University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown
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Faculty Publications

Articles Published by Pitt-Johnstown Faculty

Pitt-Johnstown's faculty features talented and enthusiastic professors who are accomplished in their respective fields. They have been published and recognized worldwide and offer Pitt-Johnstown students the benefit of real-world expertise. The following links detail recent faculty publications.

  • John W. Mullennix, PhD, professor of psychology, was published in scientific journals. His co-authors are Pitt-Johnstown students:
    • Mullennix, J.W., Pilot, K.M., Steeves, T.A., & Burns, J.C. (in press).  The effects of cognitive load on judgments of titled visual art.  Currently in press, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
    • Mullennix, J.W., Varmecky, A., Chan, C., Mickey, Z., & Polaski-Hoffman, L. (2016).  The effect of color on automaticity of aesthetic judgments. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 34, 8-34.
       
  • Elizabeth Katrancha, DNP, RN, CCNS, CSN, CNE, assistant professor of nursing, was published in:
    • Katrancha, E., Zipf, J., & Schroeder, R. (in press).  Retrospective evaluation of the impact of geriatric trauma institute on fragility hip fracture patient outcomes. Journal of Orthopedic Nursing.
    • Curlej, M. & Katrancha, E. D. (2016).  One rural hospital's experience implementing the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) guidelines to decrease central line infections.  Journal of Trauma Nursing, 23(5), 290-297.
    • Faett, B., Katrancha, E., Drahnak, D., Sowko, L, & Blazeck, A. (2016). Using interactive video-based teaching to improve nursing students ability to provide patient-centered discharge teaching. Journal of Nursing Education, 55(5), 296-299. doi: 10.3928/014834-20160414-11.
       
  • Jill Henning, PhD, associate professor, conducted a multi-year study on the risk of Lyme disease in western Pennsylvania concluded that one in three deer ticks carry the Lyme bacteria. The report, titled Effective Techniques in the Definitive Diagnosis of Lyme Disease, was published on Aug. 8, 2016, in the SciMedCentral JSM Tropical Report. 
     
  • Maddu  Karunaratne, PhD, associate professor and electrical department chair, co-developed a method for Optimized Random Access Scan Circuitry and Methods for Test Compression and recently (August 2016) secured the US Patent #9423455 with a colleague in semiconductor industry.  He also recently published the following:
    • Maddu Karunaratne also presented and published a paper on Impact of Piggybacked MATLAB in C-Programming Course, in Proceedings of ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, New Orleans, LA, June 2016
    • Maddu Karunaratne, based on his research into power estimation and analysis of digital integrated circuits co-published the paper titled, A Dynamic Power Estimation Method for System on Chip Designs, in Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), Vol 11, No. 4, December 2015.
       
  • Pitt-Johnstown instructor Neil M. Coleman and the late professor emeritus Uldis Kaktins teamed with researcher and Pitt-Johnstown alumna Stephanie Wojno to analyze the hydraulics of the South Fork Dam to challenge the 127-year-old findings of the cause of the 1889 Johnstown Flood. Their article was published June 16, 2016, in the journal Hydrology, Volume 2, Issue 6, and titled Dam-Breach hydrology of the Johnstown flood of 1889–challenging the findings of the 1891 investigation report.
     
  • George, N. M., Drahnak, DM, Schroeder, D. L., & Katrancha, ED, Enhancing Prelicensure Nursing Students’ Use of an Electronic Health Record. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 12(5), 152-158. All authors are Nursing faculty: Nickole M. George, PhD, RN; Dawn M. Drahnak, DNP, RN, CCNS, CCRN; Diana L. Schroeder, DNP, RN; Elizabeth D. Katrancha, DNP, CCNS, RN, CSN, CNE, May 2016.
     
  • Lisa Bell-Loncella, PhD and Chemistry Department chair, led a research team study about metal-containing complexes having the potential to treat breast cancer in the  Journal of Translational Medicine manuscript Inhibition of cancer cell growth by ruthenium complexes, February 2016.
     
  • Thomas Malosh, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry, along with Pitt-Johnstown chemistry grads Thomas N. Rohrabaugh Jr., Joshua C. Doverspike, Evan D. Sawyer and Mitchell R. Stibbard, as well as Steven J Geib, PHD crystallographer at the University of Pittsburgh, authored the paper titled, Diruthenium tetracarbonyl sawhorse complexes bearing N-heterocylic carbene and phosphine ligands: Synthesis, structural characterization, and catalytic activity published in the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry in January 2016.
     
  • Manisha Nigam, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry,  with  Brittney Rush and Jay Patel (Pitt-Johnstown chemistry graduates) and collaborators Raul Castillo and Preeti Dhar in the Chemistry Department at SUNY New Paltz, collaborated on the paper titled Aza-Michael Reaction for an Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Laboratory, an experiment for the second-year organic chemistry laboratory. It appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education in January 2016.
     
  • Dawn Drahnak, DNP, RN, CCNS, CCRN (Nursing) & Nicole Custer published Prone Positioning of Patients With Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome in Critical Care Nurse 35(6):29-37, November 2015.
     
  • Neil Coleman, MS, geophysics instructor, has authored a paper about megaflooding on Mars caused by the catastrophic breach of a large crater lake.  The paper is titled “Hydrographs of a Martian flood from the breach of Galilaei Crater,” published by the journal Geomorphology in May 2015.
     
