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On May 15, 2022, Archbishop-Metropolitan Borys Gudziak will receive an honorary degree and serve as the principal commencement speaker at the University of Notre Dame’s 177th Commencement Ceremony.��

Archbishop Gudziak currently serves as the Metropolitan-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy in Philadelphia and the head of the Department of External Church Relations. He left Ukraine for Philadelphia shortly before the war began and moved his offices from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., to help communicate the truth of what is happening in the conflict to political leaders and others.

He spoke with the to discuss the harsh realities facing the Ukrainian people, and how their faith and strength of character have already given them the moral victory during the Russian invasion.

“In the last 250 years, every time there’s been a Russian occupation of part of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Catholic Church ministers, the Church gets strangled. It can take a year or two or sometimes a decade or two decades, but sooner or later, the Church gets strangled and even rendered illegal.”

Though Archbishop Gudziak said it felt like the Russians were “extinguishing” the Church as it shrunk from 3,000 priests and almost 4 million faithful in 1939 to 300 priests in 1985, he said it was the largest illegal church in the world.

In 2022, the Church has recovered.

“Now we’re back at 3,000 priests,” Archbishop Gudziak said. “We have 800 seminarians for the global community of Ukrainian Catholics. This is a sign of miracles, of the power of prayer, of the grace that comes from the sacrifice of people who give their lives for the ultimate love.”

Ukrainian Catholicism is often referred to as a “Church of Martyrs,” as it was illegal from 1946 to 1989 in the Soviet Union.

Archbishop Gudziak became a seminarian in the Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1980.

“It was like becoming a seminarian for a diocese on Mars,” he said. “You couldn’t go there.”

In 1992, after receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and biology from Syracuse University, a theology degree after studying in Rome at Holy Sofia College and the Pontifical Urban University, and his doctorate in Slavic and Byzantine cultural history from Harvard University, Archbishop Gudziak moved to Ukraine where he founded the Institute of Church History in Lviv.

While there, the archbishop was visited by his close friend Henri Nouwen twice.

Nouwen was a Dutch-born Catholic priest, professor, psychologist and prolific writer. He taught psychology at the University of Notre Dame and pastoral theology at the Divinity 91��Ƶs of Yale and Harvard before leaving academia to become the pastor at L’Arche Daybreak, a community for people with intellectual disabilities.

That close friendship partially inspired Archbishop Gudziak to place two M’s — for the martyrs and the marginalized — at the heart of Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), where he serves as organizer and president.

“The martyrs were those in the 20th century who carried the faith through the totalitarian tunnel,” he said. “They met the greatest challenges of the 20th century, which was the totalitarian attempt to crush the human dignity of the person.”

UCU embarked on an oral history project to capture the stories of those martyrs.��

“We thought if we can look closely at that, we can learn how to face challenges in the 21st century,” he said.

UCU is also built upon the pillar of the marginalized, with the creation of the on the UCU campus, a place where people with developmental disabilities and their families receive spiritual support and share their lives with students.

“They live in the dormitories, they help in the cafeteria. They helped in my office when I was a rector and president of the university, “Archbishop Gudziak said. “They’re part of our community and I think it’s the first university in history that has placed the mentally handicapped at the heart of the identity of the university. Not as a social project, but at the heart of the identity.

He considers the developmentally disabled to be “tutors of human relations at the university.”

“Our friends with special needs help build trust. They break down those walls and facades and help us take down our masks,” he said.

While UCU is academically competitive, the inclusion of the Emmaus Center ensures that the competition is “not against the Beatitudes.”

“It’s a competition to build each other up, not bring each other down,” the archbishop pointed out.

That’s why the Russian invasion of Ukraine is so disheartening, he said.��

“In light of that Gospel vision, this war is just complete devastation because it’s killing, it’s marauding, it’s destroying.”

He likened the steadfastness and resilience of the Ukrainian people to those marginalized who are placed at the center of UCU.��

“The Ukrainians right now are tutors of human relationships for the world,” he said.

“That’s why during this crisis we as a church in North America are asking people to do three things: to pray, because prayer moves mountains; to be well informed; and to help where they can.”

As he explained the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Archbishop Gudziak highlighted the peacefulness of the Ukrainian people.

