Annual Faculty Awards Celebrate Research and Teaching Excellence

An internationally recognized linguist, anthropologist and philosopher, Dan Everett has been hailed as “the closest thing we have to a real-life Indiana Jones.” During a distinguished career spanning nearly 50 years — the last 15 of them at Bentley, where the former Dean of Arts and Sciences (2010-2018) is a member of both the Sociology and Global Studies departments — Everett has written 18 books, published 120 scholarly articles and received nearly $6 million in grants and funding. His research has also been the sole focus of a documentary (2012’s “The Grammar of Happiness”), a play (2016’s “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes,” staged at London’s Park Theatre) and six international conferences (including a day-long symposium hosted by MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2023.)

Everett is best known for his work with the Pirahã [pee-dah-HAN], a small community of Indigenous hunter-gatherers living deep in the Amazon rainforest jungle with whom he and his family lived for a total of 10 years. During that time, Everett became fluent in the Pirahã language, a tonal tongue notable for its lack of specific terms for colors and numbers as well as words to convey historic events that predate the speaker’s lived experiences. His analysis of Pirahã grammar revealed a lack of recursion — or “nesting” clauses and phrases within each other to create increasingly complex sentences — that challenged the influential theory of universal grammar advanced by Noam Chomsky.  

Everett’s colleagues commend his commitment to scholarship. “Dan is a scholar at his core; he is driven to discover and to write,” says Jeff Moriarty, Philosophy professor and executive director of Bentley’s Hoffman Center for Business Ethics, who characterizes Everett as “one of Bentley’s most productive and impressive researchers.” Anne Rawls, professor and chair of the Sociology Department, offers similar praise: “Dan’s research and influence — both nationally and internationally — is so exceptional that it is difficult to know where to begin....  There is no other scholar currently at Bentley, or anywhere else nearby, whose work compares.” 

Roy (Chip) Arthur Wiggins III passed away peacefully, with his family by his side, on Aug. 27, 2024, after a hard-fought battle with cancer.  

Wiggins joined the university in 1996 as an assistant professor of Finance. During his nearly three decades at Bentley, he served in increasingly important leadership roles, including chair of the Finance Department, dean of business (2011-2018) and interim co-provost and vice president of Academic Affairs (2017-2018). A staunch advocate for the integration of business with the arts and sciences, Wiggins helped strengthen and expand Bentley’s curricular offerings, introducing several new undergraduate majors — including Actuarial Science, Creative Industries and Professional Sales — and developing the university’s flagship MBA and graduate programs in financial planning and real estate management.  

Wiggins was also founding director of the Bentley Microfinance Initiative, a student-run organization offering loans to small business owners in Massachusetts and Ghana. The initiative grew out of Seminar on Micro-lending (F1 333), a course Wiggins developed “to help students think about how financial decisions translate into actions that benefit society and have a positive and real impact on people,” says colleague Kartik Raman, George and Louis Kane Professor of Finance and associate provost for Academic Affairs. Raman remembers Wiggins as “sincere, selfless and, above all, never afraid to explore new avenues to constantly learn, innovate and mentor other faculty.”  

Wiggins was also known for his commitment to helping students achieve success both in and out of the classroom. “Chip’s selfless dedication to Bentley, unwavering advancement of the university and care for student learning and development was not an accident. It was reflective of his values,” says Michael Mazmanian ’15, MSA ’16. “He taught us to be stewards, how to build relationships, respect, accountability, interpersonal skills and self-management. None of these ‘lessons learned’ are listed in a syllabus or course description, but they are the bedrock of long-term student success after graduation.” 

Before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022, reproduction rights activists warned that overturning federal protections to abortion care would adversely affect women’s physical and mental health. But as Savannah Adkins discovered, restricting abortion access also has significant and sobering implications for the nation’s foster care system.

In “Association between restricted abortion access and child entries into the foster care system,” published in JAMA Pediatrics and highlighted by CNN, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, Adkins and her co-researchers examined the relationship between states that enacted Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws — legislation that effectively limits access to abortion care, she explains, by imposing “unnecessary and burdensome” requirements on medical providers — and the number of children who subsequently entered foster care. The scholars found that, compared to states without abortion restrictions, those with TRAP laws saw an 11% increase in foster care placement. This effect was even stronger (15%) among Black children and children from racial and ethnic minority groups.  

“From real, historical data, we can see that denying access to abortion services not only violates bodily autonomy but also perpetuates systemic inequalities and injustices,” Adkins wrote in an essay for The Hill, noting that restricting abortion access has broader economic implications for both states and the federal government, which fund the U.S. foster care system. “It is critical to recognize the importance of safe and legal abortion as a fundamental human right.”

Blockchain may be best known as the bedrock of cryptocurrency, but the technology — a decentralized database that records, stores and verifies information in encrypted blocks that cannot be altered or deleted — has the potential to transform the health care industry, says Haijing Hao.  

