The shared research interest in creative arts therapies between Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions and the International Arts + Mind Lab of the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University has led to the decision to collaborate on new creative arts therapies utilizing virtual reality.

Representatives from each university will examine the use of virtual reality in established art therapy sessions. Girija Kaimal is an assistant professor in CNHP’s Department of Creative Arts Therapies. Her research focuses on understanding the way that self-expression affects human emotion and other brain processes.

Susan Magsamen is the executive director at the IAM Lab. Magsamen pioneered the Impact Thinking model. At the lab, she combines interdisciplinary, evidence-based research with practical, applicable ideas and programs.

There has been no research previously done on how art therapy can be successfully integrated into a virtual reality-based experience to enhance patient care. Traditional art therapy has to do with using physical materials and art-making processes to help patients manage challenges like trauma or everyday stress. It is all about delivering successful mental health interventions using art and creative expression.

Findings from Kaimal and Magsamen’s research could help expand arts therapy opportunities into clinical places like physical rehabilitation and to clinical populations like those who are facing physical challenges and stressors.

“We are very excited to explore innovative art therapies and its impact in our lives,” Kaimal said. “This promising partnership brings together two institutions invested in creative approaches to promoting health and enhancing well-being across the lifespan.”

This project will bring together IAM Lab’s Impact Thinking model and CNHP’s expertise on creative arts therapies in clinical practice and research.

“Drexel is at the forefront of rigorous research in the arts as solutions for health and well-being,” Magsamen said. “Using the IAM Lab’s Impact Thinking model — a consensus framework for problem identification, research, translation, dissemination and outcome evaluation using the arts — we hope to add knowledge for our growing field and enhance practice.”  

Kaimal and Magsamen will also collaborate on seminars planned by IAM Lab for this year and 2020. They will focus on collaborative discovery, dissemination and applied research methods in neuroaesthetics. This marks the second project between Johns Hopkins and Drexel University’s CNHP.  

The Tailored Activity Program, developed by CNHP dean, Laura H. Gitlin while she attended the JHU School of Nursing, was involved in the first collaborative project between JHU and Drexel. This is a program that assesses the abilities and interests of a person living with dementia and then acts as an aid to caregivers by developing activities for the patient and teaching them to the caregivers. These activities may include crafting, listening to music and cooking.

Research and examination of the program is ongoing. While Drexel University Online is still working on research, the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center outpatient day program are examining the possible physiological mechanisms of TAP. Collected salivary specimens are used to determine if TAP participation is able to reduce physiological stress in patients.

“Results from previous clinical trials suggest TAP mitigates unwanted behavioral and psychological symptoms, helps to maintain daily function and improves caregiver well being,” Gitlin said. “This project will extend our understanding of TAP by examining its effects on physiological distress.”

TAP is going overseas and being used as part of Scotland’s national dementia care plan,  as well as other countries. Drexel’s CNHP also wants to eventually implement the program.

The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University opened a new exhibit Feb. 16 that is all about the link between real-life and mythic creatures.

The exhibit — Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids — was organized for the Academy by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“This specific version of it, [the AMNH] custom built for us here at the Academy because they actually have a much larger version of it,” Mary Bailey, the interim head of public experience at the Academy, said.

Through this role, she oversees all of the public spaces especially from an education standpoint.

“And the reason why this exhibit exists is because people are so fascinated by the topic. We really love it because we also love imagination and flights of fancy. It’s really cool to be able to take the things that human beings talk about and put some science behind them in a really fun, imaginative way,” she explained.

This exhibit, which runs until June 9, is arranged into themes that include sea monsters, mermaids, giants, griffins, unicorns and dragons. It features colorful, life-sized models of mythic creatures like a European unicorn and a sea monster called the kraken. There is also a sculpture of the African water spirit called Mami Wata.

Visitors are encouraged to explore how the creatures depicted could have inspired the stories by people across cultures.

“This exhibit in particular is really interesting because it is a natural inroad for what they already like and they already know. They know what a dragon is. They know what a unicorn is. They know what a mermaid is,” Bailey said. “We’re able to make the connections between that and the real science that is behind those things — the mythology, the folklore. How all of those things work together with things that we also study.”

The topics explored in Mythic Creatures also ties into topics featured in other exhibits at the Academy.

