PhD student

Studying the ‘cause of causes’ affecting cardiovascular health

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 15:08:47 +0000

Studying the ‘cause of causes’ affecting cardiovascular health Rachel Sauer Tue, 01/21/2025 - 08:08

Chris Quirk

CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers find that socioeconomic status is a key indicator of heart health

Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, significantly affects those of lower socioeconomic status. In addition, members of historically marginalized groups—including Black, Indigenous and Asian populations—suffer disproportionately. Therefore, public health advocates and policy makers need to make extra efforts to reach these populations and find ways to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease.

These are the findings of researchers Sanna Darvish and Sophia Mahoney, PhD candidates in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Integrative Physiology. Their recent paper on socioeconomic status and arterial aging—written with CU �鶹ӰԺ co-authors Ravinandan Venkatasubramanian, Matthew J. Rossman, Zachary S. Clayton and Kevin O. Murray—was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Researchers Sanna Darvish (left) and Sophia Mahoney (right), PhD candidates in the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Integrative Physiology advocate for making extra efforts to reach historically marginalized populations and find ways to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease.

Darvish and Mahoney conducted a literature review of cardiovascular disease, looking specifically at how it affects various demographics. Their focus was on two physiological features that are predictors of cardiovascular issues: endothelial dysfunction—a failure of the lining of blood vessels that can cause a narrowing of the arteries—and stiffening of arteries.

“It’s pretty well established that individuals of lower socioeconomic status have increased risk for many chronic diseases, but our lab focuses on the physiological and cellular mechanisms contributing to that increased risk,” Darvish explains. “We’re looking at what studies have been conducted, looking at blood vessel dysfunction, arterial dysfunction in these marginalized groups that then will predict their risk for cardiovascular disease.”

Exercise as therapy

Beyond the clinical findings, Darvish and Mahoney cite four social determinants of health regarding cardiovascular disease across ethnic and racial groups: environmental factors, like proximity to pollution or access to green spaces; psychological and social factors, such as stress or structural racism; health care access; and socioeconomic status.

While each of the four has different facets that contribute to overall cardiovascular health, the authors found that socioeconomic status was the “cause of causes,” and thus the most important indicator to examine in their goal of recommending effective therapies.

“It became clear to us that socioeconomic status really played a role in every single aspect of social determinants of health,” says Mahoney. “So, our paper naturally centered around socioeconomic status as we realized that it was the most integrated and affected the rest of the determinants of health.”

To help overcome the barriers to better cardiovascular health among those in lower socioeconomic groups, Darvish and Mahoney recommend exercise.

“Exercise is well established as first line of defense, especially aerobic exercise,” says Mahoney. “It’s easy for us to say that in Colorado, but there are plenty of barriers to people everywhere who do not have access to resources.”

“Exercise is well established as first line of defense, especially aerobic exercise,” says CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Sophia Mahoney. “It’s easy for us to say that in Colorado, but there are plenty of barriers to people everywhere who do not have access to resources.”

One option the researchers propose is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which packs a robust aerobic effort into workouts as brief as five or 10 minutes. The authors also recommend inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST), during which users breathe into a simple handheld device that inhibits air flow and get a simulated aerobic workout that also strengthens the diaphragm. Previous research has demonstrated that just a few minutes of IMST therapy a day can reduce blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Reducing research barriers

One thing Darvish and Mahoney hope their study will do is galvanize researchers to include more diverse populations in their research. While investigating the existing literature for their review, the two were dismayed to find few studies that included or focused on populations from the lower socioeconomic echelons.

There are structural reasons for that, Darvish explains. Time is an issue, as those lower on the socioeconomic ladder often work more hours and have more demands on their non-work time. In addition, transportation can be an obstacle, as research facilities may not be near neighborhoods with more diverse populations. “We pay our participants an appropriate amount for their participation, but not all clinical trials do,” Darvish says.

“Another thing we are doing is instituting a lift service through our lab, to drive people in from their homes in Denver to our lab in �鶹ӰԺ, and we hope this will help improve access for more people to participate.”

Language barriers can be another impediment, as all release forms and study literature would need to be translated for those who don’t speak English. Darvish and Mahoney say it is important that researchers work to overcome these structural barriers. “Our lab is working to do all we can to reduce biases, and include these diverse populations,” says Mahoney. “We need to practice what we preach and start with ourselves.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers find that socioeconomic status is a key indicator of heart health.

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Learning the recipe for grizzly gourmet

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Learning the recipe for grizzly gourmet Rachel Sauer Thu, 12/12/2024 - 07:30

Doug McPherson

CU �鶹ӰԺ anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford has been learning what’s on the menu for grizzlies in Montana

If you’re ever heading to Montana’s backcountry, you’d be hard pressed to find a better guide than Sabrina Bradford, a �鶹ӰԺ PhD candidate in biological anthropology.

Bradford has spent more than a decade in the area’s countryside, mostly on horseback, studying conflict between humans and wildlife, social-ecological systems, livestock damage and the grizzly-bear diet.

Lately she’s been getting noticed for that last item.

Anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford (left) wrote Grizzly Bear Foods: Reference Guide to the Plants, Animals, and Fungi in the Montana Grizzly Bear's Diet, published by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

This fall, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks published her new 100-page book, Grizzly Bear Foods: Reference Guide to the Plants, Animals, and Fungi in the Montana Grizzly Bear's Diet, which will be part of the state’s “bear aware” education program for the public in 2025.

“I saw a lot about how grizzlies used the landscape,” says Bradford, who sometimes has ridden 20 miles a day in the backcountry doing research and working as a guide and bear education specialist. “I took plenty of photos of grizzly bear signs―areas where it looked like a tiller had rolled through the soil, over rocks and torn up trees. I wanted people to be able to see the landscape similar to the way I did. It’s really important to me that the public understands what bears are actually doing on the landscape.”

Of course, that landscape is a massive buffet for grizzlies, whose four food groups are plants, animals, fungi and trash from humans. A few specific examples of their diet: grasses, shrubs, seeds and fruits of trees, mushrooms, ducks, bird eggs, trout, salmon, squirrels, beaver, moose, bison, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, ants, termites and bees.

Bradford, who graduates this month, says grizzlies serve an important role as seed dispersers within the ecosystem there, and many of the shrubs grizzlies eat produce berries (e.g. huckleberry, raspberry, serviceberry, grouse whortleberry, buffaloberry) that are dispersed via scat.

‘Pretty cool animals’

“Bears are pretty cool animals,” Bradford says. “They have incredible spatiotemporal memory [they can recall where and when food was presented], and they use social learning. Mom teaches her cubs food acquisition strategies. This is key for people to understand, those who question why cubs were removed from an area as well as when the mother is removed for dumpster diving. She’s just teaching her cubs how to access a reliable food resource.”

Bears are also not above stealing other animals’ food stash, an activity called kleptoparasitism.

