When Mackenzie first arrived at Pace University Pleasantville campus in the fall of 2016, there is no question that she hit the ground running. With a major in computer science and a minor in mathematics, Mackenzie has quite the workload – an 18-credit schedule and extra-curricular on-campus activities.

Image

Some of that workload is spent volunteering: as part of her Intergenerational Computing class, Mackenzie and her fellow students are required to volunteer twice a week with older adults. During these sessions, students learn what life is like as an older adult, including how interaction with computers and mobile devices can be restricted by physical and mental limitations.

Volunteering is extremely rewarding, though. While spending time with her new friends, Mackenzie got to hear about their lives, including fascinating stories about what it was like to live through the Great Depression and Second World War.

Alongside Intergeneration Computing, Mackenzie’s favorite class so far is Computer Programming II, which is taught by Dr. Mary Courtney. Mackenzie has enjoyed learning new concepts and has found the class structure easy to follow. “Dr. Courtney really creates a fun learning environment for our class,” she says.

Besides keeping busy with her classes, Mackenzie is involved with a few on-campus groups at Pleasantville. She is the Vice President of the Honors Council, where she serves as a liaison for students and helps to plan on-campus events. She is also the Vice President of Seidenberg Tech Collective, one of our computing clubs that meets every week during the semester.

In January, 2017, Mackenzie started as the lead developer in a multidisciplinary research project spanning three Pace University schools – Dyson, Lubin, and Seidenberg. The project aims to understand the effects of the environment on the pond that lies in the heart of the Pleasantville campus.

As one of the resident techies on the team, Mackenzie has been working on implementing pipe sensors in the pond that will collect data about the water temperature and store that data on a cloud-based server. Dyson’s role in the project is geared towards the environmental side, and Lubin aims to create a curriculum from this project and its findings for future students, as well as potential business projects.

That sure seems like a lot for a student in her first year to take on. You’d have to be extremely determined to sign up for more – and yet that’s exactly what Mackenzie did.

One of the results of Intergenerational Computing, which is taught by Dr. Jean Coppola, is that students can end the class having built a mobile application designed for use by older people. Those apps can be entered into competitions such as the annual #WestchesterSMART Mobile App Development Bowl and the Pace Pitch Contest. Guess who entered both with her team from the class, and guess who won a prize?

Alongside her teammates Ricky Harris and Daniel Citardi, Mackenzie presented the app VR Discover at first the Mobile App Development Bowl and then the Pace Pitch Contest. The team took home the second prize in the Mobile App Creativity category, which is an amazing achievement for a first year student!

So what did Mackenzie think about her first year at Pace? “College has been amazing. There are so many great relationships created in Seidenberg. I did not expect Seidenberg to be as close-knit as it is. The professors and students care. Everyone wants you to succeed,” Mackenzie says. “The students all root for each other and support one another in their endeavors.”

For students considering a career in computer science, Mackenzie has some advice to give: do not hesitate to ask for help. “Programming is not as simple as writing. There will be questions and it is okay to not know everything right from the start,” she says. “There are so many people willing and available to help you with any questions or concerns you might help.”

We’re very much looking forward to the rest of Mackenzie’s time with us at the Seidenberg School. After such an action-packed first year, the next three are bound to be just as exciting.

Thank you so much to Mackenzie for taking the time to chat with us!

A good researcher sheds light on a probing question. Shayna Rosado, a senior studying Computer Science at Pace University and the Spring 2020 Virginia Letourneau Intern at Seidenberg’s Blue CoLab asked, “Why don’t we know the quality of our water before we drink it?”

The answer: Real-time detection of contaminants in drinking water is not a national policy; therefore, technology that can immediately analyze the quality of water before it reaches the tap is not a national priority.

Image

Real-time detection is a headline issue in the age of COVID-19, and water-borne disease can be as devastating as a pandemic. By way of example, Shay points to Milwaukee in 1993, where 403,000 people were sickened by a pathogen in their drinking water, and to current research from the University of Arizona that concluded pathogenic contamination still causes 1.5 million illnesses in U.S. water drinkers annually. Real-time monitoring could save lives, but innovation, like policy, is lagging.

