The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Liang Zhao. Liang is a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a lab member of the Environmental Virology Laboratory. His current research focuses on the prediction of fluctuations of COVID-19 incidences in communities through the application of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). As the prevalence and transmissions of COVID-19 and its variants persisting across the world from the inception of 2020, researchers, epidemiologists, and public health scientists have been working assiduously on the advancement of more accurate, complete, real-time monitoring and prediction methods of the virus for the purpose of public health protection and potential prediction of upcoming outbreaks. In a more than 15-month study amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Liang and his colleagues have analyzed hundreds of untreated wastewater samples that were collected weekly from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF), located in southeast Michigan, and successfully detected and monitored SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19. He and his colleagues worked to build models and analyzed the statistics in order to correlate the SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater to the confirmed COVID-19 cases in the communities of the City of Detroit, Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties. He and his colleagues found that the wastewater testing results of SARS-CoV-2 are ahead of the fluctuations of COVID-19 cases in communities for a lag time of 4 to 5 weeks. This result is quite significant and promising since the lag time provides early warnings of upcoming fluctuations of COVID-19 cases in communities and provides important references for public health policies. He and his colleagues will summarize the findings and submit the results in a journal publication very soon. He thinks that the current research monitoring COVID-19 in wastewater really requires collaboration efforts including environmental engineers, hydrologists, GIS specialists, public health workers, molecular microbiologists, epidemiologists and data science specialists, and it would be really encouraging and exciting to see the work has actual impacts on people's lives.  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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Merve Nur Kursav. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Mathematics Education at MSU and a research assistant in the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) with anticipated graduation in Spring 2022. She received a graduate student award, and she has been recognized as a Fulbright Scholar and a Scholarship Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (SUTL) fellow. She is committed to promoting equity in mathematics and STEM education through research, teaching, and service. She has spent much of her career to date involved in all aspects of K- 16 mathematics and STEM education. The last decade of her life has seen her take many different academic and professional pursuits. Yet, through all of these experiences, one thing has been a constant: active ambassadorship of mathematics and STEM education. During her Ph.D. program, she has focused explicitly on statistical research methods and applied her theoretical knowledge in various mathematics and STEM education research projects [CMP, Instilling Quantitative and Integrative Reasoning (INQUIRE), and Scholarship Program for Retaining (SPRING)] and manuscripts. She has taken advanced methods courses and applied the skills she learned in these courses –both quantitative and qualitative–to her work on various projects. Inspired by her own experiences, she had the privilege to recognize the complex challenges faced by different populations of students in mathematics and STEM education fields. Her academic work reflects her commitment to working with all students, regardless of ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. With this commitment in mind, she designed a mixed-methods dissertation study focusing on teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, experiences, and strategies for teaching and engaging English Learners (ELs) in 6-12 grades mathematics classrooms using Culturally Responsive Pedagogy as her theoretical framework. Her dissertation study will set the stage for determining what teachers’ beliefs and practices in teaching mathematics to ELs are. She plans on using the findings from her dissertation study and plans future studies that will involve intervention and professional development for mathematics teachers of ELs. Being an educator of mathematics teaching is a high honor for her. In her teaching, she thinks that she is not only contributing to who her students (future teacher educators) become as individuals, but she has a powerful opportunity to guide them in embracing the diverse world. She has always believed that by knowing who we are, acknowledging our own beliefs and actions, and admitting the existence of inequities and injustices, we can do our part to make a change. She hopes to become a catalyst for change in the teaching and learning of mathematics. She is also engaged in the professional community and service to the field. For example, she is one of the founding members of the Critical Philosophical and Psychoanalytical Institute for Mathematics Education and Journal for Theoretical and Marginal Mathematics Education. She has been a representative to MSU Student Advisory Council and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee. 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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

Kayleigh is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, many coastal communities along the northeastern coast were completely decimated. In the following 10 years, various efforts have been made by national, prefectural, and local governments to assist residents as they recover from the disaster. However, these rural areas already had major social and economic problems they were handling prior to the disaster. Kayleigh’s research partnered with one such community, Minamisanriku, in order to evaluate social and economic problems related to a lack of jobs, lack of businesses, lack of social resources, high depopulation, and other issues associated with rebuilding. Kayleigh and her community partners focused on evaluating how residents handle these types of problems and how they utilize their social resources, such as family and business connections, and organization connections, to manage them. Their project combined creating community programs and research to help residents improve their skills, problem-solving, and collaboration skills over the past year to help support their recovery. Working with four other community organizations, the project analyzed more than 2,600 relationships in the community and showed that some residents are very isolated from each other, require different assistance, and that power dynamics generally exclude residents from having their opinions, ideas, and concerns heard. Through the project, her partners were able to identify new areas and new programs to assist residents, and Kayleigh developed a variety of policy recommendations that will go on to help other communities in similar situations in the future. 

