The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week's The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brett Volment. Heart diseases represent the leading causes of death worldwide. Researchers commonly use cellular and animal models to investigate and study cardiovascular disease and other diseases. However, these models do not provide the best representation of human physiology. To this end, Brett's work focuses on growing and creating miniature 3D human hearts, termed “heart organoids” that allow more faithful insight toward heart development, disease mechanisms and effective treatments for heart disease. Brett creates these mini hearts using human stem cells and mimics the environment present in the fetus to advance their maturity. In doing so, he elicits 3D hearts with all major cell types found in the human heart, internal chambers representing atria and ventricles, and a dynamic vessel network. This system represents a powerful tool that researchers can use to investigate human heart development and to screen for disease therapeutics, and ultimately, serves as a major stepping stone towards generating fully synthetic human hearts from stem cells.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Joshua Kaste. Joshua is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University, and he works in the Shachar-Hill laboratory. His work focuses on building and analyzing mathematical models that describe the rates of all the chemical reactions going on in a living cell or whole organism. If you think of all the chemical compounds and the chemical reactions between them as a sort of road map, these models are like the traffic heat map showing where there's congestion, where there's not much activity, etc. This kind of work gets used for basic biological research, but it can also be used by biological engineers since a lot of projects require modifying an organism so that it makes more of a chemical compound. This kind of analysis can be very helpful for figuring out how exactly to accomplish that. In particular, Joshua's work focuses on the oilseed crop Camelina sativa, which is cultivated for its oil, which can be used as fuel. By modeling its metabolism, we may be able to improve the oil yield farmers get from it, improving its viability as an alternative to fossil fuels.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Jamell Dacon. Jamell is the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His current research focuses on fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Because inclusivity matters in all forms. He intends to investigate, examine and mitigate societal biases to conceptualize the "isms" that plague our society via NLP technologies to increase social justice and reduce feelings of disenfranchisement. Specifically, he focuses on conceptualizing social harms arising from the advancements in language technologies, highlighting both positive and negative societal impacts. If you're interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Emily Greeson. Emily works in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department in the Contag lab at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on studying and engineering genes in bacteria to create new functions. Recently, Emily has been working on Bacillus subtilis, a soil bacterium, and adding temperature-sensitive repressors to it to control protein production. Temperature-sensitive repressors respond to changes in temperature by stopping protein production at lower temperatures and allowing proteins to be produced at higher temperatures. The Contag lab has taken the bacteria with these temperature-sensitive repressors one step further and combined them with magnetic nanoparticles and electromagnetic fields to create a new system. After graduation, Emily hopes to focus more on science communication and education, including working at the MSU Museum CoLab Studio in the 1.5 Celsius exhibition.If you're interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Hariharan Ramakrishnan. Cisplatin is an incredibly powerful chemotherapy drug used to treat a variety of cancers. However, its side effects, such as kidney toxicity and painful neuropathy, may result in dose reduction or termination of treatment increasing patient mortality. Physicians must closely monitor the patient's kidney function during chemotherapy due to the high risk of kidney failure, and the patient's sensitivity, due to severe pain from peripheral neuropathy. Therefore, there is an urgent medical need for novel therapeutics that limit cisplatin's side effects. Adenosine receptors are involved in several kidney diseases and neuropathic pain pathophysiology. Hari hypothesizes that blocking adenosine receptors (AR) using Istradefylline, an FDA-approved AR antagonist will alleviate kidney toxicity and pain from cisplatin. He found that administering Istradefylline reduces both the pain hypersensitivity and kidney toxicity induced by cisplatin and the associated inflammation. Since the FDA already approves Istradefylline for treating Parkinson's disease, it can be quickly clinically applied to cancer therapy. You can learn more about the Laumet lab's research at their website. If you're interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Anna Kim and Roksana Riddle. The United States CDC estimates 2.8 million drug-resistant infections resulting in 35,000 deaths yearly. Pseudomonads are amongst the most resistant to antimicrobials, not only in clinical settings but equally in plant systems like P. syringae. P. syringae is a causative agent for multiple diseases affecting nearly all major economic crops worldwide. Despite the yearly rising numbers of drug-resistant infections, common treatments include antibiotics. Drug-resistant microbes have sparked renewed interest in bacteriophage use in plant infections. Bacteriophages, or phages, are natural predators of bacteria, using them as