The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

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

Aaron is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. He is originally from Massachusetts, where he completed my undergraduate studies prior to attending Purdue University. There, he attained his Master of Science in Agricultural Economics, writing his thesis on consumer valuation of different sustainability attributes in beer. Now, much of his research focuses on the complexity of agricultural value chains, with beer and hops being the primary focus. His current projects examine producer and consumer valuation of localness, marketing strategies for hop farmers, sustainability in brewing, and price analysis of the hop market.

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 for our 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 Jaffe. Nick is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Fisheries and Wildlife. Nick studies gray wolf movement, behavior, and conflict with people.

Over the last 25 years, gray wolves have successfully recolonized the entirety of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP). Wolves have, on multiple occasions, also crossed over to the Northern Lower Peninsula (NLP) of Michigan, highlighting the potential for continued expansion. If wolves did recolonize the NLP, they would find a much larger population of prey (mainly white-tailed deer and elk) and much denser human population, which would likely lead to conflict. Nick's research works to anticipate this challenge using agent-based modeling to predict when, where, and how many wolves could recolonize the NLP. The goal of this research is to help prepare wildlife agencies, inform policymakers, and minimize human-wildlife conflict.

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].
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In November last year, Chelsie and Danny saw Doppsee, the black rhino, get an ultrasound and they had an episode about it.

Doppsee is the 13-year-old female eastern black rhino at Potter Park Zoo, who is originally from Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas. The male rhino at Potter Park, Phineus, traveled to Lansing from Caldwell Zoo in Texas in 2017. Doppsee gave birth to Jaali, on December 24th, 2019. In this episode, they follow up with Dr. Ronan Eustace, and Pat Fountain again to see how Doppsee is doing after giving birth. They were also joined this time by Adrianna Davidson, Murphy Swartz, and Kim Hernandez.  

Adrianna and Murphy are hoofstock keepers and Kim is the area lead hoofstock keeper. They take care of the rhinos and they discuss what it is like to tend to a baby rhino. 

Dr. Ronan Eustace has a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Saskatchewan, Western CVM. After three and a half years at Potawatomi Zoo, Dr. Ronan Eustace came to Potter Park Zoo. Before coming to Potter Park Zoo, Dr. Ronan worked at practices ranging from sizeable multi-doctor specialty practices to small rural mixed clinics for four years before he became a zoo veterinarian.

Pat Fountain is the Animal Care Supervisor at Potter Park Zoo. He received his B.S. in Zoology in 2006 from Michigan State University. Pat has cared for Doppsee since she arrived in 2011 and he was there for Jaali's birth. 

To find out more about Potter Park Zoo, ways that you can support Doppsee and Jaali and the other animals at Potter Park Zoo, you can visit their website.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Nick Young. Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in Physics & Astronomy and Computational Mathematics, Science, & Engineering. Nick studies the graduate admissions process in physics. To do so, he uses actual application data to build predictive machine learning models. Using these models, he is able to determine which aspects of the application are most influential in determining why an applicant is admitted. Through this work, he hopes to see if current admissions practices are aligned with known “best practices” for admitting applicants.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Lauren Eichberger, Natalie Lyric Kagole and Arienne Patano about the coronavirus.

Lauren is a graduate student in the Department of Animal Science with a focus on Immunology. Her research is focused on Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) which infects over 80% of herds across North America. Her current research investigates specific alleles that may correlate to host susceptibility or resistance to BLV. After her studies, she hopes to pursue a career in counter-bioterrorism and work with emerging viruses and diseases.

Natalie is a Junior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Global Public Health and Epidemiology. Natalie obtained a strong interest in One Health after she attended the One Health World Congress 2018 in Canada. She speaks her mind on how the coronavirus can be interpreted in the perspective of the One Health Framework and what can be done to avoid future global health surprises worldwide.

Arienne is a first-year doctoral nursing student. Her area of novice and passions lie in end-of-life and palliative care. She is interested in investigating the relationship between circadian rhythm and the symptom experience of pain among advanced cancer patients.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook! 

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

David is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Computational Mathematics Science and Engineering department at Michigan State University, working under Prof. Murillo. David’s research employs a computational modeling technique called agent-based modeling.