 On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace in academia, and how COVID-19 has had a harder impact on different groups of scholars, especially women and people of color.
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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jen Fry. Jen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at MSU. Particularly limited research has been conducted on the experiences of Black female volleyball players who played in Europe, and how place, space, and geography are intimately intertwined with how they experience life abroad based on their identities (Etzel et al., 2002). The centrality of place and space within sport and geography affects all aspects of a Black female’s experience while playing professionally. Such an impact affects both their professional and personal identities, as “each is concerned with space and the way it is occupied and they both focus on the way people move and interact in geographic space” (Bale, 2003, p. 12). Research on lived experiences of professional athletes who play overseas has received very little attention within the academic and athletic communities (Meisterjahn and Wrisberg, 2013). Through utilizing a mixed methods process of surveys and interviews, Jen's research focuses on understanding the racial experiences of Black female professional volleyball players within Europe who have not existed within geography studies; or, more specifically, sport geography studies within lenses of Black Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, Black Geographies, and Theory of Racial Space. The goal of her research is to understand if Black female volleyball players from the United States experience race and racism while playing professionally in Europe, and if so, does it differ from racism experienced in the United States. Unsurprisingly, it was found they experience racism in both similarly and wildly different ways such as being spit on, teammates withholding their English skills, and being accused of prostitution. 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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on discovering the different ways that the electric fish Mormyrids determine their sex genetically. Her research involves searching for the AMHR2 gene in many mormyrid species to begin piecing together how each fish population may have evolved distinctly.
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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Nick Chargo. Nick’s research is focused on preventing osteoporosis by changing the composition of the bacteria in the gut. Menopause is a well-known cause of osteoporosis, but the bone loss also occurs as a side effect of some diseases and medications. One phenomenon associated with conditions that cause osteoporosis is gut bacterial changes (aka dysbiosis). The main goal of Nick’s project is to understand how dysbiosis leads to bone loss and how to prevent it. He is specifically studying glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis. Glucocorticoids are anti-inflammatory drugs used chronically to treat many conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, COPD, asthma, and inflammatory bowel disease to name a few, and are the second leading cause of osteoporosis. The lab he works in has shown that changing the gut bacteria composition by supplementing the diet with either pre- or probiotics can prevent osteoporosis. Probiotics are “good” bacteria that improve the health of the host while prebiotics are compounds that essentially feed the probiotic bacteria. Importantly, both are natural and confer little to no side effects while effectively preventing bone loss in various models of dysbiosis-induced osteoporosis. Overall, Nick’s research will explore new avenues to improve the treatment and prevention of glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis.
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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Justin Wigard. As a 2021-2022 Scholarship of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (SUTL) Fellow, Ph.D. Candidate Justin Wigard, along with Assistant Professor Megan K. Halpern in the Lyman-Briggs College, is exploring the intersection of art and science studies in the classroom via drawing comics. More specifically, Wigard -- a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department -- is teaching a course that centers on analyzing comics as discourse about medical humanities and on creating comics as exercises in the critical making: the elision of critical-thinking and material-making. Prior work on introducing the arts into social science and humanities courses about science has two benefits. The first is that these forms of creative expression provide new ways of knowing about a topic. The second is that creative activities are often seen as unique and positive experiences, providing benefits for both mental health and intellectual growth. Ultimately, this ongoing project studies the specific value of courses that have students create comics to understand the role of science and medicine in society. Or, put another way -- how do we think by drawing comics, and how does creating graphic narratives visualize how we think about healthcare?

Relevant link: https://grad.msu.edu/sutl/projects

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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Nathan Kauffman. Nate's research revolves around developing novel radiopharmaceuticals and delivery strategies to combat solid cancers. His thesis focuses on using locally delivered internal radiation therapy to induce a systemic immune response against cancer. One of the hallmarks of cancer is the ability to escape recognition by the host immune system. By using radiation, it is possible to trick cancer into exposing itself to the immune system and lead to its own destruction. Discovering safe, effective, and broad ways to accomplish this immunological phenomenon will lead to improved outcomes in patients with a variety of cancer types, which is extremely valuable as no two cancers are perfectly identical.
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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Robert Stanley. The invasive Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis, EAB), the most destructive forest tree insect in North American history, threatens the majority of the native American ash species. This includes green ash, white ash, pumpkin ash and black ash. Green ash was widely used as a street tree, white ash is famous for baseball bats, pumpkin ash for guitars and black ash for native American baskets. This insect (EAB) can kill over 99% of the ash they encounter, and threaten the industries and communities that utilize these ash resources, costing billions of dollars annually.
Robert's collaborators work to find the trees the mount a defense against this insect. What they see in these “lingering” trees is that they somehow manage to kill the insect, and heal over the wound caused by the larvae boring into the wood.
Robert's particular work is to figure out how these trees manage to kill the insects. They use traditional plant breeding coupled with 21st-century analysis techniques to examine the chemicals the plants use, as well the as transcripts influencing this response. He works primarily with the plant chemistry, and run considerable amounts of exploratory studies to figure out which chemicals the plants use. This is called untargeted metabolomics, where they look at all the chemicals in the woody tissue. What he finds is that what is important is the ability of the plant to sense and respond to the EAB attack. This is counter to what many people previously hypothesized, that the native green ash doesn’t have any defense against these invasive species. In fact, it appears that the majority of the green ash has the capability to make these defensive metabolites, it’s just a select few that are able to respond appropriately and fend off the EAB invaders. It’s like if you gave a million people different possible ways to make a tank, and only a couple of them were able to put it together. Those ones that happen to be able to put it together will do well and be able to pass it on to their children. It is absolutely incredible to watch a species being saved in real-time.
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, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!