FALL 2012
A Therapeutic Community UF’s Living Laboratory for Addiction Research
Explore
Fall 2012, Vol. 17, No. 3
Dr. Bernie Machen President Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research Board of Trustees Cheri Brodeur, Gainesville C. David Brown II, Orlando Susan Cameron, Fort Lauderdale Christopher Corr, Lake Lure, NC Marshall McAllister Criser III, Miami Charles B. Edwards, Fort Myers Michael Heekin, Sandy Springs, GA Alan M. Levine, Naples Carolyn K. Roberts, Ocala Juliet M. Roulhac, Plantation Steven M. Scott, Boca Raton Jose Antonio Villamil IV, Gainesville Alfred C. Warrington IV, Houston, TX
Research at the University of Florida
Explore is published by the UF Office of Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. Š 2012 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Paul Messal Nancy Schreck Writer: Donna Hesterman Copy Editor: Patricia B. McGhee Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org
Sequencing Success
Tangled!
UF researchers have
UF veterinarians
stayed ahead of the
help aquatic
biotech curve for 25
mammals
years with help from
snarled in
the Interdisciplinary
fishing line.
FALL 2012
Center for Biotechnology Research.
A Therapeutic Community UF’s Living Laboratory for Addiction Research
Cover illustration by K. D. Kinsley-Momberger
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Research News Briefs
Cover Story
A Therapeutic Community
Exchange Gainesville tech
Science Quest
firms are on venture capitalists’ radar.
UF is giving teachers the tools to make science classes fun again.
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The Florida Recovery Center provides a safe haven and a living laboratory for addiction research.
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A David Norton, Vice President for Research
UF
research is improving health care and agriculture, creating engineered solutions to everyday challenges , and accelerating our understanding of the world around us.
s the leading research university in the state, the University of Florida carries unique responsibilities in fulfilling its mission both locally and globally. Research at public universities, including the University of Florida, has yielded countless discoveries that improve the quality of life for millions of people, advance our understanding of our world, and fuel economic growth.A recent survey conducted by the National Science Foundation identified the top 20 regions where businesses locate their U.S. research and development operations. Not surprisingly, the highest concentrations of business R&D are located near highly productive research universities, many of them land-grant universities.
Businesses recognize that innovative ideas and talented people congregate in and around these institutions. Over the past decade, the University of Florida has made great strides in growing a research enterprise comparable to those in the upper echelon. At present, total research expenditures at the University of Florida rank in the top 25 among all U.S. universities, providing a catalyst for growing and attracting future business R&D enterprise to the state. UF research is improving health care and agriculture, creating engineered solutions to everyday challenges, and accelerating our understanding of the world around us. These accomplishments are testament to the very concrete impact UF has on Florida, the
nation and the world. Throughout this year, the University of Florida is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the legislation that created land-grant academic institutions and essentially birthed what is now the U.S. public research university. While the original intent of the Morrill Act was to create academic institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes,� these institutions continue to achieve much more in our education, research, and outreach. As we move forward, the University of Florida and its research enterprise must continue its pursuit of excellence, serving as a valuable resource to the citizens and an essential contributor to the economic future of our state.
Office of Research
UF Research Awards Reach A New High
$644M
$619M
$574M
$583M
$562M
$494M
$470M
$400
$458M
$500
$519M
$600
$678M
$700
MILLIONS
Research awards to University of Florida faculty totaled $644.4 million in 2012, a $25 million increase over 2011. Only $5.8 million of the $423 million from federal agencies was economic stimulus money, making the nonstimulus funding of $638.6 million the highest in the university’s history.
$300
$200 STIMULUS $100 0
FEDERAL NON-FEDERAL 02-03 03-04 04-05 05-06 06-07 07-08 08-09 09-10 10-11 11-12
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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Gator Nation Plays a Major Role Search for the Higgs Boson
in the
Particle physicists aren’t typically a “giddy” bunch, but that’s exactly what they were when news broke that the Higgs Boson had been found. the particle was detected.” In fact, under the direction of Mitselmakher, the UF team led the design and construction of one of the major components of the CMS. “That was a global effort as well,” said Mitselmakher. “We built part of it here at UF while other portions were assembled at 11 other U.S. universities, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, China and Russia.” All told, that one component of the CMS cost $45 million. Nine faculty members and about 15 post-doctoral researchers and engineers, mostly funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, make up the UF CMS group. A number of graduate and undergraduate students work with them as well. But finding the Higgs wasn’t just a triumph for a bunch of scientists working in an esoteric field of study. It was a powerful demonstration of what can be accomplished through a global collaboration. More than 40 nations had a hand in this discovery, and their participation was made possible through an elaborate Maximilien Brice; Michael Hoch; Joseph Gobin
And why shouldn’t they be? It was the last piece of a multi-decade puzzle that a global consortium of scientists had been working on since the middle of the last century — namely, the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Smashing atomic particles in a series of evermore-sophisticated colliders since the 1960s, physicists had found all but one of the 12 fundamental particles predicted by the model. Finally, their hard work paid off. On July 4, 2012, officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, confirmed that a particle very much like the long-sought Higgs Boson had at last been found in data from its Large Hadron Collider. “The Higgs particle is crucial to the Standard Model because it gives all the other particles their mass,” said Guenakh Mitselmakher, a UF professor of physics and leader of the UF research team at CERN. “Quarks, leptons and other subatomic particles do not have mass on their own — not until they interact with the Higgs.” Hence, the Higgs Boson’s moniker, “The God Particle.” “The search for the Higgs is one of the biggest scientific endeavors of our time,” said John Yelton, professor and chair of the UF physics department. “And the University of Florida group is one of the biggest contributors to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, one of the two experiments where
CMS Detector at CERN
system of grid computing that allows researchers, wherever they are, to analyze data and contribute to the experiment in a very meaningful way. Paul Avery, a UF professor of physics, helped establish the grid computing system in the U.S. and is head of the CMS grid computing site at UF, one of seven such facilities in the U.S. The UF group at CERN was also a major player in analyzing the CMS data which eventually revealed the existence of the Higgs particle. Mitselmakher said that beyond the technological spinoffs that come from a Big Science endeavor like the Higgs search, he doesn’t see any immediate practical applications for the Higgs discovery. But 19th century nuclear physicists could never have
