Many organisms are able to change certain traits in response to their environment. This ability, known as phenotypic plasticity, is an important evolutionary strategy in allowing an organism to better survive.

But how does an organism sense its environment and pass on that information to its offspring? What are the genetic mechanisms that regulate how environmental cues influence the ways organisms develop? And how do these processes evolve?

Jennifer Brisson, a professor of biology, received a nearly $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate these questions and more in a quest to better understand plasticity. The award, to be distributed over five years, will enable her to study the mechanisms that control phenotypic plasticity and the evolution of the genes responsible, which has important implications in human health and disease.

Brisson uses genetic mapping, genomics, pharmaceutical manipulations, and developmental observations to study phenotypic plasticity in pea aphids.

She has previously discovered, for instance, that the pea aphid genome co-opted virus genes that influence whether or not an individual aphid has wings. She also identified the first-known genetic basis of wing loss in an insect. Learn more.

If Russian leader Vladimir Putin succeeds in his war against Ukraine, “other countries, most prominently the Baltic states, but also other USSR successor republics, will have every reason to think they are next,” says Hein Goemans, a professor of political science and an expert on international conflicts, territorial disputes, why countries go to war, and how wars end.

“The world will change and NATO will have to rearm and all countries will have to spend more on defense. There will be rounds of arming and rearming. In this environment, even a small mistake, a glitch, a missed phone call, a mistranslation, a malfunctioning GPS can get out of hand really quickly.”

And if Putin fails?

“It’s not just Putin’s possible success that scares me, it’s also the possibility of a big failure for Russia,” Goemans says. “So if we’re in a situation where either success or failure both present horrible, dangerous situations, we’d better be very careful and think very, very carefully about what we can do, and perhaps what we cannot do, and prepare accordingly. You don’t want to corner Putin with sanctions to the extent that he feels that he must gamble—all or nothing.”

Learn more in this Q&A with Goemans by Sandra Knispel.

New research identifies neurons in the brain that ‘light up’ to the sound of singing, but do not respond to any other type of music.

Samuel Norman-Haignere, assistant professor of neuroscience and biostatistics and computational biology with the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, is first author on the paper in Current Biology that details these findings. “The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” Norman-Haignere says.

The singing-specific area of the brain is located in the temporal lobe, near regions that are selective for speech and music. Researchers worked with epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain (electrocorticography or ECOG) in order to localize seizure-related activity as a part of their clinical care. ECoG enables more precise measurements of electrical activity in the brain.

“This higher precision made it possible to pinpoint this subpopulation of neurons that responds to song. This finding along with prior findings from our group give a bird’s eye view of the organization of the human auditory cortex and suggest that there are different neural populations that selectively respond to particular categories, including speech, music, and singing.” Learn more.

Elmina Castle is among 20 historic forts and castles along the coast of Ghana that constitute a single world heritage site, protected by UNESCO as a “monument not only to the evils of the slave trade, but also to nearly four centuries of pre-colonial Afro-European commerce on the basis of equality.”

How do you digitally reconstruct 33 billion laser scan data points of a historic castle in Ghana, so that people wearing virtual reality (VR) headsets thousands of miles away can experience what it would be like to walk through each of the 120 rooms and exterior areas, seeing every detail as if they were actually there?

And how would you do so using low-end desktop systems, so the experience can be accessible to a broad range of people?

Yuhao Zhu, assistant professor of computer science; Michael Jarvis, professor of history; Sifan Ye ’20, and Ting Wu ’20 MS have demonstrated a way to do it, using laser scans taken at Elmina Castle in conjunction with the Ghana field school. Their paper received the Kostas Pantazos Memorial Award for Outstanding Paper in Visualization and Data Analysis at the annual Electronic Imaging Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IST).

Normally reconstructing such a large data base with existing 3D systems would involve expensive, time-consuming computational resources, or decreased visual quality, or slower rendering by the VR headset. Instead, the team describes a reconstruction system that avoids these trade-offs by directly transferring details from the original point cloud to a UV map generated by a low polygon mesh. This significantly reduces the reconstruction time and cost, preserves the scene details, and enables real-time rendering on mobile VR devices.

