Past RJP Fellows
2025-2026 Cohort
Alan Blanco, Assistant Professor, Film and Television
My goal for the Research Jumpstart Program is to develop the screenplay for “Thirty Pieces Eight,” a period drama depicting the first Catholic Mass in the Philippines through the eyes of indigenous peoples. I’m working to translate the script into classical Cebuano using period-specific language reconstruction, requiring extensive collaboration with scholars to ensure historical accuracy in every aspect of the narrative. Through the RJP’s coaching support, I aim to apply cultural introspection and academic rigor to this creative work to better understand my own Filipino-American heritage and the colonial forces that shaped modern Philippine identity.
Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, Associate Professor, History
My goals for the program are to complete one paper in which I propose the idea of constitutionalism as a key concept for the study of the intellectual history of Africa. This is to be submitted to the “Key Concepts” series published by the journal African Studies Review. In addition, I plan to prepare a book proposal for a monograph entitled “Constituting the Nation: An Intellectual history of Constitutionalism in the Gold Coast.”
Jaclyn Catalano, Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Research Jumpstart program will support me in preparing a peer-reviewed journal article based on data collected by Montclair undergraduate students. Additionally, it will help me develop a grant proposal to fund the next phase of my research. My work focuses on a biological molecule that may serve as a potential target for cancer therapies.
Minkyung Choi, Assistant Professor, Teaching and Learning
My goal for the Research Jumpstart Program is to complete two articles and submit them to peer-reviewed journals. Additionally, I would like to begin to develop a book proposal. I am hoping to use this program to bring together my projects to ask larger questions about narrative research, specifically how teachers and students experience literacy moments. I’ve been interested in the tensions that arise in this process for a while, and I hope to use this opportunity to craft a more cohesive scholarly agenda around these questions.
Lauren Covey, Assistant Professor, Linguistics
My primary goal for the RJP centers on completing several in-progress manuscripts of research projects. Specifically, my journal articles will report data from psycholinguistic experiments with monolinguals and bilinguals, focusing on language comprehension in both populations. By working with a writing coach, I aim to establish a productive pipeline of publishing peer-reviewed work in my field while also balancing ongoing data collection in the Experimental Linguistics Lab.
Larissa Goulart da Silva, Assistant Professor, Linguistics
My goal for the Research Jumpstart Program is to write and publish two studies about the use of GenAI in Undergraduate Writing. My primary area of research is register variation in undergraduate student writing, with a focus on how students’ grammatical and lexical choices vary across assignment types and disciplines. However, the public release of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude has significantly impacted my field. As students might turn to AI for writing assignments, foundational assumptions about student writing are being challenged. For my RJP, I will work in two papers about this topic. The first study examines students’ perceptions of the linguistic differences between AI and human writing, and the second study examines which lexico-grammatical features differ between AI vs. student writing across disciplines.
Marylou Naumoff, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies
I am a rhetorical scholar interested in constructions of American identity and our telling and reimagining of American mythos. My recent work has focused on horror texts as a site of contestation, negotiation, and the (re)invention of race, gender, and sexuality in the United
States. I have three writing projects in various stages of development that I hope to complete and submit for publication to peer-reviewed journals. In addition to my single-authored work, I will be contributing to three co-authored journal submissions. Finally, I have a forthcoming book chapter that I will be seeing through the revise and resubmit process.
My goals for joining the Research Jumpstart Project (RJP) program are to advance and refine my scholarly works in progress. Specifically, I aim to: 1) strengthen the clarity and focus of my research proposal, 2) incorporate targeted feedback to enhance my literature review, and 3) develop a structured and sustainable writing plan to support ongoing productivity.
Yunsen Wang, Assistant Professor, Accounting
Through the Research Jumpstart Program, I aim to strengthen my academic writing and research pipeline, with a focus on two papers targeting top-tier, leading peer-reviewed journal submission. One paper, “The Lack of Informativeness of Auditors’ Going Concern Opinion in Predicting Bankruptcy,” reevaluates the predictive value of auditors’ opinions using machine learning. The second, “Don’t Drop the Data: Using Machine Learning to Handle Missing Values for Fraud Prediction,” explores effective imputation methods to address missing data in fraud detection research. Both projects aim to advance the intersection of auditing, data analytics, and financial reporting.
John Paul Wilson, Associate Professor, Psychology
I research biases in person perception. Focusing on factors like race and facial trustworthiness, I examine how shallow impressions of others can have meaningful (and often negative) impacts on their life outcomes. My goal for this program is to write new manuscripts that can serve as the basis of my next grant proposal.