The Academic Minute

On Texas Christian University Week: Have you sent your DNA off to be tested?

Amina Zarrugh, associate professor of sociology, examines how these tests can lead to misunderstandings of race.

Faculty Bio:

Amina Zarrugh is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on politics and forced disappearance in North Africa as well as race and ethnicity in the U.S. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Problems, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Sociology, Middle East Critique, Teaching Sociology, and Contexts, among others. She completed her BA in sociology and government and her MA and PhD in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Transcript:

Many of us have seen commercials for 23andMe or AncestryDNA, two leading companies for at-home DNA-based genealogical testing. With a small saliva sample taken at home, these companies promise to reveal long-lost ancestries. While millions in the United States have taken the companies up on this offer, we still know very little about how people interpret the tests and what they take away from them.

What we do know is that the tests have been valuable to communities long denied information about their ancestry, especially Black communities in the United States. As the industry reaches more people, including those who already have access to ancestral information, we asked: “How do people who take at-home DNA-based ancestry tests interpret their results?”

To answer this question, we analyzed over 400 YouTube videos of people reacting to their results. One key finding is that consumers often confuse ancestry with race or ethnicity, interpreting race as a biological category identifiable through DNA. Although they provide a saliva sample, many shift to using the language of “blood,” even labeling types such as “Native blood” or “Black blood.”

Because the tests use terms like “ethnicity estimates,” consumers are encouraged to think about identity in quantities and proportions. They may downplay or emphasize results based on what they view as “desirable” ancestries, reinforcing long-standing stereotypes.

These findings raise concerns about how misinterpretation of DNA-based technologies could revive racial science—the false belief that race is biological rather than a social construct. Given the deep ties between racial science and twentieth-century racism, our research underscores the importance of careful scientific and public understanding of these technologies.

Given how deeply intertwined racial science was with twentieth century projects of racism, our research emphasizes the importance of how scientists and the public understand DNA-based technologies.

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On Texas Christian University Week: Misinformation in the medical field is not new.

Melissa Reynolds, assistant professor of early modern European history, looks back to find out more.

Faculty Bio:

Melissa Reynolds is a historian of early modern Europe whose research examines how ordinary people understood their relationship to medical and scientific knowledge and to the natural world around them. She received her PhD from Rutgers University and held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University prior to her appointment as Assistant Professor of History at TCU. She is author of Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and co-edits The Recipes Project, a scholarly digital publication focused on recipes and their role in the histories of food, art, magic, medicine, and science.

Transcript:

The circulation of medical misinformation on social media has been in the news a lot—so much so that it sometimes feels like we’re the first people in history to deal with the problem. But 500 years ago, readers had to wade through a similar quagmire of unverified medical knowledge.As a historian of early modern medicine, I’ve spent the past decade researching how readers in Tudor England navigated the dramatic increase in medical publishing between 1485 when the printing press was first brought to England, and 1557, when the Stationer’s Company was established to license and authorize printed books. Over those seven decades, printers produced more than 350 editions of medical books in English, offering advice on everything from how to cure the plague to how to eat a healthy diet. What I found was that these books contained very old knowledge that had circulated among English readers for centuries in handwritten manuscripts. What changed, in other words, wasn’t the medical advice itself; what changed was that for the first time, printers had a commercial incentive to propagate this advice. It didn’t matter to printers whether miracle cures worked. What mattered was that books sold. Understanding the dynamics of medical marketing from 500 years ago can help us see our present problem of medical misinformation in a new light: this is not the first time that new media has generated new commercial incentives that end up destabilizing medical expertise. At the same, this history suggests a way forward: in Tudor England, printers eventually organized to regulate the free-for-all market created by print.

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On Texas Christian University Week: What you think about your body’s appearance can have many effects on your well-being.

Jeannine Gailey, professor of sociology, discusses how to change harmful beliefs.

Faculty Bio:

Jeannine A. Gailey is professor and director of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on sociology of the body, fat studies, gender, sexualities, and deviance. She is the author of the monograph, The Hyper(in)visible Fat Woman and co-editor of Fat Oppression Around the World. Her publications have appeared in journals such as, Feminist Psychology, Journal of Gender Studies, Fat Studies, Qualitative Research, Social Psychology Quarterly, Deviant Behavior and Cultural Criminology, to name a few.