“We also study reptiles and dinosaurs, which is where the mythology of dragons came from,” Bailey said. “We have a really large axiology collection where we’re studying animals of the ocean that are related to the mermaid stories. This is a really easy exhibit for us to be able to interpret and talk about because we have so much good content.”

According to Bailey, the Academy of Natural Sciences has not had an exhibit like this in the past that marries mythology and science together.

“When people walk away from this exhibit, they are going to be able to understand and experience that people make sense of their world in a lot of different ways,” Bailey said. “Some of it is mythological and some of it is scientific. It’s okay to have a little bit of fun with the things that you’re doing and base them in science. I think that’s going to be a great way for kids to get excited about the world that they live in.”  

Drexel Writers Room and Drexel Smart House hosted their second event Jan. 26 in the series of public talks and guided writing workshops at the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships.

The event, which was part of the Healthy Living Forum, was called “HOME: Affordable Housing + Cooperative Living Symposium.” It explored the home and how the spaces within our homes affect us.

The forum began with a short lecture by D.S. Nicholas, the director of the M.S. in Design Research program at Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design and an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture Design and Urbanism.

Nicholas, who is also the leader of the Ingregal Living Group, spoke of the group’s efforts.

“We accomplish what we do through collaboration and study in the areas of health, science and design,” she explained. “We see a true need for advocacy just like the writer’s room and human-centered approach to the housing and living situation in the urban environment. I’m a design leader of this group, so what I do is I try to bring that design process into the problems that we’re solving and thinking about.”

After the introduction, Nicholas talked about how we all may have some preconceived notions that creativity can be messy and take up a lot of space.

“I think that one of the goals today is to kind of uncouple your creative activity from what you see as the physical barriers and allow you to find a place where you can do that within your environment,” Nicholas stated.

Guests were invited to work on a storyboard of their creative activity at home. Nicholas shared a list of activities. Some of the creative activities listed surprised guests, such as organizing and parenting.

The symposium included flash talks by Rachel Schade, Yvonne Michael, Gina Lovasi and Uk Jung.

Schade is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Architecture Design and Urbanism at Westphal. She is also the author of Philadelphia Rowhouse Manual.

“Philadelphia is often called the city of rowhouses,” Schade said during her talk. “We have more rowhouses in our city than any other American city and potentially other cities around the world.”

Schade gave a brief history of the rowhouse structure in Philadelphia and even included a picture of her own creative space.

After Schade,  Michael, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Dornsife School of Public Health, spoke.

Michael discussed research that she had been doing for ten years on trees and health. She spoke on the history of thinking about trees and how they can improve our health. She also mentioned the emerald ash borer and its impact on ash trees in the U.S.

“This bug was transported here from Asia and it has decimated our ash trees slowly in the U.S. over a period of more than a decade,” Michael said. “In the process, it’s estimated that over 100 million ash trees have died.”

Lovasi was the third flash talk in the forum. She is the co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative. She is an associate professor of Urban Health in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in Dornsife.  

Lovasi talked about what is in the air we breathe and the alternatives for improving urban air quality.

“There’s a couple of paths that cities might consider,” Lovasi stated. “One of which is to focus on green spaces as a way to limit the effects of urban pollution on humans. The other is to go after those pollution sources like traffic emissions.”

The final speaker was Jung, an adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture Design and Urbanism at Westphal.

Jung is an alumni of the architecture program at Drexel. One thing he spoke about in his talk was his interactive projected map of Mantua. He played a short video for the audience, which illustrated his discussion about the projected map.

“I had a model of Mantua and I actually projected visual information. I hope to have a complete model of Mantua and have it project information and stories on top of that,” Jung explained.

The last part of the event involved thinking about how creative spaces might change in the future. Guests were given a blank postcard and were asked to write a letter to their future selves. It was suggested that the postcard should represent their hopes for how creativity might be used in the future.

The third HOME symposium will take place in April.

The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University opened a new exhibit centered around the subject of Academy curator Robert Peck’s new book “Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne” Nov. 14.

For this exhibit, which will be opened until Feb. 18, the Academy will display naturalist Peter A. Browne’s five 19th century albums containing samples of human and animal hair, including 13 samples of U.S. presidents’ hair.

With the collection on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University for a few months, visitors have a chance to view a collection built around the study of something we all have. In regards to the presidents’ hair, it will be probably the closest that most of us will get to them in real life.

