Learning Through the Pandemic

Presented by

Zhenyang (David) Tang

Associate Professor of Finance

Zhenyang (David) Tang joined Clark University’s School of Management in 2014. His research interests are insider trading, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, and venture capital. His works have appeared in academic publications such as the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Portfolio Management, and the Financial Review. Tang teaches Corporate Finance and Financial Management; he received the School of Management’s Best Undergraduate Professor Award in 2016 and 2019. Tang earned a doctorate in finance from the University of Alberta, and a master’s in quantitative economics and a bachelor’s in economics from Tsinghua University.

Nathan Ahlgren

Assistant Professor of Biology

Nathan Ahlgren’s NSF- and NIH-funded research focuses primarily on aquatic bacteria and the viruses that infect them (not human viruses). In his work, he examines marine cyanobacteria that are important to the health of our oceans and explores how human activity influences bacterial communities in Massachusetts waterways, including those in Worcester. He was inspired to join the collaborative project on the social factors influencing COVID-19 after starting a “hobby” of tracking COVID-19 cases locally and becoming curious about what causes sharp differences in COVID-19 cases between Worcester and surrounding towns. He translated his experience working with large bacterial DNA sequence datasets to access, organize, and analyze COVID-19 and demographic data across U.S. counties for this project.

Rosalie Torres Stone

Associate Professor of Sociology

Rosalie A. Torres Stone is the recipient of a 2021 Clark University President’s Achievement Award for Inclusive Excellence. She has been a co-investigator on a number of University- and National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded grants, including assessing the mental health needs of the Worcester community and investigating the day-to-day stressors and coping strategies of undocumented college students in the Northeast. Her work on the Asian disparities in patient communication and satisfaction with providers is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Torres Stone’s most recent projects focus on the effect of structural racism on COVID-19 cases and deaths across counties in the United States. In collaboration with UMass Memorial Health Care researchers, she is working on an NIH grant entitled, “Trusted Messengers: Supporting Physicians in Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination.”

Philip Bergmann

Associate Professor of Biology

Philip Bergmann, an evolutionary functional morphologist and biostatistician, joined the Clark faculty in 2011 and teaches Comparative and Human Anatomy, Advanced Biostatistics, and Herpetology. His research interests focus on understanding the diversity of body forms that have evolved in vertebrates, how that diversity arises through changes in animals’ skeletons, and the implications of those changes for animal locomotion and ecology. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and publicized by The New York Times. Bergmann’s interests in biostatistics led him to collaborate with fellow Clark professors Nathan Ahlgren and Rosalie Torres Stone to understand the social determinants of COVID-19 severity.

Jacqueline Geoghegan

Professor of Economics

Jacqueline Geoghegan joined the Clark University faculty in 1996 and currently chairs the Economics Department. Her teaching and research interests are broadly focused on developing spatially explicit econometric models using GIS data and technology; her research has been funded by the U.S. EPA, NSF, NASA (including a New Investigator Program award), and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She also has served as an associate editor for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and president of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association. Recent projects include measuring the University Park Partnership’s impact on housing prices in the Clark neighborhood, as well as factors affecting healthy food access. Her current research is consumed by the burgeoning craft beer industry in New England. Geoghegan holds a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mary-Ellen Boyle

Associate Professor of Management

Mary-Ellen Boyle is a sociologist whose scholarship is focused on organizational and social change. She has published on global liberal education, inequities in workplace literacy, business school citizenship, university-community partnerships, and the arts in business. She teaches courses on responsible global management, sustainable community development, business and society, ethics, entrepreneurship, leadership, cross-cultural management, education, and women and work. Boyle currently serves as a Fulbright Specialist with expertise in liberal education and academic leadership and spent five weeks consulting with Hoa Sen University in Vietnam. Prior to that, she was Dean of the College and Associate Provost at Clark. She received an MBA and Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale.