Sabbatical Summaries | Provost's Office

Dr. Carrie Bredow spent her ’25–26 sabbatical working on three different manuscripts examining:

The predictive validity of people’s a priori mate preferences (preferences stated prior to relationship formation) for their future partner choice, relationship quality and dissolution risk (2 papers)
The extent to which individuals desire and select partners who resemble their same- or different-sex parents

In addition to these projects, Dr. Bredow began working on a systematic review of the theory and literature linking parental traits to (adult) children’s partnering behavior, presented her research at academic conferences in Chicago, Illinois, and Glasgow, Scotland, and mentored two research students on ongoing projects. She also attended the NetVUE Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Discernment (Indianapolis, Indiana) and revamped one of her courses to include new vocational elements.

Personally, Dr. Bredow spent time reading, traveled to New Zealand and Costa Rica with her family, and began training to run her first marathon in Milwaukee this October!

The goal for Dr. Burnatowska-Hledin’s sabbatical was to complete and publish several research
projects and to advance her knowledge and skills in the field of modern cell biology/biochemistry. These activities help her to better serve and educate students coming to Hope College and to prepare them for careers after graduation. During this sabbatical, she completed work that resulted in two manuscripts; one has been published and the second one is in revision/review. Both manuscripts have numerous Hope students as co-authors.

Dr. Burnatowska-Hledin next project was to characterize the monoclonal antibody her lab generated against VACM-1/CUL5 gene. This project has a potential for commercialization, as they have been approached by a large company to market it.

The third project in her lab focused on continuing to characterize a novel ligand/peptide for VACM-1/CUL5. Full characterization of this peptide and identification of pathways that it regulates could lead to the development of new endothelium-specific therapeutic strategies for heart diseases. This work will provide an excellent opportunity for undergraduate students to get excited about careers in sciences, to get first-hand experience in basic scientific research and to be exposed to the latest technologies in science that may lead to a successful patent application. Importantly, while on sabbatical leave, she continued to mentor a student who worked on his research project.

Finally, although on a sabbatical leave, she spent the time writing letters of recommendations for students applying to medical schools to graduate schools.

Dr. Flora Chuang relocated to downtown Chicago during her sabbatical leave. She accepted an invitation to serve on the reviewing committee for the Fulbright program, and submitted an application for the Luce-ASIANetwork Summer Institute for Faculty. Although she was off campus, she continued to recruit for Hope College and held advising meetings online with students during Hope’s advising and registration weeks. Her application for a 100-level philosophical perspective course has been approved by the General Education Council. The approval of this course will strengthen the curriculum of the new Anchor Plan.

Dr. Jayson Dibble was grateful to use the spring semester to complete two major projects. The first project involved a concept called parasocial interactions. That’s the sensation a viewer gets, when a television personality looks into the camera and speaks to the viewer, that the personality is aware of the viewer and is reading and reacting to the viewer in the moment even though they really aren’t. Two experiments showed that when this sensation is stronger, viewers find the televised personality to be more persuasive. The findings help professionals who design broadcast-based public interest messages, such as public safety announcements (PSAs).

The second project extended Dr. Dibble’s longstanding research program on breaking bad news. Dr. Dibble meta-analyzed more than 40 experiments that demonstrated people in general hesitate to transmit bad news relative to good news. Despite what people often give as their reasons — they'll say they're worried about hurting the recipient of the bad news — the meta-analysis suggested people hesitate more because they're afraid to look bad. In other words, Don't kill the messenger looms larger in the news giver’s mind. Both projects resulted in papers that are currently under review by communication journals.

Dr. Sarah Estelle made significant progress on a book manuscript applying economic ideas to the Christian virtue of love for Baker Academic. If we understand the love of neighbor as willing the good of another, then love requires a hefty dose of prudence. Prudence — not to be confused with hesitancy or stinginess — is the virtue that we embody when we see the world as it is and respond accordingly. Economics is a discipline dedicated to understanding the causes and the consequences of human action within the context of a created world where resources are limited relative to all the good things we can aspire to do. Recognizing these limitations, but also appreciating human potential, economics is a tool that can be readily employed in prudential, another’s-good-seeking action.

Dr. Estelle’s sabbatical year, intentionally predominated by solitary reading and writing in her Van Zoeren office, was helpfully peppered with opportunities for soliciting feedback from colleagues from many disciplines. She presented some of the main ideas of her project off campus, too, including a short-term fellowship at the American Institute for Economic Research in the Berkshires last October and at Asbury University in April, where she served as the keynote speaker for the annual SEARCH Symposium.

Dr. Tori Longfield spent her sabbatical time taking the next steps from her dissertation research on digital competency skill framework development to understanding the development of digital competency skills of Hope College undergraduate students. During the spring semester she spent her time writing and submitting to peer-reviewed journals three different articles based on her dissertation research, collecting data from Hope College students on their digital competency skill development, and writing and submitting two grants for the center for teaching and learning on faculty teaching development.

Jasmine Mejia completed Phase Three of her movement research project, Rhythmic Motion in Fortuity, during her sabbatical supported by the Towsley Research Scholars Fellowship. Throughout the semester, she explored the connections between sound, movement and fortuity using looping techniques and chance procedures. Her work culminated in Bremen, Germany, where she collaborated with artists Aaron Samuel Davis and Yasmin Shônmann. During her residence, they developed a multi-layered soundscape to accompany a dance work performed by four Hope College students, in which each performance evolves uniquely in real time. The creative team also developed a semi-structured choreographic framework and audience participation guidelines for the immersive, interactive performance that will premiere at Hope on August 21–22, 2026.