Historically, scientific models were written mathematically and heavily simplified the real-world systems they represented. These models made large approximations, including treating many elements in a system as a single entity. Such simplifications were necessary in order to ensure that the models were solvable by humans. For example, in evacuations, we would be unable to model each driver on the road with a specified starting and ending location, amount of gas in their cars, and varying aggression in driving, but have to settle with just the number of cars on the road.

Computational models allow us to relax most of these limitations. Agent-based modeling specifically treats each element of a system explicitly, as agents. Agents interact with each other and their environment following a set of rules to achieve a goal. Rules replace equations that allow for behaviors that may be too complex to represent with other types of models to be added easily. Current applications of agent-based modeling include planning evacuations for emergency events including hurricanes and modeling deer movement to predict the spread of chronic wasting disease in Michigan.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Seyed Mohammadreza Heidari.

Mohammad is a dual Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. He has been involved in different research projects related to sustainable nanotechnology, green chemistry, biofuel, and solar energy. His Ph.D. dissertation is about how to synthesize fullerenes with less environmental impacts.

Professor Kroto discovered fullerenes in 1986 and received Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 because of fullerene discovery. Since then, fullerenes have been used in various applications such as cancer therapy, HIV treatment, drug delivery, MRI, electrical sensors, lasers, etc. Since the global market of fullerene is exponentially increasing, quantifying the environmental impacts of existing fullerene production processes is necessary. Mohammad is using green chemistry, life cycle assessment, and ecotoxicity assessment to quantify carbon footprints and mitigate the adverse environmental effects of fullerene production. In another project, he is focusing on generating energy from municipal wastes. In this project, sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants is used as a source of energy to produce methane in anaerobic digesters.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook! 

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

Mustafa is in the dual degree DO/Ph.D. program at MSU, which enables him to blend his love for understanding disease mechanisms with a desire to directly affect patient care. Currently, Mustafa studies the enteric nervous system or "brain of the gut" in the laboratory of Dr. Brian Gulbransen. The enteric nervous system is composed of millions of nerve cells that regulate digestion, absorption, and motility independently of the brain. These neurons are in turn supported by populations of cells called enteric glia.

A major hypothesis of the Gulbransen lab is that alterations in enteric glia are involved in many functional bowel diseases like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic constipation and pseudo-obstruction. Using genetic models, Mustafa can “see” in live-time how neurons and glia communicate with each other under healthy and disease conditions. In this way, Mustafa hopes that his research will shed light on the role of enteric glia in functional gastrointestinal diseases. Mustafa has authored several primary publications and 2 book chapters and has presented at national conferences in both Canada and the USA.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook!

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

Tyler is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Engineering and a member of the Data Science and Engineering Lab. His research is generally focused on data science 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, due to the fact that much of today’s big data can be represented as graphs, his emphasis has primarily been on harnessing this natural structure of data. In this case, when we mention graphs, we are talking about a collection of objects that have relations between them and can furthermore be associated with a set of features/attributes associated with both the objects and their relations.

An example of a graph can be a social network consisting of online users as the objects, different user relations such as “friends”, “blocked users”, etc., and attributes such as their “likes”. His research is currently focused on how to advance state of the art deep learning approaches (which is an area of machine learning that utilizes artificial neural networks) to harness the graph structure of data. For example, if seeking to categorize the political affiliation of an online user, can we come up with a way of incorporating those you’ve followed (and unfollowed) in a deep learning framework to obtain better predictions.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Pratap Bhanu Solanki.

Pratap is a 6th year Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at Michigan State University. His research focusses on wireless communication for underwater robots.

In the underwater domain, most of our standard wireless modes like wifi, Bluetooth, and cellphone signals do not work as they diminish more quickly in the water. Currently, standard industrial technology is acoustic communication. However, it suffers from time delay, low bandwidth, and high power consumption. LED-based visible-light communication is a promising alternative for data-heavy underwater applications. A fundamental challenge associated with the free space optical communication systems is to establish and maintain Line-Of-Sight (LOS) between two communication parties. Pratap's work involves developing underwater autonomous robotic systems and algorithms to address the challenge of alignment control for optical communication.

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]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter @SciFiles89FM and Facebook!