Transcript:

Negative body image is so common in women that it is often considered normal, but it’s impact can be devastating. Body image refers to one’s perceptions, thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs about their own body. Poor body image can harm mental health, strain relationships, and lower overall well-being. My collaborator, Dr. Jamie English, a licensed clinical social worker and eating disorder specialist, and I are interested in whether narrative therapy can improve women’s body image and sexual wellbeing by helping participants rewrite their body story. Narrative therapy has the potential to help with negative body image because it separates the individual from the problem, helping women see themselves beyond negative body image. Our participants are adult women whose struggles with body image are negatively impacting their sexual relationships. While we are still in the early stages of the study and continuing to recruit participants, the results so far are promising.Of the 10 women who have completed each phase of the study, which includes a pre and post-test, entrance and exit in-depth interviews and three narrative therapy sessions, all have shown at least some improvement. Most have experienced significant positive changes in how they feel about their bodies and appearance.Participants report that they are no longer fixated on their bodies, weight, or food, and shared that they now have the tools to think differently about their bodies. A few shared that the sessions helped them identify a trauma that had kept them stuck in patterns of negative self-thought.Rewriting their body story, they tell us, is giving them the freedom to think beyond their appearance.

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On Texas Christian University Week: Making better leaders going forward is key; so how do we do so?

Ariane Balizet, Assistant Provost for Faculty Success and Professor of English, reads some classic texts to find out.

Faculty Bio:

Ariane M. Balizet is the inaugural Assistant Provost for Faculty Success and Professor of English at Texas Christian University, where she created a nationally-recognized New Faculty Mentoring Program in the AddRan College of Liberal Arts. In addition to the TCU Deans’ Award for Teaching, she has received ten recognitions for research, service, and graduate and undergraduate teaching since joining the faculty in 2008.Ariane Balizet specializes in the literature of Renaissance England and its afterlives in popular culture and pedagogy. She is currently researching a book on games and colonial competition in early modern England, Spain, and the Caribbean. She is the author of Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies (2019), Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (2014), and many essays on Renaissance emotions, histories and theories of girlhood, and performance in early modern England and Spain. Most recently, she co-edited Strategic Shakespeare: Transformative Leadership for the Future of Higher Education (2025), with Marcela Kostihová and Natalie K. Eschenbaum..

Transcript:

Yes, studying Shakespeare can make you a better leader. But as a Shakespeare professor, I can promise that you won’t find many examples of good leadership in Shakespeare’s works. If anything, Shakespeare’s plays delight in bad leadership: the bloodthirsty tyrant Macbeth; the foolish megalomaniac Lear; or the spoiled, narcissistic Richard II. While Marcela Kostihová, Natalie Eschenbaum, and I don’t look to Shakespeare for leadership role models, we have found that leaders can strengthen their influence and effectiveness in modern contexts through the core liberal arts skills used in studying plays about tyrants, despots, and even teenage lovers, whose passions and mistakes reveal timeless truths about power, responsibility, and the human desire for connection and meaning.

After a quarter-century teaching Shakespeare’s plays and poetry to young people, we’ve learned that the skills required to make sense of Romeo and Juliet are the very skills successful leaders use in times of crisis or change. These include a sophisticated grasp of historical context, to recognize the difference between novelty and true innovation, the ability to understand conflicting viewpoints and data sets, to make critical decisions when there is no “right” answer, and an appreciation for the value of a good story, to communicate clearly when change is necessary to advance a shared mission and sustain trust.

Shakespeare is certainly not, as a murderous Macbeth would say, the “be-all and end-all” of good leadership. But studying Shakespeare shows us that learning history, philosophy, religion, languages, and literature — that is, learning from the Humanities — equips us to lead with empathy, courage, and confidence.

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On New York University Week: Where are PFAS chemicals in our wastewater facilities coming from?

Bridger Ruyle, assistant professor of civil, urban and environmental engineering, says the answer may be surprising.

Faculty Bio:

Bridger Ruyle is an Assistant Professor of environmental engineering in the Civil, Urban and Environmental Engineering Department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering.His research explores how human activity, the biosphere, and climate change affect water quality. Specifically, research foci in the Ruyle lab include developing analytical tools to quantify chemical contamination in environmental media and associated uncertainty, understanding biogeochemistry and impacts of fluorinated chemicals including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, i.e. forever chemicals) and pharmaceuticals, and integrating in-situ and remote sensing data to assess climate impacts on water quality.