Three graduating classes of pre-health students at Hope took a survey once a year with questions that measured empathy, moral foundations, religiosity, politics and mental/physical health. Are there groups of students who have similar response patterns to these survey questions? Do individual students change their response patterns from one year to the next? Are there trends in how students change their responses over their four years at Hope? The research team (Dr. Aaron Franzen, Dr. Mark Pearson and Dr. Paul Pearson) worked with summer research students for two years to address these questions. In his sabbatical, Dr. Pearson extended their work to account for missing data, the nested (or multilevel) structure in their data, and other variables they measured (covariates) that may have predictive power.

Dr. Pearson used multilevel latent transition analysis (LTA), which both defines latent (or hidden) states characterized by similar response patterns to the survey questions, and determines whether each student changes latent states from one year to the next. The data were cleaned, explored for patterns of missingness, and missing data were imputed. Multilevel latent transition analysis was achieved using R software by a combination of multilevel latent class analysis to define latent states for each “wave” (i.e., year in college), taking into account the multilevel structure defined by “cohort” (i.e., graduating class), and using multinomial logistic regression to determine transition probabilities between waves. The results will be submitted in fall 2026 for publication in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

Dr. Matthew Smith spent nine months working on a materials research and development project at Gentex Corporation. He gained experience in several new materials research areas and enjoyed connecting with local engineers and scientists working in industry. He also published a peer reviewed conference proceedings, which he presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers IMECE conference last November. Following his experience at Gentex, he pursued research on how variations in temperature field affect the stability of arch structures. He spent the summer working on this project with two undergraduate Hope students and two local high school students.

Traci Smith spent her spring semester sabbatical focusing on three main areas:
universal design of learning; diversity, equity and inclusion; and the of use AI on college campuses.

She completed a nine-week course in universal course design for post-secondary education and earned her credential in “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Higher Education”. She has since joined a UDL learning community to stay up to date on developments in UDL in higher learning and plans to use what she learned from the course and the learning community in her own classes. Additionally, Traci met with the representatives for the disability and accessibility resources offices for multiple college campus. These conversations were helpful for using the UDL framework to think about how to improve accessibility for all students in a given classroom setting.

On the DEI front, Traci attended multiple lectures and events that were sponsored by CDI and participated in a racial healing circle. She also took part in a multi-day training workshop known as CQ (Cultural Intelligence) Train the Trainers and is now a Hope College CQ Certified Facilitator. Unfortunately, Traci was not able to participate in other plans she had for her sabbatical due the change in climate that has taken place across the country centered on DEI.

Finally, Traci took time to learn what she could about AI use on college campuses. She attended multiple events held at Hope centered on AI use in the classroom. She also attended five months of AI Ready webinars that were made available due to a partnership with the GLCA. The material presented in the webinars was challenging, but Traci was able to learn a great deal and develop plans for how she will be using AI in her own classes.

Dr. Rachel Spooner’s sabbatical was devoted to building the empirical foundation for her book, The Polarization of Justice: How the Supreme Court Became a Partisan Battleground, which argues that the Republican Party’s reshaping of the federal judiciary reflects a disciplined, multi-decade electoral strategy. She assembled and coded an extensive original database of national party platforms dating to the nineteenth century, presidential addresses and debate transcripts, and judicial interest group activity, all coded for attention to and treatment of the federal courts. Because this work sits squarely at the intersection of content analysis and automation, methodology became a project in its own right: she is completing two chapters for Sage on the use of AI in research, addressing how computational tools extend content analysis across large corpora and where human validation remains essential. The semester also produced a collaborative working paper on tonal and language shifts in Supreme Court opinions with colleagues at the University of Georgia, Michigan State University, North Carolina State University and the University of Mississippi, and a new project on biblical conceptions of justice that she expects to submit this summer.

The full report will follow in early September.

Dr. Gloria Tseng traveled to Taiwan twice to visit family and to continue her work on a documentary project on the Atayal people of Taiwan, visiting Atayal churches, attending an exhibit by Atayal artist Anli Genu, and renewing and building new connections with Atayal communities. She wrote several grant proposals to seek funding for the project.

She presented a paper at the 2026 Yale-Edinburgh Annual Meeting titled “The Bible, Modern Media, and the Ancient Art of Storytelling: A Preliminary Study of Zeng Yangqing’s The Bible has no secrets” and completed an article by the same title, expanding her research on Chinese Christianity from mainland China into the contemporary Chinese-speaking world. As part of her work on the history of Christianity in China, she discovered a contemporary Christian poet and novelist Shi Wei, whose work she intends to explore and incorporate into this ongoing project.

Last but not least, she ventured outside the field of history and translated a short musical from Chinese into English, titled I with Him and He with Me: Revelation 3.20.

Professional highlights from Dr. Daniel Woolsey’s semester sabbatical include:

Serving as vice president for the Christian Association of World Languages, organizing the CAWL annual conference at Pepperdine University in March, and presenting the paper “Programmatic JEDI: Woke agenda or Christian mission?”
Serving as an external reviewer for Wheaton College’s Department of Modern & Classical Languages in February and for Andrews University’s Department of International Languages & Global Studies in April
Planning and leading the Hope College Camino de Santiago program in May

Personal highlights include:

A Harry-Potter-themed trip to London in February with his wife and daughter
Visiting his 84-year-old father in Oregon in April
Walking the Camino with Hope students in May
Attending a FIFA World Cup game in Seattle with his brother and son in June