The Overlooked Consequences of a Transit Strike

who had to choose between waiting on long bus lines, taking sick days or working from home that week. The strike was inconvenient for office workers, but potentially disastrous for many of New York’s most essential services, such as hospitals, schools and public agencies.

“Telling people to work from home is sound guidance for a large part of the workforce,” said Nicholas Cagliuso, PhD, adjunct professor of emergency management. “But it doesn’t help the nurse, the home health aide, the retail clerk or the shift worker whose job requires being on site. The LIRR strike is a good reminder that ‘all-hazards’ really means ‘all-consequences.’”

Emergency Management Training Transcends Disciplines

Students studying emergency management at Adelphi are trained to follow an all-hazards approach, which translates, in the simplest terms, to “be ready for anything.” The program’s curriculum brings together the strengths of several schools at the University—including the College of Nursing and Public Health, College of Arts and Sciences and Robert B. Willumstad School of Business—to provide students with an interdisciplinary framework that can be applied to any emergency in any industry.

Terry Cooper, DHSc, clinical assistant professor and director of emergency management, calls emergency management “an art and a science.” “To be able to serve people to the best of our ability, we need to wear so many hats,” he said. “Our students are developing skills in everything from project management to human resources, communications, technical writing and science.”

Dr. Cagliuso echoes the sentiment. The backgrounds that serve students well in this profession, he says, are legion: public health, transportation, urban planning, public administration, business, labor relations and more. “Whatever your co-discipline or your interest is, wherever you’re coming from, there’s a space for you in this program,” Dr. Cooper added.

Preparing for the Big Picture Makes the Biggest Impact

No matter their background, emergency managers must be able to see the big picture. Professionals working on the LIRR strike would have been able to envision, for example, how displaced rail commuters would crowd roads and subway stations. And, most importantly, they’d have seen the strike coming. “This strike had a visible runway: years of negotiations, federal emergency boards, a near-miss in 2025 and a concrete timeline for mediation under federal labor law,” Dr. Cagliuso said. “A good emergency manager tracks a deadline the way they’d track a hurricane’s path.”

Unlike a hurricane, however, the LIRR strike left behind minimal damage in the end. All things considered, Dr. Cooper believes, this was “a plan that went right.” Commuters were notified in advance, the incident was resolved within three days and, in the meantime, nothing fell apart.

Teaching Students to Think on Their Feet

Though a deal was reached late on Monday night, full service was not restored for nearly 24 hours. Dr. Cagliuso sees a critical lesson there: “Live by the rule of no surprises.” As he notes, the LIRR couldn’t just “flip a switch” to get trains running in time for Tuesday morning’s commute. “My advice to newer professionals is to challenge your assumptions, not just your procedures. Exercise the oddball but plausible scenarios.”

Dr. Cooper plans his own curriculum around the inevitable oddball scenario, too. Though his classes are held online and asynchronously, he makes room for real-time discussions with students, often centering around current events—like a recent cyberattack targeting supermarket refrigerators in France—that are continuously evolving.

“These future professionals are going to have to make decisions on the fly that require critical thinking. Sometimes there isn’t a right answer, there’s just a best option,” he said. “Learning this early will make students much more competitive in their fields.”

The post What the 2026 LIRR Strike Taught Us șŁœÇֱȄ Disaster Preparedness—And How Adelphi’s Emergency Management Faculty Are Preparing Future Professionals to Respond appeared first on Adelphi University.

It begins with Kyungmin Lee, PhD, the inaugural director of sustainability in the Office of Sustainability and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences. “My role is to bring students, faculty and staff together to advance sustainability initiatives across the campus at Adelphi University,” Dr. Lee said.

At the heart of Adelphi’s push for sustainability is (STARS). Managed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), STARS is a framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance.

“Participating in STARS is an opportunity to bring our existing efforts together and establish a sustainability direction for future work,” Dr. Lee said. “We want to recognize what our campus community has already accomplished and make it more visible.”

Measuring What Matters: The STARS Initiative

As a STARS participant, Adelphi will gather data on various aspects of campus life, including academics, food and dining, buildings and grounds, and more, and earn points toward a Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum rating.

The STARS initiative will involve the entire campus. “Students can help collect and analyze the data, and brainstorm and propose possible sustainability projects,” Dr. Lee said. “Faculty can support these projects with students so they can be implemented on campus, and staff can bring knowledge about how the University operates and what is feasible to implement on campus.”

