Dr. Gail Tang (La Verne Scholar Award, 2017) is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Mathematics Program. Her research aims to foster mathematical creativity in the classroom with the goal of broadening participation in STEM, especially for minoritized populations. In 2018, Dr. Tang and her research group was awarded an NSF grant to examine the student-reported teaching practices that encourage students’ creativity in mathematics. The group is also analyzing the impact these teaching practices have on students’ mathematical identities. Preliminary results show that teaching actions that foster creativity in mathematics have positive impacts on students’ affective experiences in the classroom. For example, students report increased understanding and confidence in doing mathematics. They also report enjoyment, persistence, and ownership in the mathematics they are creating.
Allyson Brantley (La Verne Scholar Award, 2020), an Assistant Professor of History & Director of Honors and Interdisciplinary Initiatives, researches and writes about histories of grassroots, coalition-based activism in the 20th century United States. Her first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, tells the story of one of the longest consumer boycotts in American history: the boycott of Coors beer. From the 1950s to the 1990s, labor activists, Latinos, gay men and lesbians, feminists, students, and other activists worked together to oppose what they saw as the anti-labor, anti-minority, and conservative politics of the Coors Brewing Company. Published in May 2021 with the University of North Carolina Press, Brewing a Boycott argues that this movement not only demonstrates the vitality of grassroots activism in this period but also the shifting uses of the consumer boycott tool. Brantley’s current research project focuses on grassroots activism by and for those experiencing homelessness in the 1980s. In this work, she seeks to understand not only the roots of our current homelessness crisis but, more centrally, the ways that activists and others responded and thus shaped national conversations about housing, social services, charity, and homelessness.
Dr. Fengmei Gong (La Verne Scholar Award, 2019) is Associate Professor of Information Technology. She is working on some interdisciplinary topics of information technology and supply chain management. One of the projects examines the impact of information technology (IT) spillovers on the technical efficiency in production and how the effect is moderated by the focal industry’s own IT intensity and its relationship with supply chain partners. It employs a two-stage stochastic frontier approach to estimate the relationships based on the data from 60 U.S. industries. Previous studies about IT and technical efficiency focus on the impact of own IT investments without considering the effect of supply chain partners’ IT spillovers. This study presents empirical evidence on the role of IT spillovers on technical efficiency from the supply chain perspective. Another project takes a network analysis perspective to generate connectivity measures among industries in an ego-centric network and concentration measures in an ego industry’s supplying market. The future study is to explore whether IT is responsible for the change in the input-output structure of production in supply chains measured as connectivity and concentration.
La Verne Scholars of 2018, Roy Kwon (fourth from left) and Giacomo Laffranchini (fifth from left) with members of the La Verne Academy. Front row, l. to r.: Issam Ghazzawi, Chuck Doskow, Iraj Parchamazad, Tom Harvey, Deborah Olson (new inductee for 2018), and Ngoc Bui. Back row, l. to r.: Felicia Beardsley, Jonathan Reed, Jason Neidleman, Kenneth Marcus, Reed Gratz, Matthew Witt, Kevin Marshall, Glenn Gamst, and Jack Meek.
