This past summer and fall, two of the Great Lakes, Ontario and Superior, were giant outdoor laboratories for John Kessler, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, and a team of six students.

Twice they crossed Lake Ontario by boat on daylong trips to measure methane gas concentrations. Then, after receiving additional funding, they spent a week on Lake Superior doing the same, launching a project that Kessler hopes will eventually measure methane in all of the Great Lakes.

The goal is to answer several key questions: How much methane – a potent greenhouse gas – is being emitted from the Great Lakes? Where is it coming from? How much of it gets transferred into the atmosphere? How does climate change itself influence the dynamics of further methane production, release, and emission?

“We’re already really excited by the data that we see,” Kessler says. “What has surprised us is how variable methane emissions are.”

The project has been an opportunity for masters student Amy Eisenstadt and undergraduates Sawyer Johnson, Colin McCormack, Benjamin Riddell-Young, Nicola Wiseman, and Eric Yarmoff to experience all facets of a research project.

“I’ve learned plenty about the geochemical methane cycle and the processes influencing it,” Yarmoff says. “But more importantly, I’ve learned quite a bit about the research process itself: securing funding, planning trips, organizing teams for research excursions, and how to be flexible in the face of unpredictable situations.”

Read more here.

Kessler’s project is a good example of how University seed grants, such as PumpPrimer II, can help promising projects get off the ground.

Last April, Kessler received a $10,000 PumpPrimer II award from Arts, Sciences & Engineering. Combined with departmental money from the Elizabeth Wright Dunbar fund, this enabled his team to collect enough data during the summer to secure a two-year National Science Foundation grant. The NSF funding allowed the team to then spend a week in October collecting data on Lake Superior in a state-of-the art, fully staffed NSF research vessel.

PumpPrimer II is now seeking applications from AS&E tenure-track faculty for a new round of funding. The deadline to apply is March 20.

Click here for more information. Faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in the Hajim School of Engineering to Cindy Gary.

NEW SPECIES SHEDS LIGHT ON WARMING EVENT
Fossils of a new species of bird, discovered in the Canadian Arctic by a team of geologists led by John Tarduno,  professor and chair of earth and environmental sciences, offer further evidence of an intense warming event during the late Cretaceous period. The team’s findings, published in Scientific Reports, add to previous fossil records Tarduno uncovered from the same geological time period and location in previous expeditions. Taken together, these fossils paint a clearer picture of an ecosystem that would have existed in the Canadian Arctic during the Cretaceous period’s Turonian age, which lasted from approximately 93.9 to 89.8 million years ago. Read more here.

TRIAL SHOWS HORMONE’S ROLE IN UMBILICAL CORD BLOOD TRANSPLANTS
In the first human trial of its kind, Omar Aljitawi, associate professor of hematology/oncology at  the Wilmot Cancer Institute, has discovered the importance of a hormone called erythropoietin (EPO) for effective umbilical cord blood transplants for patients with leukemia and lymphoma. Lowering EPO levels in people aids in a process known as homing, where newly transplanted blood stem cells migrate properly to the bone marrow of the patient and begin to restore the body’s ability to make healthy blood and immune cells. Read more here.

STUDY SUGGESTS IMPORTANCE OF A MOTHER’S TOUCH
Findings from a team of researchers led by Julie Fudge, associate professor of neuroscience, shed light on changes in the brain that may explain why young infants who are placed in an orphanage or foster care often struggle with social relationships later in life. The scientists revisited data from a study at the University of Pittsburgh that observed the behaviors of newborn monkeys that were separated from their biological mothers and raised by another group of females. The researchers identified a gene, called tbr1, which was essentially switched off in the amygdala brain region of monkeys raised without their biological mothers.  This was associated with less time spent by the infants engaging typical social behaviors.  Tbr1 is known to play a role in prenatal brain development and has been associated with autism. However, this is the first time it has been identified as playing a key role in brain development after birth. Read more here.

NEW RETINAL IMAGING TECHNIQUE DISTINGUISHES GANGLION CELLS
Medical Center researchers have developed a new imaging technique that could revolutionize how eye health and disease are assessed. The group, led by David Williams, dean for research in Arts, Sciences & Engineering and the William G. Allyn Chair for Medical Optics, was able to distinguish individual retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which bear most of the responsibility of relaying visual information to the brain. Ethan A. Rossi, assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, describes the new technique in a study highlighted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.

‘CHEMO-BRAIN’ PERSISTS AS LONG AS SIX MONTHS
A study led by Michelle C. Janelsins, assistant professor of surgery at the Wilmot Cancer Institute, shows that a condition known as “chemo-brain” persists in women with breast cancer for as long as six months after chemotherapy. “Chemo-brain” includes problems with memory, attention, and processing information. The researchers compared cognitive difficulties among 581 breast cancer patients across the U.S. and 364 healthy people, using FACT-Cog, which examines a person’s own perceived impairment as well as cognitive impairment perceived by others. Investigators found that compared to healthy people, women with breast cancer exhibited 45 percent more impairment. Anxiety and depressive symptoms at the onset led to a greater impact on the FACT-Cog scores. Read more here.

HIV CAREGIVERS FACE TREATMENT DILEMMA IN AFRICA
Physicians treating HIV-positive patients in sub-Saharan Africa are often forced to choose between controlling seizures, which can occur if the disease goes undiagnosed for too long, or treating the underlying HIV infection, according to a study led by Gretchen Birbeck, the Edward A. and Alma Vollertson Rykenboer Professor in Neurology who also serves as director of the Epilepsy Care Team at Chikankata Hospital in rural Zambia and is an honorary lecturer at the University of Zambia. Barriers to diagnosis and lack of access to modern medications create a no-win situation.  Because the HIV infection is often advanced, the appropriate course of action is to aggressively start a treatment of combined antiretroviral therapy (cART).  However, at the same time there is a sense of pressure and urgency to treat the seizures as well, which represent a significant health risk if left unaddressed. Read more here.