STARS data collection and sustainability projects will be coordinated and reported by the Sustainability Task Force, while Sustainability Fellows will brainstorm and carry out the actual projects.

Adelphi junior Laurel Owen and first-year student Mahan Nanandhan have already signed on to assist with data collection.

“For now, we’re learning how to collect data for the STARS reporting system,” said Nanandhan, an environmental studies major. “They updated it recently from version 2.0 to 3.0, so it’s a whole process, but we’re getting there.”

For Owen, also an environmental studies major, the work is personal. “I’m a huge nature lover,” she said. “I was raised to respect the natural world, and I wanted to channel that into action.”

Beyond the rating itself, Dr. Lee sees STARS as a way to connect to efforts already happening across campus. “People may already be doing sustainability work in different departments, but without knowing who is doing what,” Dr. Lee said. “This process will give us a reason to connect with each other across departments, share information and identify opportunities to work on sustainability initiatives together.”

New Ways to Live and Learn Green

To integrate sustainability into campus life and the academic curriculum, Adelphi is developing a new Living and Learning Community and a first-year seminar focused on sustainability.

The Living and Learning Community will bring together a group of students to live on campus in the same dorm hallway. “The idea is to have a group of students with shared interests and cohort them so they feel a sense of community,” said Aaren Freeman, PhD, professor of biology and chair of environmental studies and sciences.

Students will decide what sustainability practices and activities they want to undertake, and Adelphi will provide support. “If they want to compost, we’ll provide the materials,” Dr. Freeman said. Students can also participate in cleanups, invasive species removal and other projects that interest them.

Meanwhile, the first-year seminar, themed Into the Wild and taught by two environmental studies faculty members, will emphasize campus sustainability through field trips and classroom learning. Students have the opportunity to shape the course. “The professors have academic freedom to teach the class how they want, but we’re all working together on this,” Dr. Freeman said. “There’s a lot of room for modification and feedback along the way.”

Both initiatives are set to begin in Fall 2027.

Students Leading the Charge

In addition to assisting with STARS data collection, Adelphi students are shaping the campus sustainability efforts.

Owen, president of the , a student club that coordinates volunteer sustainability opportunities in the community, attended the first STARS workshop with other members of the EAC. There, they presented their list of demands to improve sustainability on campus. Many of those demands will form the foundation of future STARS projects.

Nanandhan, who also attended the workshop, plans to go to law school so he can help draft and implement environmental policy. “I want to make an impact,” he said. “I don’t want to just sit by and watch people run things and leave some of us out. I want everyone to feel heard.”

For Owen, the stakes reach well beyond Adelphi’s campus. “It’s about thinking about the future of the planet and of humanity, and doing our part so generations after us will have an earth to live on that’s sustainable,” she said.

Interested in becoming involved with STARS? Contact us at sustainability@adelphi.edu.

Learn more about sustainability at Adelphi University.

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We’ve all heard of the Bermuda Triangle—that part of the Atlantic best known for sensationalized myths about aliens, wormholes and the lost city of Atlantis. But zoom out a little, and you’ll learn that this patch of ocean is just one part of the Sargasso Sea, which holds mysteries of its own.

The Sargasso Sea is a 2-million-square-mile region of the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by four circulating ocean currents, creating calm, warm and highly saline waters covered by dense mats of free-floating brown macroalgae known as Sargassum, which lend this patch of sea its name. This microalgae forms a floating tropical rainforest that provides food and refuge for ocean life from fish to sea turtles—and serves as the exclusive breeding ground for the enigma that is the American eel.

“American eels have a cool life history,” said Andrea Ward, PhD, vice provost for research and libraries. “They reproduce in the Sargasso Sea and then migrate thousands of miles into rivers all along the east coast of the U.S. and Canada, where they can stay in fresh water for many years until they return to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce and die.” Because it takes place in this deep sea location, no one has ever directly witnessed the eel mating process, and as yet, eels have not been bred in captivity.

Young eels drift thousands of miles on ocean currents as transparent, leaf-shaped larvae before transforming into tiny “glass eels” and making their way to the freshwater rivers, streams and estuaries of eastern North America, where they spend the majority of their lives—sometimes decades—growing slowly into yellow eels and eventually the darker adult “silver eels.” Capable of breathing through their skin and even wriggling overland through wet grass to reach new waterways, American eels are remarkably adaptable, yet their populations have declined sharply in recent decades.

