Twenty Rochester city school students were stymied as they tried to build model boats in Rettner Hall this past summer.

“They were trying to build propellers, and were making things that could spin but had no angle of attack, so nobody was going anywhere,” says Douglas Kelley, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Kelley took apart a box fan and showed the students the blades. “Look at the shape, there’s an angle here that’s really essential,” he explained.

And sure enough, those boats started going places.

That is the kind of broader impact the National Science Foundation is looking for in deciding which grants to fund. Kelley’s willingness to teach hands-on engineering to city school students one week each summer helped him secure an NSF CAREER award on his first try.

Best of all, because he teaches the class as part of the Kearns Center’s Upward Bound program, he doesn’t have to worry about where to find the students or figure out how to get them to campus or schedule a room. The Kearns Center handles all of that.

“Once you bring your expertise to us, we bring the students to you,” said Danielle Daniels, a Kearns Center STEM specialist at an AS&E grant workshop for junior faculty members.

The center, now in its 15^th year, has demonstrated increasing success in preparing low-income, first generation, and underrepresented minority students for college and then for graduate school.

For example, the center’s Upward Bound program was launched in 2007 to help address the needs of students in the Rochester City School District, which has a graduation rate of about 43 percent. Of 400 city school students who have participated in Upward Bound here, 96 percent have gone on to college.

Such documented effectiveness is another thing NSF emphasizes in broader impacts. In fact, NSF is currently funding the Kearns Center’s work as an INCLUDES pilot project for broadening participation, acknowledging the center’s potential as a model for other institutions.

“It’s no longer enough to say ‘I’m going to use this grant to train the graduate students in my lab’ or ‘I’m going to develop materials from this research for my class,’“ explained Wendi Heinzelman, Hajim School dean, who has served on NSF review panels. She encourages faculty to “plug into” Kearns Center programs to help give their proposals broader impact – in this case, helping to increase access to STEM fields.

There are even grants available through the University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to pay students in a faculty member’s lab to help develop a summer course.

Kelley’s CAREER grant involves fluid dynamics to study liquid metal batteries as a way to store back up energy for regional power grids that use intermittent wind and solar generation. He is also organizing a seminar series for visiting scholars in the field as part of his broader impact.

Fluid dynamics will continue to be the theme for the Upward Bound classes he teaches each of the remaining four years of his grant. This past summer he taught three two-hour sessions, devoting the first 20 minutes of each class to basic safety and engineering concepts, then letting the students dive into hands-on projects.

He strongly encourages other faculty to work with the Kearns Center. “It’s super easy. The staff is great. They really know the literature about what works well with these students, and they can provide lots of manpower.”

A new study led by Rashid Deane, research professor of neurosurgery, shows that the brain’s waste-removal system serves as both trash collector and delivery service, providing neurons with a protein important to maintaining cognitive function while simultaneously cleaning brain tissue. The research may help explain why different genetic varieties of a protein called apolipoprotein E (apoE) can indicate risk for Alzheimer’s disease or promote longevity.

ApoE is responsible for delivering cholesterol to nerve cells in the brain and plays a key role in synaptic plasticity, the process by which neurons build new connections in order to learn and store memories.

There are three different types of apoE and the version present in our bodies is determined genetically.  ApoE3 is the most common and is found in approximately 78 percent of the population.  ApoE2 and apoE4 appear in 7 percent and 15 percent of the population, respectively, and these two variants have been associated with dementia.  ApoE2 appears to have neuro-protective qualities and individuals with this version of the protein are less likely to develop the disease.  However, individuals with apoE4 have a 12-fold risk of developing dementia.

In the brain, apoE is primarily created by astrocytes, an important support cell that is responsible for maintaining the health of neurons, but also by the choroid plexus. Scientists speculate this is because astrocytes, though present throughout the brain, may not be able to produce enough apoE to meet demand. The unanswered question, however, was how the additional protein gets from the choroid plexus to where it is needed in other parts of the brain.

The new study, conducted in mice, indicates that the glymphatic system – first detailed by Medical Center researchers in 2012 as a unique, self-contained waste removal system– plays a role in moving the extra apoE from the choroid plexus to the rest of the brain. As the glymphatic system pumps cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) through brain tissue, not only does this process wash away waste, it simultaneously delivers apoE from the choroid plexus to nerve cells.

The study may also shed light on why the different variants of apoE have an impact on dementia risk.  ApoE2, which is associated with lower Alzheimer’s risk, travels farther in the brain as it hitches a ride with the CSF and thereby benefits more neurons.  ApoE4, by contrast, only reaches a smaller number of nerve cells.  The researchers also noted that the distribution of apoE is impaired if the animals were sleep deprived, a finding that reinforces the link between lack of sleep and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Read more here.