Grizzly bears sometimes steal other animals' food stashes, an act called kleptoparasitism. (Photo: Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)

“People who hike in grizzly country with their dogs off the leash say their dog will protect them. That doesn’t really work,” Bradford explains. “Kleptoparasitism is one of the food-source acquisition strategies grizzlies use, and they’ll steal food from packs of wolves. Wolves will yield to grizzly bears, and your dog is nowhere near as tough as a pack of wolves.”

Bradford says while she’s seen many grizzlies, she’s never had to use her bear spray. Her advice to avoid attacks: “Realize that the human voice is the most powerful deterrent out there, not radios or bear bells. Talk loud in areas of low visibility so the bears can hear you coming. It’s critical to understand that you shouldn’t surprise a bear, that they’ll do anything to protect their cubs. And be aware of magpies or ravens in the forest because they’re a sign you might be hiking up on a carcass.”

And while grizzlies’ sense of hearing is strong, their sense of smell is astounding. “The size of the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that processes scent information in grizzlies, is more than five times larger than humans’ olfactory bulb.” She advises people to sleep in clothes they haven’t cooked in: “Just because you can’t smell food on your clothes doesn’t mean bears can’t.”

Bradford adds that there is a common misunderstanding that grizzlies are looking to wipe out the first person they see and that livestock producers want to kill all grizzlies.

“That isn’t true,” she says. “Yes, livestock loss to grizzlies does occur, but ranchers I interviewed said over 80% of the grizzlies out there never cause any trouble. And other ranchers reported that it’s common to see grizzlies grazing grass in the same fields that the cattle use.”

She recalls one rancher telling her, “’Wildlife is embedded deep in our traditions. We don't hate grizzly bears; they're amazing animals. I don't want to give up all I have to the grizzly bear but I'm willing to share it.’”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford has been learning what’s on the menu for grizzlies in Montana.

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Racing for climate action at 18,000 feet

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:14:08 +0000

Racing for climate action at 18,000 feet Rachel Sauer Thu, 12/05/2024 - 08:14

Rachel Sauer

Invited by the king of Bhutan, CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Clare Gallagher completed the 109-mile Snowman Race to bring attention to the realities of climate change

Usually when Clare Gallagher runs 100 miles, she does it all at once—a day that’s alternately punishing and exhilarating and at the furthest boundaries of what her body can do.

The 109-mile Snowman Race was different. It spanned five days across the Himalayas and saw 16 of the most elite ultramarathoners from around the world traversing multiple mountain passes approaching 18,000 feet.

Clare Gallagher (left) was invited by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to run the 109-mile Snowman Race ultramarathon. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“As far as ultramarathons go, it was not that crazy a distance—we were doing about a marathon a day,” Gallagher explains. “But it took so, so long because these mountains are just so high. We started in Laya (Bhutan), which is about 13,000 feet in elevation, and went up from there.”

Gallagher, a PhD student in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Environmental Studies and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), was invited by the king of Bhutan to participate in the 2024 Snowman Race held at the end of October. It was the second time the race was held—an event envisioned by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to draw international attention to the stark realities of climate change in Bhutan and around the globe.

“Once we actually got there and were literally on top of these glaciers, I could see his point,” Gallagher says. “His goal is for international trail runners like myself to help share the story of what we saw, and what I saw is that the glaciers are melting.”

Running 100 miles

Before she vividly learned that a journey of 100 miles begins with a single step, however, Gallagher was simply a girl who liked to run. She ran track as an undergraduate at Princeton and kept running in Thailand, where she moved after graduating to teach English. While there, she signed up for the inaugural Thailand Ultramarathon almost on a whim and ended up winning.

Learn more

Read more about Clare Gallagher's experiences in Bhutan in an essay she wrote for Outside magazine.

The races she entered grew in length, and in 2016, at age 24, she ran the Leadville Trail 100 for the first time and won. “I had been reading Outside magazine, and I always looked up to some of the women who preceded me (in ultramarathons),” Gallagher says.

“I thought they were really badass, and trail running seemed a lot more interesting than track—I’d gotten really burned out in undergrad, but to race in a beautiful mountain environment, in places that are so remote, really appealed to me.”

Clare Gallagher (front row, far left in purple shirt) and 15 ultramarathon colleagues from Bhutan and around the world completed the five-day Snowman Race. (Photo: Snowman Race)

She won the 2017 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc CCC, setting a course record, and went on to win the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run in 2019, the Black Canyon 100K in 2022 and the Leadville 100 again, also in 2022. She was invited to run the inaugural Snowman Race in Bhutan that year, but she’d started her PhD program, and her schedule couldn’t accommodate the training.

When she was invited to the second Snowman Race in 2024, despite still being in graduate school, she eagerly accepted. The 16 participants were evenly split between Bhutanese and international runners, “and the Bhutanese runners destroyed us,” Gallagher says with a laugh.

“The physiology of running at altitude is pretty fascinating. A lot of the literature is finding that aspects of this ability are genetic, so if you don’t live at these altitudes and if you can’t afford to be acclimating for a month, your experience is going to be really different. It’s probably the gnarliest race I’ve ever done, and I got wrecked by altitude. People thought I might do well because I’m from Colorado—and I was using an altitude tent beforehand a little bit, but I was also taking my PhD prelims and didn’t want to be sleeping in it. So, I got destroyed.”

She did, most importantly, finish the race, and the slower pace she adopted in acquiescence to the altitude allowed her more time to look around.

‘Please send our message’

The Snowman Race course follows the historic, high-altitude Snowman Trek route, beginning in Laya and ending in Chamkhar, and summitting a series of Himalayan passes—the highest of which is 17,946 feet.

"My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it," says Clare Gallagher (foreground, running in Bhutan), a CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student in environmental studies. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“On day three we were up almost to 18,000 feet, and I’m walking and kind of sick with altitude, but I still had never felt the immensity of what I felt in the Himalayas,” Gallagher says. “The race route goes really close to glaciers well over 18,000 feet, and I’ve honestly never felt so scared. I could tell these glaciers were melting and the sun was so hot.

“The story of Bhutan is that these glaciers are melting at a much faster rate than predicted and are then creating these big alpine lakes that break through their levy walls or moraines and flood villages. We ran through one of these most at-risk villages—it takes seven days to get there by horse—and the people who live there don’t want to be forced to move. So, they were saying, ‘Please send our message back to your countries, we’re scared of our glaciers obliterating us.’”

And even though her PhD research focuses on plastic pollution in oceans, “even the issue of plastic pollution was apparent up there,” Gallagher says. “The interconnectedness of our world became so, so apparent up there. A piece of plastic trash up there is going to degrade really fast because of the high altitude and super harsh alpine environment, and then all those chemicals are going to go downstream. There’s not ton of trash in Bhutan, but plastic pollution is still a part of this story.”

She adds that Bhutan, like many smaller nations, is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change despite having one of the smallest carbon footprints on the planet, and she rues that it takes runners from western nations flying there—another carbon-intensive activity—to draw attention to the seriousness of climate change.

“A really surprising take-home from this journey was how spiritual the experience was,” Gallagher says. “All of my fellow Bhutanese runners were praying at mountain passes, and any time there was a meditative stupa, they were stopping and praying to the mountain deities, thanking them for safe passage.