predicted how their discoveries in electricity would change the world either, he said. “No matter,” Mitselmakher said. “Shouldn’t simple curiosity about the universe be enough to keep us working?” “In a particle collider, energy becomes new particles according to E=mc2,” he said. “It’s just like the Big Bang — the big explosion that produced the particles that formed protons, neutrons, stars and planets. We do this on a smaller scale at CERN.” “The laws of physics are still the same,” he said. “They haven’t changed.” John Yelton, yelton@phys.ufl.edu Paul Avery, avery@phys.ufl.edu Guenakh Mitselmakher, mitselmakher@phys.ufl.edu
Donna Hesterman
Explore
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Extracts UF Delivers on a Promise Personalized Medicine
College of Pharmacy
of
Under a new standard of care, UF doctors will help ward off heart attacks or strokes after heart procedures by taking a person’s genetic information into account before prescribing medications that prevent blood clots. Patients at Shands at UF who undergo a procedure that involves passing a thin tube into the left side of the heart to diagnose or treat heart disease will be routinely screened for biological signals in their blood that give clues about how they might respond to a common anticlotting drug called clopidogrel, also sold as Plavix. “In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration changed clopidogrel’s label to warn clinicians that it may not work for highrisk heart patients with certain genetic traits. But there hasn’t been a good way to get genetic information to doctors so they can use it during treatment,” said Julie A. Johnson, director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Personalized Medicine Program and the UF College of Pharmacy’s Center for Pharmacogenomics. “Over the last year, we worked with stakeholders across our health system to tackle that challenge, and we are now able to deliver on the promise of personalized medicine.” Julie Johson, johnson@cop.ufl.edu
Claire Baralt
UF
researchers at
IFAS
are test-
ing a new produce laser labeling method that could make paper sticky labels a thing of the past. Scan the QR code to see related video.
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Jesse S. Jones
Personalized medicine — a concept in which an understanding of a patient’s genetic makeup is used to enhance treatment — has arrived to Shands at the University of Florida.
R. David Anderson, M.D., and Julie Johnson, Pharm.D., in the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Shands at UF, which has implemented personalized medicine for its patients. Emerging Pathogens Institute
Florida Forms New Food Safety Center of E xcellence The Florida Department of Health in partnership with the University of Florida has received a $250,000 grant to establish an Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence. The Food Safety Center of Excellence will be one of five national centers working to help public health agencies sharpen their response in the event of a foodborne illness outbreak. The centers were legislated by congress with the signing of the Food and Drug Administration Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011. UF’s College of Public Health and Health Professions will be offering a new graduate certificate specializing in food safety epidemiology in support of the Center of Excellence training and education goals. The program will include 15 credit hours of coursework, which can be applied to the Master of Public Health degree. Researchers from UF’s Institute of Food
and Agricultural Sciences will work with staff from the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute to create the curriculum. “This is a chance for us to do what we do best,” said Douglas Archer, associate dean for research at IFAS. “We have decades of experience in foodborne pathogen research and a long history of reaching out to the public through the cooperative extension system. Choosing Florida as a site for one of the five national centers establishes UF as one of the top food safety research institutions in the country, said Glenn Morris, Director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at UF. Douglas Archer, dlarcher@ifas.ufl.ed Glenn Morris, jgmorris@epi.ufl.edu
College of Medicine
Nanorobot Targets Disease
In laboratory tests, these newly created “nanorobots” all but eradicated hepatitis C virus infection. The programmable nature of the particle makes it potentially useful against diseases such as cancer and other viral infections too. The research effort, led by Y. Charles Cao, a UF associate professor of chemistry, and Dr. Chen Liu, a professor of pathology and endowed chair in gastrointestinal and liver research in the UF College of Medicine, is described online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During the past five
decades, nanoparticles — particles so small that tens of thousands of them can fit on the head of a pin — have emerged as a viable foundation for new ways to diagnose, monitor and treat disease. Nanoparticle-based technologies are already in use in medical settings, such as in genetic testing and for pinpointing genetic markers of disease. And several related therapies are at varying stages of clinical trial. Hepatitis C infection causes liver inflammation, which can eventually lead to scarring and cirrhosis. More than 3 million people in the
Charles Cao
University of Florida researchers have moved a step closer to treating diseases on a cellular level by creating a tiny particle that can be programmed to shut down the genetic production line that cranks out disease-related proteins.
United States are infected and about 17,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. Current hepatitis C treatments involve the use of drugs that attack the replication machinery of the virus. But the therapies are only partially effective, and help fewer than 50 percent of patients. Side effects vary widely and can include flulike symptoms, anemia and anxiety.
In laboratory tests, the new virus-destroyer, called a nanozyme, led to almost a 100 percent decrease in hepatitis C virus levels. In addition, it did not trigger the body’s defense mechanism, and that reduced the chance of side effects.
Engineering who is the principal leader of the project. The extreme cyber makeover will give researchers on campus the computing power they need to work on big, sometimes global collaborations like NASA missions looking for extra-solar planets and the search for the Higgs Boson. “Big Science means Big Data,” said Paul Avery, a UF professor of physics and a coleader on the GatorCloud’s project. “UF researchers are tackling big questions in science that require massive data storage capacities
and the ability to share data quickly to remote team members,” he said. The network’s speed will make it one of the fastest university research networks nationwide and be one of the first ever attempts to combine the power of cloud computing with the efficiency of a software defined network.
Charles Cao, cao@chem.ufl.edu Chen Liu, liu@pathology.ufl.edu
Czerne M. Reid
College of Engineering
UF receives $1.2 million GatorCloud Network
for
The National Science Foundation has awarded a University of Florida professor $1.2 million to create a first-of-its-kind, campuswide cyber infrastructure called GatorCloud. GatorCloud will give UF researchers all over campus increased computing capacity through a virtual “cloud” platform much like that offered by Amazon Web Services. It will also be built on an emerging software architecture called “software defined network,” that monitors and controls data flow so that it is always sent along the most efficient pathways.
