President John Fry attended the spring installment of Innovation with Impact, highlighting the creative work of faculty throughout Temple’s schools and colleges.

On Jan. 28, during the unveiling of Temple’s strategic plan, President John Fry emphasized Research in Action as one of the plan’s key priorities. 

A glimpse of that priority was on full display at Mitten Hall on April 20, as the Temple community filled the space for a series of Temple Talks, where faculty from across the university showcased the impact of their work in six-minute presentations. 

President Fry opened the spring installment of Innovation with Impact by reflecting on the university’s sustained commitment to advancing scholarship, research, creative work and service across a range of disciplines. 

“Innovation really doesn’t happen well in silos; it happens when ideas move across disciplines, campuses and into the communities that we serve,” he said. “Faculty are not only experts in their disciplines, but contributors to a broader societal impact.” He added that when Temple creates space for sharing ideas, “something really meaningful happens.” 

Boys to Men: Navigating Identity and Education Possibilities 

Addressing the challenges that Black boys face in education, James Earl Davis, the Bernard C. Watson Endowed Chair in Urban Education at the College of Education and Human Development, explained that only 15% of Black male eighth graders are proficient in reading and that just 2% of teachers in the United States are Black men. He argued that schools can create intentional educational environments where students are given the freedom to dream and make sense of their various identities, and challenge how masculinity gets constructed in the imagination of others, and how Black male youth imagine themselves. The Urban Youth Leadership Academy, which Davis co-founded, provides intentional support for seventh- and eighth-grade boys in two North Philadelphia schools, using research strategies to help them navigate their educational identity, disrupt deficit narratives and create opportunities possible in education.  

“Having even one Black teacher in the early grades significantly improves outcomes for Black boys, it reduces dropout rates by nearly 40%, improves performance on standardized assessments, and increases expectations for college and career success,” he said. 

Dance Interventions: Responding to Technological Disruptions  

Jillian Harris, associate professor at the Boyer College of Music and Dance, told the audience that Gen Z spends 6.9 hours engaging with media content every day, according to a 2025 Deloitte Digital Trends Report. She believes dance artists should acknowledge and respond to the media-saturated environment. Her creative research integrates new technologies to recenter the body and mind as a source of inquiry. Her projects include Invasion, a dance installation where participants’ movements are sampled, manipulated in real time and projected onto layered screens; Mud: Bodies of History, an interactive dance film website she produced in Colombia that explores embodied memory and trauma; and SHIFT, an ongoing live performance collective merging data, live and digital bodies. 

“We all have body minds rooted in a physical world. I encourage us to rethink our relationship with media and technology,” she said. “How can we reinforce the value of embodied connection?”  

Market Manipulation in the Age of AI 

Tom Lin, the Murray H. Shusterman Chair in Law at the Beasley School of Law, showed AI-generated images of an explosion near the Pentagon from a 2023 incident, noting that reports and images of the explosion on social media caused both the Dow Jones and S&P 500 to drop significantly, wiping out about $500 billion within minutes. “The intelligence behind those fake images was artificial, but the effects were very real. This is the new reality of market manipulation in the age of AI,” he said. Lin stressed that the most pertinent new method is AI-aided mass misinformation, where unscrupulous parties can now leverage AI to disrupt and distort financial markets by disseminating bad data, fake news and faulty information into a marketplace. He explained that detection attribution is difficult, and rulemaking and enforcement are similarly challenging, given the politics domestically and internationally. 

“I have recommended that regulators should organize and facilitate business war games involving public and private players,” he said. “Encourage long-term investment so that investors can better sidestep across the short-term and fleeting volatility of an AI-manipulated market and reinvigorate traditional tools by marrying old regulatory tools like disclosures and human exams with new technologies like AI.”  

Rethinking Pain Relief Without Addiction 

“So, imagine a pill that’s an opioid but is no longer addictive,” said Anjali Rajadhyaksha, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at Temple, who shared her research toward developing the first nonaddictive opioid. Rajadhyaksha and her team found that blocking a brain protein called monoacylglycerol lipase boosts a chemical called 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), allowing them to identify a therapeutic target for treatment. She emphasized that what has been fascinating in the lab is that when they boost these levels of 2-AG in the brain, opioids remain highly effective, they can manage pain and they don’t cause addiction. Her team is currently using AI tools at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine to develop new inhibitors that they can take from the lab bench to patients, creating new treatments focused on pain management. 

What Public Bathrooms Tell Us About America 

“I’ve turned myself into a toilet scholar, someone who studies bathrooms—in my case, public bathrooms,” said Bryant Simon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of History at the College of Liberal Arts, as he pointed to the cover of his new book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality. Simon shared that after checking out books from Charles Library and conducting endless Google searches about bathrooms, he discovered that every major protest movement of the 20th century—including the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement and the gay rights movement—reshaped American life by taking its demands for greater freedom to the public bathroom door. His research shows that public bathrooms matter because access to them has never been equal, both in the past and today, a point he illustrated with images of protest movements related to bathroom access throughout his presentation. 

Breath as a Biomarker: A New Window into What We Eat 

Gina Tripicchio, associate professor in the Barnett College of Public Health, discussed her research on improving eating behaviors and reducing diet-related chronic disease, emphasizing the idea that “you are what you eat.” Her research examines the feasibility, acceptability and methodologies for how to capture breath carbon isotope ratios (CIR) to assess dietary intake, making it the first study to examine breath CIR in relation to total dietary patterns. Her research team found that the CIR from breath was significantly and inversely associated with Healthy Eating Index (HEI) scores, meaning the healthier their diet, the higher their HEI score and the lower their CIR.  

“The higher their diet was in those C3 plants, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, and the lower their intake of C4 plants, including sugary and corn-based foods, is the first evidence for breath CIR, which is a noninvasive, easily obtainable and scalable biomarker that is associated with an indicator of total diet quality,” she added. “This could not only transform our nutrition research, but also the way we conduct our dietary interventions, measure their effectiveness and the way we provide clinical care.”  

Chemistry as the Currency of Earth’s Energy Web 

Michael Zdilla, professor of chemistry at the College of Science and Technology, studies how to better store energy in batteries that are more powerful and safer, as well as how energy can be released in explosions from energetic materials safely. His team aims to discover electrolytes that are nonexplosive and that are solids because solids are less flammable than liquids. He pointed to a picture comparing the flammability of their materials with a commercial electrolyte, which caught fire after about six seconds of flame exposure, while theirs did not catch fire even after 40 seconds. He noted the importance of materials designed to explode toward technology for construction, demolition and defense, but that manufacturing, transporting and storing them come with safety risks.  

“In our work, we have shown where a particular magnetic explosive material changes how much heat you have to deliver to it before the explosion is initiated, suggesting a possibility for explosive materials that we can turn on and off by putting them near a magnet,” he said. 

To conclude the event, David Boardman, interim provost and dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication, reflected on the presentations. 

“What we witnessed from these seven academic luminaries is a testament to the excellence of Temple faculty,” he said. “Each presentation showcased not only the breadth of expertise across our schools and colleges, but the creativity, the curiosity and the commitment to impact that defines Temple at its best.”