  • Jill Henning, PhD, an assistant professor of biology, and Rachel Ellsworth, a Windber Research Institute scientist and member of Pitt-Johnstown’s Health Science Advisory Board, collaborated on the study Chronic Inflammation in Cancer: The Role of Human Viruses, which was published in the journal Advances in Tumor Viruses, which was published by Libertas Academica in February 2015.
     
  • Christine Dahlin, PhD, assistant professor of biology, was published along with L. Benedict for the 2014 work Angry Birds Need Not Apply: A Perspective on the Flexible form and Multifunctionality of Avian Vocal Duets. Ethology, 120(1), 1-10.
     
  • Steven E. Stern, PhD and Natural Sciences Division Chair, collaborated with recent graduates Chelsea Chobany, Disha Patel, and Justin Tressler, on a study of listeners’ preference for computer synthesized speech over natural speech of people with disabilities. Their work was published in 2014 in Rehabilitation Psychology.
     
  • Seung Hyun Im, PhD, associate professor of computer science, in 2014 worked along with L.S. Tsay on Classifying an Object using Class Differentiators. Transactions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, 2(5), 64-71.
    • Seung Hyun Im also published, "A Method for Evaluating An Action Rule Specified By A User ", The International Conference on Data Mining, Internet Computing, and Big Data (BigData2014), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nov 17-19, 2014.
       
  • Michael Cox, PhD, associate professor of writing, published a volume of his short stories, Against the Hidden River, in 2013, and has presented readings from this work and from his novel-in-progress in Erie, Scranton, Savannah, Baltimore, Fairmont, WV, Pitt-Greensburg, and Pitt-Johnstown.
    • Cox's flash fiction "John Sloan's Coffee Line" appears in the current issue of Weave. His review of Ann-Marie Einhaus's The Short Story and the First World War appeared in the February issue of Choice. He was a featured reader at Fairmont State on February 5th and at Pitt-Greensburg on April 10th. He presented an excerpt from his novel-in-progress in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the College English Association on March 29.
       
  • Ako Inuzuka, PhD, associate professor of communication, is engaged in a research project on the construction of current Japanese identity from the memories of Japanese militarism.  She has published her work in Journal of International Communication, Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Multicultural Discourses.
    • Inuzuka's essay, co-authored with Thomas Fuchs, "Memories of Japanese Militarism: The Yasukuni Shrine as a Commemorative Site," has been published in the Journal of International Communication.
       
  • Derek Leben, PhD, assistant professor of philosophy, is publishing his scholarship in two of the most prestigious journals in his field: Philosophical Psychology and Mind and Language.  His work crosses disciplinary boundaries from philosophy and ethics to psychology and neuroscience to language and linguistics. He also hosts a podcast with a colleague from Carnegie Mellon University, Axons and Axioms.
     
  • Kristen Lynn Majocha, PhD, associate professor of communication, has published “Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org)” in the Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics Ed. Kerric Harvey, SAGE Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA (2014) as well as two book reviews for CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.  At the 105th Eastern Communication Conference, Providence, MA, April 2014, she presented the papers “We Work for God’: Mother Teresa and Mercy though the Philosophical Lens of Seneca” and “A Heideggerian Approach to Caring for Others: Three Weeks at the Missionaries of Charity House in Ponce Puerto Rico"; was a panel participant for “Hannah Arendt and Lively Dissent: An Exploration through the Lens of Ronald C. Arnett’s Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope.
     
  • Ross Kleinstuber, PhD, assistant professor of justice administration and criminology, published the following in 2014:
    • “Mitigation Versus Individualism:  Examining Judges’ Capital Sentencing Decisions.”  Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 63: 187-224.
    • “Death by Design in Delaware: How the Law Disengages Jurors, Impedes Receptivity to Mitigation, and Encourages Death Sentences.” Criminal Law Bulletin 50 (2): 384-408.
       
  • Mark Previte, EdD, and interim chair of the Education Division, recently published a book chapter entitled “Second class citizens in the social studies curriculum: The role of anthropology and sociology in an issues-centered education framework." This chapter appears in the book Educating about Social Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
     
  • Julie Ankrum, PhD, and associate professor in education, published along with Nail, A. (2014). Preparing U.S. pre-service teachers for literacy instruction through student teaching in New Zealand. In Leung, C., Richards. J., & Lassonde, C. (Eds.), International collaborations in literacy research and practice. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
     
  • Bruce Robart, PhD, and associate professor of biology, lead author of Phylogeny and Biogeography of North American and Asian Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae), co-author.
     
  • Stephen Kilpatrick, PhD, and associate professor and biology department chair, published the following:
    • Phylogeny and Biogeography of North American and Asian Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae), co-author.
    • Essential Genes, published in January 2012 is the undergraduate/med school text.Krebs, J. E., E. S. Goldstein, and S. T. Kilpatrick. Lewin’sEssential Genes, 3rd ed. (Jones & Bartlett, 2013).
    • GENES XI was published in January 2013:  This is the graduate-level text. Krebs, J. E., E. S. Goldstein, and S. T. Kilpatrick. Lewin’sGenes XI. (Jones & Bartlett, 2014).

If you have information about a Pitt-Johnstown faculty member that should be added to this page, please submit it to: upjweb@pitt.edu.