The new network should increase Internet speeds on the campus research network from 10 gigabytes per second to 100 gigabytes per second. A separate NSF grant to UF will be used to bolster connections between the UF campus and the rest of the world. “That’s like sending dozens of DVD’s per second,” said Andy Li, a professor in the UF Department of Electrical and Computer
Xiaolin Andy Li, andyli@ece.ufl.edu Sanjay Ranka, sanjayranka@gmail.com; Paul Avery, avery@phys.ufl.edu
Donna Hesterman
Explore
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Extracts “There’s
currently not a
lot of satellite imagery used in ecological studies.
Part
of the reason is ,
there’s a strong need to improve mathematical formulas for analyzing the data , and that’s what we’re doing here.”
— Matteo Convertino IFAS biological engineering researcher, Matteo Convertino. Institute of Food and Agriculrual Sciences
Conservation Gets New Perspective For scientists, making field observations of organisms and ecosystems can be a daunting challenge. Travel to remote locations is costly and difficult. Observation methods are limited and must be devised so that they only capture accurate, relevant data. Satellite imagery is one alternative for assessing wild places, and it has some advantages over boots-onthe-ground observations, said Matteo Convertino, a research scientist with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “There’s currently not a lot of satellite imagery used in ecological studies,” said Convertino, with UF’s agricultural and biological engineering department. “Part of the reason is, there’s a strong need to improve mathematical formulas for analyzing the data, and that’s what we’re doing here.” In the journal PLoS ONE, Convertino and colleagues outline a new method for
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extracting information from digital images quickly and efficiently. The system identifies the components of photos based on their appearance, and pinpoints similar features or objects. The research team hit accuracy levels as high as 98 percent with analyses of satellite photos showing Everglades wilderness. The team used this method to estimate the number of different plant species in the photos. Those results were compared with field observations. “This method provides three benefits: improved accuracy, higher speed and reduced costs,” said Convertino, who is also a contractor at the Risk and Decision Science Team of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and part of the Florida Climate Institute. Digital photos taken far above Earth can provide information that covers long
periods of time and large tracts of land, with great clarity, he said. Satellites can also provide more thorough coverage of an area, compared with on-the-ground observation. Add to that the fact that there are decades of satellite images available through digital archiving, and there’s a treasure trove of data for ecologists, biologists, foresters and others. To unlock it, the research team has harnessed a probability formula called Kullback-Leibler divergence. Computer software developed by the team can gauge the intensity of the light reflected off objects in a photo. Then the software notes the frequencies of the most prevalent light waves. Finally, the software classifies the objects into two or more groups, based on the amount and type of light they reflect. The system could not tell researchers which plant species they were looking at, but it did reveal how many plant
species were in an image, where they were, and how numerous they were. It also provided information about landscape features. The study involved satellite images showing a part of the Florida Everglades known as Water Conservation Area 1. There, standard on-the-ground observations have been sparsely recorded. The Everglades and other wetlands need close monitoring because they are sensitive to rainfall, water management and other external factors that affect overall ecosystem health. Ultimately, the analytical method may prove useful for other image-retrieval challenges, Convertino said. It has already been used to classify stem cells found in photos taken with microscopes, and can be used to analyze surface water and soil shown in satellite images. Matteo Convertino, mconvertino@ufl.edu
Tom Nordlie
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Little Mouse
has
Big Potential
A small African mammal with an unusual ability to regrow damaged tissues could inspire new research in regenerative medicine, a University of Florida study finds. That’s not the case in other mammals, he said. Usually scar tissue forms to fill the gap created by a wound. The spiny mouse also regrows tissue on its main body when injured but not as completely as it does in its ears. “On their backs, they regrow hair follicles and skin, but the muscle beneath the skin doesn’t regenerate,” Seifert said. Seifert was studying scarfree healing in amphibians when a colleague told him that a small rodent he had observed in Africa seemed capable of autotomy, a defense mechanism whereby the animal self-amputates a body part to escape a predator. “Autotomy in skinks, geckos and some salamanders is well known,” Seifert said. “But it is very rare in
mammals, and so far we’ve only seen it in a few rodents that can jettison their tail.” Seifert’s colleague said that the African spiny mouse appeared to have tear-away skin that allowed it to slip a predator’s grasp. The notion was interesting enough to send Seifert packing to the Mpala Research Centre near Nairobi, Kenya. In Nairobi, Seifert was able to document the first
IFAS
Ashley W. Seifert, seifert@ufl.edu
Donna Hesterman
researcher Jamie
Ellis
found
that two common chemicals used to protect crops from fungal infections can also harm honey bee larvae.
Tom Wright
For years biologists have studied salamanders for their ability to regrow lost limbs. But amphibian biology is very different than human biology, so lessons learned in laboratories from salamanders are difficult to translate into medical therapies for humans. Research in the journal Nature describes a mammal that can regrow new body tissues following an injury. The African spiny mouse could become a new model for research in regenerative medicine. “The African spiny mouse appears to regenerate ear tissue in much the way that a salamander regrows a limb that has been lost to a predator,” said Ashley W. Seifert, a postdoctoral researcher in UF’s biology department. “Skin, hair follicles, cartilage — it all comes back.”
known case of skin autotomy in a mammal. But it was how the animals’ injuries appeared to be healing that really got his attention. Seifert used a 4mm biopsy punch, about the size of a large BB, to puncture holes in the ears of the mice to see if the animal showed regenerative capabilities. “The results were astonishing,” he said. “The various tissues in the ear grew back through formation of blastema-like structures — the same sort of biological process that a salamander uses to regenerate a severed limb.” Ken Muneoka, a Tulane University professor of cell and molecular biology who was not involved with the study, agrees that Seifert’s findings are important. “It could represent a new model system for skin wound healing and tissue regeneration in humans,” he said.