Shay is the Software Development Engineer for the twelve-member Blue CoLab, Seidenberg’s collaborative STEM laboratory that advances innovation in real-time water monitoring for the protection of human and environmental health. She is chief developer of Blue HomeLab, the mobile app to alert water users when a contaminant is detected. “If we demonstrate how a cell phone can be a warning system,” she said, “maybe policymakers and developers will make a priority of innovating technologies, such as advanced sensors, that detect a wide range of contaminants in real-time.”

Shay is a standout at Seidenberg and the Blue CoLab. A community college transfer and single mom who never gave up on her education, she will graduate summa cum laude in May 2020 with a BS in computer science. “I am fortunate to have a family that provides a loving support system that makes my education possible, and helps to keep Mackenzie cared-for and enriched,” she said.

Mackenzie, Shay’s two-year old daughter, is a familiar sight at the Goldstein Academic Center in Pleasantville - sometimes seen in her mother’s arms during class, and at other times entertained by team members during the weekly scrums of the Blue CoLab, where Mackenzie is considered a part of the team.

When COVID-19 arrived, things changed all around. “Mackenzie misses Seidenberg and being part of the CoLab events. And although it is a drastic change to move an entire office staff and our collaborative area online, Seidenberg and Blue CoLab operate in a way that keeps everyone working, involved and supported, even at a distance.”

We asked Shay about her app, her Blue CoLab experience, her years at the Seidenberg School and ahead.

What motivated you to choose Blue HomeLab for your Blue CoLab project?

Our bodies need water more than anything else. We can survive on food for weeks but, without water, only days. Yet, currently, water systems take samples on an occasional schedule, and days or weeks can pass before analytical results are evaluated and reported. The challenge that emerged from my discussions with Blue CoLab Director John Cronin was: If technology will someday be developed that monitors water 24/7, and delivers analytical results in an instant, how can real-time information about water quality be delivered to consumers? How will we serve the public’s right-to-know?

What skills did you learn at the Blue CoLab?

The first is the importance of teamwork. The Blue CoLab is a collaborative team, a study group, a safety net, and a support system rolled into one. I made relationships that will last a lifetime. The next is all the aspects of deploying and operating a real-time monitoring system – from launching Ada, our monitoring platform in Choate Pond, to collecting, analyzing and presenting the data she produces. And, of course, the big one: transforming the Blue HomeLab from an abstract idea to the real thing.

What did that entail?

I had to design, from top to bottom, how data will be passed down and stored within the app's back-end on the web. I had to create functions that ran around-the-clock to fire off notifications when one of our sensors detected unsafe water quality, and build mechanisms for resetting conditions once the quality was again safe. I then had to create a method to prompt the user for feedback. The final major component was design of the HomeLab phone app itself.

Were you ever concerned that Blue HomeLab was too big a task?

At first, designing the HomeLab did seem like it would be a lot to handle. I knew we already had sensors for measuring water data, and software for delivering that data safely to our back-end. But my job was to design the system that would interact with those elements to evaluate water quality in real-time. The challenge of finding that solution was exciting and outside my comfort zone. But that creates space for me to grow. And, looking back, I am delighted I stepped up to the plate. Now, it’s completed and ready for testing!

The pandemic has changed life at Pace. How have you and the team been able to continue your work?

I must say that I'm extremely grateful for having chosen a technology-related major. At Seidenberg, we were more prepared than most for what came next. For me specifically, I use GitHub to host the code for my project. That way it is easy to keep track of each new version of the app. I store all of my important files on Microsoft Teams, which is provided by Pace. Teams is a great tool for assigning tasks through Planner and communicating with other team members. Zoom allows us to hold Blue CoLab team meetings throughout the week and interact about keeping the various layers of our projects in synch. Sometimes Mackenzie is able to participate as well!

