Dr. Shelby Crosby ’92 – Teaching is her true passion

Throughout the month of February, Mercyhurst Prep has been celebrating Black History Month with the help of the MPS Critical Concerns Club. They are educating themselves and the community by selecting historical figures to highlight each morning with a brief memoir read on the morning announcements. An MPS alumna studies and teaches the works of some of those we are highlighting every day.

Shelby Crosby ’92, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Memphis in their African American Literature Department, and teaching is her true passion. She received her BA from Morehead State University and her MA and PhD from the State University of New York, Buffalo, where she started her teaching career as a teaching assistant. From there, she taught at D’Youville College and has now been at the University of Memphis since 2008. Currently, her favorite course to teach is a course called Black Women & the Fantastic, which focuses on Black women who write in the genre of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

In college, her studies took her in many directions until she finally landed on English. Taking English courses for fun in her first few years, she knew she loved it and loved presenting but didn’t know how to turn it into a career. Her interest was not in elementary or secondary education, but she didn’t know how to become a college professor. Even so, she took a leap and worked toward her doctorate to reach her goal of teaching at the collegiate level. She said that at MPS, she was encouraged to think critically and ask questions, which is an invaluable skill to have and helped her immensely in her college studies and beyond.

Shelby’s work has appeared in numerous journals and books in the past, but recently she has been working on her first book project. She is co-editor, along with Dr. Aparajita Nanda, of God Is Change. Religious Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler. The book will be out next month and published by Temple University Press. She explained, “It is an edited collection that explores how Octavia E. Butler creates and uses religion in her novels to critique the racial, class, and gendered imbalances in our worlds.”

Turning a Hobby into a Career: John’s Geology Journey

John Morettini ’90

The Sisters of Mercy are committed to five “critical concerns”: Earth, Immigration, Nonviolence, Racism, and Women. Much of Mercyhurst Prep’s exploration of Catholic social teaching is rooted in these concerns, and many of our alumni leave the halls of MPS living out their lives with a continuing focus on them. John Morettini ’90 has made a career around the critical concern Earth.

John had always been interested in rocks and fossils as a child, like most young boys, but as he grew, so did that interest. On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helen erupted, and he was hooked. From then on, he learned as much as he could about geology. John took every science class that he could at MPS and even took a single trimester geology course with Mr. Rohrbach, who, he said, was a huge inspiration. When he took that geology course at MPS, that is when he realized this could be more than just a hobby for him.

Millcreek Dump Site trench

After his day at MPS, John received his bachelor’s in geology from Thiel College, where he is now an adjunct professor teaching geology courses in the Environmental Science Department. Out of school, he worked as a geologist for two geo-technical firms that dealt with large-scale construction projects, and the pride of his young career was performing the soil analysis for the Cleveland Browns FirstEnergy Stadium. He went back to school to receive his Master’s from Emporia State University in Kansas, and, along with teaching at Thiel, he now works for the PA Department of Environmental Protection. John is a licensed professional geologist and has worked for DEP for a little over twenty years. He is the only geologist assigned to the Hazardous Sites Cleanup Program (HSCA). The HSCA is the state equivalent to the US Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Program, and John has worked on both state and federal sites. Simply put, he works to provide a clean and safe environment for us all. He inspects potentially contaminated sites to find the contamination and determine what media needs to be sampled. After sampling and confirming the contamination, he designs a plan to remove the contamination and oversees that removal. We are only scratching the service of what John does, but it’s evident that he is doing some pretty incredible things for our world.

Millcreek Treatment Plant

John shared with us about some of his most interesting, multimillion, decade-long projects.

“The Millcreek Dump Site is a covered landfill in Millcreek Township. The landfill has contaminated the groundwater, so a treatment plant was built to clean it. We operate the treatment plant that collects water out of buried trenches, treats the contaminated water in multiple processes, and discharges the clean water into Marshall Run and eventually Lake Erie. The treatment plant has been in operation for almost 30 years and continues to clean the groundwater to state and federal standards.

“The New Castle Development Corporation is a 500-acre site that was used for manufacturing explosives from the late 1800s until 1972. They produced trinitrotoluene (TNT) until 1928, then dynamite and nitroglycerin until 1969, and ammonium nitrate until 1972. During the investigation of the site, we had to bring in a remote control drilling rig due to encountering explosives in the soils. We have worked with the property owners and the responsible parties to clean up the property, and we continue to work on cleaning additional areas. Now, part of the property is used by the Hickory Run Energy Plant, one of the largest gas-fired electric plants in America, along with a producing natural gas well, and a small industrial complex for businesses.

