The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kathleen Rhoades. Kathleen is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Biotechnology program studying tart cherry breeding and genetics with Dr. Amy Iezzoni, the Tart Cherry Breeder at MSU. The goal of the breeding program is to create new varieties of tart cherry that are better-adapted to Michigan’s climate, resistant to pests and diseases, and easier to process for packing, drying, canning, and consumption. Tart cherry is an allotetraploid, meaning it has four sets of chromosomes derived from two different parental species of cherry that cross-pollinated in the wild. Kathleen is studying the way the two parental genomes in tart cherry interact and how those interactions are affecting fruit quality traits, which will help inform tart cherry breeders in their selection decisions to create improved.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kyle Whitehouse. Kyle is an undergraduate student at the MSU Residental College of Arts and Humanities (RCAH).

Purpose and adversity go hand in hand. If you have purpose and goals in life, there is going to be adversity along the way. For Kyle, racism has been one of the primary adversities affecting him for a long time that he had to overcome. Young black children are growing up and seeing numerous acts of racism. But, spreading love and acceptance is something that has helped him despite the hate that he sees every day on social media, the news, and in his interactions. Spreading the message of love and acceptance is one of his purposes in life. In this episode, he discusses how his experience volunteering at Willow Elementary School in Lansing, MI. He used activities on purpose and facilitated conversations about love as a method to overcome adversity, which assisted with increasing his understanding of civic engagement.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

https://www.nami.org/mhstats

https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/features/kf-childrens-mental-health-report.html

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Leigh Anne Tiffany. Leigh Anne is a second-year doctoral student in the Information & Media Program with a dual major in Environmental Science and Policy. She works jointly with John Besley, Ph.D., in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations, and Bruno Takahashi, Ph.D., with the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism in the School of Journalism. Her research centers on topics related to science communication and public engagement with science.

Leigh Anne's research is inspired by her prior careers as a scientist working in wildlife conservation, a multimedia science journalist for outlets like the PBS NewsHour, NBC, and NPR, and a public relations specialist for a wildlife nonprofit in Washington, D.C. In these different roles, she experienced firsthand the current crisis of scientific findings being regularly miscommunicated to the public. She decided to get her doctoral degree to help find evidence-backed ways to combat this systematic problem.

Her research addresses science communication from the viewpoints of scientists, journalists, and public relations practitioners. She looks into why these groups want to communicate about science (and how they do so), how do these groups interact with one another when communicating about science, and the effectiveness of training programs aimed to help these groups become better science communicators.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Adam Kawash. Adam is a Ph.D. candidate in the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The main research question he is trying to answer is what is the nova rate of the Milky Way? A nova occurs in a double star system when the core of a dead star steals matter from its companion star. If enough matter is accumulated the outside of the dead star can become hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur. This causes an outflow of the accumulated material and the system can increase in brightness by up to a factor of a million. Due to their relative brightness, these events have been found in the Galaxy for centuries by astronomers. However, we still do not have a good idea of how frequently these events occur in the Milky Way. Recently published models predict about 50 novae per year, but even with the emergence of large field surveys in the past couple of decades, we still only find about 10 per year. This mystery of the apparent missing novae is the central topic of his thesis.
MSU Observatory, MSU Abrams Planetarium and Astronomy on Tap host local astronomy events, during the pandemic they are hosting virtual events.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

Located in the Department of Anthropology, the Michigan State University Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL) works to uncover stories in human bones. The graduate students, Amber, Kelly and Micayla at the MSUFAL are trained by lab director, Dr. Joseph T Hefner, a board-certified forensic anthropologist, and Dr. Carolyn Isaac in the study of the human skeleton. Forensic anthropologists do many different things from working with the police and medical examiners to scientific research experiments. They commonly work with law enforcement to estimate demographic information, such as age, biological sex, height/stature, and ancestry, in unknown skeletal remains. This information is compared between unidentified skeletons and missing persons’ cases. They analyze trauma including bone fractures that can be related to many different causes such as firearms, car accidents, or falls. Additionally, they examine the skeleton for diseases like arthritis or bony infections. 

At the MSUFAL, graduate students assist with forensic casework and carry out their own research projects. In this interview, three lab members briefly describe their research and their relationship to forensic and biological anthropology. Amber Plemons, a fourth-year graduate student, aims to understand how genes and climate interact to shape the human face. She uses statistical modeling that incorporates shape information from the skull to measure the impact of temperature and humidity on facial shape. This study helps us understand why people's faces are different and dispel the idea of biological race. Kelly Kamnikar, a fourth-year graduate student, examines the 'ancestry' part of the biological profile. She looks at variation in the human skull within people living in Latin America to understand if variation can be used reliably to estimate ancestry. She hopes this will improve efforts to identify people who die while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Micayla Spiros, a second-year graduate student, focuses on the postcranial skeleton, or all bones below the skull, to see if morphology, or shape, varies in a predictable pattern. She looks at the growth and development of the human skeleton across different cultures to see if these postcranial variations can be used to help estimate ancestry in unknown children and adult skeletons.  Each of these three studies are examples of the type of research performed at the MSUFAL, with the ultimate goal to advance our understanding of human variation to further improve efforts in identification.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Dhaval Gandhi. Dhaval is an undergraduate student at MSU in the departments of Neuroscience (College of Natural Science) and History Philosophy & Sociology of Science (Lyman Briggs College). He examines how neuroscience has slowly crept its way into various fields like marketing, philosophy, and law. Chiefly, Dhaval focused his research efforts on the ways neuroscience has begun to influence the legal system, creating a new niche field dubbed by others as 'neurolaw.'