“There were 15 million people killed through the world wars and the totalitarian regimes, of course, first and foremost the Soviets, the communists, but also the Nazis,” Archbishop Gudziak said. “[The Ukrainian] people didn’t want to go back to that totalitarianism. They wanted democracy. They wanted transparency.”

In 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal after the United States and Russia. In 1994, it unilaterally became the first country to disarm that nuclear arsenal.

Archbishop Gudziak said that he believes the true reason for the Russian invasion is not the threat of NATO, or the fear of an uprising of the Ukrainian people.��

“[Ukraine] had a very dangerous disease for Russia — the virus of democracy,” he said.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has had a long-term desire to quash democracy in Ukraine. To quash that virus of freedom, and to actually reconquer the country for the new Russian empire. We’re seeing the aggressive, brutal manner in which he’s trying to do it right now.”

Archbishop Gudziak is in contact with many people across Ukraine, including the bishops still on the ground in cities providing prayer and humanitarian aid, citizens, and UCU students and relatives.

“Yes, Ukrainians are shaken, but most of us when we call Ukraine are really inspired by the fortitude of the people.”

He cites the civilian volunteers and paramilitary groups who have grown Ukraine’s troops from 150,000 to more than 200,000, according to reports from Ukrainian officials.

“People are defending the country,” he said, which draws people together and provides inspiration to the rest of the world.

“In the 21st century, we live in a time of great subjectivism, of great deconstruction. We’re kind of a confused lot,” he said. “We question many of the things that have been fundamental for society and civilization for centuries and this witness is giving great clarity.��

“There’s something special when someone gives their life for their friends. Jesus calls it the greatest love.”

Still, even if Ukraine is winning the war morally, Russia seeks to sow discontent across the world and the humanitarian crisis caused by this invasion could help its cause. Already more than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, according to Bloomberg. That’s close to 10 percent of the population. Archbishop Gudziak said the number could continue to climb closer to 10 million as the war continues and more cities are destroyed.

“It’s destabilizing,” Archbishop Gudziak said. “When 1 million Syrians came into Germany, it shook up society and the political system. If 10 million people pour into the European Union, the European Union will have great problems and that’s what Russia wants.”

The archbishop reiterated the need for prayer, information and support for the Ukrainian people.

“The world’s focus on Ukraine is going to change, but trauma has already been inflicted and might get much much worse,” he said. “These people are going to need the support of the world for a long time.”

He encourages the spread of truthful information to combat the vast amount of disinformation and misinformation, especially in global politics, that is backed by Russian influence and funding.

“This is a global issue, and Ukrainians are the ones who are confronting it and they’re paying the dearest price for it,” he said. “I think they deserve the support of the world for a long time to come in the future.

Hurtling down a sheet of ice at over 80 mph. Spinning 6 revolutions per second 24 inches in the air and landing on a blade going 15 mph. Doing a 1440 rotation flip back-to-back on a half-pipe. Every four years, the world hunkers down to watch the best athletes complete some near humanly-impossible feats in cold-weather sports at the Winter Olympics.��

For assistant professor of anthropology , the Winter Olympics hold more than a personal fascination, however. She’s also the director of the Notre Dame Human Energetics Laboratory and her research explores the physiological and behavioral mechanisms necessary to cope with and adapt to extreme climates and physical activity.

The Olympics allow us to see how hard or fast people can push their bodies.

“We all relish in, I think, if not just witnessing what our human bodies - which we sometimes consider to be frail and weak - what we’re actually capable of,” Ocobock said. “The strength, and the speed, and the power, and the coordination and all of that. It’s amazing to see on display.”

They’ve come a long way, too, in terms of gender representation, but Ocobock said that both Games and exercise physiological research have a ways to go.

“Only in 2014, I believe, was the first time that women had ski jumping competitions in the Olympics,” she said. “When you hear the president of the International Ski Jumping Federation say, ‘Well it just doesn’t make sense medically for women to be doing that,’ you take this huge step back and just say, ‘Woah, woah, whoa, what are you basing this on?’”

Often, the answer is not much. There aren’t as many studies examining female athletes as there are for male athletes. And, Ocobock said, fewer females actually conduct exercise physiology research, so the questions about female physiology are often left unasked.����

One question she’d like an answer to is why some female athletes are prevented from competing when they have higher levels of natural testosterone. The rules in question primarily affect Track and Field athletes in the Summer Olympics, but, Ocobock said, they’re based on one study that has since been retracted.