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For the past two years, Dr. Whitley and her research partner, William Massey, PhD, of Oregon State University, have been developing the United States’ first-ever comprehensive youth sports mental health guidelines. In the absence of federal regulations or a dedicated government ministry, these guidelines close a problematic policy gap. They’re the product of input from more than 100 athletes, families, coaches and experts, translating both scholarly research and lived experience into actionable, evidence-based guidance for youth sport leaders.

Rethinking the Youth Sports Ecosystem

In many youth sport settings in the United States, any adult can show up and volunteer to become a coach, no prior experience or training required. Dr. Whitley wants to change that. “We need to make sure volunteers are coaching in ways that are physically safe,” she said. That means, at the very minimum, conducting background checks and sport safety training.

But training coaches to support mental health is trickier. “How do we help coaches understand how to build psychologically safe, developmentally appropriate environments where kids can flourish? How do we help coaches cultivate a sense of inclusion and belonging?”

Dr. Whitley’s guidelines lay out a clear path forward—not only for coaches, but for parents, too. As her research revealed, parents’ behavior can make or break their child’s experience. “Time and again, we heard from young athletes that the worst part is the car ride home after the game.”

“” (Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, May 2026), a related article Dr. Whitley co-authored with Dr. Massey, recounts young athletes’ frustration with their parents’ postgame critiques. Parents becoming critics rather than caregivers, even when their feedback is well-meaning, only adds fuel to the fire. Much like coaches, Dr. Whitley believes, parents have to be trained how to “show up.”

A Landmark National Initiative, Supported by $450,000 in Grant Funding

Dr. Whitley’s research has been supported by high-profile organizations across the country. A $100,000 grant from the powered phase one, with another $100,000 from Movember powering phase two—along with a $250,000 grant from the . For this most recent grant, Adelphi was selected as just one of 10 inaugural partners in its Empower Every Coach (EEC) program, enabling Dr. Whitley’s work to be connected with a national portfolio of other systems-level youth sport projects.

“Mental Health Guidelines for Youth Sport Across the United States” kicked off in early 2025 with an intensive literature review, encompassing 20,000 research papers and programming from 80-plus programs and organizations, as well as a series of national focus groups and an Adelphi study, which allowed her team to get feedback from 22 experts in the intersection of youth sport and mental health. Later in 2025, Dr. Whitley and her team held a two-day expert advisory panel at Nike’s headquarters in New York City to finalize the guidelines and develop a plan for dissemination.

In July 2026, the project entered a new, much-anticipated phase: implementation and testing. Dr. Whitley and her team began working with a cohort of “anchor partners,” spanning grassroots, school-based and performance sport settings from coast to coast.

The Seven Guidelines Making Real-World Impact

For the next 18 months, these anchor partners will serve as an important proving ground. As they put the mental health guidelines into practice, they’ll be reshaping their sport programs from the ground up, turning potential pressure cookers into the safe havens they were always meant to be.

The first three guidelines set a developmental baseline: prioritizing young athletes’ physical, psychological and social growth over performance. The rest address mental health directly, covering subjects like crisis response training, clear access to mental health resources and emergency preparedness plans.

“Lots of programs have emergency plans for physical injuries, but what about mental health?” Dr. Whitley said. “If there’s a collective trauma in the community, or something really hard has happened for one athlete on the team, we don’t want program leaders to be figuring out what to do on the fly.” She’s also determined to enhance mental health literacy. Coaches should be able to recognize early signs of distress and, critically, gauge if their athletes are just having a bad day, “or if it’s something more serious that needs to be escalated.”

A Healthier Future for Youth Sports

During the testing phase, Dr. Whitley’s team will be collecting data from their anchor partners, working in real time to refine the “Mental Health Guidelines for Youth Sport Across the United States.” “We’ll be learning as we go,” she said. “Where are the friction points? What is and isn’t feasible? How can we make sure the guidelines are ready for a broader rollout?” At the end of 2027, they’ll synthesize their findings into an open-access tool kit that can be accessed by any sport program leader, anywhere.

Though the guidelines will remain a work in progress for some time, Dr. Whitley is excited about the possibility of real, systems-level change—especially as some states are finally beginning to legislate mental health training and coach requirements. “I hope our guidelines will help shape those policies,” she said. “And eventually we’ll have a clear foundation for rebuilding youth sport as a healthier, more inclusive ecosystem.”

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Social workers play a key role in helping people understand these changes to eligibility—and supporting them from a whole-person approach. “Social workers are trained to help people navigate systems and to deal with mental health crises,” says Elizabeth Palley, JD, PhD, professor of social work and director of the PhD in Social Work program.