What impact did Blue CoLab have on your Seidenberg experience?

My involvement with the Blue CoLab has been a wonderful complement to my education here at Pace. During my first semester as a team member, I was taking Software Engineering where we were assigned a final project of building an Android app that used publicly available data in some way, shape, or form. After that was complete, and after my discussions with John Cronin about real-time delivery of water quality data, I was inspired to create the HomeLab app. Blue CoLab gave me the support and team members that made it possible, and, of course, the facilities – our data lab, tech lab and living lab on Choate Pond. And I would be remiss if I did not mention Leanne Keeley, the CoLab Program Coordinator, who was available to me on a moment’s notice.

Seidenberg and Blue CoLab encourage interdisciplinarity, as Pace President Krislov mentioned in his State of the University Address. How did that enhance your education, and prepare you for a career?

It was fascinating to have been taking Biology during this semester as well - gaining a deeper lens into the importance of environmental issues such as water quality. On top of that, the back-end for the HomeLab app was designed using concepts I learned in the Internet Computing course I took that semester. Blue CoLab encouraged the applied, interdisciplinary problem-solving that gave me invaluable experience in app design, a very marketable skill in the technology industry. By providing the space to start big, and the assistance to break down the system into smaller modules, Blue CoLab enabled me to learn and exercise key skills that are needed from a Software Development Engineer in any firm.

What program do you study at Pace and why did you pick that one?

The Master of Science in Information Systems at the Seidenberg School. When I was planning to fly to the States for my graduate degree, I was already two years into my design career. I looked up design courses and already knew most of what they had to offer. I found that I was more intrigued by the planning and strategizing of a product, as those lead up to important design decisions. Knowing the technical aspects, feasibility, organizational information, data analysis, and other stages of the process made a lot of sense to me as a designer. By adding those skills, I would become more than just a person who can arrange pixels on the screen. If designers want a seat at the table, they should know a lot more than just design.

Image

For that reason, I took front end development courses at Pace University so I could understand what comes next – after I've designed something. Those classes helped me think about how a website or app will actually be built, and enabled me to design with development in mind. Knowing all of that makes the development cycle simpler for everyone, which is a great thing to bring to a team in the workplace.

The MS in Information Systems helped me build myself as a complete designer.

What are your main interests?

I absolutely love design. I'm really lucky to have figured that out early in my life. I have tried coding and other domains around design, but nothing has been able to pull me out of my chair when I'm designing; I end up starving for hours – and it's really enjoyable!

Apart from that, I have a strong instinct for content. Now that I look at the things I did during my undergraduate life, I have created a lot of content. I've written 60+ articles for a content related organization I founded as a student. It was called Pen Paper and Thoughts. Deciding a name has not been my strongest pursuits clearly. My interest in these two domains led to the biggest project of my life – the Unpixelate Design Podcast series. Three cities, 14 episodes, with five top designers in India.

Did anything surprise you during your degree?

I'm really fascinated by the higher education system here in the States. I love it. There are just so many things a student can do – they just need to extend their arm and grab it. For a person like me who learns a lot outside the classroom, it felt like paradise. I still feel I could have done even more in my grad student life, but with two jobs plus classes I have a full schedule! Plus, the education system here revolves a lot around the students, instead of the faculty – which is how I feel it should be.

What are you the most proud of?

I have been lucky to have a few things. First, the podcast series. It was a big investment in terms of time and effort for me; my parents were boggled by the amount of effort I was putting in. I had so much interest and enthusiasm about it. While most of the people around me questioned me and thought I was wasting my time, some felt it added a lot of value to my profile. And the results have been really good. I still get new subscribers every week, two years since the last episode went up. People still comment how the podcast has helped them and that they love the conversation. There is some recognition for me as well. It is really satisfying, so much that I really wanted to make a second season here in the United States. But doing it alongside a master’s program is tricky. Someday I will, I hope.