a host to reproduce. Due to phage's high-host specificity and ability to kill microbes efficiently, the use of phages as a plant biocontrol has increasingly been studied with the rise of drug-resistant microbes. The application of phage on crops results in decreased phage viability due to varied environmental conditions, including UV and pH levels. Check out more about their project here.If you're interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 Sam Barans. Sam researches patient histories of trauma in populations at Clinical High Risk for psychosis at the University of New Mexico. With estimates of trauma exposure ranging from 54 to 97% in this population, it's important to identify trauma risk factors and focus treatment on patients' history of trauma. Sam's research aims to identify discrepancies between patient self-reports of trauma and clinician reports of Adverse Childhood Experiences. If you're interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. Zahra is a senior studying Comparative Cultures and Politics with Minors in Global Public Health and Epidemiology and Computational Math, Science, and Engineering. Aware of the racial bias in police use of force, Zahra's research focuses on the impact police administrative policy can have on police behavior, especially regarding police use of force. This episode will look at the situation of the State of Michigan in terms of the level of transparency of these policies, what this means, and where to go from there. Please see 8cantwait.org if you want to learn more about the policy reforms that inspired the research!If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alissa Ball. Alissa is an undergraduate researcher in the Plant, Soil and Microbial Science Department looking at using fungi to clean up heavy metals. Current methods of heavy metal removal create toxic byproducts, so her work aims to investigate how effectively fungi can accumulate heavy metals, thus giving an environmentally friendly solution. Besides building an understanding of how fungi process these metals, her research will open up further possibilities for using fungi as eco-friendly tools in our everyday lives. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

 On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. This research explores Gap Junctional Intercellular Communication (GJIC) as a bioindicator of cancer. Cells use GJIC for the signaling of proteins and stresses. When a cell is stressed, it will close its gap junctions, signaling uncontrolled cell proliferation. These experiments have specifically focused on using GJIC to determine the carcinogenic effects of PFAS compounds. PFAS compounds are a classification of compounds of particular environmental concern, as they have been found in the water and soil of the Great Lakes region in high abundance.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Zach Miller. A therapeutic window is a dose range between the minimum effective drug dose (MED) to the minimum toxic drug dose (MTD). Many commonly-used cancer drugs, including chemotherapies such as Doxorubicin, are highly toxic to normal tissues and have narrow therapeutic windows. The drug concentration should constantly remain between the MED and MTD in order to produce risk-free therapeutic effects. In general, critically, administration of too much drug (above the therapeutic window) will cause serious side effects on normal human organs, leading to patient morbidity or even death. On the other hand, too little drug (below the therapeutic window) will result in a lack of treatment efficacy and may induce cancer drug resistance, which is the most important reason for the failure of chemotherapy. Herein, we studied the viability of two cell lines, a dox-sensitive cell line (BT459) and a non-dox-sensitive cell line (4T1), to estimate the therapeutic window of doxorubicin. We studied the cell viability to estimate the therapeutic window of DOX in vitro so as to guide the DOX dose in vivo.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Andrew Deleruyelle. How can one go about measuring the effects forests have on combatting climate change? As a student of forestry, Andrew has observed changing climates and wondered what can be done to quantify the largescale ecological patterns they're experiencing. When Andrew finished an ecological data monitoring and analysis course taught by MSU professor Dr. Andrew Finley, he wanted to continue learning about the forest's impact on these processes. Funded under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Forest Carbon Estimation (ForCE) project, his research under Dr. Finley led him to an existing toolset: The US Forest Service (USFS) National Volume and Biomass Estimator Libraries.  These libraries proved to be useful for Forest Service employees, but remained inaccessible to the general public and mainly focused on the forests within North America. Andrew's research has been focused on writing an interface in the R computer language for these libraries, a project he calls TimbuR. Andrew's current focus, now that his research has concluded, is to bring TimbuR to the public as free-to-use software and expand its ability to serve global audiences.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maddy Eischer. As a student pursuing a dual degree in Apparel & Textile Design and Genomics & Molecular Genetics, Maddy has long felt the societal pressure to pick one of her passions in school and in a future career. Instead of choosing between these two dichotomous interests, Maddy has managed to use her research to highlight the interconnection between the arts and the sciences by investigating scientific advancements in textiles as well as by designing and creating a collection of five unconventional and fashionable lab coats. This research explores the struggle to pick a career path, the importance of fashion and textiles in all facets of life, and the concept of professionalism and individuality within medical and scientific spaces.