Explore
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Extracts
College of Engineering
UF Engineers Working Nuclear Power Safety
to Improve
Jesse S. Jones
The nuclear engineering program in the University of Florida’ s Department of Materials Science and Engineering has been awarded an $800,000 research grant by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Researchers Jae-Sung Kim and Christaan Leeuwenburgh. College of Medicine
Cellular Housekeeping Healthier Livers
is
Key
to
University of Florida researchers have received nearly $1.3 million from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to uncover ways to treat liver damage by studying the body’s natural process for breaking down and removing injured cells.
As part of DOE’s ongoing commitment to support university-led nuclear research and development, the department is awarding $19.9 million for fuel cycle research and development at 32 U.S. universities and colleges, including the UF College of Engineering, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Case Western Reserve University. “This grant recognizes the outstanding research that is being conducted at the University of Florida’s Laboratory for Development of Advanced Nuclear Fuels and materials,” said James S. Tulenko, professor emeritus in the nuclear engineering program and principal
investigator on the grant. “We aim to make strides in making nuclear fuel a safer and more efficient energy for America and the world.” Tulenko and his team will study the use of diamond nanoparticles composite material on fuel pellets to improve the thermal conductivity of the nuclear fuel resulting in reduced fuel temperatures, fuel thermal expansion, thermal cracking and fission gas releases. This would produce a better performing, higher burn-up and more accident-tolerant fuel. A study of the economic benefits of this fuel will also be conducted. James S. Tulenko, tulenko@ufl.edu
Finding a way to boost cells’ natural cleanup process could help patients recover faster after liver surgery and increase the number of livers available for people on waiting lists for transplants. The multidisciplinary UF research team seeks to confirm earlier findings that the liver’s ability to recover from surgeryrelated damage is linked to the process by which cells remove their own damaged components. Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, chief of the biology of aging division in the Department of Aging and Geriatric Research said they plan to study natural cellular cleanup mechanisms in older mice. There are many studies that have investigated liver injury in younger animals, he said, but most surgeries and interventions are done on older individuals. Knowing more about how the cells recover in older animals could pave the way for new treatments in liver disease, and other ailments as well. Leeuwenburgh and Sung Kim, an assistant professor of surgery are leading the study. Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, cleeuwen@aging.ufl.edu.
Laura Mize Cygnus constellation explored by Kepler mission.
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Helen Goh
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
ASTRONOMY ROUND-UP Two For One
Contradicting data from different types of telescopes can make planet hunting a controversial proposition. But as scientists improve their tools for cosmic observation, the picture is coming into focus. In 2008, astronomers announced the discovery of Fomalhaut-b, the first extrasolar planet to be detected by visible light. But when NASA’s Spitzer telescope peered into the dusty ring around the star Fomalhaut where the planet was supposed to be, it didn’t see a thing. However, when UF astronomer Aaron Boley and his team used a new array of radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to look for Fomalhaut-b, they found evidence of two — not one — planets. Boley and his team cannot yet tell what the planets are made of, but they can tell that they define Fomalhaut’s ring by herding the dusty
cloud around it into its welldefined band. The array of telescopes, called ALMA, is the largest astronomical project in existence. And even though it is still under construction, it is proving to be one of the world’s most powerful telescopes for observing the universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths of light. When the project is complete, scientists hope to be able to see through the dusty veil of newly forming stars and observe the early stages of planet formation.
Fomalhaut's ring.
Anthony Gonzalez, anthony@astro. ufl.edu Eric Ford, eford@astro.ufl.edu Aaron Boley, aaron.boley@astro.ufl.edu
Javier Barbuzano
CARMA antennas near Bishop Cal.
An Unlikely Pair
A R are Find
When astronomers look at other planetary systems, they expect smaller, rocky planets to orbit closest to the star while larger gaseous planets are confined to outer orbits. That’s how it is in our own solar system, so it stood to reason that other systems would have a similar arrangement.
UF astronomer Anthony Gonzalez and a team of scientists using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently found a massive galaxy cluster that caught them by surprise.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Using data from NASA’s Kepler mission and working with a team from Harvard University and the University of Washington, UF astronomer Eric Ford found a planetary odd couple that defied the expected pattern. Two planets in the Cygnus constellation orbit the same star at very similar distances, but their densities differ by a factor of ten. This and other recent discoveries from Ford and the Kepler team are reshaping models for how planets form. Eric Ford, eford@astro.ufl.edu
It was 10 billion light-years from Earth, which means that the cluster formed when the universe was a mere adolescent. Gonzalez said clusters that size should have been extremely rare 10 billion years ago, and that they certainly didn’t expect to find one while exploring such a small 9-square-degree sliver of the night sky. So how did they find it? Luckily, the cluster was situated in the foreground of a more distant galaxy whose light was bent into an incandescent arc by the gravitational pull of the massive cluster. The display, known to astronomers as gravitational lensing, showed up in images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and that prompted Gonzalez to investigate further. He used data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to verify the find. Anthony Gonzalez, anthony@astro.ufl.edu
Explore
11
Extracts
takes a cue from the wild
The inspiration for the next Google or search-and-rescue drone may spring from a seemingly unlikely source: Watching how animals sniff out food, according to University of Florida research. Innovators in everything from robotics to Internet search engines study patterns that animal predators walk while searching for prey. But mathematical models that have been used in the past to study these patterns are in need of a little revamping, the UF study finds — because in the animal kingdom, scent plays a major roll in tracking prey. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Imagine trying to find a bakery in a foreign city without a map,” said Andrew Hein, a researcher in UF’s biology department. “You’re in sort of a general search mode until you catch of whiff of fresh bread. Then you start to look more carefully for visual cues like a store front or someone else carrying a baguette.” The strategy saves predators time and energy by helping them cut to the chase, but the models currently used to represent animals on the hunt aren’t equipped with olfactory senses. Hein worked with colleague Scott McKinley, a researcher in the mathematics department at UF, to endow two widely used computer models with a simulated sense of smell. “In a natural environment, smell can be a very vague, directionless signal for where a target, like prey or a mate, can be found,” Hein said. “But even when an animal smells nothing, that signal is telling him something: Keep moving.” In the study, Hein and McKinley pit the olfactory-equipped computer models against two of the original models in a series of virtual hunts. The models with smelling power won hands down. They were far more efficient and reliable predators than their non-sniffing counterparts, the study found. The improvement also made the model behave more like what biologists have observed in nature, Hein said. “We know that albatrosses alter their flight pattern when they encounter prey scent,” he said. “And frigatebirds find the eddies where they hunt at least in part, by smell.” McKinley said their work addresses a gap in the existing body of literature on modeling animal search patterns. But Massimo Vergassola, a physicist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said the study is important because it provides an abstraction of general principles that can be useful for scientists modeling bioinspired search strategies in a variety of applications. People are using this sort of research to inform a range of exploration, Vergassola said, from insect mating and reproduction control to “sniffer robots” that could be deployed to detect chemical leaks. Andrew Hein, amhein@ufl.edu
