In Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, Assistant Professor of History Bench Ansfield examines what ignited the 1970s landlord arson wave in the Bronx and other U.S. cities.
According to The New York Times, which named the work one of its 100 Notable Books of 2025, “Deeply researched and masterfully told, Born in Flames is a definitive account of how race, risk and exploitative real estate have shaped the American city.”
Led by Laura H. Carnell Professor of Biology S. Blair Hedges, researchers in Temple’s College of Science and Technology identified 35 new species of forest lizards on Caribbean islands. Of the new species that have been discovered, more than half of them are at risk of extinction. Some may even already be extinct.
“They’re disappearing, and they live in the same habitat as many other species, so it’s kind of like a canary in a coal mine,” Hedges explains in an interview with E&E News by Politico. “That indicates that there’s trouble with the environment across many islands.”
As an R1 institution, Temple cultivates the highest level of university research activity, and among Temple’s faculty you’ll find some of the most impactful researchers in their fields.
Featured on Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list are three Temple researchers: Gerard Criner, chair and professor of thoracic medicine and surgery and director of the Temple Lung Center at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine;
Sudhir Kumar, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Biology and director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGem) at the College of Science and Technology; and Sergei Pond, professor of biology in the College of Science and Technology. Glen Stecher, a senior programmer at iGem, was also recognized on the list.
The global data and analytics company compiles an annual list of researchers who’ve authored multiple research papers that rank in the top 1% of citations for their field and publication year.
It has been proven time and time again that youth sports participation helps develop leadership skills and qualities in young people. But since leadership traits are stereotypically associated with masculinity, what does this mean as it relates to young women athletes and their takeaways from youth sports?
Associate professors Elizabeth Taylor and Gareth Jones of Temple’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management (STHM) studied the impact sports participation has on these female athletes. They found that female athletes are comfortable displaying leadership in some settings but not others.
“They felt like they could be aggressive,” Taylor told WHYY. “They could be independent, but when we asked about how do you show leadership in the classroom, or how do you show leadership on the job … They talked about how they felt the need to kind of work harder, while also softening those agentic traits.”
Ally Micek, FOX ’19, competed as a member of Temple’s women’s fencing team.
A collaborative effort between Temple Athletics and STHM, the Athletic Innovation, Research and Education (AIRE) Lab is rethinking how academic research can be used to support athletic departments and student-athletes. Its mission is to drive innovation in the management of athletic programs and college athlete development.
Assistant Professor Jonathan Howe and Associate Professor Elizabeth Taylor from STHM serve as co-directors of the lab and hope to integrate applicable academic research that is happening at Temple and STHM directly into Temple Athletics, which will ultimately help optimize the department and lead to a better experience for Temple’s student-athletes.
“For me, the AIRE Lab allows us to break down some of the long-standing barriers we’ve had at the higher education level,” Howe told Inside Higher Ed.
“Our hope is that this study can help reduce barriers and that these individuals will have more independent forms of transportation so that they can live independently and engage with their communities.”
—Beth Pfeiffer, health and rehabilitation sciences professor in the Barnett College of Public Health, told The Philadelphia Inquirer upon receiving a $7.5 million grant from the Patient-centered Outcomes Research Institute to compare travel training approaches for helping young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn to use public transportation.