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Charlotte Best. Charlotte works in a lab that studies the influence of the gut microbiome (all the bacteria in our gut) on the brain and behavior. She is in charge of analyzing its effects on individual neurons and she also found that MRI impacts certain neurons in a negative way, which hasn't been documented before.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lauren Emerick. Lauren is a junior studying Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, working for Dr. Roloff in the Applied Forest and Wildlife Ecology Lab. Lauren has been researching the behavioral changes in invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) in response to management activities in the state of Michigan. Wild pigs are a newly established invasive species in the state of Michigan, and they pose several threats; they uproot agricultural crops, cause damage to the landscape, and compete with native wildlife species. However, very little is understood about wild pig behavior and movement throughout the state. Lauren's research investigates the impact of wild pig management tactics currently being used by wildlife management officials on the behavior of this species, in hopes of informing managers the best course of action to take against this invasive wildlife species. Lauren used data collected from GPS collared wild pigs to assess the movement and behavior of the animals before and after management actions and analyzed the data to better understand the implications of our current methods of invasive wild pig management. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Marchal. Gregory's research investigated influenza vaccine hesitancy. This project uses experimental data from rural Wyoming to analyze how risk preferences and perceptions of uncertainty influence parental influenza vaccine hesitancy. Their key finding is that parents who perceive that there are more "unknowns" in the risks of vaccines, relative to the risks of diseases, tend to vaccinate at a lower rate. This relationship exists after controlling for trust in the healthcare system, so beliefs that vaccine risks are unknown are not just tied to whether someone trusts their doctor or the pharmaceutical industry.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Grant Bruninga. Inland lake herring can be found in lakes all around the state of Michigan as well as the Great Lakes. However, recent increases in habitat destruction, chemical runoff, and pollution have caused significant declines in lake herring populations. Since lake herring are important prey species to much notable predatory fish such as salmon and have important ecological and commercial roles in society, their conservation is of particular concern to natural resources managers in Michigan. Grant's work in the Molecular Ecology Lab at Michigan State looks at the history and diversity of these fish from a genetic perspective. His research, alongside the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, studies differences in lake herring genetic information and determines their origins as well as differences in populations across various lakes in Michigan. The data collected from this study will then be used as part of the Michigan Wildlife Action Plan for lake herring, currently being drafted by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, in the hopes of obtaining federal funding to help conserve these important species for years to come.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview June Oh. How can an English major help promote critical science literacy for STEM undergraduate students? As a humanities scholar, June has been a part of an IRB-approved interdisciplinary pedagogy project that develops a first-year writing course for STEM undergraduate students. With a team of collaborators in the College of History, Philosophy, and Science, Education, and English, this project leads an effort in designing a college-wide first-year writing course that seeks to foster culturally responsible student (science) identity and critical literacy through five inquiry-based writing projects. This project has been funded by SUTL (Scholarship of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning) at MSU since 2019. With another year of support from MSU, the team is now applying the pilot writing program to fourteen different sections with ~230 students in total. Bringing her expertise in developing student writing and inclusive pedagogy in English classrooms, June is currently coding student writing and further analyzing promising early results on responsible identity formation data.  If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles89fm@gmail.com. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Hess. The U.S. electrical grid, the system of control centers, substations, poles, and wires that provides electricity to almost all American homes pre-dates the computer and Internet revolutions. Introducing computers to the operation of this grid allows for the grid to react faster than any human being could, either to protect itself, heal itself, or turn itself off to avoid some physical disaster. The demand for these computing systems and how they communicate pushes the very limits of modern digital communications. In addition, the computers at the end of those communications must be protected to avoid them being misused in ways that could be anything from inconvenient to disastrous. Greg's research seeks to use modern computer networking technology to address these two issues. Lab tests confirm that Intent Based Networking can allow computer networks to dynamically configure both to meet the daunting communication needs of the end devices as well as protect those devices from accidental misuse or purposeful hacking.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!  