“Even if you look at the study, it doesn’t say what the International Olympic Committee says,” she said. “You don’t see people regulating Michael Phelps because he doesn’t produce lactic acid the way the rest of us do. You only see it among women, and it ends up actually disproportionately harming women from the global south because they have greater representation in those sports that are actually being policed for testosterone.”

Testosterone is naturally present in both males and females, as is estrogen, she said, and both are needed to function properly. And both can provide some seeming “perks” to those who have it in higher amounts.

For example, females might actually have an advantage for long endurance sports like marathons and ultra-marathons because they tend to have more estrogen receptors on their muscles than males do. Estrogen, it turns out, is more just a reproductive hormone, it’s important in the metabolism of glucose.

“This is actually something we see in endurance trained males, as well,” she said. “There is a higher number of estrogen receptors on their muscles than non-endurance trained males. So it’s something that could be plastic, something that you can actually train, but we don’t know.”

Similarly, there are differences in muscle-type amongst females and males with females frequently having more slow-twitch muscle fibers which lead to endurance while males have more fast-twitch muscle fibers leading to power.��

But there’s also “middle of the road” muscle fibers, Ocobock said.��

“We are getting some evidence that middle of the road muscle fiber can be trained to behave more like slow twitch or more like fast twitch. So you can train that type of muscle fiber to behave a little bit more like one of the other,” she said. “So you can improve despite being limited in your initial starting point of slow twitch to fast twitch fibers.”

Another difference between males and females comes from a study that Ocobock herself is leading amongst reindeer herders in sub-Arctic Finland. Her research showed that the female herders she worked with had higher resting metabolic rates than the males did.

“That's unheard of,” she said.��

Resting metabolic rate is the total number of calories burned when your body is completely at rest. Most of the time, this scales with body size so smaller individuals have a lower resting metabolic rate while larger individuals have a higher one, but even when the researchers corrected for the size difference between the females and males, the females’ rate “was way higher than males were.”

Ocobock hopes to return to Finland to test the thyroid hormone levels of the reindeer herding population to test her hypothesis that climate change is affecting males and females at different rates in the country. Thyroid hormone levels directly affect metabolic rate and while the environment warms she suspects that thyroid hormone in males is decreasing leading to a lower metabolic rate.��

Thyroid hormones in females, however, also play a role in maintaining successful pregnancies, so she believes that their thyroid hormone levels aren’t falling as the climate warms like they are in males.

We only discover these differences and the implications of them through research and including more women in the discussion of exercise physiology, though, Ocobock said. And that’s something she hopes to see happen on Notre Dame’s campus.��

“Given our strong athletic tradition, we could totally have an amazing sort of kinesiology sports performance department that would not only benefit our student-athletes here on campus and our university, but could also properly inform bodies like the International Olympic Committee,” she said.

“Let’s get the science done and then make informed policy based on that.”

To read more of Ocobock’s discussion of physiological differences in male and female athletes, .

It’s one of the biggest news stories of the year: social media and the spread of misinformation. While Facebook garnered much attention over the past several weeks, the problem of misinformation goes back far longer and is far broader than many people realize.

Tim Weninger, the Frank M. Friemann Associate Professor of Engineering at Notre Dame, has been studying the spread of misinformation on social media for more than a decade.

He said he’s been “studying misinformation since before it was cool” and started researching the dawn of the Islamic State group to see how it was able to recruit so well. The answer? Coordinated efforts.

“There were entire buildings of people who weren’t fighters, they were social media information warriors,” he said of the Syria-based teams who created well-produced, compelling content inviting others to “become part of a brotherhood of fighters for this cause.”

The advertisements weren’t enough, though. Weninger said what was really interesting is that they also had large teams coordinating to like and share the content being produced to spread the message further.

“If you have a handful of people working together, you can really drive a message if you do it in the right way.”

The “right way” to get a message out is not always the right thing to do for society, though.