“I really do feel there’s some connection between caring for this planet and each other and all the plants and animals on this planet. I feel like that reverence is something I’ve been missing in my work as an environmentalist. The phrase ‘climate change’ has taken on an almost corporate flavor, but in Bhutan things aren’t emails or PowerPoints or slogans, they’re real. Climate change is not just a phrase; it means melting glaciers. So, I’m interested in taking that depth and reverence for the land and living things and beings and asking, ‘OK, what are our problems here in Colorado? What are our challenges?’”

A hazard of the field in which she’s immersed is extreme climate anxiety, and Gallagher says she’s worked to focus day-to-day on “taking care of what I can take care of and acknowledging my present. My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it. I feel a lot of gratitude for being alive at this time in history and asking, ‘What are we going to do with this moment?’”

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Invited by the king of Bhutan, CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Clare Gallagher completed the 109-mile Snowman Race to bring attention to the realities of climate change.

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Top photo: Clare Gallagher runs the Snowman Race in Bhutan. (Photo: Snowman Race)

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:35:43 +0000

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/12/2024 - 12:35

Rachel Sauer

On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence

Almost every night, Tyler Nuckols can hear fireworks and shouting—not celebrating a holiday or marking an occasion, but trying to drive elephants back into the forest.

In Ruam Thai, Thailand, where Nuckols is conducting socio-ecological fieldwork as he pursues a PhD in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Environmental Studies, elephants emerge from the trees of Kui Buri National Park almost every night in search of pineapple.

Over many years, elephants have learned that an easy and accessible meal is in farmers’ fields—to the detriment of those fields and farmers’ livelihoods. As farmers lose their source of income and means of supporting their families, elephants risk injury or worse as farmers—also risking injury or worse—try to deter them.

CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Tyler Nuckols (left, conducting research in Thailand) and Karen Bailey, assistant professor of environmental studies, emphasize that human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation.

For a lot of people—mainly those who don’t coexist with elephants—this may not seem like much of a problem. Elephants, after all, are among the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals, credited with an emotional range that some claim matches or even exceeds that of humans. People visit a zoo and return home daydreaming about backyard elephants.

But on World Elephant Day, being celebrated today, Nuckols emphasizes that the challenges and successes of human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation that communities and populations worldwide are tackling as climate change fundamentally reshapes how humans coexist with wildlife.

“We’re interested in supporting and partnering with local communities to look at solutions to human-elephant conflict beyond the predominant approaches of ‘Where do you farm? What do you farm? How much money do you make farming?’” Nuckols explains. "Our research and community-based conservation approach looks to explore a more complex focus related to factors like identity, access to resources and historical and political factors, among many more layers that may shape how households can engage in solutions to human-elephant conflict and participate in the first place."

Studying coexistence

Nuckols has been working with elephants for more than 10 years, starting with the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia—an ethical sanctuary and retirement home for elephants that had worked in tourism or logging. After earning a master’s degree at Colorado State University, and after COVID curtailed his plans to return to Cambodia to study mitigation techniques to prevent elephants from entering agricultural fields, he began working with Karen Bailey, a CU �鶹ӰԺ assistant professor of environmental studies who leads the WELS (well-being, environment, livelihoods and sustainability) Group.

Bailey completed postdoctoral research in southern Africa with communities living outside protected areas “who were living with the threats of climate change and the impact of sharing the landscape with wildlife,” she says. “Some of the impacts of crop raiding by elephants in southern Africa were significant predictors of potential food insecurity. When that’s combined with the threats of changing seasons and changing climate as well, the realities of human-elephant coexistence in communities in and outside of conservation areas become really pronounced.”

Tyler Nuckols (second from left, blue shirt) and colleagues from Bring the Elephant Home in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

As part of the Human Elephant Coexistence Through Alternative Agricultural Research (HECTAAR) working group with the human-elephant coexistence research organization Trunks & Leaves, Bailey and Nuckols partner with researchers and conservation groups from around the world to study the reasons for conflict between agriculturalists and elephants, as well as develop and test interventions that support livelihoods and work to rebuild community resilience and landscapes in different countries and cultures.

Nuckols began researching in Thailand in 2022, partnering with NGO Bring the Elephant Home to study human-elephant conflict and how elephants interact with different types of agricultural crops. Nuckols’ research also focuses on environmental justice and resilience, and how communities define ecological justice for both humans and elephants.

The community where Nuckols’ research is based is not only a human-elephant conflict hot spot, but also a success story for conservation and community-based tourism.

“But despite the positive impacts of tourism and some grassroots efforts, conflict occurs every night,” Nuckols says. “You can hear fireworks and shouting and people trying to get elephants back into the forest every night. So, one of the ideas that community members are evaluating is crop transition. Research has shown that elephants won’t eat lemongrass, ginger, chili, citronella, so farmers are interested in growing these crops, but the community is asking how to ensure it’s sustainable and equitable.

“Changing crops is a high-risk decision, when they know they can sell monocrop pineapple that they’ve been growing for decades.”

Risk vs. reward

A significant challenge in human-elephant coexistence is the disconnect between people actually living with or near elephants and the rest of the world that is watching and loves elephants, or at least the idea of elephants.

“Even in Thailand, there’s a huge disconnect between major urban centers like Bangkok and rural provinces,” Nuckols explains. “These farmers are often villainized or portrayed as invaders. They’ve been told they should just pack up and give elephants back their habitat, but that’s not feasible or tenable or just for those people who are being told to leave. It’s very grim, but we’ve had people die in our community from negative encounters with elephants, victims who’ve been attacked in the night while they were guarding their crops.”

Almost every night, farmers in Ruam Thai, Thailand, deal with elephants in their pineapple fields. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

Bailey notes that while the world may be watching and feeling invested in the plight of elephants, “there’s an inherent framing of environmental justice that we more equally share the costs and benefits of the environment. We as people globally benefit from elephants existing—we get a warm feeling when we think about them—but we have to remind people that there are costs. We have to think about how to more equitably share the costs and benefits. Anyone who loves elephants and might call themselves an elephant person should know and should be clear that elephant conservation simply will not work if we don’t think about those humans and elevate the human components.”

A complicating factor in some climate change discourse is the argument that humans caused it and animals are blameless in it, so animals should be prioritized in human decision making. “The important nuance is that the rural farmers in Thailand didn’t do this,” Bailey says.

“It’s the wealthy individuals all over the world who are, per capita, emitting many more tons of carbon. There’s an inherent inequity in who is causing the environmental problems, and often the people and communities experiencing the realities of environmental change aren’t key drivers of this change.”

In the community where Nuckols is studying, which is in the rain shadow of a mountain range, drought is a very serious concern. During the last dry season, the reservoir that supplies water to the community nearly dried up. Many farmers in the area grow pineapple for many reasons, one of which is that it’s considered a crop that can survive in high-heat and low-water conditions.