The new approach offers archaeologists and historians an important tool to make the past accessible and meaningful for millions of people. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities grant, the team is now working on applying this general method to other historical artifacts and sites.

Andrew Elliot, a professor in the Department of Psychology, is being honored with two awards this year—the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Jack Block Award, and the American Educational Research Association’s Sylvia Scribner Award.

Elliot, the author of nearly 300 scholarly articles, which have been cited more than 90,000 times, is one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of personality psychology.

“His work on personal goals has been transformative, particularly for understanding their role in well-being,” says his Rochester colleague Harry Reis, a professor of psychology and the Dean’s Professor in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. Elliot’s work on personality structure and function is “ground-breaking,” Reis says.

Among his scholarly contributions are several successive achievement goal models, including the trichotomous model, and the 2 x 2 and 3 x 2 models, providing evidence of achievement motivation and performance, in both laboratory and real-world settings. Elliot reintroduced the approach-avoidance distinction to personality research, which has led to numerous conceptual and applied advances throughout the field. More recently, the Rochester psychologist has been examining the effect of income inequality on intergroup cooperation and competition.

The Central New York Humanities Corridor has issued its call for proposals for this spring’s round of funding, with a deadline of March 28.

Faculty members and academic staff are welcome to propose projects for both new and continuing Working Groups. You can join a zoom info session from 10-11:15 a.m. today to ask questions about how to submit successful proposals.

The Corridor is a vehicle for scholarly collaboration among the principal investigators—University of Rochester, Cornell, and Syracuse—as well as six New York liberal arts colleges, RIT, and LeMoyne.  Here is the link for more information and to apply.

Heather Comerci Reyes, a pediatrician at Golisano Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics, critical care, will discuss the importance of social-emotional learning and how digital health can change the way we deliver healthcare. She will describe using Moxie the robot to help children learn social-emotional skills through play.

The talk, from noon to 1 p.m. today, is hosted by the UR CTSI, Public Health Sciences and Center for Community Health & Prevention.

The Medical Center has teamed with Embodied to investigate the use of Moxie to enrich the inpatient pediatric experience. Register here.

Current PhD and Professional Doctorate (Research) candidates from all graduate schools at the University who have passed their qualifying exam or are in their third year of study or greater can register for this year’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Registration starts at 8 a.m. Monday and will continue through 4 p.m. next Friday, March 11.

3MT is an academic competition that challenges doctoral students to describe their research within three minutes to a general audience. 3MT celebrates the discoveries made by research trainees and encourages you to communicate the importance of your research to the broader community.

Don’t miss this opportunity to practice your presentation skills, meet other trainees, and have a chance to win up to $1,000 in travel awards.

Sub-heats will be held as a live event at 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 22. The Final Competition, also a live event, will be at 4 p.m. April 6 in the Class of ’62 Auditorium (G-9425 at the Medical Center) with a reception to follow in Flaum Atrium.

For more information, visit myhub.urmc.edu/3MT. To request accommodations, contact Jen_Prosceo@URMC.Rochester.edu at least three business days prior to the event.

Nobel Laureate Phillip A. Sharp  will share new insights about the role of RNA in regulation of transcription and gene expression when the Dean’s Lectureship Series returns 4-5 p.m. March 14 in the Class of ’62 Auditorium.

Sharp is professor of biology and member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

The talk is the second in a series of lectures featuring international experts and SMD’s best on a broad range of timely and interesting topics.  Add to Outlook calendar

Researchers can now use MyChart to offer clinical trial opportunities to patients 18 and older who may be eligible for their studies.

This empowers patients to make their own decisions and takes the burden of communication off healthcare providers.

This service requires a recruitment consultation with the UR CTSI and IRB approval. The study must also be entered in OnCore and eRecord. Learn more.