Here’s a closer look at what’s changing, who will feel it most and how Adelphi prepares students to help.

What’s Changing With SNAP

There are a few key SNAP changes taking effect on October 1, 2026, the start of the federal fiscal year 2027. These include:

• States and counties absorb more administrative cost burden. The federal share of SNAP administrative costs drops from 50 percent to 25 percent, increasing the local share to 75 percent. For New York, this equals an increase in state costs by roughly $36 million per year, and county costs by $168 million a year.
• Benefits increase slightly. Given the higher costs of living, the are rising. For example, a family of four will go from a maximum monthly benefit of $994 to $1,023.
• The new three-year work-requirement window starts. People who are subject to SNAP work requirements must work for at least 80 hours a month. If they don’t, they can receive SNAP for only three months in a three-year window. The three-year window resets on October 1, 2026.

Some changes went into effect earlier in 2026. In particular, work requirements now apply to adults ages 55 to 64 (previously adults ages 18 to 54 without dependents) and to parents whose youngest child is 14 years or older.

Who Will Feel the Impact Most

The expanded work requirements have made it more difficult for people to qualify for SNAP. The New York governor’s office estimates that 300,000 households will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits, with an average loss of $220 a month.

Meeting the updated work requirements can be especially challenging for older adults and parents with teenagers. “We don’t want teens to be without parents around,” Dr. Palley says. “Often, the kinds of jobs you can get have night and early morning hours when your kid is around, so that can have impacts on parenting.”

Dr. Palley also notes that many adults in their 50s and 60s who have recently been pushed out of the workforce already struggle to find new jobs, and the jobs they can find are often physically demanding, minimum-wage work.

Losing SNAP benefits will be especially hard on children. “Certainly for children, hunger affects your physical and mental health, as well as your ability to concentrate, so school performance will likely suffer,” Dr. Palley says.

And shifting more of the administrative cost burden on states and counties will put the most strain on poorer counties that can’t absorb the cost shift. So, even if people qualify for SNAP, they may not be able to access benefits if funding runs short, Dr. Palley notes.

With more people losing SNAP benefits, the demand for food banks, private charities, and other community services will rise. Families may also need to divert money from rent to food, leading to housing instability, Dr. Palley says.

How Adelphi Prepares Students

Adelphi University’s social work programs teach students how to help clients access resources and, more importantly, how to engage in policy advocacy to support legislative changes that benefit their client population. “It’s important to have social workers who understand the experiences of clients, but also understand how to navigate and lead systems,” Dr. Palley says.

Students learn how to understand an issue, conduct research and interpret data, and create a convincing argument. “Those are the skills you would take into advocacy,” Dr. Palley says.

In addition to classroom learning, all students must participate in the School of Social Work’s annual social action initiative. Students can choose from various projects, including social media campaigns, expert interviews, website creation and legislative advocacy. Interested students can even travel to Albany and nearby counties to meet with legislators or testify on issues they care about at the county level.

“As a social worker, you’re closely tied to the populations you’re working with, so you can make a really good case and present people’s stories, because sometimes it’s too hard for people who are currently struggling to be able to testify and meet with legislators,” Dr. Palley says.

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Anna Akerman Berman, PhD, associate professor of communications and a social psychologist who specializes in child development, is taking a stand against a global media machine that’s designed to keep us hooked on content. Once a media consultant for the likes of Nickelodeon, MTV, Scholastic and Disney, Dr. Akerman Berman now uses her insider knowledge to help parents wean their children off of screens.

Peggy Cassidy, PhD, professor of communications and an expert in the history of children’s interactions with media, is looking to the past to understand our potential digital future. Dr. Cassidy has published at length on the evolution of American media environments. Her tips for a healthy media diet take their cues from 200 years of history: how generations of parents and children have adapted to the disruptive effects of new forms of media.

From attention-grabbing TV to attention-proofing phones

After earning her PhD, Dr. Akerman Berman applied the scientific theories she’d studied in school as an audience researcher for Sesame Workshop and Noggin. She analyzed children’s “eyes on screen”—when they were paying attention to the screen, when they were bored enough to look away—and worked with creative teams to modify programming accordingly. “Before I started working for these companies, I hadn’t realized the extent to which psychology was being used to create content,” she said.

Dr. Akerman Berman went on to provide consulting services to executives at some of the world’s top media and entertainment brands. “The question we always returned to was: How can we keep kids watching?”