Remacor magnesium waste drums

“Berlin Metals is an old metal plating facility in Punxsutawney. During an inspection of the facility, I found (after sampling) hexavalent chromium seeping through the wall in a partial basement. We drilled through the floor of the facility to sample the soils beneath the building and found mass contamination from the metal plating operations. The best option for the safety of the public was to tear down the dilapidated building and remove all of the contaminated soils beneath it. When finished, we had clean property.

“The Saegertown Industrial Area is an industrial park that consisted of four companies. These companies contaminated the groundwater with Volatile Organic Carbon Compounds (VOC’s). We are cleaning the groundwater with the use of bio-remediation. There are microbes in the groundwater that break down the VOC’s into non-hazardous chemicals. We injected molasses into the groundwater to help feed the microbes and make them multiply to deal with the contamination. It has protected French Creek, which runs next to the property, and the Borough of Saegertown was able to purchase part of the property and install two public water supply wells.

Remacor drums repacked for recycling

“Remacor is a metal recycling facility in the town of West Pittsburg that is out of business. When the facility stopped operating, the owner kept taking magnesium waste and stockpiled it on the property. In total, there were over 11 million pounds of magnesium. The problem with magnesium is that as the drums fail and the magnesium is exposed to water, it ignites very violently. While working there, we had to carry thermal cameras with us to see if any drums or piles were heating up. We ended up repacking all of the magnesium into new drums and shipped it off to operational recycling facilities.”

From Commercials to Movies to Music Videos, Kendall Does It All!

My name is Kendall Stetson, and I graduated from MPS in 2010.

After graduating, I attended The University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and graduated in 2014 with a degree in Communications Studies. During my junior year of college, I landed an internship working in Extras Casting on the Nicholas Sparks movie, Safe Haven. I have been working in the film industry ever since. A few notable feature films and TV shows I have been a part of include The Longest Ride (20th Century Fox, Feature Film), Good Behavior (TNT, TV Series), The Sinner (TNT, TV Series), Under the Dome (CBS TV Series), and SIX (A&E/The History Channel, TV Series).

After a few years of freelancing on different shows, I took a job with a commercial production company, Lighthouse Films. As their Production Supervisor, I work in all stages of our productions, from development through editorial. Depending on the nature of our shoots, I help schedule, maintain budgets, hire crew, and work with our clients to ensure successful shoots. Over the summer, I worked on a commercial for the HGTV Urban Oasis Home Giveaway in Portland, Maine, and, because of Covid-19, we had to have a super small crew, so the producers ended up making me the talent for a Duluth Trading Company campaign.

Recently our company produced a music video for Kygo’s latest remix of the 1979 hit by Donna Summer, “Hot Stuff.” The video starred Madelyn Cline and Chase Stokes from the Netflix hit TV series, Outer Banks. I played a large role in this project from start to finish. One of the biggest challenges of the entire project was handling Covid-19. We were one of the first productions in our region to start filming in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The safety of the cast and crew was our top priority. We had to figure out how to balance a tight filming schedule with protocols that were rapidly shifting within our industry. As you can imagine, this was no small feat. We went through great lengths to source personal protective equipment (PPE) for everyone, hired a doctor to advise on safety protocols on set, and tested each crew member three different times before we started shooting.

Additionally, our crew size was scaled down to be much smaller than what it would typically be on a project like this. That meant each crew member had to wear multiple hats. For me, this meant completing my regular duties plus helping with wardrobe, hair and makeup, and art, taking behind-the-scenes photos, and even acting as a stand-in for Maddie while the crew set up each shot. After we wrapped filming, I gave creative feedback to the editors and helped develop marketing with the artists’ label to help promote the track release.

Overall, it was an incredibly fun and rewarding experience and a great reminder of why I love working in the film industry!

Libby Federici ’15

Mercyhurst Prep has many students who go on to Ivy League universities and the MPS Class of 2015 is a wonderful example of that. This class, as a whole, is excelling and doing many wonderful things for this world. The Class of 2015 has four students who graduated from or are currently studying at Ivy League schools. Libby Federici graduated from Harvard University, and Dan Fitzgerald graduated from Brown University this past May, both virtually, of course. Matt Benczkowski and Amanda Simmons are both working towards their master’s, Matt at Yale University and Amanda at Columbia University.