Two studies at the Medical Center will explore ways to help caregivers manage stress and improve their own health so they can more effectively provide care for loved ones with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Kathi Heffner, associate professor in the School of Nursing and Department of Psychiatry, and Jan Moynihan, the George L. Engel Professor in Psychosocial Medicine in the Departments of Psychiatry and Microbiology and Immunology, are collaborators on the five-year randomized clinical intervention trials. The projects, which focus on reducing the effects of caregiving on immune health, have been awarded more than $5.66 million in NIH funding.

Heffner is principal investigator on a cognitive training intervention trial looking at different types of brain training activities and whether they have an effect on the aging of the caregiver’s immune system. Participants perform brain training exercises for 30 minutes, three times per week, often right in their homes. The activities may include watching videos, doing puzzles, or other mentally stimulating activities.

Moynihan is leading a study on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), to see if mindfulness can lead to better immune response to the influenza vaccine. The MBSR training will center on developing a non-judgmental outlook and includes self-focused activities such as yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation.

After the training period ends, there are several follow-up contacts with the caregivers as researchers track their immune systems over time. For the cognitive training trail, the main interest is in slowing immune aging, as indicated by both profiles of specific immune cells and markers of inflammation in the blood. For the MBSR study, the primary outcome is adaptive immune response to the flu vaccine, as well as inflammation.

Read more here.

University researchers are working at the cutting edge of the intersection of data science and music, developing databases to study music history and perfecting ways in which computers can:

• Automatically identify a genre or singer.
• Model aspects of music cognition and extract the emotional content of a song.
• Predict musical tastes.
• Offer tools to improve musical performance and notation.

Mark Bocko, professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering, and his group have been using computers to analyze digitally recorded music files, with the goal of better understanding and mimicking the ways in which humans are able to recognize specific singers and musical performance styles. The project has applications not only in settling copyright disputes, but also in training musicians, studying trends in the development of musical styles, and improving music recommendation systems. An MP3 file of a song is good for reproducing sound for listeners, but the format does not allow researchers to easily identify properties such as pitch modulation, loudness contours, or tempo variations. Using a variety of audio signal processing algorithms, computers can extract such information from sound recordings.

Zhiyao Duan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, together with PhD student Andrea Cogliati, has been working with David Temperley, professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music, to extract data from songs and use that data to produce automatic music transcriptions—in effect, feeding audio into a computer and allowing the computer to generate the music score. Duan’s ultimate goal is to offer this software for commercial use, where it can help users to spot errors in a performance, search for pieces that have similar melodies or chord progressions, analyze an improvised solo, or notate it for repeated playing.

While Duan and Bocko work on the engineering side, designing algorithms to extract information from music, researchers at the Eastman School often provide ground-truth data that informs those algorithms. “Most machine learning tools have to be trained in some way on some direct data and then they can use that to analyze new data,” Temperley says. “We’re trying to develop a dataset of correct data that a machine learning system can then be trained on.” Temperley and his team at the Eastman School are creating a database of rock songs and analyzing the harmonies and melodies by hand. This can be useful for tasks such as classifying songs by genre, training systems to extract melodies, or using “query by humming” databases, where users can hum a tune into a computer that then finds the song.

Darren Mueller, assistant professor of musicology at the Eastman School, is creating a corpus of information based on a large-scale data analysis of Wikipedia’s coverage of various musical performers and genres. Did more people start posting on Beyonce’s Wikipedia page after her 2013 Superbowl appearance? Why is there more information on Wikipedia about an obscure jazz record than there is about an early-career Mozart piece? Do male composers have more Wikipedia entries than their female counterparts?

Using computer algorithms and machine learning, Mueller hopes to analyze how information about music is distributed, who is using Wikipedia, and the types of information being posted. He also hopes to show that Wikipedia can be a valuable source of information, if only as a springboard for defining a concept or identifying the drummer in a particular band.

Read more here.

Recently, NIH refined its policies governing research involving clinical trials. Is your research subject to these policies?

You may be surprised.

It is critical to understand the NIH definition of a clinical trial, and how the definition might be applied to particular studies.  NIH institutes and centers may differ in their interpretation, so it is imperative that investigators discuss with program officials if and how their research may be subject to NIH clinical trials policies and efforts.  Work is ongoing at the NIH to address the application of clinical trial policies across institutes and centers. In the meantime, case studies are available to help investigators understand whether their study is a clinical trial.

Click here to read more about the new policies.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute has developed a registry of patients and community members who are interested in participating in future research studies. You can access the recruitment information for participants in the registry if you include the registry as a recruitment method in your RSRB application. To learn more about the Research Participant Registry, email the Research Help Desk.

The Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences will award up to $30,000 to research faculty partnering with New York state companies on a range of optics, photonics and imaging interests, including ophthalmic and vision science, fiber optic communications, biomedical imaging, geospatial imaging, precision optics, consumer imaging and displays.