“In the past few years, though, temperatures in the field can soar to 43, 44 (Celsius) and so even now pineapple is struggling to survive,” Nuckols says. “Those conditions are also driving elephants more and more to the edge of the national park, where a lot of the habitat restoration has been funded by large corporate subsidiaries that don’t have time to trek into the forest and dig a water hole.

Elephants at the edge of Kui Buri National Park in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

“So, you get a concentration of elephants on the edge of the forest, and as climate change gets worse, as resources get more sparse in the forest, elephants are going to go for high energy, high reward crops like pineapple. In a short hour they can devour an entire patch of pineapple that gives them the nutrients and sugar they would spend days foraging for in the dry forest. It’s basic risk versus reward.”

Just listen

In researching the complex factors influencing human-elephant conflict and coexistence, Nuckols emphasizes that a foundational principle of the work is that it’s community-driven and community-led.

“We’re involved in study and data collection, but we do everything in a framework of participatory action research,” Nuckols explains. “We pilot everything we do with focus groups in the local community, we run everything by a group of trusted stakeholders like the village chief and elders working with our organization. We ask them, ‘Is this appropriate?’ and a lot of things were thrown out the window because they’re like, ‘No way.’

“The whole group that’s growing and testing alternative crops now, which is 16 people, are community members who created a collective and are working together. We as researchers act as a bridge to help support the trial, to help find funding. We use our skills to elevate the work that this community is already doing.”

Bailey adds that the lessons learned in researching human-elephant coexistence—though the details can vary broadly between cultures, countries and regions—may inform human-wildlife coexistence in other areas, including Colorado.

“There are tons of parallels and tons of lessons to be learned that we can apply more broadly,” Nuckols says. “One of the biggest is just to listen to community members and help empower those community members. Don’t ever go in assuming you know best. Spend time in the community and pilot your work before you go in and think anything is going to work within a community. Make sure community members feel heard, have a meaningful seat at the table and feel empowered to solve these problems.”

Top image: Asian elephants living in Thailand's Kui Buri National Park (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

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On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence.

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Jim Halpert is looking at all of us

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:21:18 +0000

Jim Halpert is looking at all of us Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/05/2024 - 14:21

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published paper, CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look'

A couple of years ago, Cooper Casale was dating a woman who loved the American version of “The Office.” Despite having watched seasons two and three on repeat in middle school so he’d have something to talk about with a girl he liked, a decade had passed and he wasn’t really a fan anymore.

“But I end up being sucked into it,” recalls Casale, a PhD student in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of English. “I watched all the way through multiple times—it becomes a kind of hypnosis. It was just always on.”

Through nine seasons and repeated watching, Casale began to wonder: Is Jim Halpert looking at me?

In a newly published paper, CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Cooper Casale argues that the Jim Halpert gaze represents the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism.

In the 650 times that Jim Halpert (played by actor John Krasinski) looks at the camera through those nine seasons—there’s even a 10-minute compilation video of them on YouTube—Casale began considering what or who he was seeing in the Jim Halpert gaze: the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss or the fascist father? Or perhaps all three?

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Casale considers how the Jim Halpert gaze is also the fascist look.

“The Fascist Look enlists its subjects into their make-believe hero's service, a role audiences want to occupy,” Casale writes. “They want to please Halpert, as the worker wants to please the foreman. Their peculiar loyalty partly explains ‘The Office's’ remarkably enduring popularity…

“Halpert's Gaze arms people against their feckless bosses, slovenly neighbors and annoying coworkers. At the same time, his frozen glare, his pranks and his sarcasm represent the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism. Halpert does not critique his corporate arrangement but merely masters it. He becomes its boss, and viewers enamored by his cruel fiction but powerless to act it out, choose, in Halpert, a more nightmarish boss than they had before. Furthermore, viewers are thankful because he reminds them that the great can still overcome the small.”

Microdosing work

First, though, a sorry-not-sorry: While Casale appreciates a lot of the humor in “The Office,” he increasingly resents its popularity now that remote work is so common. He wanted to understand how the “almost liturgical pattern in which some people watch it” has become a sort of surrogate to having an in-person, so-called work family, he explains. “There are some who never turn it off. When I was in publication for this paper, my editor was like, ‘You can’t prove that,’ and I can’t, not yet, but there’s an observably strange practice in people watching this show on rotation all the time.

“So, the initiating question was ‘Why do people come home from a 9 to 5 and immediately watch a show about 9 to 5?’ Theodor Adorno wrote about this in his essay ‘Free Time,’ about how free time is itself a kind of work. We have to spend those hours after work preparing to return to work, so people watching ‘The Office’ is almost like microdosing having to go back to work.”

In the character of Jim Halpert, Casale says, “The Office” established an everyman protagonist—a frustrated dreamer and creative type who somehow ends up in a meaningless job at the world’s most boring business. When he looks directly at the camera, he conveys that he recognizes the absurdity and ridiculousness around him and that he is somehow above it.

Citing another Adorno work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” which observes that enlightenment and barbarism are often linked, Casale notes that “Jim Halpert represents this enlightened corporate subject. He’s presented as smarter than everyone else, but we see how fast that enlightenment has to express itself through barbarism or violence in the pranks he’s constantly pulling on Dwight.

Actor John Krasinski played the character Jim Halpert in "The Office" and looked directly at the camera 650 times over nine seasons. (Photo: NBC Universal)

“Dwight’s biggest crime in the whole show is that he likes his job. He’s presented as naïve, sentimental, he likes beets and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and because of his sentiment he must be punished. We’re meant to believe that Jim really deserves to be somewhere else, and he’s only there because he’s unlucky, but it’s everyone else’s fate to be there. Kevin will never do better, Stanley will never do better, but it’s Jim’s fate to overcome the circumstances of his life. We’re meant to find his cruelty affable.”

“The Office” reaffirms the strange hierarchies of corporate America but sells them as quirky, Casale says. Its documentary style becomes a two-way mirror between Jim Halpert and viewers—in Jim’s disgust, annoyance, resentment or bemusement, viewers have a proxy in lieu of their own documentary camera recording their reactions to the clowns and fools around them.

Interrogating power

The Jim Halpert gaze becomes the fascist look when considered through the lens of power, Casale says: “We have this TV show teaching me that the best way to express my power is to lend it to somebody else who can punish people in my stead. It’s similar to how a vote for an autocrat is a vote to not have to vote anymore. We see it in the working class voting for Donald Trump, who’s only going to give tax breaks to the rich. But because they want to be rich, there’s an aspect of living out their dreams through him.

“I think people always struggle with how members of the working class can vote against their self-interest. Part of it, I think, is that people’s resources to express themselves or express some kind of autonomy are so impoverished that their last opportunity to be free is to live in surrogate through someone else. If Jim Halpert can prank these people and humiliate all his coworkers, then I can live vicariously through Jim Halpert.”

Casale adds that rather than interrogating the structures of power and capitalism that Jim Halpert ostensibly gazes against, “The Office” emphasizes a message that mimicking the behaviors of power will lead to having power. In “The Office,” Jim Halpert is in control—not Michael, not Dwight, nor any of the other characters to essentially serve as his minstrels.