“The importance of saving such a collection and caring for it is that it tells us a lot about the world. Also, it tells us different things over time,” Robert Peck, curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow explained.

This will be the third time that the museum has put the locks of the presidents on display. The first time was over a weekend in 2008, during the presidential year. The second time was for the month of July 2016, when Philadelphia hosted the Democratic National Convention.

“In 2016 when the Democratic National Convention was held here in Philadelphia, nominating Hillary Clinton, I was asked by the Academy to do an exhibition in the front hall of collections from the museum that had to do with presidents,” Peck explained. “We have Thomas Jefferson’s fossil collection here, and we have letters from everyone from Ulysses S. Grant to Teddy Roosevelt all in the archives. There was plenty to show, but at the very end, I thought about how we had this collection of hair that isn’t exhibited. Maybe I should get out some of the presidential hair, and we’ll put it on display.”

The presidential hair collection was covered in papers all across the country and the process of writing “Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne” began there. Peck was approached by a publisher in New York named Laura Lindgren from Blast Books. She has done work with places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Natural Academy of Sciences. A photographer named Rosamond Purcell, who Peck had worked with previously, was brought on to do all of the photography for the book.

There were several different people featured in the hair collection like academy naturalist Joseph Leidy and the Smithsonian Institution’s first secretary Joseph Henry. Henry offered to help Browne with this project by writing to museums and everyone he knew around the world asking if they would contribute. He is also responsible for Browne making the decision to give the collection to the Academy of Natural Sciences.

“When Browne wrote him a letter at the end after he had thousands of hair samples, he wrote to Mr. Henry and said, ‘what do you think I should do with this collection? Should it come to The Smithsonian?,’” Peck explained.

However, they decided to keep the collection at the academy due to the robust scientific activity within the museum and since they expected a greater number of people could see it from this location. As such, it’s been at the academy since 1860.

The amount of hair that Browne received from a person varied. It somewhat depended on whether they were alive or dead at the time, Peck explained. If they were alive when he wrote them, they gave him a large amount. If they were dead, like George Washington, the hair was in short supply and desired by many people.

There are only 13 out of 14 U.S. president’s hair featured in the collection, the one who is missing is Millard Fillmore. The reasoning is down to an instance of miscommunication.

“What happen was Peter Browne wrote President Fillmore a letter, as he had done all the others and their families. He wrote him a letter, said that I would like to collect your hair and here’s why,” Peck said. “President Fillmore wrote back a very nice letter, which we have, saying ‘Thank you very much, very interesting project, and I’m happy to give you my hair sincerely Millard Fillmore.’ He forgot to put the hair in the envelope, and so Mr. Browne got very upset. He took it as a personal insult; he wrote him a nasty letter. Needlessly to say, Millard Fillmore did not send his hair the second time. I think that if Browne had just written him a letter and said ‘Thanks for your letter, but you forgot to put in the hair,’ he would have sent it. He interpreted it as an intentional slight and so the two had a falling out.”

Peck explained how staff will lift the glass from the two cases and turn the pages of the album every three weeks so that none of the samples are exposed to the light for too long.

Overall, he said this preserves an important time in history.

“Had we not saved it all this time, all that would have been lost,” he said.

Ultimately, according to Peck, this collection will continue to have an impact on the science community for years to come.

“It’s the responsibility of museums like The Academy of Natural Sciences to preserve and document collections of the natural world, including humans, so that we can have that as a record going forward for generations to come,” he said.

This, he said, is important in an ever-changing world.

“Science is always a changing process, and there are always new things to discover,” he said.

The University City Science Center celebrated their grand opening Nov. 9 with music, food and people from all walks of life in their brand new building located on 3675 Market Street.

The space, which will now house Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics by the spring quarter, will become a center hub for the sciences, and academic and medical campuses of University of Pennsylvania and Drexel.

It is the tallest commercial life science, biotech and research building in Philadelphia and will also include labs, offices and convening spaces. Attendees were given a wristband and were free to explore this new space, which encompasses 345,000 square feet across 14 floors.

The Quorum drop-in lounge was on the first floor. It was there that you could hear a couple of the community partners like the West Philadelphia Orchestra and DJ Osagie. Federal Donuts was located on floors 1, 2 and 3. Drexel University’s Excite Center was located on floors 2 and 3.

These are just a few of the many community partners that were there to celebrate the grand opening. Guests also got to interact with representatives of some of the programs located in the new Science Center building.

