Traditionally, superheroes wear capes. But in this day and age, the individuals saving the world are the ones who are tackling our planet’s most dire threat head-on: climate change.

Pace students, naturally, are ready to do their part. Through the Project Planet USA competition—an initiative hosted by the Lubin School of Business and The Front Yard at Pace University, students and faculty were encouraged to submit their concepts, innovative ideas, or solutions aimed at addressing climate change for a chance to win a cash grant in the amount of $15,000, plus professional mentoring, public relations, and network connections.

Unsurprisingly, a number of Pace students–Seidenberg’s Shubham Madhavi ‘24 and College of Health Professions’s Danielle Hanson ’24, Nisha Troupe ’24, Anjienna Lowtan ‘24– rose to the challenge and were awarded the big prize.

Their ideas, both ingenious and impactful, may very well make major waves to usher in a greener, more sustainable future.

The Bio-Brick Revolution

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Every cloud has a silver lining. Seidenberg graduate student Shubham Harishchandra Madhavi is taking this proverb to new heights; he’s hoping to take the plastic that has made its way into the ocean into special bio-bricks, designed to restore coral reefs.

“My winning concept revolves around the creation of bio-bricks harvested from ocean plastic, which have the remarkable ability to convert CO2 into coral-restoring nutrients," Shubham explains. “This innovative approach not only addresses the urgent need to tackle plastic pollution in our oceans but also contributes to the restoration of coral reefs, which are vital ecosystems threatened by climate change.”

With the support of the grant and accompanying mentoring, Shubham envisions tangible impacts rippling across oceans and coastlines worldwide.

"By removing ocean plastic and converting it into bio-bricks, we directly mitigate the harmful effects of plastic pollution on marine life and ecosystems," he says.

Naturally Shubham's ambitions extend far beyond the confines of the grant period. His long-term goals are as vast as the ocean itself, encompassing the scaling up of bio-brick production, the expansion of the project to distant shores, and the integration of his innovation into existing reef restoration efforts. As Shubham charts a course towards a greener tomorrow, he’s helping to rebuild our oceans purposefully; one bio-brick at a time.

Hope in a Barrel

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Nisha Troupe, Anjienna Lowtan, and Danielle Hanson, are on a mission to revolutionize clean water accessibility.

"It all started with our Health Science program," says Nisha. "We delved into global health discrepancies, and one glaring issue stood out: access to clean water."

Their winning concept? A barrel filtration system designed to harness rainwater, purify it, and provide communities with a sustainable source of clean water.

"We realized that by tapping into rainwater, we could alleviate the strain on traditional water sources," Anjienna explains. "This means reducing energy-intensive processes like pumping and treating water, ultimately curbing carbon emissions."

The trio envisioned their project not just as a solution but as a catalyst for change, with specific outcomes aimed at amplifying its impact. Scaling up implementation, refining filtration technology, forging partnerships—these were just a few steps towards their overarching goal: ensuring clean water for all, regardless of geographical or socioeconomic barriers.

Their long-term vision goes beyond the grant period, to a future wherein water scarcity was a thing of the past and where communities can thrive in harmony with nature.

"We're not just providing water; we're paving the way for sustainable solutions," Danielle says. "By harnessing technology and fostering community engagement, we're rewriting the narrative of water scarcity."

Learn more about The Front Yard program at Pace University, an educational platform that aims to build the most advanced toolbox for Pace University students, alumni, and faculty to support their entrepreneurial and innovative endeavors.

For the past five years, Kathy Winsted, PhD, has connected her digital marketing students with local small businesses. Her goal is to give her students invaluable real-life experience as they apply their learning to a practical situation, while offering small businesses a free audit of their marketing strategies.

This spring, one of the businesses that students collaborated with was Twenty Sided Store, a board game shop and event venue in Brooklyn. Two groups presented their ideas for how Twenty Sided could continue their marketing efforts, including search engine optimization, expanded social media content calendars, and custom bots powered by Chat GPT to run analytics. One group even reached out to potential influencers and began negotiations for influencer deals.

I felt like I actually got a lot more experience out of it than I would in a hypothetical case study. —Derasmo

For Mike Derasmo '24, a recent Global Marketing Management graduate, the project was a unique opportunity. "It was definitely interesting to work with a real small business,” he said. “It was a lot more interactive and hands-on. I felt like I actually got a lot more experience out of it than I would in a hypothetical case study.”

This takeaway is exactly the reason Winsted continues to team up with businesses for this project. “I'm a huge believer in learning by doing,” she said. “Students have to not only learn the course material but figure out how to apply it to a specific business situation. You can only learn so much by watching a video. Real learning happens when you have to create an ad or present Google analytics findings to a real client."

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Morgan Beetham, who leads Twenty Sided’s marketing efforts, was thrilled to get outside input on the work the Twenty Sided team has put in over the past 13 years they have been in business. "Seeing our business through the eyes of someone navigating our website for the first time was really helpful,” she says. “The students at Pace had some great ideas for ways to reach a younger generation and clarify our brand."