Weninger said that the spread of misinformation is both better and worse now. It’s better because researchers are studying this phenomenon and the social media platforms are aware and looking into it, too.��

“One of the most important things that social media companies are starting to realize is that they have an important role to play in civilized discourse, and they didn’t think they had that before,” he said. “Now they know they do have that responsibility.”

It’s worse, though, because the barrier to entry to be shady on the internet is very low and a lot more players are getting into the game, which can spread more misinformation much farther.

He shared an example of an article about Brexit written by a fake professor from a university that doesn’t exist. The authors paid for a couple hundred likes on the false article and it made it to the front page of a social media site, spurred discussion and trended for 12-14 hours.

“It’s fascinating to see that it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort — $200 to drive this message and start a conversation based upon something completely made up,” Weninger said.

In hindsight, it can be comical to see things like that happen, but the implications of it are not actually funny. But Weninger said that these bots or paid likes aren’t the biggest problem. It’s real people.

“You just need a bot to get it into the conversation, and then real people do the rest of the work,” he said. “We, the well-meaning individuals, do most of the bad work. And the reason is because we don’t read before we share.”

He said to watch out for “pink slime journalism” or digital “news” sites set up in smaller towns adjacent to larger populations that masquerade as legitimate news sources by using similar logos and URLs. These fake news sites primarily share fictional stories of vigilante justice, politics or responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Pick your topic of the day and you can make fake headlines out of this, and then because people don’t actually read, they just see the headline, these stories spread on social media like wildfire,” Weninger said. “And [the stories are] fake and made up, and by sources that look legit but don’t actually exist.

Similar things are happening with video, too. Weninger mentioned both deep and shallow fakes using an example of a video he saw of a sporting event where fans in the stands supposedly began chanting expletives about President Joe Biden.

“I was at that game, I was in the stands. That didn’t happen. There was no chant,” he said. “But what ends up happening is that people with political agendas can very easily take a chant that might have happened somewhere else and superimpose the audio onto a video of the camera panning across the crowd. … That is ridiculously simple to do. That’s a shallow thing, that’s just someone with five minutes of time.”

Sometimes, like a chant at a sporting event, the shallow fake is difficult to validate because it’s hard to find a primary source or corroborating videos. Other times, content like memes or clearly edited images make spotting a fake much easier. The problem with these fakes comes, once again, when there are coordinated efforts to drive conversation that could potentially be nefarious.

With his latest research, Weninger and others at Notre Dame are working to combat coordinated efforts to spread misinformation through media forensics.��

Media forensics uses the most advanced artificial intelligence technology to try to wade through the deluge of online images, media and video�� and look for coordinated campaigns.

“We can take a look at a picture or a video or an audio stream and we can determine not only has this been faked? Has this been altered or slowed down or spliced or cropped or whatever?” he said. “But we can also say who did it. We can say that this was done by people using what software, and usually we can say from what region of the world.”

Weninger wanted to be clear, though, that media forensics is not intended to silence the free speech of individuals, but rather will look at coordinated efforts of organizations or other countries. That, he says, could constitute “modern warfare.”

“This information operations, influence operations, is how the hearts and minds will be won in the next several decades,” he said. “And right now democracy and democratic countries are having a hard time fighting that, because we’re vulnerable to those types of things because we’re so free. And our freedom provides vulnerabilities. And so we’re trying to create these tools to level the playing field to say we’re able to call out when these countries are behaving badly.”

So how can a person make sure they contribute to the solution instead of the problem? Weninger recommended slowing down and being intentional. That means actually reading a post before liking, commenting or sharing.��

“It’s important to realize that we, collectively, and our neighbors, and our friends, and our family are all the editors of our friends’ news feeds,” Weninger said. “That’s a responsibility that we didn’t know that we had. And it’s a responsibility that we need to take seriously.

Read more about Weninger's work .

Notre Dame Stories highlights the work and knowledge of the University's faculty and students. This podcast features interviews with Notre Dame faculty members who can lend insight into some of the major national and international stories of the day, as well as pieces that show the breadth of the life and research at the University.

Listen to more episodes��.

In May, Tuan Ngo and his wife Kelsey will celebrate a very special first Mother’s Day with 4-month-old Tuanny, their miracle baby.
Last summer, Tuan, an IT support consultant for the Office of Public Affairs and Communications in Grace Hall and the offices in the Main Building, received heartbreaking news after a routine ultrasound.

