(5-6), 2093-2113.

■ Fedorov, A. V., et al. (2015). Tightly linked zonal and meridional sea surface temperature gradients over the past five million years. Nature Geoscience, 8(12), 975.

Research Focus

My research covers a variety of topics in sub-seasonal to seasonal variability and predictability of the atmospheric circulation and related weather. The goal of this research is to provide scientific insight regarding the factors which may make the prediction of the evolution of weather patterns two to four weeks ahead possible, and those factors which may make the prediction of the upcoming seasonal mean possible. My research uses a combination of the output of state-of-the art forecasts, observations, and innovative numerical model experiments to try to identify sources of enhanced predictive power of both mid-latitude weather patterns and the Indian Monsoon circulation.

Current Projects

■ The prediction of the seasonal mean summer Monsoon rainfall over the Indian subcontinent is of enormous societal importance to the Indian population. We have developed a method for correcting the atmospheric diabetic heating that arises from the ocean temperature anomalies in numerical models, and are applying such corrections to a large series of seasonal prediction. The goal is to better understand the separate roles of Pacific heating, Indian Ocean heating, and their interaction.

■ The storm tracks in the Northern Hemisphere describe the locus of intense weather systems which directly impact Europe, Asia and the US. In this project we are evaluating the storm track predictions of a suite of state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction models that are being considered for use by the National Weather Service.

■ This project uses the state-of-the-art European model forecasts to explore just how the diversity of the Maddden-Julian Oscillation (MJO ) structures influences the response of mid-latitude weather, and whether a further discrimination of MJO episode types may help to better understand the tropical forcing of mid-latitude weather on intra seasonal time scales.

Select Publications

■ Yadav, P., D. Straus and E. Swenson. (2019). The Euro- Atlantic response to the Madden-Julian Oscillation Cycle of Ttopical heating: Coupled GCM intervention experiments. Atmosphere-Ocean 57(3), 161-181.

■ Amini, S., and D. M. Straus. (2019). Control of storminess over the Pacific and North America by circulation regimes. Climate Dynamics 52, 4749-4770.

■ Yadav, P. and D. M. Straus. (2017). Circulation response to fast and slow MJO episodes. Monthly Weather Review 145(5), 1577-1596.

Research Focus

My research group aims to develop advanced autonomous (underwater) vehicles that can serve as mobile sensing platform for aquatic environmental monitoring using novel sensing, actuation, and control mechanisms.

Current Projects

■ The flow sensing project aims to apply reduced-order modeling, fluid mechanics, and estimation theory to create a systematic background flow estimation approach for autonomous underwater vehicles to navigate through unknown and dynamic environments.

■ The heterogeneous lighter-than-air vehicle project aims to apply engineering dynamics, control and estimation theory, sensors and actuators, and artificial intelligence to develop smart robotic blimps that interact with each other for studying emerging swarm behaviors.

■ The learning and control project aims to apply control theory, engineering dynamics and machine learning (in particular deep reinforcement learning) to develop a real-time learning and control approach for autonomous dynamical systems with a focus on bioinspired and biomimetic robots.

Select Publications

■ Cook, G. and Zhang, F. (2020). Mobile robots: navigation, control and sensing, surface robots and AUVs. Wiley-IEEE Press.

■ Dang, F. and Zhang, F. (2019). Distributed flow estimation for autonomous underwater robots using POD-based model reduction. Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control, Special issue on Unmanned Mobile Systems 141.7, 071010.

■ Zhang, F., et al. (2016). Autonomous sampling of water columns using gliding robotic fish: algorithms and harmful algae-sampling experiments. IEEE Systems Journal, Special issue on Cyber-innovated Environmental Sensing, Monitoring and Modeling for Sustainability 10(3), 1271-1281.

Research Focus

Most of my research sits at the intersection of governance with science and risk communication. It is primarily–though not exclusively–in the environmental domain. This work has three primary dimensions: 1) communication of science with policymakers; 2) public participation in decision- making; and 3) use of communication as a “soft tool” to achieve governmental policy goals.

In the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, I lead the environmental science communication concentration (ESCM) within the master’s degree program and teach courses such as EVPP 429/529 Environmental Science Communication, EVPP 336 Human Dimensions of the Environment, and EVPP 608 Introduction to Environmental Social Science.

Current Projects

■ In a study funded by the National Park Service, I am working with ideas42 and Haereticus Environmental Laboratory to build the research foundation for a strategy that encourages visitors’ use of reef-friendly sun protection while within park boundaries.

■ With funding from the Office of the Provost, I am collaborating with George Mason University Professors Chris Clarke, Katherine Rowan, and Jim Olds to scope the field of conservation and environmental science communication and associated graduate training needs.

■ In a study with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and University of Michigan, we are exploring how congressional staff members access, interpret, and use science communicated to them within different policy contexts.

■ Under a project funded by the National Science Foundation, I am working with colleagues from UCL and AAAS to investigate how communities of researchers and practitioners from across the globe prioritize social science needs in furthering the study and practice of legislative science advice.

Select Publications

■ Akerlof, K., et al. (2019). A collaboratively derived international research agenda on legislative science advice. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-13.

■ Akerlof, K., et al. (2019). Key beliefs and attitudes for sea-level rise policy. Coastal Management, 1-23.

■ Akerlof, K. (2018). Congress’s use of science: Considerations for science organizations in promoting the use of evidence in policy. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

■ Akerlof, K., et al. (2017). Communicating sea level rise: Media, public opinion, and engagement. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Oxford University Press.

Research Focus

I joined the Schar School of Policy and Government in 2003 after a career as an ocean and earth scientist in the U.S. Geological Survey. I also served as Chairman of the Department of Marine Science, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. My prime interest at George Mason University is environmental science and regulatory policy. Subsidiary interests include federal science agency and environmental law history, comparison of U.S. and European policies, and regulatory barriers to development of renewable energy in the U.S. Other interests are in African American educational history.

Current Projects

■ Book proposal to Palgrave-MacMillan Publishers: Fourteen Weaknesses in U.S. Society That the Donald Trump Presidency Reflects: Donald Trump exploited weaknesses in society that have arisen since the 1960 to rise to the presidency. The weaknesses include a sensation-addicted media that gave Trump $2 billion free publicity, lowered levels of public literacy, extreme political polarization, and disproportional deindustrialization of the nation.

Select Publications

■ Manheim, F. T. (2020). Transformation of congressional lawmaking by the Clean Air Act amendments of 1970 and its effects. C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State Research Paper.

■ Manheim, F. T. (2014). A new classification of U.S. environmental laws. Presentation at Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference.

■ Manheim, F. T. (2009). The Conflict Over Environmental Regulation in the United States: Origins, Outcomes, and Comparisons with the EU. Boston, MA: Springer Publishers.

Research Focus

Current Projects

■ Genetic factors and trauma injury patient outcomes

■ Epidemiology

■ Vision and cognition

■ Sciencemetrics and science of science

Select Publications

■ Huber, G., et al. (2020). A minimal model for household effects in epidemics, medRxiv.

■ Thai, D., et al. (2020). Using BibTeX to automatically generate labeled data for citation field extraction. Automated Knowledge Base Construction.

■ Akhmadeeva, L., et al. (2020). Efficiency of rehabilitation after stroke: A multifactor analysis, European Journal of Neurology, 27, 115.

■ Veytsman, B., et al. (2020). Practical detection of biological age: Why it is not a trivial task. A. Moskalev, ed., Biomarkers of Human Aging. Healthy Ageing and Longevity, vol. 10, Springer.