Freedman Fellows Program

Erika I. Barcelos is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Case School of Engineering, Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on data management, spatial data science, data integration and statistical learning. She has a diverse background in polymer and data science and vast experience in computational and experimental methods for materials data science. She has a lead position in CASFER, a NSF Research Center focused on creating a nitrogen circular economy and in the FAIR-Ontology team in the Materials Data Science Center of Excellence (MDS3-COE). She is one of the professors in the Applied Data Science program at CWRU with a focus on data science research projects and Geospatial Data Science.

In Dr. Barcelos' project, "Leveraging satellite imagery and health data to monitor the influence of ambient temperature on mortality rates in the United States,"a data-driven approach leveraging open-source datasets will be used to investigate the relationship between population mortality and ambient temperature rates in the United States. Health data at the Census or zip code level and Satellite and ground level data for ambient temperature will be collected at a monthly or yearly basis and cross-correlated to generate visualizations, trends and patterns. Our findings will be related and mapped to underrepresented communities locations such as red-lined
areas and additional subsets including vulnerable populations (high social deprivation or social vulnerability indices) and their spatial distribution in the United States.

Ayesha Bell Hardaway is a Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University where she serves as Director of the Law School’s Social Justice Law Center and its Criminal Defense Clinic. Professor Hardaway also serves as Director of the University’s Social Justice Institute. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Professor Hardaway’s research and scholarship interests include the intersection of race with constitutional law, criminal law, policing, and civil litigation.  Her scholarship includes the publication of major articles in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Boston University Law Review, and the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties. Professor Hardaway has written on many topics, including reparations and the intersection of labor law and the Thirteenth Amendment. As Director of the Social Justice Law Center and of the University’s Social Justice Institute, Professor Hardaway serves students and the broader community in the exploration of pressing social justice issues through research, community partnerships and dialogue, engagement with local and national thought-leaders, and curricular offerings.  Professor Hardaway’s academic career also aligns with her strong commitment to serve the community. She has represented individuals who are unable to hire private counsel as a clinician in Case Law School’s Health Clinic, Civil Litigation Clinic and Criminal Clinic. As Director of the Criminal Clinic, Professor Hardaway uses a client-centered pedagogical framework to instruct and supervise third-year law students on handling criminal cases from arraignment to trial,

The land in and around Case Western Reserve University has been shaped by city planning, legal actions, and community development decisions over the years. Eminent domain actions have played a factor in the continuously changing landscape. The Social Justice Institute (SJI) looks to shed light upon the economic and geographical changes on Cleveland’s East side that have affected minority business owners throughout the last six decades. The impact on Winston E. Willis and his businesses is one prominent example of these actions. Mr. Willis was a self-made businessman who created a prosperous Black neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side for residents to enjoy. This research project, "Oral Histories and Mappings: The Winston Willis Project," a longstanding interest to the lead researcher and a broad section of community members, aims to identify any institutional and systematic ways in which Winston Willis’s businesses were rendered defunct. SJI also plans to document the view of Cleveland’s Black business landscape on and around Euclid Ave between (E. 105th and Mayfield Road) with an emphasis on Willis’s businesses. A key component of this project includes collecting Cleveland resident oral histories to create a picture of the once thriving Black establishments. This project will serve to undo prior efforts of erase an important part of Cleveland history and restore existing hole in the historical record regarding Black businesses in the area between approximately 1960 - 1985.

Dr. Pelfrey is a Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine serving as Director of Program Evaluation for the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) of Northern Ohio in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the Ohio State University. Her experience includes 19 years in translational research studying the immunology of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Dr. Pelfrey has served as a PI on her own RO1 grants and as a reviewer on NIH study sections. She is co-inventor on a patent and has been involved in clinical trials on MS. This has provided her with a thorough understanding of clinical and translational research.  She served as a Scientific Review Officer for the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program and the Institute for Educational Sciences, where she ran peer review panels for biomedical and educational research and prepared scientific summary statements to communicate with principal investigators. Dr. Pelfrey's other experience includes serving as Program Officer for a Cleveland Clinic pilot grant program and teaching in the graduate and medical schools at CWRU.
Dr. Pelfrey has served as the Evaluation Director since 2012. She served as the Chair of the Translational Research Evaluation Topical Interest Group within the American Evaluation Association in 2016-17 and again in 2019-20.  Since 2016 she has been an active member of, and currently leads, the Translational Science Case Study Working Group. This group has published a detailed protocol for conducting successful translational science case studies and in 2021, published the first TS Case Study in the JCTS. The Case Study Group was recently awarded a 2024 Coordination, Communication, and Operations Support (CCOS) Center Working Group entitled: “Learning about the science of translation: Identifying best practices to accelerate the translational process through case studies”.