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Philip Engelgau. Philip's research aims to understand how banana fruit is able to synthesize its characteristic aroma compounds. The chemicals that banana fruit produce and that we sense as banana-like are derived from the same metabolic routes as valine and leucine, common, primary metabolites that are essential to the day-to-day metabolism of not just bananas, but all living things. As bananas ripen, they accumulate valine and leucine simultaneously with the production of banana-aroma volatiles. However, not all is as it seems. Both valine and leucine are normally under strong feedback regulation which should prevent the stark increases that have been observed in banana fruit. This paradox suggests that banana fruit are able to somehow uniquely overcome this inhibition in order to generate these aroma chemicals. Philip's work investigates how alternative splicing, a mechanism that creates variability in how genes are expressed, of the two rate-limiting enzymes of valine and leucine biosynthesis may be leading to versions of these enzymes with compromised regulatory regions. These unregulated enzymes are likely able to produce copious amounts of valine and leucine in banana fruit and thus provide a means for the production of the banana's unique smell. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Claire Kopenhafer. The Hubble Space Telescope has given us many gorgeous images of galaxies, with bright stars and swirls of dust, but there's a lot more going on than we can easily see. Stars are born out of compressed gas, and gas is constantly flowing in and out of galaxies. Most of this gas cannot be seen in Hubble's pictures, but its impact is profound. Claire uses computer simulations to study how this flow of gas affects a galaxy's ability to form stars: allowing it to form more, or cutting it off entirely. These simulations use what we understand about the laws of physics to make predictions and interpretations for telescope observations.

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alassane Sow. Alassane is an undergraduate researcher working in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics currently working on germinating symbiotic and parasitic fungi in the order Pezizalies. They are also a part of a nationwide project that focuses on creating a way to consistently grow Morels outdoors and in high tunnels. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Brooke Devries. Brooke is a second-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Hanne Hoffmann. Her research focuses on daily rhythms in the body called circadian rhythms. You'd be surprised at how many things, from sleep to metabolism, to mood and energy, have predictable rhythms throughout the day! These rhythms are all coordinated by a tiny area in the brain referred to as the SCN. The SCN gets light input from the eyes, coordinating these rhythms to the time of day. So what happens when light input is altered? Brooke's research focuses on how the changes in the SCN changes normal hormone levels and mood when light exposure is changed.  If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Azam Ali Sher. Azam is a dual major Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology (CMIB) & Environmental Sciences and Integrative Toxicology (EITS), and a BEACON research fellow at Michigan State University. There are around 3 million infections and 36,000 deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant (AR) bacteria in the USA (CDC, 2019), and many disease-causing bacteria are resistant to several different antibiotics. Many bacteria carry their antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) on conjugative plasmids, small pieces of DNA that can be freely transferable to normal bacteria or pathogens in their natural habitats, such as the human gut. However, little is known about the transfer of these ARGs among bacteria in nature. Azam's Ph.D. research in Dr. Linda Mansfield's lab focuses on studying the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance among human gut bacteria. He addresses a high-impact but straightforward question: what happens if one bacterium with these transferable drug resistance genes colonizes a human gut. He uses laboratory mice with transplanted human gut microbes and colonizes them with bacteria carrying fluorescently labeled ARG plasmids. He then uses advanced molecular techniques to follow the transfer of plasmids to the resident bacteria after colonization. This study will uncover what kinds of bacteria can donate and receive ARGs in the human gut. Azam says that this kind of study will be used to help find some solutions to halt the development of multiple drug-resistant bacteria in the gut and other environments. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Megan Mikhail. Megan's research focuses on the intersection between biological and environmental risk for eating disorders, with a particular focus on underserved and marginalized populations. Historically, eating disorders have been stereotyped as “vanity disorders” that predominantly affect advantaged (i.e., white, wealthy) individuals. Unfortunately, these stereotypes have led to the increased stigma around eating disorders, and limited access to care for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In research including a representative sample of over 6,800 youth from the state of Michigan, Megan found that eating disorder symptoms were significantly greater in youth experiencing familial and neighborhood disadvantage. Moreover, genetic influences on eating disorder symptoms appeared to be expressed earlier and more strongly in these youth. Contrary to stereotypes, Megan's research suggests that children and adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds may be at elevated risk for eating disorders, especially when they also have genetic vulnerabilities. Their research highlights the urgent need for access to screening and treatment for eating disorders for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are currently underserved. Press release from MSU describing one of Megan's recent studies: https://socialscience.msu.edu/news-events/news/2021-12-13.htmlFor people who may be worried about their food or eating, the National Eating Disorders Association offers support and resources: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Serena Lotreck from MSU's Plant Biology & Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering. Serena's research is focused on helping researchers in the plant sciences navigate the flood of available information when designing new hypotheses and experiments. Since the 1980s, there has been a 3% increase per year in scientific publishing, leading to an overwhelming amount of available articles for scientists to navigate when beginning a new project. Currently, researchers rely on labor-intensive manual methods to manage this flow of information, like reading individual articles from the search results of an academic search engine in order to generate a new hypothesis. Knowledge graphs are representations of information automatically extracted from a large quantity of unstructured text like scientific papers, where real-world objects are represented as the nodes of the graph, and the connections between nodes are the relationships between those real-world objects. For example, in molecular biology, the nodes are things like proteins or genes, and the edges are relationships like "upregulates" or "inhibits". New nodes and edges can be predicted on these graphs, which generates novel scientific hypotheses based on a greater percentage of existing information than could be achieved with a manual literature search. The goal of Serena's research is to adapt existing methods for building knowledge graphs for the plant sciences and to develop a framework for using these knowledge graphs for hypothesis generation. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maria Milan from MSU's Civil and Environmental Engineering. Rural Alaskan communities face challenges unique to other areas in the United States. Energy usage and costs are high due to the shipping of materials and cold winters. Many communities are in need of more efficient housing to combat the cold weather and provide a safe, comfortable indoor environment. Maria's research took her to a remote community on Alaska's west side, where she performed energy assessments on 27 homes and held interviews with many of these homeowners to talk about housing concerns and future housing. She compiled her data into summaries that were shared with the community and housing director in hopes of future grant funding for new homes.Listen to learn about challenges faced by rural Alaskan communities and how these challenges can be addressed in future housing. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Paul Bylsma from MSU's Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. This thought project discusses the simultaneous proximity and distance that most of us in the academic world felt as a result of COVID online learning. Paul and his collaborators use a unique theoretical lens that foregrounds the role of the body in learning to describe how being visually present online is not enough to replicate the physical presence that we took for granted in in-person learning. For example, our squares in a Zoom room were super close, and we (typically) had no problem seeing and hearing each other. But Paul's research explains how such visual proximity is betrayed by irreconcilable distances masked by technology. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. 