Secondly, there is this brilliant project I'm working on with the faculty at Pace University – CyberPassport. It's a project funded through the Department of Defense Cyber Scholarship Program, and I've designed the website and the mobile app for it. It's an amazing opportunity for me. The team is just brilliant at what they do, and that makes it really enjoyable to design. It puts a good product in my portfolio during my student life, which I think is really cool. Professor Andreea Cotoranu and Dr. Li-Chiou Chen have been amazing mentors to me for this project.

Any standout moments?

Oh, there are so many! In class, in the Seidenberg student lounge, around campus, where I live in Jersey City, everywhere. Moving countries has been great for me. I have met brilliant people here - especially the creative team at Seidenberg School. I have been fortunate enough to have an opportunity to work with these amazing students who are so great at design and content strategy. I remember feeling really humbled by the amount of creativity flying around in our group meetings every Monday. That was a standout moment right there, every week. Thanks to Katie Todd for bringing me on the team. It's something that gets attached to my college life as the best memory.

What’s one piece of advice would you give future students?

Skills: build them, practice, and do projects. That is all that matters. Life is easier if you can do something not everyone can do. Take up courses that build your skillset. Do personal projects and most importantly - finish them. It's a really satisfying feeling to learn a new skill and produce something out of it. There's no better time than the student life to do that. I am constantly working on new projects every month to sharpen my skills. Recently, I reimagined Instagram, as if it was designed at Apple. It was really fun. You should also have a website portfolio, irrespective of your domain. With a website, you can show off your skills easily – plus there is a sense of pride in seeing your name in the URL of a website that contains all your amazing work.

Interested in seeing some of Ronak’s work? Check out his website.

Andrew Iadevaia, ’23 (BS Computer Science) loves working with computer systems. When he first arrived at Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, he only knew one programming language: Java. Knowing that, to succeed, he needed to expand his knowledge and experience, he started joining student teams.

Image

In his first semester Andrew joined the student-run BergCyberSec’s National Cyber League (NCL) and National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) teams, as well as the Blue Colab’s water monitoring team. By the end of the semester, he was an indispensable member of them all.

Andrew learns a great deal working with clubs and teams. He has picked up experience in programming, cybersecurity, networking, operating systems, communication, competition, and of course, teamwork. He has learned cyber defense, Python, SQL, Java, C, C++, C#, FastAPI and more.

Teams and Clubs

The Pace Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team competes against teams across the Northeastern US in Cybersecurity competitions. They defend (Blue Team) or attack (Red Team) the resources of a hypothetical company or organization. In his first year on the CCDC team, Andrew competed with the Blue Team, documenting injects. This meant he was responsible for keeping a record of every action the team took in their efforts to defend their system against attack. Andrew explains: “So I would write to [a hypothetical director or CEO] explaining what we did, why we did it, and how we did it and I put it into words that they could understand, not super technical.” To do this well, he had to understand “the overall picture, every part of the system: networking, hardware, and software” as well as the current security landscape and communicate that in an easy to understand way to a non-technical actor.

Pace CCDC has qualified to compete at regionals the two years Andrew has been part of the team. Why are they doing so well? Andrew thinks it’s because of the people. Everyone on the team is ambitious and eager to learn. In competition, “it’s a team effort; you have a duty you need to do and so does everyone else. Everyone does their part.” He says the competitions can be stressful, but “competition makes you want to be the best, that's what encourages you to learn things.”

Andrew also competes with the National Cyber League (NCL) team in Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions. It wasn’t until he joined the Seidenberg community at Pace that he participated in his first CTF . Being part of these competitions has taught him about “red teaming, privilege escalation, security auditing, and overall cybersecurity.” When asked how he does in competition he says “I've qualified for the gold bracket every season I participated, which is pretty good. Last season [as a sophomore] I ranked 42 out of 6,072 [in the US].”