Historically, phrenology, an early tool to observe the brain's ability by examining the natural surface of an individual's head, was prevalent in the legal setting in the mid-1800s. Fortunately, American judges were quick to dismiss phrenological evidence as it lacked scientific evidence. In the last century, neuroscience has been slowing reintegrating back into the American legal system with polygraphs and MRI technology. Polygraphs were used as a measure of an individual or a witness was being fully honest. Moderately, the scientific basis of polygraphs has been questioned. Now, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology is being used for lie detection. This is unsettling as the machines used are unreliable, the results can be misleading, and the current legal system has inconsistencies that can make the matter more complicated. For these reasons, it's crucial that society separates the two fields of neuroscience and American law once again, as we did with phrenology until there is more scientific grounding for neuroscience-based legal evidence. Through his research and reasoning, he argues against the use of 'neurolaw' until better technologies and practices are developed.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Zachary Morehouse. Zach is a 3rd-year osteopathic medical student at Michigan State’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Zach was looking for a way to use his background in molecular virology and drug development, in conjunction with the knowledge he has gained from medical school thus far, to do his part in the fight against this disease. In mid-March, he received a call from one of his former research colleagues and mentor, Dr. Rodney Nash in Atlanta, GA asking if he could come down to help develop some viral testing procedures for a biotechnology company called Omni International Inc. Since classes had moved online and Zach was entering into his dedicated boards self-study period, he jumped at the chance to put his skills to use in the lab again. Over the last 11 weeks, Zach and the laboratory team at Omni International have worked every day, long hours, nights, and weekends to develop viral extraction and detection protocols using the laboratory equipment that Omni already manufactured. Using one of the company’s most popular devices, the Omni Bead Ruptor Elite, they developed extraction methods to pull viral RNA out of feces, wastewater, tissue culture media, and off swabs to be used in downstream PCR based applications that confirm the presence of the virus. As COVID-19 continued to expand, basic laboratory supplies, such as the standard reagents used in nucleic acid extractions and the laboratory plastics needed to conduct those extractions became increasingly difficult to find, given the exponential increase in demand. This resource scarcity caused Zach and the team to come up with the now patented, two-step direct-to-PCR methodology. This method allows for the complete bypass of the standard extraction methods used in PCR based assays for viral detection off swabs, reducing the cost and time associated with the processing of each sample. While this technology has been proven in vitro with human coronavirus 229E, the group is currently working with their clinical collaborators to validate the method on COVID-19 patient samples. Zachary and Dr. Nash are hopeful that this novel technology will provide relief to resource challenged health care environments with its potential to reduce the cost of testing, and improve turn around time on each sample being processed. If you want to reach out for more information or potential collaboration, please contact Zach at [email protected].
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Megan Miller. Megan is a registered nurse and is graduating from the MSU College of Nursing Ph.D. program in Spring 2020. Her experiences in palliative and hospice care have led to a mixed-methods dissertation project focused on holistic (mind, body, spirit) approaches to pain for people with advanced cancer.
With a majority of advanced cancer patients reporting pain, management of this symptom continues to be a critical problem. Spirituality (broadly defined) is one area that has not yet been adequately investigated, as it may positively impact the experience of pain. In the first phase of the dissertation work, Megan examined data from women with advanced breast cancer to determine which personal and clinical factors were associated with pain and spirituality, the impact of spirituality on pain over time, and the impact of spirituality and pain on engagement with a Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) Intervention. In the second phase, Megan conducted interviews with advanced breast cancer patients to explore how they described their pain, their spirituality, and the potential connection between the two.
Megan will begin a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall 2020. She is enthusiastic about continuing to explore CIH interventions to holistically address symptoms for patients with advanced cancer.
This dissertation was supported by grants from the American Nurses Foundation and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation. Data included in part of the project was collected in a National Cancer Institute-funded study led by Dr. Gwen Wyatt.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Hamid Karimi.

Hamid is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a member of the Data Science and Engineering Lab. His research is generally focused on data science and machine learning where he seeks to extract insightful patterns in data that can then be used to both understand/analyze the past and to make predictions about the future. More specifically, he is interested in applying and developing data mining and machine learning algorithms in the field of educational data mining (EDM) which refers to techniques, tools, and research designed for automatically extracting meaning from large repositories of data generated by or related to people's learning activities in educational settings. His research is currently focused on ensuring fairness in EDM algorithms, for instance in the online course performance methods. Hamid is also an active member of the Teachers in Social Media Project. As teachers direct their information and professional learning from the cloud to class, Teachers in Social Media uses big data and rich data to gain a better understanding of teachers’ engagement within social media. In particular, Hamid develops advanced machine learning algorithms to characterize instructional resources on online social media as well as understand and promote teacher-teacher connections on Pinterest -- a popular image-based social media platform. In his recent publication in the Journal of Teachers College Record, titled A Roadmap for Incorporating Online Social Media in Educational Research,  the proposed general guidelines to help new researchers use vast online social media data, as a manifestation of “big data,” in their education research.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Nick Ivanov. Nick is a second-year graduate student, pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Michigan State University (MSU). His major research area lies at the intersection of blockchain and the security of the Internet of Things (IoT). He conducts his research as part of the MSU SEIT (SEcure and Intelligent Things) lab led by Dr. Qiben Yan. They use smart contracts to replace password-based authentication with private-key authentication and achieve the highest levels of security, privacy, and reliability.

The blockchain technology is often associated with cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. However, the unique properties of blockchain are useful not only for cryptocurrencies. Blockchain allows us to elegantly address some security-related challenges of the IoT world. Moreover, blockchain technology allows deploy and run immutable, deterministic, irreversible, and non-deniable programs called smart contracts. In his lab, they show that smart contracts allow them to bring the Internet of Things into the new level of security, reliability, and convenience.

If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!