Transcript:

When you pee or flush medications down the drain, you probably assume wastewater treatment plants remove chemicals before the water flows back into the environment. Our study analyzing eight large treatment facilities nationwide revealed something unexpected.We’ve been focused on PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”, a class of toxic chemicals usually associated with firefighting foams and non-stick pans. But when we measured PFAS at these wastewater facilities, we found that common prescription drugs account for the vast majority. Here’s why this is concerning. Many pharmaceuticals contain fluorine and meet the chemical definition of PFAS. The fluorine additions stabilize the drugs in your body and help improve their effectiveness as medicines. But that same stability means they are hard to break down during wastewater treatment or in the environment. We found that even the most advanced treatment systems remove less than twenty-five percent before discharging water back into rivers and streams.We used a national model to track how wastewater moves through our waterways and reaches downstream drinking water supplies. During average river conditions, we estimate that about fifteen million Americans receive drinking water containing hazardous levels of PFASdue to wastewater discharges alone. During droughts, when there’s less natural baseflow to dilute the wastewater, that number climbs to twenty-three million people. However, current EPA regulations for drinking water cover only eight percent of the PFAS we detected.These pharmaceuticals are designed to be biologically active at very low doses. What we don’t yet understand is what it means when people who aren’t prescribed these medications are unknowingly exposed to them through their drinking water over years or decades.

Read More:

Ruyle Laboratory

[NYU Tandon School of Engineering] - “Forever chemicals” in wastewater far more widespread than previously known, new multi-university study reveals

[NY Times] - ‘Forever Chemicals’ Reach Tap Water via Treated Sewage, Study Finds

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On New York University Week: How do vines climb so quickly?

Joyce Onyenedum, assistant professor of environmental studies, looks inside the plant to find an answer.

Faculty Bio:

Joyce G. Onyenedum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. She holds a B.S. in Plant Sciences from Cornell University and received her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. The Onyenedum lab studies the evolution and development of plant biodiversity with a particular interest in addressing the age old question: How do plants climb?

Transcript:

While most plants are relatively stationary, only climbing vines have the capacity to move rapidly coiling themselves around host trees as a shortcut to access light at the top of the forest canopy. While beneficial to vines, this competitive edge can come at a cost to forest ecosystem because vines are growing quicker and larger in response to increasing temperatures and forest fragmentation. In the tropics, vines are proliferating often outcompeting and killing forest trees, while in highly developed urban centers, we also find vines proliferating. A notable example is the invasive Kudzu vine aka the “plant that ate the south”. Despite the ecological success of vines, we still lack a fundamental understanding of how they move.My lab sought to investigate this problem. Using the common bean vine, we began by breaking down this complex form into phases: common bean begins a truncated shrub, then the main stem suddenly elongates and begins to rapidly whip around in a tightly controlled circular motion to attach to a host. Upon attachment, a critical change occurs within the stem: specialize contractile cells, called G-fibers, form enabling these plants to securely attach to a support to avoid slipping down.But what do G-fibers do? We can answer this question by tweaking the development of G-fibers, which we achieved through enhancing and repressing the plant hormone, Brassinosteroid. Our findings were striking. Vines with excess hormones were lazy they failed to attach to support structures corresponding to a repression of G-fibers. By probing the genetics of this phenotype, we learned that cell wall enzyme gene expression was significantly altered in lazy plants, hence the underdeveloped G-fibers. Together, this study linked cell wall modifying genes to overall plant form and function, revealing a critical role of specialized cells in the success of climbing vines.

Read More:

[YouTube]

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On New York University Week: Seeing is believing, especially when it comes to natural disasters.

Yuki Miura, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, uses 3D visualizations to see what can happen to your own street.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Miura is an assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU. She is also a faculty advisory board member at the Volatility and Risk Institute at NYU Stern School of Business. She is a member of New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC5). Previously, she worked at Morgan Stanley in climate risk management and quantitative strategy.Her research is at the intersection of engineering, climate science, finance, and social sciences. She develops data-driven strategies to mitigate natural hazards and build resilient cities. By coupling advanced modeling with in-depth understanding of socioeconomic factors, she provides actionable solutions for both public and private institutions. She has collaborated with the National Center of Atmospheric Research and the governments of New York State/City. Her work has been recognized through publications in leading journals and featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Transcript:

When Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City in 2012, it became clear that traditional flood risk maps weren’t helping people understand what they were facing. Statistics and shaded zones on a map couldn’t convey what flooding would mean for your own street, your own home.That’s why we created GeoFlood Studio, an interactive 3D visualization platform that lets you see exactly how water would rise in your neighborhood. You can watch storm surge flow down your actual block and see which subway entrances would flood first.What makes this tool different is the level of detail. You can adjust a human silhouette to your own height and see how deep the water would reach on your body. And our velocity overlays show how fast the water is moving, because two feet of still water is very different from two feet of fast-moving water.Users can explore different scenarios—Superstorm Sandy-level coastal flooding, Hurricane Ida-style rainfall, or both simultaneously—and add projected sea level rise through 2100. You can toggle the East Side Coastal Resiliency seawall on and off to see how protective infrastructure would help.By letting people see themselves in flood scenarios, we’re translating abstract climate risk into something tangible and personal. GeoFlood Studio is one example of how we do this. At the Climate, Energy, and Risk Analytics Lab, where I lead, we go beyond visualization. We develop the underlying hazard models, quantify cascading infrastructure impacts, and design optimization frameworks that help cities decide how to protect and invest. Because understanding risk is only the beginning. Acting on it is also important.

Read More:

GeoFlood Studio

[NYU Tandon School of Engineering] - NYU Tandon researchers launch interactive 3D flood map to help New Yorkers visualize climate risks

Yuki Miura

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On New York University Week: Excessive heat can have consequences for children.

Jorge Cuartas, Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology, determines why.

Faculty Bio:

Jorge Cuartas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt and the director of the Catalyzing Action for Resilient Ecologies (CARE) lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Human Development, Learning, and Teaching from Harvard University, an Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University, an M.Sc. in Economics from Universidad de los Andes, and a B.Sc. in Economics from Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.Dr. Cuartas’ research program lies at the nexus of developmental psychology, economics, and public health and examines:the promotion of resilience and positive developmental trajectories across the life course, globally;the developmental consequences and prevention of violence against children;the design, implementation, and evaluation of parenting and early childhood programs and policies;the intersections between climate change and the science of human development.His research is informed by interdisciplinary theory and employs advanced quantitative methods, including econometrics, psychometrics, and meta-analytic approaches. His work has been published in The Lancet, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Mental Health, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, The Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, Child Development, Developmental Science, Child Development Perspectives, and Developmental Psychology, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for his work, including the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship, the American Psychological Association (APA) Developmental Psychology’s Early Career Outstanding Paper Award, APA’s Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Victoria S. Levin Award, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, SRCD’s Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant for Global Early Child Development, the Early Childhood Development Action Network’s (ECDAN) Knowledge Fellowship, and the Science and Innovation Fellowship from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Before joining NYU, Dr. Cuartas served as a Consultant for UNICEF, the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), Parenting for Lifelong Health, and the Colombian Government. He is also a researcher at the Centro de Estudios sobre Seguridad y Drogas (CESED) at Universidad de los Andes.

Transcript:

When we think about climate change, we often picture melting glaciers or rising seas. But in my research, I focus on something closer to home: how heat affects young children’s development.Early childhood is a critical window for brain development and cognitive, social, and emotional skills. I wanted to know whether growing up in hotter environments could quietly shape these foundational skills.To answer this, I combined large-scale child development data with temperature records for nearly twenty thousand three- and four-year olds across six countries—Gambia, Georgia, Madagascar, Malawi, Palestine, and Sierra Leone. This allowed me to track how much heat children were exposed to from birth.What we found was striking. Children exposed to temperatures that were hotter than what is typical for the region where they live—especially if such atypical temperatures were above about 86 degrees Fahrenheit—were less likely to be developmentally on track. The strongest effects showed up in early literacy and numeracy, the basic skills that support learning later in life. In other words, heat doesn’t just make children uncomfortable; it may interfere with how they learn and develop.These effects were not evenly distributed. Children from poorer households, those living in urban areas, and those without reliable access to clean water and sanitation were hit hardest. This shows that heat exposure can amplify pre-existing disparities that tend to persist and even grow across the life course.As the world gets hotter, more children are growing up in conditions that may limit their potential before they ever step into a classroom.The good news is that this is preventable. Investments in cooling, water access, heat-resilient infrastructure and parenting support programs—especially for vulnerable families—can help protect children’s development. If we want children to thrive in a warming world, climate adaptation needs to start early.

Read More:

[NYU] - Excessive Heat Harms Young Children’s Development, Study Suggests

[The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry] - Ambient heat and early childhood development: a cross-national analysis

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On New York University Week: Is there a wildfire that we’re not planning for?