“I think that’s the fascist myth,” Casale says. “It’s a desire to be dominated so I can learn the procedures of how to dominate others. In my own domination, I learn what it feels like and how I can do it. We see this with any kind of autocrat, including Jim Halpert. When Donald Trump says he wants retribution, there are thousands upon thousands of regular, pretty nice people who say, ‘I want retribution, too.’ And because they won’t direct their anger to capitalism, the real culprit, they have to have proxy wars about DEI, gender, immigration, whatever else, so they won’t have to focus on the real cause of their powerlessness.”

Top images: NBC Universal

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In a recently published paper, CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look.'

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Making the case for President Average Joe

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:40:59 +0000

Making the case for President Average Joe Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/10/2024 - 08:40

Bradley Worrell

CU �鶹ӰԺ doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters

As the U.S. presidential campaign heated up in 2020, Kate Arnold-Murray’s friends started sharing social media posts that simultaneously poked fun at Joe Biden while also promoting him as a much better alternative to Donald Trump.

One such post on Instagram compared Biden to a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, with the accompanying tagline “Unappetizing but still edible.” Another post showed Biden preparing to swing a baseball bat, with the tagline “Because a foul ball is better than a strike,” while a third post showed Biden taking a knee in front of a chalkboard, with the tagline “Because a C+ is better than an F.”

“My friends started sharing these, what I would call memes, on Instagram—and I thought they were absolutely hilarious,” says Arnold-Murray, a doctoral student in the �鶹ӰԺ’s Department of Linguistics.

Kate Arnold-Murray, a CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student in linguistics, was intrigued by the "Settle for Biden" campaign, in part, because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

“I also felt (the ads) were impactful, because my friends were sharing them as a way of saying, ‘Hey, I’m not thrilled about it, but I’m voting for Biden, and you should, too.’ That was a really powerful messaging strategy when Biden wasn’t really liked by a lot of progressives, or when people on the left had a hesitancy with Biden in a way I didn’t see with people sharing they were voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Arnold-Murray says the social media campaign—dubbed “Settle for Biden”—intrigued her, in part because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

Meanwhile, the way in which the campaign stumped for its preferred choice for president—as someone who is less than ideal but still much better than the alternative—was something that captured her attention as someone who studies the effect that language and visuals can have on an audience. That, in turn, prompted Arnold-Murray to write the paper “Settle for Biden: The scalar production of a normative presidential candidate on Instagram,” which was published online by the journal Language in Society earlier this year.

Recently, Arnold-Murray spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about insights she gained from examining the verbiage and visuals from the Settle for Biden campaign, her view on the pros and cons of promoting a candidate as mediocre but safe and her thoughts on whether such a campaign can be successful a second time around, now that Biden has an established presidential track record. Her answers have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: Why did you think ‘Settle for Biden’ would be a good topic to explore in a research paper?

Arnold-Murray: Since Trump first ran for president, the U.S. has been in such political turmoil, and in my opinion, the political left has been a mess. We have had a really hard time figuring out how to respond to Trump and how to message.

What I saw—and what I’m still seeing—is that the left is constructing this new strategy. This campaign (Settle for Biden) was doing something that I hadn’t seen before. Usually, when people are running for office—and you’re advocating that people should vote for them—you’re saying, ‘He is the best of the best.’ ‘She has the highest level of education.’ ‘He has done so much to help people.’ ‘She’s an incredible person.’

We haven’t historically seen (a campaign for a politician) that says, ‘Because a C+ is better than an F’ or ‘Because a foul ball is better than a strike.’ We don't see people saying, ‘Our candidate, we don’t love them, but we are going to support them.’

And I think that’s something that needed to happen in 2020 among a divided Democratic Party, or especially with progressives feeling divided from the Democratic Party—to get people onboard against a common enemy.

"The (Settle for Biden" campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win," says CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Kate Arnold-Murray.

Question: It seems like an underlying goal of the Settle for Biden campaign is to get people to pick Biden as the safe, if mediocre, candidate?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, definitely. This is why I chose to use this kind of scalar theoretical framework, because in each post we really have three candidates: We have the nonexistent, nonrealistic, ideal candidate for young progressives. But in a two-party system—and especially in 2020—that candidate did not exist, at least in terms of having chance of winning.

So, in that scenario, we have the home run or A+ candidate; then we have Joe Biden in the middle, as a foul ball or C+; and then we get to Donald Trump, always portrayed as the worst possible thing.

In constructing that scalar world, the campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win.

Question: In your paper, you talk a lot about ‘scalar normativity.’ What does that mean?

Arnold-Murray: It’s a somewhat new theoretical framework for thinking about normativity. When we talk about normativity in the social sciences, usually we’re talking about things that are viewed as so normal that they usually fly under the radar. … I was looking at how this campaign was appealing to centers of authority, like with the Dairy Queen example, to say, 'What is normal to the middle class?' Well, maybe it’s like a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, because you can eat it, but you don’t necessarily love it.

Question: In the Settle for Biden memes you highlighted, Trump isn’t named, but there’s the assumption that the audience is going to understand whom Biden is being compared to, correct?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, Trump is always there in every post, and I think that’s always true of an election between two people. When you are campaigning and saying things about yourself, it’s known and assumed that you are going against this other person. For the most part, in the posts I examined, the campaign did not mention Trump at all—but he’s kind of this haunting presence.

For example, in the post ‘Joe Biden knows how to pronounce Yosemite,’ even if you did not know that Trump had mispronounced it earlier, you would be able to infer it, based on how the campaign talks. So, the other guy must have done it wrong if Joe Biden is doing it right.

And when we get these two positionalities, in the post that claims ‘Because of C+ is better than an F,' the caption says, ‘Joe Biden isn’t the A we wanted … but four more years of Trump would certainly mean failure.’ So, you know who the F is.

Again, I very much view (Trump) as almost kind of haunting this campaign, and at least for me personally, I found it a really effective strategy. As someone on the left, I just didn’t want to see pictures of Donald Trump; I didn’t want to hear his voice; I didn’t want to read his words in my daily life, because it was just so toxic. This strategy of calling Trump in, therefore, gave a wary audience a way to engage with him less directly.

CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar Kate Arnold-Murray notes that the "Settle for Biden" campaign might not land as well in the 2024 presidential election.

Question: Is there any way to gauge whether the Settle for Biden campaign actually helped get progressives to vote for Biden on election day?

Arnold-Murray: The campaign’s director, Sam Weinberg, ended up doing quite a few interviews that got a fair amount of media attention. And they (Settle for Biden) ended up partnering with organizations that were dedicated to motivating young voters to vote and helping people register to vote.

I would have loved for there to have been a poll (about the campaign’s effectiveness) but that doesn’t seem to exist. So, I can only judge things based on the media coverage it generated and the work that the group was able to do because it had this platform to support on-the-ground efforts.

Question: Do you think the campaign can be successful a second time if progressives don’t believe Biden has been sufficiently liberal during his first term in office?

