Category Archives: Faculty Research and Instruction

Presentations, Publications, Awards, Accomplishments

Below is a list of Purdue Libraries faculty and staff publications, presentations, honors, awards, and field or industry recognition in August and September 2018.

Director of Purdue Libraries Facilities Nanette Andersson was interviewed for the article, “Purdue University Combines Classroom and Library Space to Promote Active Learning,” in Tradeline Inc. (published August 8, 2018).


Building Purdue - President Thank You - Purdue University

Purdue University President congratulates Neal Harmeyer, a digital archivist in Purdue University Archives and Special Collections. Harmeyer curated the current exhibit, “Building Purdue: 150 Years of the West Lafayette Campus.”

Professor Bert Chapman conducted the webinar, “Enhancing Your Intelligence Agency Information Resources IQ: Part 3 Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency” for the U.S. Government Publishing Office’s FDLP Academy (September 18, 2018).

Neal Harmeyer recently received a congratulatory letter from Purdue University President Mitch Daniels for his work on the “Building Purdue” exhibit. The press release about the exhibit was picked up by local media outlets and garnered their coverage of the exhibit. In addition, the Associated Press picked up the story, and the information ran in many media outlets throughout the U.S.


Professor Jean-Pierre Hérubel published the following articles:

  • Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V. M., Edward A. Geodeken, “Two Sides of the Same Coin? Trade and University Press Publishing of Revised Dissertations, 2007–2016: Some Observations.” Publishing Research Quarterly 34 (2018): 170-206.
  • Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V.M. “Recent Articles on French History.” French Historical Studies 41 (Winter 2018): 158-178.
  • Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V.M. “Recent Articles on French History.” French Historical Studies 41 (Summer 2018): 556-575.

He also delivered the following presentation:

Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V.M. Clio’s Interpretative Framework for a Larger Landscape of History of Education: Disciplinary Journals, Introspective and Exploratory Forays” SWG Mapping the Discipline History of Education ISCHE Berlin August 29 to 1 September 2018, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.


Professor Michael Fosmire and Assistant Professor Margaret Phillips were highlighted by IEEE Standards University in “Practical Ideas from Professors: Introducing Engineering Technology Students to Technical Standards” (September 19, 2018).


University Archivist and Professor Sammie Morris and Assistant Professor Nastasha Johnson are part of a Purdue University interdisciplinary team that received a grant from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission (NHPRC) “to provide training for archivists across the country by developing and facilitating the Archives Leadership Institute (ALI) for the next generation of archivist leaders.”

Learn more at http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/2018/09/28/nhprc-ppi-grant18/.

(Editor’s Note: The award was initially announced August 22, 2018.)


On September 24, the Purdue University Teaching Academy inducted Purdue University Libraries Associate Professor Ilana Stonebraker as a new Teaching Academy Fellow. Last spring, the Purdue University Teaching Academy selected and announced 12 inductees for 2018.

Faculty Presentations and Publications, August/September 2018

In July, Bert Chapman served as a panelist on the “Managing the Utilization of Rare Earth Elements Across the DOD” discussion panel at the Defense Strategies Institute’s Advanced Materials for Defense Summit Conference in Alexandria, VA.

B. Chapman was awarded a Research and Scholarship Grant of $867.90 by Libraries Research Council to travel to the American Society for Competitiveness Conference on October 25-27, 2018, in Falls Church, VA, to present “The Arctic’s Emerging Geopolitics: Recommendations for the U.S. and its NATO Allies.”

Howard, Heather; Zwicky, Dave; Phillips, Margaret, “Academic Libraries Support Cross-Disciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (2018). Paper presented at the 38th Annual IATUL Conference in Oslo, Norway.

Phillips, Margaret; Fosmire, Michael; Petersheim, Kristin; Turner, Laura; and Lu, Jing, “Investigating the Information Habits and Needs of Practicing Engineers and University Students” (2018). Presentation at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_fspres/127

Phillips, Margaret; Fosmire, Michael; and McPherson, Paul B, “Industry Standards for Everyone: Demystifying Technical Standards” (2018). Workshop presented at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_fspres/128

Phillips, Margaret; Fosmire, Michael; and McPherson, Paul B, “Standards are Everywhere: A Freely Available Introductory Online Educational Program on Standardization for Product Development” (2018, May/June). Standards Engineering, 70(3), 1-6. www.ses-standards.org/page/306

Phillips, Margaret; Fosmire, Michael; Petersheim, Kristin; Turner, Laura; and Lu, Jing, “How do professional engineers use information compared to undergraduates, and how can libraries prepare students and support engineers for future success?” (2018). Paper presented at the 38th Annual IATUL Conference in Oslo, Norway. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_fsdocs/203

Goben, A., & Sapp Nelson, Megan. (2018). Teaching librarians about data: The ACRL Research Data Management RoadShow. College & Research Libraries News, 79(7), 354. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.7.354

Zwicky, Dave; Phillips, Margaret, “Inspiring Innovation with Patent Information Literacy in the Engineering Technology Curriculum” (2018). Paper presented at the 38th Annual IATUL Conference in Oslo, Norway.