Donna Hesterman
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Andrew Hein
Technology
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
A parrot snake uses its tongue to sniff out prey the way a mountain lion would use its nose. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
UF
study suggests ancient sea level was surprisingly high
A new study by a University of Florida researcher finds that sea level peaked 18 to 30 feet above current sea level during the last period of global warming approximately 125,000 years ago. That’s significant, the researchers say, because knowing how high sea level peaked previously tells us something about how the earth may respond as global temperatures rise again. The range of sea level maximums the researchers estimate suggests that part of the Greenland ice sheet had collapsed, as well as a large portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet and possibly sectors of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Scientists predict that a similar collapse of an already unstable West Antarctic ice sheet today could cause a precipitous sea level rise of approximately 10 feet. The process may have already begun as scientists take note of Antarctica’s western shelf slowly sloughing off into the warming waters of the Southern Ocean. The researchers used fossil coral reef data as the baseline for their estimates, and then adjusted them for changes in the sea floor and continental land masses that have occurred over geological time. “It’s all very dynamic. Some points on the globe are
rising while others are falling,” said study lead author Andrea Dutton, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Florida. The constant shape shifting can make prehistoric sea levels a tricky thing to nail down, so Dutton turned to Kurt Lambeck, a professor of geophysics at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia for help. He used computer modeling to simulate the geological conditions during the last period of global warming and that enabled Dutton to get a more accurate read on the data. Dutton said that the poles during the last interglacial period were approximately 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are today — a temperature range that we could see again before the end of this century. It could take more than a century for the ice sheets to melt, she said. But we may already be committed to a path that we aren’t prepared to deal with. Andrea Dutton, adutton@ufl.edu
Donna Hesterman
U n i v e r s it y
of
F lo r i da
RESEARCH IN THE NEWS Ken Heilman, a neurology and health psychology professor, was quoted in a NBC News article about why scents bring back memories. Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecology and conservation professor and alligator expert at the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, gave advice in a Los Angeles Times article on how to avoid or survive an alligator attack. Ecologist Brian Silliman was quoted in a Washington Post story about the BP oil spill accelerating the loss of Louisiana’s delicate marshlands.
U n i v e r s it y
Jaret Daniels, assistant professor of entomology, was quoted in a CNN story about the decline of Schaus swallowtail butterflies and what will be done to save the species.
Law Professor Monique Haughton-Worrell was a guest on the Boston’s NPR radio show to discuss the second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case.
Political science Professor Daniel Smith was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about a federal judge rejecting a key part of Florida’s new election laws, which would have applied to the 62 counties not subject to the Voting Rights Act.
Jason Steuber, curator of Asian art at the Harn Museum of Art, was quoted in a Washington Post story about the discovery of documents inside a 350-year-old buddha, now on display at the museum.
Finance Professor Jay Ritter was quoted in a USA Today article about millions more Facebook shares coming soon and what the expiration of the lock-up period could mean.
of
Matt Sheehan, director of the 21st Century Newsroom at the College of Journalism and Communications, was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report story about the value of a Master of Business Administration degree in today’s newsrooms.
Anthropologist James Davidson was quoted in a USA Today story about many unknown graveyards of former slaves, including the one he discovered in Dallas, TX. Alan K. Knudsen, director of pharmacy legal services for Shands HealthCare, was quoted in a MSNBC story about how pharmacists are forced to discard drugs based on outdated regulations when updated science shows they are still fine for use, especially drugs experiencing shortages. Researchers Michelle Mack and Edward Schuur were quoted in a New York Times story about the potential impact on the thawing of the permafrost.
F lo r i da
N E WHIRES Patrick J. Concannon will serve as the next director of the University of Florida Genetics Institute. Previously, Concannon served as professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. His research interests include cellular DNA damage responses, breast cancer genetics, and genetics of type 1 diabetes.
Christine Schmidt will be the new chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Schmidt held the B.F. Goodrich Endowed Chair in Materials Engineering in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, where she helped grow the department into one of the five largest in the country. She earned her doctorate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana — Champaign, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.
Concannon
Schmidt
Mark Q. Martindale, former director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, has been appointed director of the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience. Martindale received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin and completed a postdoctoral appointment
Martindale
at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago. He moved to Hawaii in 1998 and assumed the duties of director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory in 2007.
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14 Fall 2012
A Therapeutic Community The Florida Recovery Center provides a safe haven and a living laboratory for addiction research
t
By Cindy Spence
K. D. Kinsley-Momberger
he young doctor was on the road to ruin, drinking secretly in his garage after tucking his children into bed and abusing medications obtained with bogus prescriptions. He was an addict, his marriage troubled, his career in jeopardy. Then his state’s medical society ordered a detour, to the UF&Shands Florida Recovery Center. Waiting outside Medical Director Scott Teitelbaum’s office for a final word of encouragement, he is one of the first “graduates” of the center’s new campus, a unique place where treatment, research and education converge for one of the most comprehensive approaches to addiction medicine in the United States. On this, his 94th and final day in treatment, he talks about the journey ahead, a ride to the Orlando airport and a plane trip halfway across the country, as well as the longer road beyond that: recovery. The future is uncertain, he says, but at least now he may have one. Teitelbaum turns him loose, knowing all too well that the measure of the young doctor’s success is likely years away.