Arnold-Murray: The resonance of an average Joe, after he’s been in office for four years, might not land as well the second time around. I think the Settle for Biden campaign might need to give more props for what Biden has done, because I think he actually has accomplished a lot. …

But with some of Biden’s actions and policies, especially with Israel, being so unpopular on the left, does that idea really stack up anymore? Does good enough still work? It’s a fair question.

Then again, it’s still the same opponent he faced four years ago. So, for me personally, I’m hoping the campaign is going to figure out how to make Biden the much better choice for progressive voters.

Question: Have you received any reaction to your paper?

Arnold-Murray: My most exciting feedback that I’ve received on the paper has been when I shared it on Facebook or on Instagram. Hearing from people who are not linguists or academics or anthropologists, who were able to read and understand it and enjoy it, was rewarding.

For me, that’s a big win, because I feel like I was doing a couple big things with theory that were a little complicated, but at the same time, I really tried to make it something that’s accessible for people to engage with. And the Instagram posts themselves are interesting and entertaining.

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CU �鶹ӰԺ doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters.

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Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution

Anonymous — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:28:05 +0000

Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/28/2024 - 10:28

Rachel Sauer

CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis

In the past year, Clare Gallagher has gotten very interested in ghost gear, which she admits is “a really depressing Google search” if you’re not already familiar with it.

Ghost gear is the umbrella term for lost, abandoned or discarded fishing gear that contributes to the crisis of plastic pollution in Earth’s oceans and can trap fish and marine mammals, causing them to die by suffocation or exhaustion. In the upper Gulf of California, for example, abandoned gillnetting has contributed to the vaquita porpoise nearing the brink of extinction.

When Gallagher, a PhD student in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Environmental Studies, joined an observer delegation at the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution April 23-29 in Ottawa, Canada, she learned that fishing gear is included in a proposed international treaty on plastic pollution that would be discussed at the weeklong gathering.

Clare Gallagher, a PhD student in the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Environmental Studies, by a sculpture outside a U.N. treaty negotiating session in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

However, after attending several all-day—and sometimes into the night—negotiating sessions, “I learned that fishing gear is almost like a side note to the greater problem. Single-use plastics are so nefarious, and this is the next climate change fight,” Gallagher says.

“To be able to go sit in conference room for 14 hours a day for nine days straight—and the final meetings went until 3 a.m.—I was pretty in awe of the dedication of the people in these meetings. But then at the same time, it was also incredibly frustrating when there’s not a lot of progress made. It’s just the way of global geopolitics, and I was getting a crash course in this—there will be some countries or blocs of countries that don’t want strong treaties, like oil-producing countries, just as there are countries that have been against strong environmental treaties for the last several decades.”

The gathering Gallagher attended was the fourth session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution and focused on the marine environment. The committee’s stated goal is to have a completed treaty written by the end of the year.

For Gallagher, attending the session not only was eye-opening to the intricacies of global geopolitics, but also brought several other key insights, including:

Abandoned fishing gear is one problem of many in the crisis of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans

“Microplastics were a huge, huge topic at the treaty discussions,” Gallagher says. “From a health standpoint, I was really surprised to see so many endocrinologists there. The endocrine destruction from chemicals that are being added to plastics is linked to the obesity epidemic, to the epidemic of anxiety and depression. It’s actually pretty terrifying.”

Among the discussion topics were plastic pellets, sometimes called nurdles, which are commonly used as a raw material for making plastic products. They are frequently shipped via container, and if pellets ever spill from those containers into a marine environment, the environmental damage and harm to living creatures can be devastating.

“So, some of the discussion was about classifying them as hazardous waste,” Gallagher says.

However, abandoned fishing gear is a big problem

“Ghost gear is the colloquial term,” Gallagher explains. “The more scientific term is abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear, or ALDFG, and it’s just a terrible thing. Let’s say you a have huge vessel that’s fishing tuna in the Pacific and use purse seines, which are these crazy kilometer-wide nets that can cinch up entire schools of tuna.

“Say that net gets lost or is intentionally cut by crew or just gets stuck on something or there’s a full-on accident. That net will continue to fish whales, dolphins, turtles, you name it after it’s lost contact with the vessel. That’s why we get term ‘ghost,’ because fishing continues to happen in a worst-case scenario.”

Gallagher notes that purse seines typically are made of nylon, which sinks in water because of its density, so they’re not a significant contributor to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now about the size of Alaska. However, lighter density nets and fishing line made of high-denisty polyethylene wash up on shorelines around the world, “so it’s pretty incredible that this treaty is trying to address fishing gear as its own plastic pollution sector because almost all commercial fishing nets and lines are made of plastic polymers, so this treaty could address industrial, global and local fishing economies.”

CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Clare Gallager attended the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution as an observer. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

Many perceive plastic pollution as a symptom a bigger issue

“The biggest thing is production,” Gallagher says, “stopping primary plastic production. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about this treaty process, because it’s almost the same story, it’s the same players, it’s the same perpetrators as the international debate over fossil fuel emissions.”

In fact, Gallagher notes, the Center for International Environmental Law analyzed the affiliations of registered attendees for the session and found almost 200 lobbyists for the fossil fuel and chemical industries were registered.

The problems of plastic pollution are daunting, but there’s room for hope

“I felt, not being a United Nations treaty expert, pretty overwhelmed by the scale at which countries around the world need to compromise and work together to create any international treaty, especially environmental treaties,” Gallagher says. “It’s pretty overwhelming to think this is how humanity governs itself at the top level.

“That being said, I have hope that the most ambitious countries will continue to push for a strong treaty on plastic pollution. I don’t know if remorse is right word, but there is sadness that many of the countries suffering the most from plastic pollution are not producing the plastic. They’re the ones that have to deal with plastic trash and plastic pollution, the ones that have to fight for a strong treaty, and there’s a real power imbalance that I find so disgusting and disturbing.”

Gallagher says one of the most impressive coalitions she observed at the session was the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS): “There was a woman from Easter Island, which, granted, is part of Chile, and she told a story about how every time her young son goes surfing, which is like every day, she has to wash his hair because there’s so much microplastic in it when he’s done.

“People from some of the smallest, poorest countries repeatedly said, ‘This is not complex. We don’t want your trash; we need to stop this.’ I think that bravery and that fight—these Davids taking on Goliaths, as seen in the Rapa Nui Declaration—is what is going to make the world a better place.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis.

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Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society

Anonymous — Fri, 24 May 2024 15:05:33 +0000

Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/24/2024 - 09:05

Blair Seidlitz, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, studied near-collisions of nuclear beams at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and he did so despite having severely limited vision

Blair Seidlitz, who earned his PhD in physics in 2022 from the �鶹ӰԺ, has won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation, the society announced.

Seidlitz’s dissertation research was on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider, hosted at the international CERN laboratory in Switzerland. His CU �鶹ӰԺ research group, led by Professors Dennis Perepelitsa and Jamie Nagle, works in experimental nuclear physics—it collides nuclear beams (“ions") at the LHC to study the fundamental forces of nature under extreme conditions.