One of these programs was Venture Cafe, represented by Kerwei Lo.

“Venture Cafe is a global organization that brings together innovators and entrepreneurs to really make things happen,” Lo explained. “We bring people together to connect, to learn from each other, have panel discussions, 101 mentoring and pitch sessions. That sort of thing.”

This is a brand new program at the Science Center — one that fits right in with the organization’s identity as a center for innovation, entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.

Cambridge Innovation Center Philadelphia was also represented at the opening. CIC is a shared office space solution, similar to WeWork, which offers a variety of different office spaces and services to companies. They welcome any company, no matter what stage or industry, although they have a reputation for attracting entrepreneurs and startups.

“Philly in particular, is focusing on being integrated with the local community,” said Adrienne Euler, a relationship manager in CIC Massachusetts. “Part of that kind of initiative is doing the social impact cohort, where we sponsor space for folks working in the social impact industry.”  

The opening of this new building was not just exciting for the public that evening, but for the programs and companies there as well.

“I think the most exciting thing about this new building is getting the chance to get engaged in the innovation space in Philadelphia and get to know this community,”  Ian Griffner, the operations manager for CIC Philadelphia said. “We have a lot of staff members and people in our site that have roots in Philly. We’re excited to get to know the community.”

The people at the Science Center look at the move into this new building as an opportunity to reach the goal of having even more of an impact on access, innovation, discovery and inclusion. People of all different ages and backgrounds explored those six floors. They saw what the center had to offer.

Looking at the turnout from the grand opening Nov. 9, the Science Center is making strides toward achieving that goal.

Drexel University’s Athletics Department is giving members of the community another reason this quarter to show their school spirit by wearing Drexel gear with its Wear It Wednesday initiative.

This weekly event — which happens every Wednesday from 12 to 2 p.m. during the fall, winter and spring quarters — aims to spread school spirit throughout the university by giving students who are wearing their dragon gear a chance to win prizes by spinning a wheel at their table.

“Wear It Wednesday was created just because we wanted to promote Drexel pride among the Drexel community,” Allison Campbell, the coordinator of marketing and tickets for Drexel Athletics, said. “We just thought that by rewarding them for wearing Drexel clothing was a good way to start doing that.”

The initiative began two years ago and the response from the community keeps getting better and better, according to Campbell.

“We started this my first year, which was 2016. We got a little bit of traction, but we still had a lot of questions like what is Wear It Wednesday? I’ve never heard of it. That kind of thing,” Campbell explained. “This year, especially since we’ve had buy-in from the university, overall we have people coming up to our table on Wednesday, and they know what it is. They’re wearing their Drexel gear, and they’re excited to spin the wheel.”

Students wearing Drexel gear are eligible to win one of the eight prizes listed on the wheel. These prizes include a laptop sticker, a t-shirt, a yo-yo, a lanyard and more. However, these prizes are subject to change from time to time, so there is a chance that they may not offer the same prizes every week.

The location of the table also changes every week. This fall quarter they are alternating between Lancaster Walk, Race Lawn and the Dragon Statue. If the weather on one Wednesday does not permit that, you will be able to find them in the Recreation Center Lobby. Students can also follow Drexel Athletics on Twitter for updates on tabling, prizes and more.

According to Campbell, you are welcome to come every single week. The only thing is that you cannot spin more than once on the same day. The table is not be available during finals week, break weeks or over the summer quarter since there are fewer students on campus.

Wear It Wednesday is an event that has had an impact on both the people working behind the scenes and in the Drexel community.

“The best part of this initiative is just getting students and the community overall excited about being part of Drexel and being proud to represent their university,” Campbell said. “That’s something that we push for in athletics and everything that we do so that’s definitely the best part.”

Photograph courtesy of the ExCITe Center

Leah Buechley,the third speaker in the ExCITe Center’s Learning Innovation Conversation series, spoke about equity, engagement and technology in education at the Bossone Research Center May 23.

Buechley is a designer, engineer, educator and the inventor of the LilyPad Arduino toolkit. This kit allows people to create wearable technology. She was also an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

“I worked in the space just as a designer, kind of playing around with what was possible and I found it a really compelling, exciting, interesting space,” Buechley said. “And my next impulse was that I wanted more people to have the creative, expressive engineering experiences that I was having so I thought that I should design a toolkit.”