Augustin Guibaud, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, examines this.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Augustin Guibaud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress. His research focuses on hazards through physics-based modeling and physics-informed machine learning (PIML), with a particular emphasis on fire safety challenges in complex environments. He leads the IgNYte Lab, which investigates urban air quality monitoring during large-scale haze events, fire dynamics in low buoyancy conditions for space exploration missions, heritage conservation through the modeling of fire-structure interactions, city-scale fire modeling in densely populated areas, and land management strategies for wildfire resilience. Dr. Guibaud’s work bridges practical applications with fundamental lab-scale analyses.Dr. Guibaud is an active member of the Fire Safety in Space ESA International Topical Team, the Combustion Institute, and the Structure group of the French CNRS/Ministry of Culture’s Chantier Scientifique Notre Dame de Paris. He also serves as an Honorary Lecturer at University College London in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering.His contributions have been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the 2020 Prix de la Chancellerie and the Distinguished Paper Award at the 39th International Symposium on Combustion.

Transcript:

Land managers use sophisticated computer models to predict wildfire risk decades into the future. These models account for climate change—rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns. But our research in Portugal revealed they’re missing something critical.Forests don’t stay frozen in time. Over the decades, vegetation itself evolves. Trees die, new species move in, entire ecosystems shift. Current models treat forests as static, essentially planning for forests that won’t exist by the time we need those predictions.We tested what happens when you include these vegetation changes in wildfire models, and the results were striking. In one climate scenario, models without vegetation predicted a fifty-nine percent increase in burned area by 2060. But when we included how forests would actually adapt to those conditions, that increase dropped to just three percent.Even more surprising, some higher-emission climate scenarios actually showed decreased fire risk in Portugal. Local fire risk doesn’t always track with global warming trends. The climate conditions and how vegetation responds can diverge significantly from global patterns. Fire-prone species like eucalyptus might thrive in some areas under certain conditions while declining in others.This matters for practical decisions happening today. Planting fire-resistant trees sounds smart, but if those species won’t survive future conditions, you’ve wasted resources. Worse, if fire-prone species will thrive instead, you’ve locked in elevated risk for decades. Because forest ecosystems take about a century to fully restore, today’s planting decisions echo for generations.

Read More:

[NYU Tandon School of Engineering] - Wildfire Prevention Models Miss Key Factor: How Forests Will Change Over Decades

[ConnectSci] - On the importance of both climate and vegetation evolution when predicting long-term wildfire susceptibility

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Simple materials can teach STEM principles and help students engage with learning.

Nicole Fenty, associate professor and chair of the Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership Department at the College of Community and Public Affairs at Binghamton University, discusses several examples.

Faculty Bio:

Nicole Fenty joined the Department of Teaching, Learning, & Education Leadership as an assistant professor in 2012. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida and her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Florida. She has worked as a special education teacher in elementary schools in the state of Florida.

Transcript:

STEM education has become a priority for students over the last decade, with concepts such as coding and problem solving now viewed as important across many career pathways. A central area of focus for me is how these concepts can be taught in ways that young learners can meaningfully understand. To explore this, I worked with two students from our doctoral and undergraduate education minor programs respectively, Leyli Yeganeh and Vanessa Uhteg, to examine how early coding concepts could be integrated into classroom literacy instruction.

We partnered with two preschool teachers to work with four of their students who were struggling to sequence stories. Because sequencing is a foundational skill in both literacy and coding, we designed an instructional activity using the familiar nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill.”

The activities we used were simple and involved hands-on materials - a poster board divided into a grid with tape, picture cards representing four parts of the story, and directional arrows. These tools allowed students to place events in order while also learning basic coding vocabulary such as “grid,” “arrow,” and “forward.”

Across three weeks of instruction, students practiced organizing story events using these materials while becoming more comfortable with using coding terms, using the grid effectively, and sequencing pictures correctly. After three lessons, all students were using the materials as intended, applying coding vocabulary, and accurately sequencing the full story.

These results highlight an important point about early STEM learning. While digital technological tools are often emphasized, it is the underlying concepts that matter most. When those concepts are embedded in familiar literacy activities, such as storytelling, students are better able to engage with and understand them.

Simple, low-tech materials that incorporate meaningful narratives can provide young learners with accessible connections to both literacy and early coding.

Read More:

[Wiley] - Sequencing Nursery Rhymes through Early Coding in Preschool Settings

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