Libby received her master’s degree in Arts in Education from Harvard. She said she was lucky to be advised by some amazing art educators and gain the teaching experience she did while at Harvard. She was a graduate student teacher at the Harvard Art Museum, and she also worked with high school teachers in the area to create in-gallery lessons for students. She is currently living and working in downtown Boston in a Catholic Worker House, through an organization called Haley House. Libby, along with 9 other housemates, runs a soup kitchen and other food ministries out of the first floor of the house. She said, “I can very clearly trace my alignment with the Catholic Worker and my interest in visual art, religion, and social justice to my time at MPS.”

Daniel Fitzgerald ’15

Dan received a Master of Public Affairs dgree with a specialization in data-driven public policy from Brown. As part of his master’s program, he worked as a graduate public policy consultant at Deloitte Belgium. While there, his job was mainly to design policy strategy for the European Union. He contributed to a couple projects, which involved modernizing government and making them more efficient via better data practices. Unfortunately, his time in Belgium was cut short due to COVID-19, but he was able to gain wonderful experience in the time he did spend working there. Dan now works for a federal government consulting firm in DC.

Matt Benczkowski ’15

Matt is starting the final year of his Master of Public Health program in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases with a concentration in Global Health at Yale. He spent the first year of his program working to research, design, and get international approval for his own epidemiological study so that he can study the entanglement of war and infectious disease. He is also working on a project to standardize the identification of parasite strains using molecular biology techniques. His focus is on the parasitic disease, Leishmaniasis in Southwestern Colombia. He was awarded three research fellowships for this past summer to help fund these projects: The Wilbur G Downs Fellowship for International Health, the Jan A.J. Stolwijk Fellowship for Environmental Health, and the Yale Professional Student Medical Research Fellowship. Although Matt could not travel to Colombia as he’d hoped, he has been able to work remotely with CIDEIM, a WHO collaborating center, and in the upcoming school year, he will begin working with Yale’s Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine.

Amanda Simmons ’15

Amanda is studying for her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, in Secondary Science Education. She began taking classes online this summer, a semester early thanks to COVID-19. Although beginning early means she will finish sooner, it also means she will be working remote for most of her studies and will only be on campus for one semester. Amanda keeps a positive attitude about studying through this pandemic saying, “I’m actually glad to be taking education classes during the pandemic because there are so many big questions about the future of education that are being discussed right now.” She will graduate in May of 2021 and plans to teach biology at an urban public high school in NYC. She is grateful for her teachers at MPS who taught her the value of a good education, and she is excited by the opportunity she will have to positively impact her future students and inspire them like she was inspired by her teachers at MPS.

Laurie Anderson Glass ’00

Laurie Anderson Glass ’00 received her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree this past January from Walden University. She is one of only one percent of nurses in the United State who have their doctoral degree and the only nurse in UPMC Hamot’s NICU with this degree.

Laurie works in Magee-Women’s, UPMC Hamot’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). She has worked in the NICU for 10 years now. She said that she always knew that she wanted a career where she could work with babies because babies are her passion. When she was a senior at Mercyhurst Prep, she did an internship in a daycare. While she enjoyed her internship, she realized she wanted to get into nursing. She received her Bachelor of Nursing degree from Case Western University and became a NICU nurse. She was inspired to get her master’s degree to become a nurse practitioner, which she received from Wayne State University. But she wasn’t done quite yet. She feels that MPS inspired her to be a life-long learner and continue to learn and grow in order to help society in any way she can.

Laurie Anderson Glass ’00

She decided to pursue her doctoral degree so that she could expand on her knowledge and try to answer the questions in practice that are out there that she felt could be answered a better way. She knew this would not be easy since she was working full time all while raising four boys. She received a scholarship from the Hamot Health Foundation that helped her pursue this degree, and with the support from her family, friends, and coworkers, she was able to get through it. She said that it was a lot of work, but it was well worth it.

She completed her dissertation on incubator humidity and completed a systematic review of evidence in order to come up with what is best for the baby. She recently found out that part of her dissertation is going to be published in the journal, Advances in Neonatal Care. She hopes that through sharing her knowledge she will not only help lead the way in evidence practice at Hamot but also have an even larger impact on society.

Laurie loves her job and is incredibly passionate about what she does. Her advice to others is to find what you’re passionate about because it’s easier to learn and work when you are doing something you love.