Zakharov, Wei, Li, H., Fosmire, M., Traynor, A., & Pascuzzi, Peter. (2018, July). Supporting students’ self and peer assessment for writing assignments with Gradient. Presented at 2018 Pacific-Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS), Shanghai, China.

Zakharov, W., Li, H., & Fosmire, M. (2018, July). Undergraduate students’ perspectives of fake news in the field of geography. Presented at 2018 Great Lakes Science Boot Camp, West Lafayette, Indiana.

W. Zakharov was awarded a $2,000 travel grant from Libraries Research Council to travel to the 2018 Global Online Learning Summit in Toronto, Canada, October 16-19, 2018, to present, “An exploratory factor analysis of the online information literacy self-efficacy (OILS) instrument.”


Purdue Libraries in the News

Excerpt from…

PURR and Libraries: Providing Purdue Researchers with Data-Management and Archiving Tool

September 7, 2018 — Last week, the Washington Post published an article about the data a Purdue University professor (and two of his research colleagues) gathered on “every confirmed, line-of-duty police killing a civilian in 2014 and 2015.” Logan Strother, assistant professor in the Purdue Department of Political Science, used the Purdue University Research Repository, or PURR, to publish the dataset of police shootings he references in the piece. (Co-authors include Charles Menifield and Geiguen Shin, both at Rutgers University, Newark.) According to Data Repository Outreach Specialist (Research Data, Purdue University Libraries) Sandi Caldrone, by using PURR to publish the dataset, Strother is promoting transparency in scholarship. Read more on the Purdue Libraries’ news site…

Exhibition shows growth of West Lafayette campus since 1869

AUGUST 29, 2018, WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) — A newly opening exhibition by Purdue Libraries highlights the physical growth and evolution of the university’s West Lafayette campus from its establishment in 1869. Read more at SFGate.com

Purdue Polytechnic professor uses grant award to bring virtual reality training to archivists nationwide

AUGUST 22, 2018 — Mesut Akdere, associate professor of human resource development (HRD) and director of HRD Virtual Lab at the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, along with [Purdue Libraries’ faculty Sammie Morris and Nastasha Johnson] and professors from and the Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment, and Research (CILMAR), received a grant from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission (NHPRC) to provide training for archivists across the country by developing and facilitating the Archives Leadership Institute (ALI) for the next generation of archivist leaders. The new program, ALI@Purdue, will provide advanced training for archival leaders in the United States, giving them the knowledge and tools to transform the profession in practice, theory and attitude. Read more from Purdue Polytechnic Institute…

Bringing Bioinformatics to Boilermakers

Biochemistry and bioinformatics expert Dr. Peter Pascuzzi teaches Purdue researchers how to use open-source and web-based tools to dig deeper into their research data.

When hearing about what Purdue University Libraries Assistant Professor Peter Pascuzzi does at Purdue and how he helps graduate-student and faculty researchers, one is reminded of the inventive plot twists often found in episodes of “The Simpsons.” His career chronicle has many intriguing turns like those portrayed in each tidy tale of Homer’s world. And then, so satisfyingly, it all makes perfect sense when you get to the episode’s end.

Purdue Libraries Assistant Professor Peter Pascuzzi

Pascuzzi presenting to students at a Fall 2018 orientation in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center (Home of the Library of Engineering and Science). Photo by Lindsey Organ

Pascuzzi, who studied biology and chemistry as an undergraduate, earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry (at Cornell). Naturally, as a Libraries faculty member in life sciences, his subject areas at Purdue include biochemistry, bioinformatics, medicinal chemistry, molecular biosciences, and molecular pharmacology.

His expertise is not only in biochemistry, but also in bioinformatics. He teaches researchers how to use web-based and open-source tools to better analyze and understand their research data. His CellMiner Companion application is an example of this. According to Omicstools, where his application is available, the tool “enables researchers to explore the output of CellMiner queries. The data from multiple files is summarized, assembled into a single data matrix, z-score normalized, clustered, and visualized both as a heatmap and dendrogram.” [See image below.]

“With the work I do here at Purdue, I really want to make an impact on the science, but more importantly, having been a graduate student, I have a lot of empathy with people who get stuck in a place because they don’t have the data skills they need. So I have always made a lot of effort to understand what the graduate students need, and that is what motivates a lot of the teaching I do,” Pascuzzi explained. “Many people I teach are new to bioinformatics. But I can look back over a few years now, and from that experience, I can surmise about half of them will go on to do their own bioinformatics, and it will really help them in their research. I’m not saying they wouldn’t publish without it, but I know they are doing more of the work themselves and that they are more qualified because of what they learned.”

Image Courtesy of Peter Pascuzzi. Image is figure from NIH website, "A gene expression pattern for 21 transporter genes was retrieved from CellMiner and visualized with CellMiner Companion."

Image Courtesy of Peter Pascuzzi. “A gene expression pattern for 21 transporter genes was retrieved from CellMiner and visualized with CellMiner Companion.” Image is figure from “CellMiner Companion: an interactive web application to explore CellMiner NCI-60 data.” (Image Link to NIH website)

Plants, Paths, Plots, and Projects

Pascuzzi, who started college at 26, began his academic career studying to be a plant scientist.