Project: "Do leadership programs create future leaders?  Tracking the career success and leadership outcomes of women faculty who have participated in the FLEX Leadership Development Program for Women Faculty in the CWRU School of Medicine"

The goal of leadership development programs is to create leaders; however, few programs have sufficient workforce, tools, or time resources to demonstrate that their participants eventually become leaders. Typically, evaluation of leadership programs focuses on participants’ immediate learning, satisfaction with the program, and perhaps, short-term promotions. Developing participants into leaders takes years, during which programs often lose touch with former participants. Surveying participants for their leadership outcomes after several years generally results in low response rates and incomplete data.
We are evaluating the leadership outcomes of the FLEX Leadership Development Program for Women Faculty in the CWRU SOM. We have successfully measured significant increases in leader self-efficacy in FLEX participants at the end of training and up to one year following completion. Our hypothesis is that we can measure the proportion of FLEX participants who have successfully become leaders by tracking their leadership outcomes using specialized software and artificial intelligence (AI) tools in combination with data captured from business networking websites. Whether participants have become leaders in medicine is a critical long-term outcome for the FLEX Program.
Applied more broadly, every leadership and training program seeks to improve their ability to highlight program success by gathering data to confirm the successful trajectories of their students, trainees, or participants. If successful, this method could become semi-automated, providing an enormous service by saving both time and money on tracking the outcomes of program graduates and participants.

Olatunde David Akanbi is a Ph.D. student researcher of the Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER) at the Solar Durability and Lifetime Extension Center in Materials Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. With a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, and an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from CWRU, he focuses on integrating geospatial data for agricultural and environmental applications. Olatunde's research has earned accolades such as the First Place Award at the NSF CASFER Annual Symposium. He is a certified AWS solution architect and volunteers under the Deeper Christian Life Ministry. Olatunde is passionate about raising the next generation of scientists through mentorship and solving real-life questions through applied data science.

Akanbi's project focuses on enhancing precision agriculture through the Integrated Geospatiotemporal Modeling of Nutrient Flows while addressing Environmental Sustainability. It aims to optimize fertilizer use, improve crop yields, and reduce nutrient contaminants in our water systems by integrating satellite imagery and other data to monitor crop health and soil nutrient flows at the U.S. scale. The project will develop advanced geospatiotemporal models to track nutrient flows in agricultural landscapes, providing valuable insights for sustainable agricultural practices and environmental conservation. Olatunde's work aims to address critical challenges in modern agriculture by leveraging cutting-edge geospatial techniques, contributing to both agricultural productivity and environmental health. The goal is to use innovative technology to enhance agricultural systems and promote sustainability.

Micah Arafah is a PhD student in Sociology. With a focus on qualitative life course research, she studies lived experiences and believes data can only be understood in the social context of those involved.

Life history research explores how individuals interact with cultural norms, navigate institutions, make sense of given phenomena, and live their lives. There are many methods for such research, and this study will analyze nearly seven decades of private diaries written by a woman born in the 1920s and raised in the rural Midwest that document her daily life as a wife, mother, and woman in post-WWII United States.
The diary occupies a unique space in the writer's personal life, balancing spontaneity and reflection, selfhood and events, and subjectivity and objectivity. It grants researchers access to areas they might not otherwise reach: personal homes, individual minds, and geographically dispersed locations embedded in sociohistorical context.
Given the extensive duration of her diary entries, this study will explore historical and social changes through the eyes and words of a woman who experienced the Great Depression, WWII, and the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements. Pages that document meals, opinions, major events, life transitions, and role identities will help show her social and personal growth while facilitating access to knowledge of phenomena, processes, and meanings ascribed by her to personal, sensitive, or ordinary circumstances. Her diaries can highlight how language has evolved over time and how these changes correlate with major historical events and social shifts. Importantly, my close relationship with her family provides an opportunity for triangulation through interviews.
This study will use OCR scanning to digitize the diaries, and NVIVO to explore changes in language over time, transcription and text analysis, and text framing of important themes with data visualization outputs using R. Interviews will not occur until post-diary analysis.

Walter Wexler is a third-year history student focusing in Early American History. On CWRU campus, he is an Undergraduate Research Ambassador hoping to make research opportunities, especially for humanities and social sciences students, accessible and well-known. He is also an attendant for the darkroom at the Art Studio and will be hosting a show on WRUW starting this fall.

The fellowship will fund a project investigating Wabanaki (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet Indigenous nations)  naval raiding and its impacts on the colonial Atlantic economies of the early eighteenth century. Particularly, the project will explore if, or to what extent Wabanaki raids impacted the viability of English enslavement practices in Caribbean Sugar plantations like Bermuda. Additionally, it will explore the intersection between the cultural significance of the maritime world for eighteenth century Wabanaki peoples and the military and diplomatic defense of maritime resources against colonial encroachment. The project will be presented as an interactive StoryMap production, utilizing digital and multimedia tools to make this story as accessible and captivating to a wide audience as possible.