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“There is the beauty of recovery, the miracle of recovery, but there is tragedy, too. Not everybody gets better,” Teitelbaum says. “But there’s always hope.” The Florida Recovery Center’s campus, dedicated in July, represents a $6 million investment in hope, Teitelbaum says. The site is a former Marriott Residence Inn and will house up to 120 patients when fully renovated. The 10-acre campus is serene, with palms and moss-draped oaks, and facilities such as a pool, a sports court, a barbecue area and a laundry. Suites accommodate two or three patients and other buildings house group therapy and offices for doctors, researchers and medical students. The location, minutes from the UF Health Science Center and Shands Hospital, also allows health professionals to participate in educational programs. Before July, the center was scattered between rented apartments and office parks where, Teitelbaum says, “no one wants you. Being next to a treatment center for people with drug and alcohol addiction is almost as bad as being next to a garbage dump or a nuclear power plant.” The new campus felt different right away. Patients not only go through therapy together, but they live together. Conversations spring up, connections are made simply doing laundry or chatting on a balcony late at night. The magic of recovery can happen in a gathering beside the pool. Before, Teitelbaum says, patients might leave a heart-rending therapy session and walk out to a parking lot to see hostile stares. On campus, patients have each other and a support system. “Healing is about pain, but also hope. You want a milieu that’s conducive to recovery,” Teitelbaum says. “Here, we have a therapeutic community; that’s what we have by having a campus.” Demand for addiction medicine treatment, research and education has
16 Fall 2012
grown, as addiction has been identified more as a factor in many illnesses. Today, more than 50 percent of preventable causes of death are related to addictions, according to Mark S. Gold, chair of the UF Department of Psychiatry in the McKnight Brain Institute. Gold’s accolades befit his status as a pioneer in addiction medicine. He is a UF Alumni Distinguished Professor, a UF Distinguished Professor, the Donald R. Dizney Eminent Scholar and has published dozens of books on addiction. He remembers a different approach to addiction four decades ago. “When my career started, you couldn’t admit alcoholics to the hospital,” Gold says. “Today, addiction is a disease.” The Florida Recovery Center rests on a foundation Gold began laying in 1990, when he joined the UF College of Medicine faculty. Teitelbaum laughs when he thinks back to the day he showed up in 1997, as Gold’s fellow, to find the noted addiction researcher ensconced in an office in the cancer center, reflecting an early focus on addiction and smoking. “It was just him and me,” Teitelbaum says. But Gold was already riding a wave of discovery in neuroanatomy. He has been responsible for breakthroughs in “state-dependent memory,” showing that students who use amphetamines to study will need amphetamines again to recall the material. He proved that opiates alter brain function, and he holds a patent for a drug used for opiate withdrawal. His work on cocaine addiction showed that chronic cocaine use causes depleted dopamine levels in the brain, leading to new treatments. Gold’s work has also determined that proximity to addictive substances can lead to addiction, for example, in children exposed to secondhand smoke or medical workers exposed to anesthesia in an operating room.
“THERE IS THE BEAUTY OF RECOVERY, THE MIRACLE OF RECOVERY, BUT THERE IS TRAGEDY, TOO. NOT EVERYBODY GETS BETTER, BUT THERE’S ALWAYS HOPE.” — SCOTT TEITELBAUM
Photos by John Jernigan Explore
17
“WE TRAIN PROFESSIONALS THAT YOU CAN’T BE WEAK, YOU CAN HANDLE ANYTHING, YOU’RE SMART, LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF YOU GOT DONE, THAT SOMEHOW BEING SMART PROTECTS YOU. BEING SMART DOESN’T PROTECT YOU.” — SARA JO NIXON
18 Fall 2012
“Today we have evidence that drug use changes the brain,” Gold says. “All drugs of abuse have the same effect on the brain. All cause the fatal attraction.” Gold’s work attracted other researchers and physicians, and today the UF addiction medicine faculty is one of the largest in the nation with 12 members, and another 12 to 15 researchers working in addiction medicine. Still a pioneer, Gold is advancing addiction medicine with research into second- and third-generation effects of opium smoking among populations in Afghanistan and much-talked-about work on food addiction, which is among the treatments offered at the Florida Recovery Center. Although some experts have been reluctant to put food in the same category with alcohol or
narcotics, the nation’s obesity epidemic is making more and more scientists receptive to considering food addiction, says Gold’s colleague, psychiatry Professor Sara Jo Nixon. “As our understanding of how the brain works and responds to stimuli has matured, we have to consider that there are other things — not just alcohol or cocaine — that create this disruption in the reward system, so that this thing has undue value, value it shouldn’t have,” Nixon says. “If you look at people who are really driven by food, their response to food is very much like an alcoholic’s. “There’s some very interesting brain data looking at activation patterns, that supports food addiction.” Nixon says the center’s residential campus makes it possible to ask and answer more questions about addiction and recovery — for example, what
THE NEW CAMPUS FELT DIFFERENT RIGHT AWAY. PATIENTS NOT ONLY GO THROUGH THERAPY TOGETHER, BUT THEY LIVE TOGETHER. CONVERSATIONS SPRING UP, CONNECTIONS ARE MADE SIMPLY DOING LAUNDRY OR CHATTING ON A BALCONY LATE AT NIGHT. THE MAGIC OF RECOVERY CAN HAPPEN IN A GATHERING BESIDE THE POOL. kinds of sleep disruptions occur with addiction and how to address sleep to promote recovery. Patients, doctors and non-doctors alike, are encouraged to attend grand rounds, generally designed for doctors to educate doctors. Nixon says a recent talk she gave on women and addiction prompted a dialogue not only from a woman in the audience but also from a physician in South Florida, who had tuned in over the Internet. It’s exciting, she says, to see more attention to a condition that used to be swept under the rug. Impaired health professionals, in particular, need reassurance that it is OK to seek treatment. “What does being impaired mean for a health professional?” Nixon asks. “Does it mean I don’t make very good decisions about drinking and drug use?