“The past few years have witnessed a significant increase in the amount of health care data being generated, not only from providers — in the form of electronic health care records (EHR) — but also from personal health and fitness devices,” including smartwatches and other Internet-enabled wearables, she explains. As a result, blockchain-based mechanisms may provide “robust solutions for existing security, privacy and efficiency challenges in current health care systems.”  

In “Technical, temporal, and spatial research challenges and opportunities in blockchain-based healthcare: A systematic literature review,” published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Hao and her co-authors conducted a systematic literature review of blockchain studies in the health industry. They identified 64 articles detailing blockchain systems being developed and/or implemented within specific health care domains, such as medial data management, clinical trials, organ transplantation and donation, and pharmaceutical supply chains. The researchers identified challenges of applying blockchain to healthcare domains and future research directions for designing and implementing blockchain-based healthcare systems.  

Overall, Hao and her colleagues found that blockchain has the potential to improve the security and accuracy of medical data by eliminating the need for a central management system. The technology’s immutability — achieved via cryptographic validation and timestamp mechanisms — can also prevent fraudulent practices like unethical organ transplant allocations; as Hao notes, the transparency of blockchain transactions “ensures that all parties in the donation process have the same information and view of the organ’s status, location and availability for the right recipient at the right time.”

Challenges of blockchain-based systems include scalability due to storage limitations or computational power and language and cultural differences among global EHR systems. As Hao explains, “One of the important future directions is to develop a compliance code, including unified regulations, standardizations and cross-border policies.” 
 

As COVID-19 transformed from an alarming but isolated outbreak in China to a global health emergency, it necessitated an unprecedented acceleration in the development and deployment of digital technologies. Virtually overnight, schoolchildren pivoted from in-person lessons to online instruction and employees of businesses worldwide stopped commuting to the office and started working remotely. Yet, while digital innovations undoubtedly helped to slow the spread of the virus and prevent untold deaths, they also raised significant ethical implications, says Marco Marabelli and his colleagues, who were among the first information systems scholars to warn of post-pandemic risks. 

In “Preventing the digital scars of COVID-19,” written in November 2020 and published in the European Journal of Information Systems the following January, Marabelli and his co-authors discuss the pandemic’s potential to leave “digital scars,” which they define as “ethically problematic sociotechnical innovations that outlast their emergency rollout.” In their article, the authors explore three key technologies implemented widely during the first eight months of the pandemic — social software (including social media platforms, videoconferencing tools and contact tracing apps), artificial intelligence and machine learning, and robotics — and address specific concerns for each.  

Their primary concern is that these technologies exacerbate existing inequalities. “People who have fewer resources to deal with the virus are often the most exposed to it,” Marabelli explains, noting that limited access to broadband internet and digital devices, as well as a greater reliance on lower-paid, part-time and physically demanding jobs, disproportionately and negatively affect “vulnerable populations, minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged groups.” Beyond accessibility, the researchers also sound the alarm on privacy risks associated with workplace monitoring, public surveillance systems and confidentiality related to telehealth platforms.  

Ultimately, Marabelli says, “We need to make sure that not only the benefits of innovation outweigh the drawbacks, but also that all these new systems or novel uses of existing systems are deployed and used responsibly.” To ensure this, he advocates “systematic vetting” via civic and corporate engagement with information systems scholars: “Academics should advise and/or work jointly with governments and institutions to help them develop transparent, high-level frameworks that assess the status quo of technologies rolled out for emergency reasons.” 

Sell-side analysts play a critical role on Wall Street. Working on behalf of investment banks and brokerage firms, they provide in-depth analysis of a company’s financial performance and advise clients on actions they should take to maximize the value of their portfolios.  

Analysts draw on a variety of skills to inform their investment recommendations, but according to research from Ari Yezegel, the ability to elicit information from firm managers contributes significantly to an analyst’s success. In “The Value of Eliciting Information: Evidence from Sell-Side Analysts,” published in The Accounting Review, Yezegel demonstrates the importance of elicitation — which he defines as “the process of acquiring information from an expert ... to predict future cash flows and form probability distributions as around those predictions” — as a “distinct skill that influences analysts’ output quality.”  

Analyzing transcripts from publicly traded U.S. companies’ earnings conference calls from 2003-2017 and cross-referencing them with corresponding reports from individual analysts, he finds that analysts whose questions elicit longer responses from firm managers issue more accurate earnings forecasts and stock recommendations. “Manager responses to skilled analysts, in addition to being longer, contain more forward-looking, quantitative and performance-related information and are less scripted and easier to understand,” Yezegel explains, noting that for each standard deviation increase in elicitation skill there was a corresponding 16 basis points increase in the average two-day market reaction to stock recommendation revisions (i.e., upgrades and downgrades).  

Ultimately, he says, this difference “gives skilled analysts an informational advantage that enhances their research and results in more favorable career outcomes.”