Today, she’s determined to keep children’s eyes off of screens. Why? There’s nothing wrong with scrolling for 10 minutes to decompress, she says. The problem is, 10 minutes often turns into several hours. That’s by design. “These algorithms are using more data points than we could ever imagine. They’re catered specifically to individual interests, and they reward scrolling behaviors in a very precise, individualized way.”

The science behind our scrolling addiction

According to Dr. Akerman Berman, scrolling seems to satiate our most basic human needs: competence, connection and autonomy. In a world where it’s all too easy to feel disconnected and disempowered, scrolling can generate instant satisfaction. But, Dr. Akerman Berman says, the feeling is “brief and disingenuous,” nothing like the satisfaction that comes from real-life experiences.

People trying to meet their basic needs—particularly children and adolescents—are easy targets for big business. They always have been. The tactics that tech companies use to keep us scrolling, Dr. Akerman Berman argues, are not so different from the manipulative marketing campaigns run by tobacco companies throughout the 20th century. However, it’s been proven that young people are less likely to use tobacco once they’ve been exposed to the tobacco industry’s manipulations. Dr. Akerman Berman is confident we can apply the same logic to social media addiction.

Education is the best weapon against “brain rot”

“The first step,” Dr. Akerman Berman said, “is educating our kids and ourselves. The second is becoming aware of our behaviors.” People of all ages should start collecting data of their own: logging their screen time and noticing how they feel before and after scrolling. Armed with this “metacognitive awareness,” they might begin to turn to other activities instead of opening TikTok or Instagram.

But going from 100 to zero won’t happen overnight, Dr. Akerman Berman stresses. “Our nervous system has learned that discomfort equals phone. In moments of stress, we will fall back on this habit. Still, we absolutely can re-habituate ourselves to a new normal where we’re replacing scrolling with taking a walk or listening to music.”

The “grasshopper mind” of the endless scroller

Dr. Cassidy sees scrolling as a cultural practice—and a cultural problem. As a media ecologist, she’s more interested in media’s form rather than its content. While we should be thinking critically about the content we’re consuming online, we also need to consider the “ways of thinking, knowing and interacting” that are encouraged or discouraged by scrolling. She cites a concept coined by scholar Maryanne Wolf, EdD, called “grasshopper mind,” or “the impulse to just scroll away, to jump from one thing to another as soon as things get boring or hard or confusing.”

That impulse could very well erode the foundations of our society. If we disengage as soon as we’re faced with something we don’t understand, what will happen to our interpersonal relationships, our cultural norms, our politics? Dr. Cassidy believes the cracks are already visible. “We as citizens are not engaging deeply with ideas,” she said. “We tend to have superficial emotional responses to political messaging, which has contributed to this intense polarization we see today. We don’t stick around long enough to hear someone’s full perspective.”

New media fears have old precedents

For Dr. Cassidy, the fears around social media addiction and scroll culture are well founded. But they’re nothing new. In her book (Routledge, 2017), she charts 200 years of panicked reactions to emerging media environments, from 19th century dime novels and nickelodeons to rock ’n’ roll and TV.

“As a media historian, I resist the temptation to use the word unprecedented,” Dr. Cassidy said. In fact, she even takes a “certain comfort in knowing we’re not that unique. Our species has been here a long time, and other changes in media have disrupted us, upset us, required us to adapt.”

At the same time, historical precedent shouldn’t become its own deterministic force. “Just because adults were afraid of dime novels in the 1800s and it all worked out okay doesn’t mean we don’t need to worry about social media and smartphones. Throughout history, there have been missed opportunities for citizens to organize themselves around resisting the direction that certain technologies are taking us.” In other words, to create the future we want to see for ourselves and our children, we have to act now.

The secrets of a healthy media diet

Like Dr. Akerman Berman, Dr. Cassidy prescribes moderation—and an open mind—to adults and adolescents alike. “I would encourage people, especially parents, to take a breath and not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she said. “Yes, so much of what our children are consuming is not developmentally appropriate. But we should stay open to wondering about what’s captured their attention.”

In social media, young people are finding benefits that prior forms of media never enabled. Adolescents who feel alienated in their immediate communities, for instance, can reach out to allies halfway across the world with the press of a button. These connections may be mediated by technology, but they’re indisputably human.

Scrolling addicts may be able to rewire their psychic habits by leaning into that innate human-ness, too. “We have to learn to stay with hard things, to struggle, to make mistakes,” Dr. Cassidy said. “That’s the only way we’ll get better.”