OK, I can handle that. But are you saying there is something wrong with my brain? That could mean I couldn’t practice; the implications are huge. “We train professionals that you can’t be weak, you can handle anything, you’re smart, look at all the stuff you got done, that somehow being smart protects you. Being smart doesn’t protect you.” Lisa Merlo, an assistant professor of psychiatry and director of research for the Professionals Resource Network, a program that monitors impaired health professionals in Florida, says many professionals report being relieved when their addiction is caught. A new study being developed to study wellness among medical students aims in part to make asking for help acceptable. “Addiction is still very stigmatized within the lay community as well as
the medical community,” Merlo says. “People would rather deal with it on their own, but they’re almost never successful doing that.” Merlo, who moved her office to the campus, says the health professionals receiving treatment there report that the environment is key. Being surrounded by other health professionals reduces their shame, and seeing those ahead of them succeed gives them a role model. For many health professionals, community 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous are not comfortable. “You can’t go to a community AA meeting and talk about stealing your patient’s drugs — that’s not going to go over well — even in an AA meeting,” Merlo says. “But here you can talk to other health professionals who understand.” Merlo says recovery rates are high
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19
“YOU CAN’T GO TO A COMMUNITY AA MEETING AND TALK ABOUT STEALING YOUR PATIENT’S DRUGS — THAT’S NOT GOING TO GO OVER WELL — EVEN IN AN AA MEETING. BUT HERE YOU CAN TALK TO OTHER HEALTH PROFESSIONALS WHO UNDERSTAND.” — LISA MERLO
for health professionals, with 80 percent back to work with no relapse five years after treatment. Monitoring programs help, because relapses can be caught early and treatment resumed. In another study, Merlo hopes to determine whether success rates remain high when monitoring ends. “There is a distinction between just being sober and being in recovery,” Merlo says. “There is a shift in mindset.” Until recently, physician abuse of prescription drugs was five times greater than in the general population. With the rise of pill mills, the general public has caught up, creating an epidemic. Part of the problem, researchers say, is that potent narcotics previously prescribed only for cancer pain now are prescribed more frequently. “You can have a dental procedure and walk out with a prescription worth hundreds of dollars on the street,” Merlo says. “If you have minor surgery and only need two pills, and you have a prescription for 30, that’s a lot of pills out there available to be misused.” Educating doctors about the potential for addiction is an important part of curbing the pill epidemic. UF has the
20 Fall 2012
largest addiction medicine fellowship program in the country and requires all medical students to do a two-week addiction medicine rotation. A doctor doesn’t have to practice psychiatry to run into addiction, Gold says. In every medical specialty, addiction shows up, often as the cause of other medical problems like heart disease, lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver. Teitelbaum has seen firsthand the need for education. He is both medical director and object lesson. In the early 1990s, he was a successful pediatrician, the doctor moms called after hours in his Connecticut town. By 1995, he was struggling with addiction, doing yard work, raking pine straw in Mississippi, his family and career lost. His first attempt at rehab that year failed, but he tried again, and in 1996 recovery began in earnest. Sixteen years later, Teitelbaum says recovery is a daily goal. “When somebody comes into the emergency room with a heart attack or diabetes, the doctor may say, ‘You need to change the way you live, lose some weight, diet, exercise more.’ If that person comes in six months or a year later after a second event, we don’t kick them out and say, ‘You’re a failure.’ We say ‘OK, here are some things you did right, that’s good, but here are the things you haven’t done that you need to change.’
“My treatment in 1995 would look like a failure. But I had begun to begin a recovery program, so was it a failure? No, it wasn’t,” says Teitelbaum, who attends meetings and keeps a copy of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous handy. “I stay grateful, I remember the pain I felt in my heart. I still do the things today that I did to begin to get well years ago.” Addiction, he says, is an illness that offers the possibility of a healthier future. “If you have heart disease or cancer, the worse you are when you come in, the worse your prognosis,” Teitelbaum says. “Not so with an addictive disorder. There’s always hope.” Mark Gold Eminent Scholar, Department of Psychiatry (352) 294-4900 msgold@ufl.edu Lisa Merlo Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry (352) 294-4900 lmerlo@ufl.edu Sara Jo Nixon Professor, Department of Psychiatry (352) 294-4900 sjnixon@ufl.edu Scott Teitelbaum Medical Director, Florida Recovery Center (352) 265-4357 teitesa@ufl.edu Related website: http://addictionresearch.health.ufl.edu/
Food for thought
F
or some, the famous potato chip slogan “Betcha can’t eat just one” isn’t a wager — it’s a promise. This idea, that food can be as addicting as drugs, cigarettes or alcohol, is the focus of the new book Food and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook. The book, co-edited by UF addiction expert Mark Gold, is the first to compile academic essays examining the scientific evidence for food addiction. The medical community has only regarded food addiction seriously for the last decade, the authors say. Backed by brain-imaging studies and multidisciplinary research, it’s finally a concept many specialists are willing to sink their teeth into. However, since the topic stretches across multiple disciplines — nutrition, addiction, psychology, epidemiology and public health, to name a few — the experts in these fields were largely unaware of each other. That is, until Gold and Yale public health
and policy researcher Kelly D. Brownell decided to bring together the work of many of these researchers and publish their findings. “It’s like an encyclopedia of experts,” says Gold, chair of the College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. Brownell, director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, and Gold chose contributors whose expertise ranged from policymaking to a variety of scientific disciplines. “The merger of public health and policy with neurobiology and translational medicine is a unique aspect of the book,” says Gold, a distinguished professor in the McKnight Brain Institute. “We wanted to include a wide variety of specialists, as well as to give people on the policy side access to basic science so their policy initiatives might be more evidence-based.” For example, basic science has confirmed that certain foods target the brain and have drug-like qualities. “Food and drugs compete in the brain for the same reinforcement sites,” Gold says. “Drug-addicted people, once they stop using drugs, always overeat. People who are stressed or in pain overeat. And they don’t just eat anything — they eat desserts, pizza or other reinforcing foods that have drug-like effects.”