Awards are typically computed as one-half the dollar value (excluding qualifying “in kind” contributions) of designated funds from New York state companies. Awards with a small company partner may be matched at 1:1. Proposal submission deadline is May 22, 2017.  Click here to learn more.

The Healthy Weight Initiative strives to increase the proportion of the Rochester community with healthy weight by generating more funding for research projects.

The Building Bridges for Healthy Weight Initiatives “unconference” on March 25 is a first step toward nurturing diverse, transdisciplinary research teams and fostering holistic, systems approaches to body weight research, targeted to researchers and community agencies interested in issues such as obesity and eating disorders. Register by March 22.

The event is co-sponsored by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the Center for Community Health, and the Department of Public Health Sciences.  For more information, go to the CTSI Stories Blog.

The next Seeds for Collaboration mixer will be from 4:30 to 6 p.m. March 28 in LeChase Assembly Hall (G-9576). The goal is to provide basic science, translational, and clinical faculty with an opportunity to share their research interests and attract collaborators. Faculty mingle for 30 minutes followed by three short research presentations (5-8 minutes each).

The presenters on March 28 will be:

David Auerbach, Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, Department of Pharmacology & Physiology: “Translational Approaches to Elucidate the Association Between Seizures and Arrhythmias in Sudden Unexpected Death.”

Danielle Benoit, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Center for Musculoskeletal Research: “Therapeutic Biomaterials.”

Eric Phizicky, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Center for RNA Biology: “tRNA Biology and Neurological Dysfunction.”

The mixers are sponsored by the Del Monte Institute for Neuromedicine and the office of the dean of basic research.

Rohit Nayak, Electrical Engineering, “Principal Strain Vascular Elastography for Imaging the Carotid Artery.” Noon March 14, 2017. Computer Studies Building Room 209. Advisor: Marvin Doyley.

Luis Rosario McCabe, School of Nursing, “Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating a Team-based Transgender Cultural Education Program for an Ambulatory Women’s Health Practice.” 10:30 a.m. March 20, 2017. Helen Wood Hall 4w301. Advisors: Margaret Carno, Maria LaFaro, Eva Pressman.

Anna Sorensen, School of Nursing, “Development and Implementation of  a Skin Cancer Education Program for Heart Transplant Patients.” 4 p.m. March 20, 2017. Helen Wood Hall 3w301.Advisors: Lisa Norsen, Beth Palermo, LeWay Chen.

March 19: Deadline to register for the University’s preliminary Falling Walls competition to see who will represent Rochester at the final competition in Berlin, Germany this fall. This year’s Falling Walls preliminary contest will be held April 20 in Schlegel Hall’s Eisenberg Rotunda on the River Campus. Register here. Contact Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator, at adele.coelho@rochester.edu for additional information.

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@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.

March 20: Deadline to nominate early career faculty in AS&E and SMD natural and biological sciences for Furth Fund awards. Additional information can be found here.

March 25: Brainstorming for the Healthy Weight Initiative, which aims to increase the proportion of people with healthy weight in Rochester and beyond. The goal is to identify potential collaborators and research topics in any area related to body weight development as a first step toward developing new transdisciplinary research teams to obtain more research funding. Register by March 22. For more information, go to the CTSI Stories Blog.

March 28: Seeds for Collaboration mixer. Presentations by David Auerbach, Danielle Benoit, and Eric Phizicky. 4:30 to 6 p.m., LeChase Assembly Hall (G-9576). Sponsored by the Del Monte Institute for Neuromedicine and the office of the dean of basic research.

March 29:  “Two Decades of Nursing Home Compare: What Have We Learned?” Presented by R. Tamara Konetzka, professor of health services research at the University of Chicago. Saward-Berg Honorary Lecture sponsored by Department of Public Health Sciences.  12:30 to 2:00 p.m. Helen Wood Hall Auditorium (Room 1W304).

April 10: Deadline to apply for pilot and feasibility awards offered by the Schmitt Program in Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN), in conjunction with the Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience. Click here for more information and to download the RFA.

April 13: CEIS (Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences) Technology Showcase. Researchers share their work in optics, imaging and photonics, energy and materials, biomedical technology, and IP with industry professionals. 1 to 5 p.m., Doubletree Hotel, 1111 Jefferson Road. Free and open to the public. Register online.

April 26: “Precision Medicine: Notre Dame’s Bold Initiative to Lead the 21st Century Revolution in Personalized Care.” Presented by Paul Bohn, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, University of Notre Dame. Hesburgh Lecture, sponsored by Notre Dame Club of Rochester and Department of Pharmacology and Physiology. 7 p.m., Adolph Auditorium, Medical Center.

May 22: Deadline to apply for research awards from the Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences to collaborate with New York state companies on projects in ophthalmic and vision science, fiber optic communications, biomedical imaging, geospatial imaging, precision optics, consumer imaging and displays. Click here to learn more.