The post Is Your Phone Actually Rotting Your Brain? Why Your Attention Span Feels Broken—And How the Algorithm Intended it That Way” appeared first on Adelphi University.

Ez-Zouhra Elmaaiden, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor of chemistry. A research and development scientist with multidisciplinary expertise in bioanalysis, preclinical research and formulation development, her work focuses on bioactive compound extraction, molecular biology workflows and cosmeceutical innovation. She holds multiple patents in extraction technologies and natural product development, bringing extensive experience in interdisciplinary project management, commercialization and graduate student mentorship.

Wan Ling Fahrer is a visiting assistant professor of , bringing more than two decades of experience across higher education, K–12 schools, museums and community-based arts learning. Her work centers on art education, museum and object-based learning, and inclusive approaches to contemporary art and pedagogy. She has held appointments at Hunter College, Queens College and the School of Visual Arts, plus museum education roles at institutions including MoMA, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, the Guggenheim and the New Museum. Fahrer has received the Keith Haring Scholarship Award and multiple outstanding art teacher awards from the NYC Department of Education, and previously served as president of the University Council for Art Education. She holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts.

Marissa Galler, PhD ’26, is a clinical assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health. With a clinical background spanning critical care, oncology and palliative care, her research focuses on nurse practitioner communication surrounding end-of-life conversations. An alumna of Adelphi University, where she earned her PhD, she also holds degrees and advanced certifications from Hofstra University, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), Thomas Jefferson University and St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing.

Charleen Jacobs-Mcfarlane ’06, PhD ’23, is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health. A nurse scientist, adult nurse practitioner and double alumna of Adelphi University, her clinical practice and research focus on health equity and rare disease care, particularly sickle cell disease. She previously served as a clinician-scientist and nurse practitioner at the Mount Sinai Center for Sickle Cell Disease, a postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a faculty member at Yale University and Columbia University. She earned both her BSN and PhD in nursing from Adelphi.

Susan Kang ’14, MS ’15, DPT, is a clinical assistant professor of health and sport sciences. An Adelphi alumna and former graduate assistant in the Human Performance Lab, Dr. Kang is excited to return to Adelphi and join her colleagues in the exercise science program. Her professional experience spans clinical testing and a variety of rehabilitation settings, including acute care, sports, neuromuscular and cardiac rehabilitation. Through her private practice, Blueprint Performance Physical Therapy, she helps active adults return to the activities and goals that matter most to them. Dr. Kang holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in exercise physiology and earned her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree.

Kyungmin Lee, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences and sustainability director. Her research spans energy policy, climate policy, urban sustainability and community development, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Her recent work focuses on applying AI techniques to analyze public responses to environmental issues through large-scale image analysis. Dr. Lee holds a doctoral degree in energy and environmental policy, a master’s degree in environmental studies, and a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Louise Lee, EdD, is associate professor and founding program director of Adelphi’s new Physician Assistant (PA) Program, to be housed within the College of Nursing and Public Health. Dr. Lee has worked as a PA educator for more than 26 years and as a clinically practicing PA in internal medicine and emergency medicine for nearly 40 years, holding leadership roles including department chair, program director, and director of didactic, clinical and research programs at universities across New England and New York. She has taught clinical medicine, patient assessment, and healthcare law and ethics, among other subjects. Dr. Lee holds a doctorate in education with a focus on higher education leadership, a master’s degree in healthcare administration and a bachelor’s degree in PA practice.

Yongjin Lee, PhD, is an assistant professor of health and sport sciences. Building on a decade as a K–12 physical education teacher and teacher community leader, Dr. Lee’s research examines how teacher and student reflection strengthens social and emotional development and informs curriculum design and instructional strategy. His recent work highlights physical education as a vehicle for building social awareness and responsible decision-making, and he is currently studying how artificial intelligence can support reflection among teachers and students to promote character and ethical growth.

Kathleen O’Connor is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health. She is a PhD candidate at Adelphi University and a nurse practitioner and clinical researcher whose background spans pulmonary medicine, post-operative surgical care and nursing education. She previously served as an adjunct instructor at Adelphi, a nurse practitioner and research coordinator at Northwell Health, and a clinical nurse at the Hospital for Special Surgery. O’Connor’s dissertation is focused on Rosemarie Rizzo Parse, PhD’s humanbecoming paradigm. She currently teaches pharmacology, fundamentals of nursing lab and health assessment lab at the undergraduate level, and her scholarly interests include nursing theory, competency-based nursing education and the human experience of isolation. She earned an MS from Pace University and bachelor’s degrees in nursing and kinesiology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Carlos Encina Oleart, PhD, is a visiting associate professor of sociology. A sociologist, journalist and organizational researcher, his work spans policy research, societal analytics, strategic communications and qualitative methodology. As a former investigative journalist and international correspondent for Chile’s La Tercera, he covered major national and global events, including human rights abuses during the Pinochet regime, the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis and international politics. He has advised multinational technology companies on strategic content and taught courses in criminology, gender studies, Latin American politics, the sociology of race and qualitative research methods.