Andrew is the Backend Software Engineer and Data Manager for the Blue Colab team on Pace University’s Pleasantville Campus. The Blue Colab is Seidenberg’s collaborative STEM laboratory that advances innovation in real-time water monitoring for the protection of human and environmental health. Andrew says that working with this team has taught him a lot about how combined systems work. In his role with the Blue Colab, he regularly works with databases, APIs, and web servers. Before he started, he didn’t know how any of those systems worked. He says, “I find it mind-blowing sometimes because I went from not knowing how to write a SQL statement to literally running the database and API.”

Learn By Doing

Andrew believes the best way to learn something is by doing hands-on projects. “You can't just go and read documentation like you would read a textbook for history class. You have to use the code, make a connection to the database, play around with it. That’s where projects come in.” When working on projects, chances are that you’ll slip up every now and then. But mistakes are another opportunity to learn. “There's always going to be errors, especially when developing your project, and that's when you actually learn.” To sum it all up, he says “Until you've done it, you haven't fully learned it. That's my belief.”

The project Andrew is most proud of is a database converter program written for the Blue Colab team. The goal of the program is to take data from text files, parse it using an Artificial Intelligence Engine, and insert it in a database based on certain conditions. Andrew wrote the program in Java. He says, “I'm proud of the database converter because it was something I’d never worked on before.” Putting together database operations, SQL, and Java was a new experience for him. “It was a big learning curve for me, but once I figured it out, I was able to actually take what I learned from the database converter and use it in other projects. Now, I'm able to comfortably read and write to databases.”

Looking Forward

What advice would Andrew like to give Seidenberg students? “To get the most out of Seidenberg, a key thing is to join extracurricular activities. Clubs and teams are just a swimming pool of knowledge that's not given to you in a classroom setting.” Your teammates will “get you out of your comfortable zone and [help you] learn other things.” For students interested in programming he adds, “There's no programmer in the world who can remember perfect syntax and stuff like that. You're always going to have to look something up.” And the most important thing to remember while programming? “KISS: Keep it simple, stupid.”

Andrew would like to spend the rest of his time at Seidenberg taking on more leadership roles in the clubs and teams he works with. He has big plans for his teams. As data manager for the Blue Colab, he wants to find a solution for some of the issues the team is facing. He wants “more flexibility in the way that we're able to input data and save it and use it.” Andrew hopes his experience with these projects will help him find internships with technology companies. He looks forward to working in DevOps (Development Operations) where he can use his knowledge of IT systems and software development together to work with all the pieces of a system. “And just have a good time,” he adds. That’s important!

When you think of a scientist conducting research, your mind might immediately visualize a bustling lab, full of test tubes and beakers. For Dyson’s Melissa Grigione, that lab is oftentimes mother nature. Over the course of her career, Grigione has traveled literally all over the world—from Cameroon, to Patagonia to countless destinations in between—to better understand the complex relationships between animals and surrounding ecosystems.

Grigione specializes in what’s called mammalian spatial ecology, which can be defined as how ecological and man-made elements impact the development and propagation of animal species. She uses sophisticated technological techniques such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing technology to better understand populations, and how they are impacted by what’s happening around them. She is highly focused on conservation biology, as she’s dedicated much of her life to understanding species whose way of life have been altered by man-made and environmental changes to existing ecosystems.

Take, for example, the bison—an iconic American species that Grigione and her husband have been researching for nearly a dozen years. Through studying the effects of human hunting norms, she has found that the species’ ability to propagate effectively has been reduced.

“We were looking at the effects of hunting on mating behavior,” said Grigione. "The large males that are hunted may be showing signs of reduced and/or altered vocalization during mating. These changes in vocalization may have profound effects on the populations, its reproductive biology, and genetic structure."

This particular project began quite modestly, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Now, it’s growing rapidly—Grigione has been conducting similar research in Canada, as well as a lot of private land in the western United States to better understand larger trends amongst diverse populations of this species.

“I’ve been all around the world studying animals in my life, but the thing I really love most about being at Pace and my career right now is enriching the minds of our students,” said Grigione.

Grigione is also focusing her attention to a species called the pika—a small, rabbit-like species that can be found in high-elevation areas around the globe. By studying pika populations in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Grigione is breaking new ground.

