Rewarding Research
Annual awards honor faculty’s academic contributions
When not captivating young minds in their classrooms, Bentley faculty can often be found conducting research that advances knowledge and broadens understanding of their respective fields. Each year, the university recognizes these extracurricular achievements with its Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Awards.
Honorees are nominated by members of the Bentley community for research conducted within the past three calendar years, and recipients are chosen by fellow faculty members on the Teaching and Scholarly Activities Committee. The committee considers the quality and reputation of the publisher and outlet in which the scholarly work appeared, as well as external recognitions, demonstrated public interest, and the impact of the research in each scholar’s respective field.
Read on to learn more about Bentley’s 2020 recipients:
Miriam Boeri
Associate Professor and Department Chair, Sociology
When Richard Nixon declared an “all-out, global war on the drug menace” in 1971, his goal was to eliminate the use and sale of illegal drugs. But as Miriam Boeri makes plain in her 2018 book, “Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation” — which received the International Sociological Organization’s 2020 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award — the ensuing “War on Drugs” has not only failed to meet its mission, it also irreparably damaged the same social fabric it ostensibly set out to protect.
As an ethnographer, Boeri’s research consists of firsthand observation, and she’s spent more than 20 years working with people who illegally use or misuse drugs to understand the reasons for their choices and identify ways to better meet their needs. In “Hurt,” she shares the personal stories of 38 women and men she interviewed as part of a National Institutes of Health-funded study about drug use among baby boomers. Among those individuals: Her beloved older brother, Harry, who spent 30 years in prison because of his heroin habit. Seeing his struggles firsthand led Boeri to become an advocate for drug policy reform.
In “Hurt,” Boeri maintains that people who use drugs will benefit more from a social recovery model — which emphasizes individualized treatment and comprehensive social and economic support systems, such as job training and reliable housing — than a criminal justice-centered approach. After all, she argues, America’s punitive drug policy has not only led to soaring incarceration rates, it’s also “contributed to the decline of the working class, the increase of single-parent families, and the devastation of minority communities.”
With opioid use now constituting a public health emergency, Boeri says we need to shift the paradigm from criminalization to compassion: “One-size-fits-all solutions for drug problems do not work. It’s time to end this civil war and focus on social reconstruction.”
Related: Why Gender Matters in America’s Opioid Crisis
Axel Seemann
Professor and Department Chair, Philosophy
How do we know what we know? Are cognitive processes individualized and internal, or influenced by communal and external factors? Questions like these lie at the heart of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the origins, characteristics and limits of human knowledge. And in his latest book, “The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space,” Axel Seemann strives to provide answers.
Specifically, Seemann sets out to explain the existence of perceptual common knowledge, which he defines as a shared understanding of our physical environment that allows humans to think and act in concert with each other. Where much of philosophy takes an egocentric view of human knowledge, maintaining that our mental lives are distinct and fathomable only to ourselves, Seemann posits instead that humans have developed a kind of socio-spatial shorthand that not only acknowledges but depends upon each other’s perceptual beliefs.
His view is grounded in the notion of joint attention, whereby two (or more) perceivers look together at a common object — for example, a pair of birdwatchers in a forest. As the pair come upon a clearing, the first watcher points out a bird on a nearby branch; the second watcher follows her companion’s outstretched arm and directs her gaze accordingly. The two may not agree on what they see — it’s a house wren, says one; no, a song sparrow, says the other — but their ability to communicate about and contemplate the same subject, despite their different physical standpoints and internal cognitive processes, reflects a shared understanding of their surroundings.
Perceptual common knowledge, Seemann says, thus constitutes a “conception of space in which positions other than one’s own can be thought of as centers as perception and action.” And as such, it’s a “critically vital feature of human sociocognitive development.”
Related: Philosophy Department hosts Conference on Loneliness
Greg Vaughan
Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences
The opioid epidemic isn’t America’s only drug problem: Skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs are directly and adversely affecting consumers’ health.
According to the RAND Corporation, prescription drugs in the U.S. cost twice as much as other Western nations. Even when covered in part by insurance, prices remain out of reach for many: A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that nearly 30% of adults couldn’t afford to take prescribed medicines. Unsurprisingly, 79% of respondents in that same survey considered drug prices unreasonable, with 80% attributing this to companies’ desire for greater profits.
But is Big Pharma truly more profitable than other industries? Working with a team from Bentley’s Center for the Integration of Science and Industry, Greg Vaughan set out to test this public perception. The resulting paper, “Profitability of Large Pharmaceutical Companies Compared with Other Large Public Companies,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), offers a more nuanced view of profits and pricing in the pharmaceutical industry.
A data scientist, Vaughan provided statistical analysis of revenue and earnings reports for 35 large pharmaceutical companies and 347 S&P 500 companies over an 18-year period (2000-2018). He and his fellow researchers found that the median net income margin for Big Pharma was indeed higher: 13.7% compared with 7.7% for the S&P 500 companies. However, when the team compared these margins to companies with comparable research and development expenses — namely, those in the technology sector and healthcare companies with non-pharmaceutical products — the difference was significantly smaller: 3.6%. In this context, Big Pharma isn’t quite the earnings juggernaut it might otherwise seem.
With Congress now scrutinizing prescription drug pricing, research like Vaughan’s can contribute to public debate. “It always feels good to see your work go on to be more than the finished product,” he says. “Public policy issues are often complicated, so I’m hopeful our work can help foster informed discussions.”