Esi Quaidoo, PhD, is an assistant professor of nutrition and dietetics. A registered dietitian nutritionist and public health researcher, her work spans clinical nutrition consulting, community health and dietetic practice. She previously served as a nutrition consultant at Mission Clinic Accra and worked as a researcher and educator at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a PhD in Public Health from UMass Amherst, an MPhil in Human Nutrition from the University of Ghana and a BSc in Biochemistry from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology.

K. Lynn Robinson, PhD, is assistant professor of . She holds a PhD in Arts Administration, Education and Policy (concentration in art education) from The Ohio State University, began her studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned a Master of Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University. She brings extensive experience in exhibit design and activation for arts institutions as a curatorial and archival assistant, and as a facilitator of community-based art and teacher development in arts integration. Her research expands the definition of educators to include caregivers exploring the arts and community-based interventions to support a “village” model for young Black learners and their caregivers, within and beyond formal schooling. She serves on the editorial review boards of Art Education, Visual Arts Research and the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, and as an editorial assistant for the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education.

Jason Spencer, PhD, is assistant professor of communications, teaching and researching AI, emerging media, podcasting, virtual production and immersive storytelling, with a focus on how AI, XR and adaptive learning can support creative practice, personalized education and public communication. He earned his PhD from Texas A&M University, where his work in virtual production and AI-assisted education produced six intellectual property disclosures. His 20-plus years in film, TV and emerging tech include work with PBS, MTV Networks, Bravo, and documentaries by Blackside and Florentine Films, as well as teaching 1,800-plus students at Texas A&M, Prairie View A&M University, The Art Institutes and CUNY. Dr. Spencer’s current work explores how emerging tech can expand human creativity and learning while preserving human judgment, authorship and agency.

Sloan Vahldieck is an assistant teaching professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health. She is a nurse educator and adult nurse practitioner whose career reflects a deep commitment to clinical excellence, student development and community service. She has taught at Adelphi University since 2018; after discovering how much she loved teaching, Vahldieck returned to graduate school to pursue her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree at Adelphi. As an adult nurse practitioner at St. Francis Hospital, she provides comprehensive occupational health services, diagnostic interpretation and employee wellness support. Her earlier roles in the emergency department shaped her expertise in triage, quality assurance, interdisciplinary teamwork and high‑acuity patient care and developed her focus on initiatives that improve safety, strengthen clinical practice and enhance patient outcomes.

Eric Dean Wilson, PhD, is an assistant professor of English and faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. He is the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort (Simon & Schuster, 2021), a work of literary nonfiction weaving the science and history of Freon with reflections on living meaningfully in a warming world. His essays have appeared in The Baffler, Orion, Esquire, Time, and Evergreen Review, among other publications. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from The New School and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and previously taught at Wagner College. He is currently writing a book-length work of literary nonfiction for Timber Press.

James Zahardis, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor of chemistry. He earned his doctorate at the University of Vermont and completed postdoctoral fellowships at both The University of Iowa and the University of Vermont. His research expertise centers on physical chemistry, with specializations in aerosols, mass spectrometry and Raman spectroscopy.

To learn more about the members of Adelphi’s faculty, visit our Faculty Profiles.

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If you’ve answered yes to any, you might be in a parasocial relationship, according to Julianna Nails, a PhD student in clinical psychology at the Adelphi University Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology.

For the past several years, Nails has been studying the rise of parasocial relationships—or one-sided emotional connections between fans and public figures—in the age of social media. She wants to know what kinds of people are seeking out parasocial relationships with social media influencers, and what effects, if any, these relationships are having on their mental health.

At first glance, a parasocial relationship with an influencer might seem like a silver bullet for isolated young adults—a population wracked by a so-called global “loneliness epidemic.” Attachments to influencers allow feelings of intimacy to be accessed anytime, anywhere, with no risk of rejection. Nails was curious to learn more about the psychological consequences of these relationships. Can they really relieve loneliness? Or do they ultimately replace in-person connections and push people to isolate?