Since the release of the LilyPad Arduino toolkit in 2007, Buechley has worked with students ranging from middle schoolers to college students. She helps them create projects using her invention. During the presentation, she even showed a video of the projects.

In addition to the toolkit, Buechley discussed the topic of equity in education. She explained the pros and cons of public versus private schooling. The audience was shown three options: a public school, a private school and a charter school.

She made a reference to an article in the New York Times written by Nikole Hannah-Jones called “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” She used the piece to draw a comparison between this New York school system and the school system in Texas, where she lives.

“Nikole Hannah-Jones closed her piece by just reflecting on the structure of the educational system in New York City, which certainly mirrors my experience with the structure of the public education system in my city. We have a system where these spectacular disparities exist, and the existence of these spectacular disparities makes doing the right thing feel like the hardest thing to do,” Buechley said.

After the LilyPad Arduino toolkit had been out for a few years, Buechley researched the intersection of fashion and engineering. She shared the results of her study with the audience.

“We found that in the traditional electronics community, about 2 percent of products in general were done by women and in the LilyPad Arduino community a majority of the products, about 65 percent more, were done by women,” Buechley said.

Learning Innovation’s conversation with Leah Buechley concluded with a moderated conversation with the Youngmoo Kim, director of the ExCITe Center. Although Buechley was the final speaker in the conversation series for this term, the conversation series will continue in the fall.

Alexandra Jones The Triangle

Drexel University’s ExCITe Center, a place for students to collaborate on projects at the intersection of design, engineering, and entrepreneurship, deployed a new program called Learning Innovation at the start of 2017.

According to Kara Lindstrom, the program director for the ExCITe Center, the Learning Innovation program was naturally born from the ExCITe Center’s identity.

“When we first imagined the ExCITe Center starting in 2011, we always envisioned a recurring public engagement component intrinsic to the work of the Center that would convene technologists, designers, educators, and all types of students and professionals across Philadelphia interested in innovation and learning,” Lindstrom wrote via email.

The ExCITe Center officially opened in January 2013. Programs include the monthly Third Thursday at 3 p.m., also known as T3, in which the community comes together to listen to speakers. In 2015, the ExCITE Center also started holding a STEAM Education Workshop annually on Presidents Day.

“This event [the STEAM Education Workshop], the third edition just ran on February 20th, allows us to bring together a more specifically education focused group for a day’s worth of case study talks, a keynote, and breakout discussions,” Lindstrom said. “The case study talks, much like T3 talks, can be Drexel faculty or students, but also partners from across the region — highlighting the value of diverse practices in the realm of research and learning.”

According to Lindstrom, a local philanthropist teamed up with the ExCITe Center in 2016 to help it develop a program that encouraged community gathering and various methods of learning.

From this collaboration came the Learning Innovation program, which is comprised of three components: the conversations speaker series, a national survey of maker spaces and on-campus pilot projects. It focuses on connecting national leaders with Philadelphia educators, to share new, creative approaches to education.

In the conversation series, innovators are invited to speak and participate in a conversation moderated by the director of the ExCITe Center, Youngmoo Kim.

The opening event in the Learning Innovation Conversation series featured John Maeda, who went from being an engineer to an artist to a business executive. Maeda has since been slated to speak at Drexel’s class of 2017 commencement.

“We developed an initial framework for the different realms of innovation in learning from entrepreneurial approaches to making, space and environment to education neuroscience and much more,” Lindstrom said. “From there we started identifying potential speakers across those areas — individuals who have both an established body of work in areas aligned with learning innovation and who are engaging presenters.”

Each speaking event has taken place on Drexel’s campus, and the next one will feature Leah Buechley on May 23 in the Mitchell Auditorium in the Bossone Research Center.

Buechley is a designer, inventor and artist whose inventions include the LilyPad Arduino toolkit.

In addition to the conversation series, ExCITe plans on conducting a national research survey on maker and learning spaces. The idea is to understand and document their activities and contribution to the development of their communities.

ExCITe also plans on developing student-focused pilot programs at Drexel that will focus on topics like learning methods and expand upon the knowledge outcomes of the conversation series and national survey. This includes supporting exploratory Drexel co-ops in 2017 and advancing the potential of classroom innovation.

More information about events concerning the Learning Innovation program can be found on the ExCITe Center website at http://drexel.edu/excite/.