“They’ve never been studied in Idaho, and I’d like to study the effects of a changing climate on these animals,” said Grigione. “They live at very high elevations and there’s nowhere else for them to go if temperatures continue to increase. If they are affected, their populations can just start blinking out.”

Image

In addition to a few other ongoing projects—including, but not limited to, studying burrowing owls in the grasslands of Florida and repopulating jaguar populations in Arizona—Grigione is focused on the classroom. As a faculty member at Pace, Grigione has taken great pride in training the next generation of scientists. Over the course of her career, she’s seen students evolve from learning the ropes during graduate assistantships to holding major roles and making significant impacts in the professional world. She credits the larger educational philosophy at Pace to helping prepare scientists; as oftentimes today, it’s not just enough to solely focus on the hard science.

“The reason why I love Pace, we’re training our students not only to do science, but how to understand policy and how to communicate.”

While Grigione has accomplished quite a lot over the course of her career, she views it as her mission to ensure the student-to-scientist pipeline remains robust. With all the advents of 21st century technology, basic understanding of the natural world can often take a backseat. Yet, as Grigione notes, training competent and dedicated conservation biologists for the future—many of whom will be faced with ever-complex challenges due to a changing climate, human population alterations, and much more—is arguably more important than ever.

“I’ve been all around the world studying animals in my life, but the thing I really love most about being at Pace and my career right now is enriching the minds of our students,” said Grigione. “Students don’t always have a sense of the natural world—if I can spark a little of light, bring some stories into my classroom and really turn on that switch to appreciate and understand the importance of nature, I've done my job. This is what I love doing.”

Originally published October 15, 2021

Image

Professor Craig Hart, Executive Director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, was named to the “2021 Energy & Environment Power 100” list published by City & State New York magazine. Professor Hart was ranked #65 on the prestigious list which includes public officials, energy executives, environmentalists, activists, academics and others who are driving the debate on climate change and reinventing how New Yorkers get their power.

Distinguished Haub Law alumnus Basil Seggos ’01, Commissioner, State Department of Environmental Conservation, received the #1 ranking for his leadership in New York State’s climate change law. Additionally, former Haub Law Visiting Professor Judith Enck, Founder and President of Beyond Plastics and former EPA Region 2 Administrator, ranked #40 along with Fred Zalcman at #16, who served as Pace Energy & Climate Center’s Executive Director from 2001 – 2007. Haub Law also acknowledges litigation partners Kim Fraczek, Director of SANE Energy, who ranked #83 and Bob Howarth, Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University, who ranked #64.

“We are so proud of the important work that both Craig and Basil are doing to address the growing threat of climate change in New York and beyond and congratulate them on this recognition,” said Dean Horace E. Anderson Jr., Dean of the Law School. “As the #1 ranked environmental law program, Haub Law remains committed to advancing climate change law and policies that enact a global response and salutes our past and present faculty, alumni and colleagues for their bold leadership.”

#65 Craig Hart
Executive Director, Pace Energy and Climate Center

Pace Law School brought Craig Hart on to run the school’s energy and climate center two years ago. Hart, who has advised governments on policies regarding renewables, grid modernization and financing infrastructure, has supported clean energy initiatives in the American Jobs Plan and urged private-sector employers to reorient toward sustainability. He also led Pace’s partnership with the Westchester County Association to launch a clean energy portal to help businesses find government initiatives allowing them to lower their carbon emissions.

#1 Basil Seggos
Commissioner, State Department of Environmental Conservation

Not only did Basil Seggos stay on as commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation during the transition from the Cuomo regime to the Hochul administration, he turned heads in October with his agency’s decision to block permits for proposed repowering projects in Queens and upstate New York. This was done on the grounds that investing in natural gas infrastructure is contrary to the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Seggos, who has led DEC since 2015, also co-chairs the New York State Climate Action Council, which is tasked with implementing New York’s ambitious climate change law.

View the full City & State 2021 Energy & Environment Power 100 list