“I don’t want you to be alarmed, but we’ve spotted an abnormality with his heart,” the doctor said. “It’s not in the right place.”

They were referred to the Center for High Risk Pregnancy/Maternal Fetal Medicine at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center, where another doctor told them, “Your baby boy has CDH.”

What was CDH? They’d never heard of it.

Their tiny baby had a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), or a hole in the diaphragm — the muscle that separates the chest and abdominal cavities. The hole allows organs from the abdomen to move into the chest cavity, taking up space and preventing the lungs from growing to normal size.

The National Institutes of Health estimates the incidence of the birth defect at less then 5 per 10,000 live births, with a survival rate of around 50 percent. Tuanny’s CDH was on the severe end of the spectrum, leaving him with only an estimated 10 percent chance of survival.

Devastated, the couple turned to support groups on the internet and Facebook to try to find answers and figure out how to cope with the life-changing news. They found options for doctors, but entering their care meant spending two to six months at hospitals outside of Indiana.
In the midst of the personal stress of the news, Tuan couldn’t help but think of what six months away from South Bend would mean for his job.

“I’m trying to figure out where we should go to get Tuanny the care he needed and asking myself, ‘Am I going to get enough sick days? Am I going to have a job when I get back? Am I going to get paid while I’m away?’ It was a lot to think about at one time,” he says.

Conversations with his manager, Ryan Palmer, and HR consultant Lori Maurer helped him focus on the most important thing to worry about — his family.

“Everybody was very supportive and reassuring and they told me, ‘Look, this is an extreme circumstance and we’ll make sure that everything is worked out on our end. Don’t worry about being able to support your family while you’re seeking medical care,’” Tuan recalls. “The Notre Dame family is not going to leave you. Focus on taking care of your baby.”

The University offers four weeks of 100-percent-paid parental leave. Coupled with vacation time and time available under the Family and Medical Leave Act, Tuan’s time out of the office was covered.

Just before Tuan and Kelsey set out for St. Petersburg, Florida, and the care of Dr. David Kays at the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, 
*Rev. Jim Bracke, C.S.C.,* the University’s staff chaplain, offered a Mass for the family in the chapel of Dunne Hall.

“It was very touching to us to see not just my OPAC friends, but also people from Office of General Counsel, the Office of Continuous Improvement, the President’s Office, the Executive Vice President’s Office, undergraduate admissions, HR, my OIT family — all these different departments that I have a contact with were represented,” Tuan says. “To see that chapel filled with the Notre Dame family showed us that there were people who cared deeply for us in our time of need. That emotional and spiritual support made a lot of difference in our journey.”

The couple left for St. Petersburg on the 21st of November, when Kelsey was 37 weeks pregnant. Baby Tuanny was born on December 14, with a team of doctors standing by to cut the cord. “They wheeled him past Kelsey’s hospital bed so she could touch him just for a few seconds. Then they rushed him to the ICU.” He was baptized there a few hours after his birth.

Shortly before Tuanny was born, an MRI showed that his CDH had improved, something doctors couldn’t explain. After his birth, one of his lungs grew from the size of his clavicle to eight or nine ribs in length. Although he has only 1 1/2 lungs, something that may impact him later, his prognosis to lead a normal life is good.

“We will always hold in our heart that because there were so many people praying and offering Masses, it was divine intervention,” Tuan says. “The graces received from prayers did nothing but aid him in recovery.”

Says Tuan, “As touching as it was to see everyone at that Mass on campus, the thing that really warmed our hearts and kept us going was that when we were in Florida we kept getting get-well cards from the Notre Dame family,” he says. “It reminded us that we weren’t alone in this trial, that although there were many people who couldn’t be there for us physically, they were still thinking of us and praying for us. We were not on our own.”

One of the most touching notes came from University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. The card included a rosary for the baby and a holy card saying that Father Jenkins would be saying a Mass for Tuanny.

“It was extremely moving to know that the president of the University, who is extremely busy running one of the largest Catholic universities, would take time out of his busy schedule to write a card, give Tuanny a rosary, and offer the most beneficial form of prayers for our son,” Tuan says.

For more information on Tuanny and CDH, visit Tuan’s Facebook page,