The major advance of Seidlitz’s dissertation was to use these nuclear beams at the LHC in an unusual way. “He was interested in the processes not where the beams slam into each other … but instead the cases where the beams just barely miss each other,” Perepelitsa said.

CU �鶹ӰԺ physics PhD alum Blair Seidlitz won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation research on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider.

“It turns out that in these cases, a photon emitted by one ion can strike the other, and thus result in rare and unusual ‘photo-nuclear’ collisions …. The ATLAS detector was not set up to take this kind of data by default. So Blair had to do a lot of work to develop the ‘trigger’ (the algorithms that decide which data to even record), to get access to this rare dataset.”

Perepelitsa said this kind of work is unusual for a graduate student; many graduate students work with existing infrastructure or use well-established procedures in research like this. “But Blair really took his idea from the conception stage, to implementing it himself, and helping to deploy it in person during data-taking at CERN,” a bustling scientific community at which Seidlitz spent significant time.

Once Seidlitz had collected the data, he then did a very careful analysis, which necessitated developing some new methods because nobody had really done this kind of thing before, Perepelitsa added.

The surprising result was that these sparse “photo-nuclear” collisions exhibited a collective “flow” behavior among their produced particles—“something you might only expect in the collisions of large nuclei where there are many, many particles that are produced and interact.”

“His measurement has come at a time when the scientific community is asking big questions, such as: Just how few particles can one have to still exhibit many-body collective motion? Blair’s thesis work, by paving the way to experimentally access these unusual datasets, is addressing these open questions head on!”

Seidlitz is now a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. He still works at ATLAS, but he now also works at a new experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, in which Perepelitsa and Nagle’s group at CU is closely involved. “So we are pleased that we can continue to collaborate with Blair very closely,” Perepelitsa said.

Seidlitz said he hopes to build on his graduate school work. “There are actually distinct categories (or types) of photon-nucleus collisions. My thesis work did not sort the different types, but studied them as a whole. In principle, it should be possible to sort these, although it has never been done. That way, we could study the ‘flow’ properties of each type individually, which would be really interesting.”

Seidlitz said that he and his colleagues will be able to study these types of collisions at the Electron Ion Collider, which is scheduled to be completed in the 2030’s at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York.

Seidlitz said he was surprised to win the APS dissertation award. “They called me while I was in the sPHENIX control room (an experiment at BNL). I don't usually pick up my phone, but it seemed to not be spam, and as fate would have it, it was an official from APS saying I had won.”

Seidlitz has charted a successful academic career even though he has Stargardt's disease, a rare form of macular degeneration that leaves him with approximately 1/20th the visual acuity of average people.

A wheel in the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider. Blair Seidlitz's dissertation research focused on near-collisions of nuclear beams in ATLAS. (Photo: CERN)

His vision posed many challenges, he said. “I guess the first challenge was learning as much as I could and getting through courses without being able to see the black board or projector, where I did most of my learning through textbooks.”

Seidlitz said disability service centers at CU �鶹ӰԺ and at his undergraduate institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “really made it possible for me to succeed, from scanning old textbooks to make PDFs, to scanning students' homework so I could grade it when I was a TA and recommending assistive technology.”

Another challenge was finding a field of research that would work for him. “Because physics that revolves around particle accelerators is so big and complicated, large collaborations are formed and the work is shared. Some people build the detectors—something I could not do—and others set up data analysis and reconstruction, which is a lot of software to take the signals from individual detectors and turn it into a measurement of a photon with a particular momentum, for example,” Seidlitz explained, adding:

“This is something I can do! I would say there are still challenges day to day, but they are manageable, and I am very grateful that I am in a place where I can contribute and do valuable work.

Seidlitz grew up in Wisconsin and earned a BS in engineering physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in plasma physics with Cary Forest, applying optical emission spectroscopy techniques for measurements of the electron temperature in the Plasma Couette Experiment and the Madison Plasma Dynamo Experiment.

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.

APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Top image: The eight toroid magnets surrounding the calorimeter in the ATLAS detector. The calorimeter measures the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the center of the detector. (Photo: CERN)

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Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 15:20:11 +0000

Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/21/2024 - 09:20

Daniel Long

Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impact on pesticide use is fully understood. Claire Powers is doing her part to change that.

Powers, a PhD candidate in environmental studies at the �鶹ӰԺ, has co-authored a paper published today in Science. Powers and co-authors Ashley E. Larsen of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia investigate how organic agriculture influences the pesticide use of neighboring farms. Does it increase it? Decrease it?

The answer, they learned by analyzing thousands of field observations, is it depends.

Claire Powers, a CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD candidate in environmental studies, and her research colleagues found that farms neighboring organic fields both decrease and increase pesticide use, depending on the type of agricultural operation.

Location, location, location

“We found that conventional fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to increase their pesticide use,” says Powers, “and organic fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to decrease their pesticide use.”

Precisely why this is the case is unclear, but Powers, Larsen and Noack suspect it has to do with how organic farms—many of which use pesticides, albeit organically approved ones—implicate the larger ecosystem.

“Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests,” says Powers.

These natural enemies and pests then venture onto neighboring fields for shelter and food. If those fields are conventional, farmers will likely have to increase their pesticide use, and if they’re organic, farmers will likely be able to decrease their pesticide use.

This may sound like a win for organic farmers, but not so fast.

When organic and conventional farms are distributed randomly across a landscape—meaning there’s no specific reason why one type of field sits next to another—it’s often both conventional and organic farmers who lose, Powers explains.

“I have not talked to farmers specifically, but I think that, from a conventional farmer’s perspective, it can be a bummer to be adjacent to organic fields, because it means that you will spend more on pesticides. Similarly, organic farmers with neighboring conventional fields may have smaller populations of natural enemies and so larger populations of pests to treat.”

Yet thanks to Larsen, Noack and Powers’ paper, this predicament may someday be a thing of the past.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields,” says Powers. Doing so will likely reduce pesticide use overall and thereby benefit both the environment and farmers’ bank accounts.

A data dilemma

Completing this research was not without its challenges, says Powers. One was finding usable data.

“You have to be able to identify specific fields in a spatial data format, link that spatial data to each field’s pesticide-use rates, and also determine which fields are organic and which are conventional,” says Powers, adding that this information comes from several sources that are tough to combine and that annual agricultural spatial data and pesticide use aren’t particularly well tracked, especially outside of California.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields," says CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Claire Powers.

But Powers, Larsen and Noack were able to find one county that kept such detailed records and made them publicly available: Kern County, California, an agricultural belt of land at the southern tip of the Central Valley and, as far as Powers and her co-authors were concerned, the golden ticket of the Golden State.

“Kern County has annual spatial data for their agricultural fields that can be linked to the two other crucial datasets—pesticide use and organic-crop producer IDs—which is really rare,” says Powers.

Yet the rareness of this data created a separate challenge: convincing the reviewers of the Science paper that it was enough. How reliable could data from just one county in just one state be?

