Long before Dana Cuomo began her career as a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor at Lafayette College, she could be found at primetime gymnastics meets competing for Pennsylvania State University.
“The nerves aside, they were really fun events,” Cuomo said of her meets as a Nittany Lion. “We had good crowds.”
Cuomo competed at Penn State between 1999 and 2003, but she began gymnastics as a 3-year-old.
During peak season, Cuomo’s competitions ran from January to April, 15 straight weeks of work.
“You had to learn how to be consistent,” she said. “If you were to make the lineup, you had to prove that you were going to hit or complete the successful routine every weekend.”
Cuomo said her specialty was the uneven bars, but she also spent a year competing on the balance beam.
“Starting my junior year, I never missed a bar routine in competition,” she said.
The competitions brought Cuomo and the Penn State team around the country, traveling to different schools in the Big 10. In 2000 — Cuomo’s freshman year — the team qualified for the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships, finishing in seventh place.
Since her competition days, Cuomo said she has seen the sport change, highlighting that more Olympic stars tend to compete in college competitions at the same time. There were a couple of former Olympians during the 2000 Sydney Games that she had to compete against: Elise Ray and Kristen Maloney.
“It would be hard when you were in an arena, and you had a former Olympian who was competing, to not kind of watch and be in awe of that,” Cuomo said. “I think that started to shift to where there’s a recognition that we should all be celebrating each other.”
Cuomo said that certain parts of her athletic training have stuck with her throughout her professional career.
“I’ve taken a lot of the visualization and mental strength training that we would do in gymnastics, and I have applied that in different ways,” she said. “Things like slowing down my breathing before giving a really big public talk.”
“There’s qualities that you learn from being an athlete,” said senior soccer player Lucy McShane, who is currently working on research with Cuomo. “It’s definitely reflected in the way that she is super organized and disciplined, and always has a plan and a way forward.”
Beyond the daily grind of practice and competitions, Cuomo said her awareness of Penn State’s social reputation pushed her toward the field of women’s studies. While she attended the university for her doctoral degree, news broke of the shocking Jerry Sandusky scandal, in which the then-defensive coordinator for the Penn State football team was revealed to have sexually abused 45 children.
Today, Cuomo’s area of study concentrates on domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. Cuomo’s research is related to gender-based violence on college campuses.
Despite being far away from the uneven bars, athletics still play a role in her work.
“One of the things that was important to me that was part of athletics, is recognizing the power dynamics of athletics on a college campus,” Cuomo said. “They have a lot of power to either proactively address issues like sexual assault and domestic violence, or they have the ability to be perpetrating that and sometimes hiding it or minimizing it.”
McShane believes Cuomo’s approach to her research is universal.
“She’s so meticulous about centering the communities that we’re trying to serve,” McShane said. “And I think that that’s not only important in the research setting but in all aspects of life — how to really center and uplift marginalized voices in all settings.”
