Faculty Fellows
Lu Lu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sport, Tourism, and Hospitality Management at Temple University. She earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration at Washington State University. Lu’s research focuses on consumer behavioral marketing primarily in service interactions and marketing, and food and beverage decision-making. Her research also examines the role of marketing messages in consumer travel decision-making. Currently, she is exploring how gaming, when integrated into restaurant services, can influence consumers’ menu-ordering and relationship with the business and how technology-enabled service interactions (e.g., self-service technology and service robots) influence consumer behavior. Her research papers often appear in leading journals in the field, including the International Journal of Hospitality Management, Tourism Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, and Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.
Christina Rosan has taught at Temple University since 2009. She is particularly interested in how we make cities more sustainable and just. She received her Bachelor’s in History (with Honors) from Williams College. After college, she taught English in Ecuador and worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC on a research project for USAID. She later attended the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) for her Master’s in City Planning with a focus on International Development. Her Master’s thesis examined the regional politics around the siting of a new airport outside of Mexico City. Rosan was offered an opportunity to continue her studies in a PhD at MIT where she worked on a research project on the politics of air pollution in Mexico City. Her interest in regional planning and sustainability led her to write her dissertation on metropolitan governance and land use planning in Boston, Denver, and Portland.
Graduate Student Fellows
Victoria Sarmiento is a Ph.D. student in Geography and Urban Studies. Her research interest focuses on measuring and monitoring land cover changes associated with agricultural activities, their impacts on ecosystems functions, and understanding the underlying social process driving ecosystem changes. She has over ten years of professional experience and training in biology and natural resources management. She has developed skills for spatial analysis, which include the use of GIS and remote sensing for environmental studies. Victoria is currently an extern at the Scholar Studio, where she is performing a multitemporal land cover change analysis in La Mojana Region in Colombia. Her project uses both active (radar) and optical (Landsat) satellite data and digital tools such as QGIS, R language, Google Earth Engine, and Google Earth Pro. She aims to map land covers and their changes between 2000 and 2020 to understand the land change dynamics occurring in the region. This project is part of her doctoral research, where she will explore how conflicts around land use have contributed to the ecological degradation of the landscape of La Mojana.
Chau Nguyen (they/she) is an MFA Candidate in Painting at Tyler School of Art. They received their B.A. in Fine Arts and History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. Their interdisciplinary art practice draws from concepts of translation, memory, cultural symbols, affect theory, materiality, and research on Vietnamese histories to convey frictions at the intersection of cultural identity, personal trauma, colonial fragments, and transnationalism. At the Scholars Studio, they are utilizing 3D printing technologies to reproduce facsimiles of Vietnamese oil paintings for an installation resembling a tourist painting storefront in Hanoi. The work will serve as part of their thesis exhibition in Spring 2022. Nguyen has received grants and awards from The Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy (OACCE), Tyler School of Art, The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, Chautauqua Art Institute, Bryn Mawr College, DIS Copenhagen, and FPT-Arena Multimedia.
CLIR-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Synatra Smith earned her Ph.D. in Global and Sociocultural Studies with a concentration in Anthropology from Florida International University. Her research focuses on the creation, perpetuation, and transformation of the socio-political intersectional Black cultural landscape with special attention to the ways in which virtual and physical space are used as environments to conceptually and practically transform Black identification processes as well as the material culture that contributes to this phenomenon. She has been working in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) field for the past five years, officially in museum education but she’s also curated, worked in collections, managed an outreach initiative, etc. In her current position with Temple and PMA, she is exploring the myriad ways in which Black artists and scholars in Philadelphia reimagine and conceptualize their communities. She is going to be working on capturing a broad spectrum of materials, from murals, zines/comics, posters, fashion/cosplay/textiles, and performance art, to 3 dimensional models of sculptures and monuments and using linked data and mapping tools for data visualization. Outside of this fellowship, She’s working on a multi-chapter report to historically contextualize the use of racially restrictive deed covenants in Hyattsville, Maryland as a federally-sanctioned method of residential segregation during the first half of the twentieth century. And as a true millennial, she not only has a full time fellowship and an external research project, she also works with a childhood friend and his fraternity brother on a Black culture trivia mobile app called Trivia Black. Synatra recently started brainstorming ways to integrate a gaming experience into this project potentially through virtual reality and/or augmented reality to create a more interactive digital exhibition model.