TOOL PREDICTS PROSTATE CANCER RECURRENCE
Researchers from the Wilmot Cancer Institute and Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo have discovered a possible new tool for predicting whether prostate cancer will reoccur following surgery based on the expression patterns of four genes. The Wilmot/Roswell Park tool was able to predict recurrence, based on human tissue samples and known patient outcomes, with 83 percent accuracy. This could be especially helpful for men diagnosed with an aggressive localized form of prostate cancer that returns in one-third of patients even after having a radical prostatectomy. “Our study sought to improve upon the prediction tools used in these types of cases so that oncologists would know with more certainty when to recommend additional treatment, such as radiotherapy, immediately after surgery,” said lead researcher Hucky Land, director of research at Wilmot and the Robert and Dorothy Markin Chair of the Department of Biomedical Genetics. Read more here.

TOXIC WASTES PLAY ROLE IN CHILDHOOD STOMACH DISORDERS
A team led by Mark Noble,  the Martha M. Freeman Professor of Biomedical Genetics, has discovered how specific toxic waste products that accumulate in severe childhood diseases such as Krabbe disease and Guacher disease cause multiple dysfunctions in stomach cells. They also found that several drugs already approved for other uses can overcome the cellular toxic build-up, providing new opportunities for treatment of these and other lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs). The study, published in PLOS Biology. demonstrated that, just like the stomach, lysosomes are usually more acidic than other parts of the cell and that toxic substances that accumulate in several LSDs disrupt maintenance of the acidic environment. The team, which included postdoctoral fellows Christopher Folts and Nicole Scott-Hewett, also showed that restoring the normal acidity of the lysosome with drug treatment was sufficient to prevent multiple disruptions of normal lysosome function and to maintain critical cell functions, such as division and survival. Read more here.

Supritha Rajan, an associate professor of English, who has won this year’s Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book. Rajan’s  A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an interdisciplinary intellectual history that examines relationships between 19^th-century political economy, anthropology, and literature—areas that were much more intertwined in the 19^th century than they are today.  Read more here.

Three University computer scientists who have been ranked among the top 100 most influential scholars in artificial intelligence and multimedia by Aminer.org, which uses a computer algorithm to track and rank scholars based on citation counts collected by top-venue publications. Henry Kautz, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and professor of computer science, is ranked 3^rd in artificial intelligence.  James Allen,  the John H. Dessauer Professor of Computer Science, is ranked 46^th in artificial intelligence. And Jiebo Luo,  associate professor of computer science, is ranked 67^th in multimedia.

Jessica Shang has joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor after a one-year postdoctoral appointment as a Stanford Cardiovascular Institute Fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine. She studies the interaction between solid bodies and their fluid environments with applications in cardiovascular biomechanics, locomotion, environmental hydrodynamics, and the general understanding of motion in aquatic environments. This includes the wakes generated by vehicles and bluff bodies that experience flow noise, vibration, and buffeting from fluid forces that generally detract from system performance. She is also interested in how organisms interact with fluids, ranging from passive movement (plants waving in the wind) to active locomotion (swimming) to physiological flows (arteries). The movement of fluids within and outside living systems governs not only the movement of the organism, but also the transport of materials and molecules that sustain or compromise life.

Researchers can help build diversity at the University by developing new faculty collaborations or hosting undergraduate students for summer research training through a partnership with Xavier University of Louisiana, a Historically Black University. The partnership, born out of the Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) program of the National Institutes of Health, seeks innovative ways to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds in the biomedical research workforce.  Xavier is one of ten primary institutions in the BUILD network, which collectively collaborates with nearly 100 other institutions. Read more here.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Seminar Series this semester explores the benefits and challenges of research networks, as well as how researchers can develop and leverage them for their studies. Networks allow for regular and broad exchange of ideas and information.

The series will give several examples of networks within and outside the University that researchers can access. The series will be held noon to 1 p.m. on Thursdays in the Helen Wood Hall Auditorium (1w-304). Read more here,

Jan. 9: Ninth annual Lung Research and Trainee Day. Poster session in Flaum Atrium from 10 a.m. to noon. Keynote presentation by Enid Neptune, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “Lessons from the Marfan Lung: TGFbeta, Angiotensin and Lung Repair” at noon in the Class of ’62 Auditorium (1-9576). Boxed lunches will be provided.

Jan. 10: Deadline to apply for Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute, a seven-week session for 10 rising seniors on the theme “The Global Black Experience in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Click here for more information.

Jan. 12: “Community Engagement in Rochester: The Center for Community Health,” Amina Alio, CTSI Seminar Series. Noon. Helen Wood Hall Auditorium (1w304).

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter “America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent” competition, promoting student interest in the science of developing new tools, standards, and approaches to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of FDA-regulated products. Click here for information and instructions on how to apply.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for a University Research Award of up to $37,500, matched by the applicant’s home school for a total of $75,000. The program provides seed money on a competitive basis for innovative research projects that are likely to obtain external support.  Completed applications should be directed to Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator in the Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Research, at adele.coelho@rochester.edu. Click here to view the full RFP.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for an AS&E PumpPrimer II award. Click here for more information. Faculty in the School of Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in the Hajim School of Engineering to Cindy Gary.