Three Goucher Faculty Embark on ‘Year of Exploration’
Three Goucher College faculty members are selected as the 2026 cohort of recipients of the Myra Berman Kurtz Fund for Faculty Research and Exploration of the Sciences (KRES Fund) Year of Exploration.
Now in its fifth year, the KRES Fund seeks to enable Goucher faculty to remain lifelong learners and continue their intellectual curiosities and passions through exploration of the sciences, technology, and their relationship to society. The fund is designed to encourage faculty to pursue new experiences outside of their prior work, explore novel areas of knowledge, and push disciplinary boundaries. Recipients are provided with a year’s worth of funding to begin these new projects.
This opportunity to pursue a new “passion project” is made possible by a generous
$400,000 pledge to Goucher College from Stuart Kurtz in honor of his late wife, Myra
Berman Kurtz ’66. The KRES Fund will support the annual awarding of multiple faculty
year-of-explorations over the course of the next decade. In its first five years,
this program has supported new research projects for 18 different Goucher faculty
members from 13 different academic disciplines.
The 2026 KRES recipients
Stefanie Kasparek, Assistant Professor of Data Science
True Crime and Crime Reality: Representativeness in Dateline NBC, 1992-2025
The project investigates whether Dateline NBC—one of America’s longest-running true-crime programs with over two million regular viewers—systematically misrepresents the demographics, geography, and nature of crime compared to official crime statistics. Drawing on more than 3,000 episodes aired between 1992 and 2025, the study will examine how victim and offender characteristics, such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status, are portrayed relative to real-world crime data and whether these patterns have shifted over time. The research combines a longitudinal analysis of Dateline episodes with original survey data on public perceptions of crime and true crime shows, using statistical modeling to assess the gap between televised narratives and empirical crime trends. Findings will contribute to ongoing conversations on journalism ethics, media literacy, and the role of entertainment news in shaping public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice policy.
Mohammad Naderi Dehkordi, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Data Privacy, Institutional Power, and Ethical Governance in Higher Education: An Exploratory Study of Sociotechnical Frameworks for University Data Practices
This project examines how universities develop and implement privacy, data governance, and technology-use policies, with a focus on ethical, legally compliant, and privacy-preserving practices. By analyzing existing institutional policies at Goucher College and benchmarking them against national standards such as FERPA, the project aims to identify gaps and opportunities to strengthen data privacy frameworks. The ultimate goal is to produce actionable recommendations and a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework that supports the responsible, transparent, and ethical use of student, faculty, and institutional data.
Arlette Ngoubene Atioky, Associate Professor of Psychology
Help-Full Birthing Experiences of Black Mothers
This project is a qualitative research study on the helpful birthing experiences of Black women who have successfully labored and delivered a child/children in a hospital setting in the U.S. in the last six months and up to two years ago.