“I always tended to make these weird angles. I fell in with a great botany professor and then good chemistry professors. Later, I transferred to a new school and got in with a good genetics professor. I went to Cornell for plant science—I was in the biochemistry program, but working in a plant pathology lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute, which surprised my department,” he explained. “Then I collaborated on a structural biology project, which involved working with another lab at Cornell. After that, I went to N.C. State for a post-doc in plant genomics, but I had to learn bioinformatics to understand our data. The interest in bioinformatics brought me to Purdue Libraries.”

While here, his work has been varied, too. He recalls one project on which he worked with a faculty member in the vet school, helping her take data from the National Center of Biotechnology Information and getting it into a format she could use.

“For me, it was very simple; for her it seemed impossible. In many ways, how I helped her is, 100 percent, the work that libraries do. There is a public resource out there, the resource is information or data, and I show them how to work with it,” Pascuzzi said.

While people have complimented Pascuzzi on his CellMiner Companion tool—that he used to develop a visualization plot, or a heatmap, on cancer cells with drug treatment, data—he points out what really is important is what can be done, with data by individual researchers.

“Generating a plot, from publicly available data on cancer cells, isn’t revolutionary. What is revolutionary is that I was able to do it myself—and I am able to teach just about anybody how to do something like that,” Pascuzzi said. “The technology has moved so quickly, data access has moved so quickly, that projects like that have become trivial. A decade ago, that would have been a major project. You would have approached computer science students, and then write to someone to get access to the data. Now it is just all out there.”

Purdue University’s Elizabeth Tran, an associate professor in biochemistry, is another faculty member who Pascuzzi has helped over the years. She said his expertise has contributed to the continued funding of her work, as well as critical bioinformatics training and instruction for her and her graduate students.

“He taught my students how to code, both from his R/Bioconductor course [BCHM 695 Introduction to Bioconductor and R] and through one-on-one assistance,” she noted.

Tran added that she and Pascuzzi have collaborated on several research projects since he has been at Purdue.

“Our research is focused on the role of RNA unwinding enzymes in gene expression. Not surprisingly, we were faced with the challenge of needing genome-wide studies gene expression differences between the pathways we were investigating. I reached out to Pete, and he was able to help us use published data sets to compare to results we had generated with RNA sequencing. This resulted in a grant renewal for my laboratory, with Pete as an essential collaborator, and a publication one of my graduate students,” she explained.

Pascuzzi has continued working on projects in Tran’s laboratory, including helping another one of her graduate students with cutting-edge “next gen” studies to identify binding sites for the RNA helicases on RNAs.

Distinguished Professor in the Purdue University Department of Nutrition Science James Fleet pointed out that Pascuzzi’s unique perspective and skill set bridge the traditional roles of the library, “i.e. information management and analysis, with an important area of modern biology, bioinformatics and big data analysis.”

“I came to know Pete through an educational program funded by the National Institutes of Health’s ‘Big Data to Knowledge’ program. This program funded projects to provide data-analysis training to traditional biomedical researchers. (This was a unique, nationally competitive grants program, and Purdue was only of only about a dozen places to receive funding from the program.) I had heard about Pete’s skills as a bioinformatician and an educator, and I knew that he was the piece we needed to round out our team,” Fleet explained. “His contribution to our course was necessary for its success. In addition, he has been instrumental in establishing core bioinformatics and data management/analysis courses for the Biochemistry Department.”

Biochemistry Assistant Professor Vikki Weake said Pascuzzi’s influence on student learning and success is clear.

“Pete and I worked together on some RNA-seq studies in Drosophila, and he helped mentor one of my graduate students, Jingqun Ma, so that she could learn how to analyze her data. These studies were published in the journal G3. Jinqun is now a bioinformatician,” she said.

When it comes to research data, Weake not only touted Pascuzzi’s bioinformatics expertise, but she also noted that Purdue Libraries’ Purdue University Research Repository, or PURR, is a tremendous resource for Purdue faculty.

“Data management and archiving are becoming increasingly important in the life sciences, and my lab team members have used PURR extensively to archive data sets associated with our published studies,” she said. “This is really important, as other researchers have access to the raw data, so they can replicate our analyses and results. The National Institutes of Health have recognized that we need efforts to improve rigor and reproducibility in biomedical science, and services that make raw data freely available are a great way for labs to be transparent about the work that they are doing. Ideally, other groups should be able to take our data and replicate our findings, or if new knowledge becomes available—they might use our data to gain novel insight into a biological process,” Weake added.

Pascuzzi, like his fellow faculty colleagues in the Purdue Libraries, serves Purdue faculty with invaluable instructional and research support, oftentimes providing key resources, tools, and insights that help them make great leaps in their learning, information discovery, and research studies.

“My niche has always tended to be helping others. Libraries are highly service, education, and learning oriented,” Pascuzzi said. “I have tried to go all in on that. It’s what we do.”