I'm a huge believer in learning by doing. —Winsted

Lauren Bilanko, co-owner of the store, wasn’t sure what to expect from the final presentations and found herself excited by the enthusiasm and efforts of the students, who went above and beyond to understand their business. “The amount of research and development the students did to evaluate our marketplace was impressive,” she said.

At the end of the class, the Twenty Sided team left with a whole new perspective and a list of potential, actionable items. According to Beetham, “I've already started implementing a posting schedule more in line with their suggestions.”

Professor Winsted has developed a great program that mutually benefits both the students and small businesses like ours. —Bilanko

Students had the opportunity to not only apply their learning to a real-life scenario but practice their skills collaborating with and pitching to a real client. Derasmo cites it as a transformative experience, saying, “It's definitely helped me prepare for a professional career. Whether it’s applying the skills I learned to a new job, or even creating my own company now that I’ve seen how all these decisions get done. It was a great experience to have.”

Bilanko agrees, seeing the value not just to businesses like hers, but through the enthusiasm of the Pace students. "Professor Winsted has developed a great program that mutually benefits both the students and small businesses like ours. We hope to be invited to participate again next year."

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“I’m always interested in some aspect of us. What makes humans tick? Why are we the way we are?”

While some aspiring academics gravitate towards established topics or research labs, College of Health Professions Associate Professor of Communication Science and Disorders Sethu Karthikeyan, PhD, took a different route. She has spent her academic career exploring topics in which she is curious and intellectually consumed by, no matter the external interest—a route that by her estimation has been a bit more circuitous, but one that has been rewarding at every step along the way.

Primarily, Karthikeyan has used speech and language as a tool to better understand human nature. Says Karthikeyan, “It’s so broad and multidisciplinary, so the question is the king. It drives your literature review, and you really have to dip into psychology, biology, anthropology, and sociology and integrate them into your work.”

“It’s so broad, so multidisciplinary, so the question is the king. It drives your literature review, and you really have to dip into psychology, anthropology, and sociology and integrate them into your work.”

Recently, she’s been exploring the phenomenon of voice pitch in relation to sexual preference. As Karthikeyan explains, on average, men have a vocal fundamental frequency (objective measure of voice pitch), that is five standard deviations below the female vocal pitch. This dimorphism, as it's called, is not unique to humans. However, the unusually high degree of dimorphism among apes suggests that this is not just something we’ve inherited, but has also been a target of evolutionary selection.

For Karthikeyan, the main question is: why?

“Men with deeper voices may be attractive to potential mates because it is associated with some aspect related to health, physical formidability, social competence and/or status. This may have been a female mate preference beneficial in ancestral environments. That’s based on the intersexual selection proposal by Darwin,” explains Sethu. “The other argument is that it could be a result of male-to-male competition, i.e., intrasexual selection, where individuals of the same sex compete against one another for highly sought after resources, including mates.”

According to Karthikeyan, it appears both these mechanisms factor into why the dimorphism in voice pitch exists—just with one of those factors being arguably a bit more prominent as detailed in the theoretical piece by David Puts (2010) and further supported by a recent study by his team (see Aung et al., 2023).

“What’s interesting is when we consider the two mechanisms together, intrasexual competition appears to be the stronger driving force. For example, the lowering of men’s voice pitch has larger effects on perceptions of dominance than attractiveness.”

Karthikeyan sees this review as a launching pad to explore other avenues of related research, such as how social context may make one change their voice pitch and other aspects of speech such as articulation and fluency and how these could influence one another.

“It is important to remember that the social context makes one change one's voice,” she explains. “Pitch is determined by the size of my vocal folds, but how much I tense or relax my folds, which affects pitch modulations, could depend on the context that is triggering my physiological response, for example, stress levels. Also, changes in vocal pitch seem to be associated with other psychological measures that look into your propensity to empathize with others, just to cite one example.”

Karthikeyan is excited to continue to delve into complex questions at the intersection of communication sciences and disorders and evolutionary psychology. She is currently exploring how articulation may change based on cultural identities and conversational partners, evaluating how foreign-accented and native-accented speakers accentuate or mitigate certain syllables in American English depending on their conversational partner. She’s also recently received approval for a book proposal alongside collaborators, Glenn Geher, Psychology department in SUNY New Paltz, and Andrew Gallup, Behavioral Biology Program at Johns Hopkins, which would take the form of an evolutionary psychology handbook, an edited volume published by the Oxford University Press.

All in all, Karthikeyan hasn’t stopped following her curiosity—and by doing so, has set an admirable example for her students and colleagues alike

“I need to be very curious about the research question; and need to make sure I have the space to think independently about everything leading to that question without falling into the trap of blindly following mainstream narratives. I’ll always ask myself; why did I get into this in the first place?”