A Student-Faculty Collaboration That’s Breaking New Ground

As an undergraduate, Nails researched the decline of college students’ mental health since the 1980s. “Today, college students are significantly more anxious and depressed than they were a generation ago,” she said, “and I suspected social media had something to do with that.” That hunch became a full-fledged research project once she entered Adelphi’s PhD program and found a faculty mentor in Katherine L. Fiori, PhD, professor and associate dean at the Derner School.

For Dr. Fiori, a developmental psychologist who studies interpersonal relationships and attachments, parasocial relationships were a promising line of scholarly inquiry. When she was introduced to Nails through Derner’s research mentor matching process, she had already been thinking about today’s “phone-based childhoods,” which have supplanted the “play-based childhoods” of yesteryear. If children now grow up with ubiquitous access to social media platforms, she wondered, are they more likely to form unhealthy attachments with the people on platforms? Parasociality offered a compelling entry into further exploration.

While looking into the literature, Nails and Dr. Fiori discovered a gap: parasocial relationships specifically with social media influencers. “It’s such a big part of young people’s online experience today,” Nails said, “but it’s something that hadn’t been studied in depth before.”

Their work has been more collaborative than the student-faculty dynamic might connote. “I’ve really enjoyed working together,” Nails said. “This is a newer interest for Dr. Fiori, so while she’s able to give me a lot of guidance, we’re still brainstorming together. I’m not necessarily being directed by an authority.” Dr. Fiori agrees, saying she often feels like she’s “speaking with a colleague.”

Surveying Where, Why and How Parasocial Relationships Are Formed

Since beginning her doctoral training in 2024, Nails has developed several different research projects to answer her research questions. Most recently, she presented her findings at Adelphi’s Scholarship and Creative Works Conference and the International Association for Relationship Research’s annual conference in Scotland.

For her master’s thesis, Nails created a research survey for people between the ages of 18 and 29 who follow influencers on any platform. Survey participants were asked about their connection with their favorite influencer—in particular, whether their opinions and values align with the influencer’s—as well as their other social relationships, social media usage and emotional well-being.

Nails and Dr. Fiori are still sifting through data from the survey, but they’ve already identified several trends. “There are a lot of ways in which people are ‘using’ influencers,” Dr. Fiori noted. For some, “fun” or “entertainment” was the draw. Others admitted they were finding real social support from their favorite influencer.

Though influencers create content about everything from politics to tech gadgets, travel and fitness, the most popular content niche among survey respondents was “day in my life.” In these videos, an influencer takes the audience through a regular day, often beginning with a morning routine and their OOTD (outfit of the day), then interpolating clips of meals, exercise, work, errands and socializing over a voiceover narration. The content is frothy, but the audience appeal is, inexplicably, enormous. “We’re working on figuring that one out,” Nails said. “Are ‘day in my life’ videos providing pure entertainment value? Are they aspirational? Or are people feeling an emotional connection there?”

The Parasocial Paradox

At first, Nails hypothesized that parasocial relationships would reduce feelings of loneliness. As more survey data came in, however, she saw evidence of the opposite: Young people who form parasocial relationships are actually lonelier than those who don’t. Still, like many hypotheses in psychology research, this one is still correlational, not causal. In other words, Nails and Dr. Fiori don’t yet know if parasociality is making people lonely, or if lonely people are simply more likely to pursue parasocial relationships.

“We know what the intention is,” Dr. Fiori said. “People seek out relationships because they want to feel less lonely. But the brain isn’t equipped to think about parasocial relationships as different from in-person relationships, even though they are.” She’s hesitant to believe that parasocial relationships can have the same benefits, although the reality is, she says, a little more complicated. “Some young people with supportive friends and family will use influencers for extra support. Some don’t, and these relationships are all they have. That drives very different outcomes.”

Only further research will tell if parasocial relationships really do cause loneliness. As Nails embarks on work for her doctoral dissertation, she’s hoping to discover evidence of causality between parasociality and negative mental health outcomes, such as anxiety and depression, among young people.

“Everything in Moderation”

For now, Nails doesn’t necessarily recommend doing a digital detox if you think you’ve formed a parasocial relationship with an influencer. Instead, she says, focus on the reciprocal relationships in your life—your networks through work, school or hobbies, the friends and family you talk to every day—and you might see that obsessive, one-directional attachment fade to casual interest. “So far, our greatest takeaway has been ‘everything in moderation.’”

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