Staff
Michael Jacobson serves as Research Development Specialist in the Office of Strategic
Research Initiatives, where he helps faculty and staff develop research and grant
proposals. He also helps conduct community outreach programs to apply the broader
impacts of research performed at Binghamton University. In his previous position as
a principal investigator and project director at Binghamton University’s Public Archaeology
Facility, he helped government agencies and industry clients with cultural resource
compliance and strategies for historic preservation. He also conducted original research
on the historic period of New York State. He investigated production and consumption
patterns at 19th century farmsteads across New York. He established a research program
supported by the National Park Service for studying and preserving New York’s Revolutionary
War battlefields. He also developed community collaborations with descendant communities
and other stakeholders to create preservation strategies and promote community sustainability
by recognizing the value of cultural resources. Jacobson has published articles on
his research on Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre as well as created digital media to present
the results of his research and aid community outreach. Jacobson holds a doctorate
and MA in anthropology from Binghamton University and a BA in anthropology from Fort
Lewis College in Colorado.
As a Research Development Specialist, Kevin Boettcher supports collaborative and interdisciplinary
research proposals for faculty across the university. He is an experienced writing
coach and editor, with more than a decade of experience delivering workshops, coordinating
writing groups and working one-on-one with researchers from the sciences, social sciences
and humanities. In the Office of Strategic Research Initiatives, he supports two Transdisciplinary
Areas of Excellence — Material & Visual Worlds and Citizenship, Rights and Cultural
Belonging — and currently leads the Division’s campus-wide initiative supporting NSF
Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Boettcher previously worked in the Harpur
College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University, where he supported proposal
development related to research and academic programs. He holds a BA in English and
Political Science from the University of Delaware, and he earned his MA and PhD in
English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, having completed a dissertation
on the creation and spread of “knowledge” about the English New World. He has taught
more than a dozen undergraduate courses on a variety of topics related to literature,
writing and research. Boettcher is currently the Chair of the Professional Staff Senate,
and he represents Binghamton University on the SUNY-wide Campus Governance Leaders
group.
Robert (Beau) DiNapoli is a Research Development Specialist in the Office of Strategic
Research Initiatives. He works with faculty in developing individual and collaborative
research projects and external funding proposals. He is experienced and passionate
about research development on convergent and transdisciplinary team-science projects
that combine the insights from multiple disciplines to address complex problems. In
addition to support for individual faculty members and informal teams, he offers research
development support to the Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence (TAEs) and Organized
Research Centers (ORCs), and has worked extensively with the Sustainable Communities
TAE, the Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo), and the Center
for Integrated Watershed Studies (CIWS). His own research as an archaeologist uses
computational modeling and geospatial methods to study the long-term interaction between
Pacific Island populations and the environment. He has received funding from the National
Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, and the American Philosophical Society.
He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oregon, an MA in Anthropology
from the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, and a BA in Anthropology from UCLA.