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 scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jenna Beffel, a 4th-year doctoral student in MSU's Department of Human Development and Family Studies and the lab manager of the Family Stress Lab. Jenna's research through the Family Stress Lab focuses on families with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)- specifically, the outcomes and experiences of the typically developing siblings (TDS) in these families. A lot of the past research on TDS focuses on negative outcomes for TDS as a result of having a sibling with ASD, but TDS provide critical help/support to their families and others and do experience a variety of positive outcomes- which is a large focus of Jenna's research. Specifically, she has examined TDS' experiences of childhood caregiving (called Parentification), intentions to care for their sibling with ASD in the future, general prosocial (e.g., helping) behavior, and adult TDS' selection of a helping profession (e.g., a profession focused on helping others, such as a doctor or psychologist). In some of her most recent research, she's explored how these different types of helping/caregiving behaviors influence each other, such as how Parentification predicts TDS' prosocial behavior (Beffel & Nuttall, 2020) or the selection of a helping profession (Beffel et al., under review). Currently, she is working on obtaining funding so that she can code TDS prosocial behavior among a sample of teen TDS, and explore how TDS prosocial behavior influences these teen TDS' intentions to provide care to their sibling with ASD in the future, when their parents may no longer be able to care for them. Overall, the goal of researching all of these instances of TDS helping/caregiving is to first, help the field recognize just how important TDS are and, second, determine how to best support TDS so they can continue to provide help/care without feeling highly stressed, overburdened, etc. If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kylie Smith. Our brains are protected by a tight-knit biological wall called the blood-brain barrier. This barrier prevents potentially dangerous substances in our blood from accessing sensitive brain tissue but also restricts access to therapeutics or imaging agents intended for brain delivery. Kylie's research focuses on how to deliver material to the brain via a direct transport pathway in the nose, bypassing the blood-brain barrier completely. Her research combines nose-to-brain delivery with medical imaging to optimize the delivery technique by noninvasively tracking drugs as they transit to the brain. By quantifying the amount of drug that reached the target site using imaging tools like positron emission tomography, we can test different versions of the drug, loading solutions, or delivery approaches. This work could reduce barriers to treatment for patients that cannot take ingestible or injectable therapeutics and lead to expanded treatment options for brain diseases without a cure.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Andrew Kearney. Andrew is a student in the MSU Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering. Due to the low water activity (aw) and high osmotic pressure, sugar is generally recognized as a low microbiological risk source to human health. As a low moisture commodity sugar may receive little to no additional processing in a home environment.  Other low-moisture commodities, such as flour, were once also generally recognized as safe. However, following foodborne pathogen outbreaks in flour in recent years, there is interest in evaluating other low moisture commodities for foodborne pathogen risks. In response to outbreaks of pathogens in connection to flour, U.S. FDA guidance has suggested not to consume raw flour. This development has made assessing the risk of other shelf-stable commodities, like sugar, important to evaluate before a similar outbreak event occurs, despite no outbreaks of foodborne pathogens in added sugar within the U.S. having been reported to date. The objective of this study was to assess the survival of Salmonella in multiple sugar products during long-term storage. Granulated, powdered, brown, and liquid sugar obtained from commercial suppliers were inoculated with a 5-strain Salmonella cocktail via dry transfer. Samples were stored at three temperatures (4, 25, 37°C) in sealed containers, and sampled 12 times up to ~1,000 days.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week's The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Ti'Air Riggins. Have you ever wondered what it's like to wake up one day and realize that you can move anything below your neck? For some people who have a stroke or have been in major accidents, this is a reality for them. Fortunately, there has been a recently developed technology called implantable probes also known as microelectrode arrays which are little metal or polymer sticks you can implant into the brain. They receive signals from specialized brain cells called neurons that help communicate to a computer for that person to move a limb again. The problem is another specialized cell called astrocytes acts as the bodyguards of the brain and attacks the probes. In the process they kill neurons. The goal of Ti'Air's research is to look at intervention strategies to minimize astrocytes from flipping from normal function to attack mode so that the probes can perform longer in patient brains.If you're interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!