Penn State Beaver alumnus helps finish, publish professor’s final research

ONACA, Pa. — Michael Brayack graduated from Penn State Beaver in 2014, but his connection to his professor and adviser, the late Professor Emeritus John Chapin, continued through Chapin’s passing in 2024.
 
Brayack, a communications major who is the grants and publications manager for Crisis Center North in Pittsburgh, now has helped Chapin’s wife, Grace Coleman, complete and publish Chapin’s final research paper.
 
Brayack worked with Chapin as his research assistant while at Penn State Beaver and interned at Crisis Center North. Upon his graduation, he continued to work in a volunteer capacity at Crisis Center North, where Coleman is the president and chief executive officer, until they had a job opening and offered Brayack a position. 
 
Chapin and Brayack stayed in contact. 
 
“As a Penn State Beaver student who came in not really knowing where I wanted to go, the campus and the faculty really helped to guide and shape my life,” Brayack said. “Without John’s input my time at Penn State Beaver and my life would be drastically different.”
 
Chapin was working on a final publication when he became ill, and he was not able to finish it before his passing. As Coleman was going through Chapin’s work, she found an email from a publisher asking if he was withdrawing his publication because they had not heard from him. Coleman reached out to the publisher to let them know what had happened and to see if it was possible to complete the work and have it published. 
 
Then she reached out to Brayack and said, “Do you think we can do this?”
 
“Neither of us are experts on academic papers, but we are both grant writers and had worked with John,” he said.
 
They decided working together to see if they could finish and publish Chapin’s final work.
 
“He was my professor and a friend. It felt like the right thing to do. He put so much of his life into working and research to make the community and families feel safer,” Brayack said. “It felt right that his final piece shouldn’t go unfinished.”
 
Chapin’s family and Brayack recently learned Chapin’s final research paper, "It's All About the Ruff: Utilizing Therapy Dogs to Address Trauma in Domestic Violence Settings," has been posthumously published in People and Animals: The International Journal for Research and Practice: Volume 8 Issue 1. 
 
“As my adviser he was incredibly influential,” Brayack said of Chapin. “I knew I wanted to do something more — wanted to help people — but I didn’t know where to go. It was really his example of working with Crisis Center North and the Women’s Center of Beaver County that inspired me to get into the domestic violence field. I’m sure he’s inspired so many other students to get involved in public service.”