Pretty reliable, says Powers. For one thing, Kern is a high-crop-producing county with many farms, which gave her and her co-authors a lot of room to check for pesticide spillover across a decent sample size. For another, its mix of organic and conventional farms closely resembles that of the nation, making it a useful case study.

Plus, Larsen and Noack put the data through a series of “robustness tests”—tests designed specifically to assess the data’s strength and generalizability—all of which it passed.

Nevertheless, Powers admits that she would jump at the chance to expand the research from the Science paper outward to other counties in California as well as to other states.

“It would be awesome to be able to do that.”

Past, present and future

Powers began this research while a master’s student at the Bren School at UCSB, where Larsen was one of her professors. Since coming to CU �鶹ӰԺ to pursue her doctorate, she has moved in a different direction, focusing on the impact of climate change on several species of alpine plants.

Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests.”

Yet the thread holding all her work together, Powers believes, is her interest in land conservation and management.

Growing up in Santa Paula, California—in “ag land,” as she calls it—Powers spent a lot of time on farms. She wasn’t a farmer herself, she’s quick to point out, but many of her family members and close friends were, and that gave her an appreciation for the outdoors.

Her passion for conservation then crystalized while she worked for five years as a field instructor for NOLS, an outdoor education provider, which took her across the United States and around the globe, including to places like India and South America.

“That got me interested in thinking about land management in a way that is inclusive and recognizes the need for working landscapes that support wildlife and native plants,” she says.

That interest drives her to this day, pushing her to ask questions, conduct research and publish papers like the one in Science, which she calls “a small step forward” on the long and winding path of scientific discovery.

“And there are lots more steps to take.”

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Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together.

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Scientist gleans human lessons from bacterial immune systems

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:56:40 +0000

Scientist gleans human lessons from bacterial immune systems Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2024 - 11:56

Rachel Sauer

CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Emily Kibby has won the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in recognition of her work researching bacterial immune responses

There are certain advantages to being a one-celled organism with no nucleus. In general, reproduction happens fast, and thus evolution does, too.

Take bacteria, for example: A bacterium can be invaded by a phage, which is a virus that infects and replicates only in bacterial cells, and within several generations—which can emerge in a single day—the bacteria may have evolved immunity to that virus.

“We’re so evolutionarily outclassed by bacteria,” says Emily Kibby, a PhD candidate in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Biochemistry and member of the Aaron Whiteley Research Group. “They can evolve so much faster, and they’re the real biochemical innovators of life on this planet. I think we have so much to learn from them.”

CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD candidate Emily Kibby has been recognized with the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences.

In fact, since joining Whiteley’s research group in 2020 for her graduate studies, that’s exactly what Kibby has done—work to understand how eukaryotes (organisms whose cells contain a nucleus encased in a membrane), including humans, have acquired and adapted bacterial immune proteins for their own purposes.

Her work recently was recognized with the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, given by the Fred Hutch Cancer Center to honor outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences. Kibby and her fellow winners were chosen for the quality, originality and scientific significance of their research and will be honored at a symposium May 3 in Seattle.

“Emily is highly deserving of the Weintraub award because she is a dedicated scientist whose fearlessness and innovative thinking have allowed her to open new research areas in my lab,” says Aaron Whiteley, a CU �鶹ӰԺ assistant professor of biochemistry.

“One of the most impressive aspects of her thesis work was a decision in her fourth year to undertake a new project in computational biology. She demonstrated independence and resourcefulness, seeking out necessary expertise from other investigators and in the literature. It can be very hard to break into new disciplines, and I am extremely proud of her accomplishments. I expect nothing short of amazing things to come!”

Bacterial origins

Kibby credits excellent AP biology and AP chemistry teachers at her Wisconsin high school with nurturing her ever-growing interest in science. It also helps that both of her parents are teachers, she says.

So, when she was considering what to study as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, “I decided to head down the middle between biology and chemistry,” she says. “I’ve just always been fascinated by the molecular mechanisms that make life possible. We have this incredible amount of molecular detail on cellular processes, but there’s still so much more to learn. That’s always what’s been so exciting to me, that we know so much but there’s this vast amount still to learn.”

She fell in love with bacteria during her undergraduate summers working in Helen Blackwell’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an aim is to devise novel chemical tools to decode and interfere with bacterial communication pathways.

After joining the Whiteley Lab, Kibby delved into research about bacterial immune systems and host-pathogen interactions. In studying the constant conflict between bacteria and phages, Kibby explored the wide range of immune pathways bacteria use to counter phage infection.

Kibby and her research colleagues homed in on proteins containing a NACHT module, which are present not only in prokaryotic bacteria, but in eukaryotic cells as well. These genetic overlaps demonstrate that elements of the human immune system originated in bacteria, Kibby says.

I’ve just always been fascinated by the molecular mechanisms that make life possible. We have this incredible amount of molecular detail on cellular processes, but there’s still so much more to learn."

“Rather than NACHT modules evolving out of thin air, it’s more likely they came to us from bacteria,” she explains. “At some point early in the history of human evolution, an ancient eukaryote interacted with a bacterial cell that had evolved this type of immunity and was able to adopt that for its own protection.”

The incredible diversity of bacteria

After four years of research, Kibby and her colleagues published their findings about how these bacterial proteins protect against phage. She then pivoted to research using AlphaFold Multimer to predict protein-protein interactions: “I shifted to this new approach in part because our mammalian NACHT proteins that have this great example of recognizing specific proteins,” Kibby says. “So, I thought I would learn something new and see if I could use computational tools to predict similar interactions in bacteria.”

AlphaFold Multimer is a tool that emerged from Google DeepMind, one of Google’s artificial intelligence think tanks, and has proven extremely good at predicting the structures of proteins from just an amino acid sequence, for example. It also can predict the interactions between multiple different proteins.

After learning the computational underpinnings of these predictions, Kibby is now doing lab work with actual proteins to determine whether the predictions are correct—do the proteins actually do what the computer says they will?

“I hope what we’re doing now helps set a standard for how to integrate protein predictions with wet lab validation,” Kibby says. “AlphaFold Multimer is really just another screening tool. It’s amazing and it’s shattering all the barriers of what we had been able to do before, but you will always have to have your controls and always have to validate your hits.”

In the midst of this research, Kibby hopes to defend her thesis in September and receive her PhD in December. She then aims to do postdoctoral research and ultimately earn a role at a university that allows her to research and teach, because guiding people through the fascinating universe of bacteria is one of her passions.

“The way I explain it is, everything is infected by viruses, and we have evolved number of ways to protect ourselves from these threats,” she says. “A lot of times, we think of bacteria as threats to our own immune system, and that’s true, they can be. But bacteria are also threatened by virus, and just like us, to protect themselves they have also evolved immune systems.

“If you look at CRISPR, for example, it’s revolutionizing medicine and research, but in the wild CRISPR is a bacterial immune system that protects bacteria from phages. There are very practical human applications for understanding the incredible diversity of bacteria.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ PhD student Emily Kibby has won the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in recognition of her work researching bacterial immune responses.

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