Food has changed, and so has our access to it. About two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; but Americans also consume more processed food per person than citizens of almost any other country. In countries where fast food is gaining popularity, obesity rates are similarly exploding. In China, the rate of obesity has increased 208 percent since 2002, according to the World Health Organization. Scientists have very little understanding of how all of this manufactured food affects our brains, Gold says. “We’ve shown that animals will selfadminister sucrose, glucose and fructose corn syrup, and they will become dependent on those as if they were drugs,” he says. “You can even cause them to have drug-like withdrawal.” Gold says it’s important to educate the medical community that addictions, including food addictions, are diseases and that blaming patients is not an effective strategy for helping them. “We’re in a ‘globesity’ epidemic — a global obesity epidemic — and I think public health approaches and preventions are relevant,” Gold says. “If food is very much like tobacco and the health impact and cost are very much the same, what’s the public policy?” Marilee Griffin
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Rob Ferl, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research and staff.
Photos by Ray Carson
By Donna Hesterman
UF
researchers have stayed
D
oug and Pam Soltis began their journey as botanical researchers in the 1980s when biotechnology was still young. years with help from the The human genome had not yet been sequenced, but the first genetically engineered “human” insulin nterdisciplinary enter for was on the market, and researchers working on techniques for recombining segments of DNA had just iotechnology esearch won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. “Doug and I were the DNA sequencing facility back then,” Pam Soltis says of their work at Washington State University. “It took us 6 months just to get eight sequences that were maybe 1,600 bases long.” Today she’s a distinguished professor of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Her husband, Doug is a distinguished professor in UF’s biology department. And the two can now sequence millions of DNA bases in a single day — thanks to a multi-million-dollar facility at UF called the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research.
ahead of the biotech curve for
25 I
C
B
R
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Close-up of a 96-well ELISA plate used in medicine and other biotech research.
“Most of what we are doing now, we could never have dreamed possible when we were getting started,” she says. “To think about how much things have changed over the span of our career is really mind-boggling.” ICBR is housed in the Cancer and Genetics Research Complex south of UF’s main campus. A shared resource available to all UF researchers, it has all the latest equipment for sequencing DNA, analyzing proteins, cellular imaging and data management. A staff of 60 experts specializing in four different branches of biotechnology runs the facility. Their mission? To make biotech laboratory support available to researchers in every college of the university — even those that aren’t traditionally associated with biotech. “Honestly,” Pam says. “It’s one of the reasons we came here.”
CommonThread Connie Mulligan, professor of anthropology and an associate director of the UF Genetics Institute, has used ICBR services in her research for more than a decade. One ongoing project began in 2007 when she travelled to the deserts of
24 Fall 2012
Electron microscopic image of a blueberry.
Yemen to study what was thought to be the migration route used by prehistoric man on his way out of Africa. She used the traditional tools of anthropology — oral histories and artifacts — but she also used DNA analysis to look for patterns of relatedness that could tell her about the ancestral roots of the Yemeni people. Standard DNA sequencing techniques at ICBR provided her with an inexpensive data set that she could not have produced in her own lab. DNA analysis is now a staple of Mulligan’s anthropological work. She and her students are currently using DNA analysis to examine the effects of prenatal maternal stress on unborn babies. “We’re conducting that research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” she says. “Where ongoing civil war and the use of rape as a weapon has created one of the most stressful environments for mothers imaginable. “We know that maternal stress affects the health of an unborn child,” Mulligan says. “But we don’t know the physiological mechanisms that translate that stress into problems for the fetus.” She suspects that signals for gene expression in the developing fetus are modified by the mother’s physiological responses to stress. The changes can
An alternate view of a blueberry through an electron microscope.
result in an increased risk for disease later in the child’s life. ICBR staff scientists analyze the DNA in blood samples Mulligan and her students collect at a women’s clinic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Next-generation sequencing techniques and cutting-edge instrumentation enable ICBR to measure the biochemical status of more than 500,000 sites throughout the genome in each of her samples. Mulligan and other scientists from all academic disciplines at UF are able to capitalize on ICBR’s expertise because of the center’s unique standing as an independent entity within the university. “ICBR is part of the Office of Research,” says Rob Ferl, ICBR’s director. “We don’t belong to any one department or college at the university, and that keeps us available to everyone.” By everyone he means researchers from any college at UF, scientists from various governmental agencies across the state and a handful of researchers working for privately owned businesses that pay a fee for ICBR’s services. Ginger Clark, the scientific director for genotyping at ICBR, has probably provided laboratory services for the most diverse group of clients. She’s known for her work in wildlife forensics and has
A
staff of
60
experts
Allen Cheuvront
specializing in four different branches of biotechnology runs the facility.
UF's Cancer and Genetic Research Building, home to ICBR.
Their To
mission?
make biotech
laboratory support available to researchers in every college of the university
—
even those that
aren’t traditionally associated with biotech.
Ginger Clark, scientific director for genotyping at ICBR.
sequenced DNA from endangered sea turtles, timber rattlers and black bears in the course of her duties. When she came to ICBR as a student worker in 1992, she mostly provided mitochondrial DNA analysis for biologists doing research on various types of wildlife, including venomous snakes. However, when state officials started allowing the sale of farm-raised exotic venison in Florida grocery stores, her phone began to ring for another reason. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers wanted to know if Clark would be able to tell if meat in the grocer’s freezer was the farm-raised venison or local white-tailed deer. White-tailed deer are a carefully managed resource in the Southeast, and the officers were keen to make sure that poachers didn’t hunt them illegally for sale to retail grocers.
Of course, Clark was able to help them and soon began analyzing DNA from other animals, helping officers bust poachers as well as restaurateurs who served mystery meat to unsuspecting customers. Today Clark spends much of her time generating genetic profiles of plants and animals being studied by ecologists. She also provides DNA analyses on genetically modified mice that are used as test subjects in medical research. “It used to be that there was a steady stream of wildlife officers walking in here with little brown bags of God-knows-what,” she says. “Today it’s mostly medical researchers bringing in samples from their study subjects.”
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by the
ICBR numbers
$5000 C O S T of
1987
Ye ar ICBR established at UF
SEQUENCING aH U M A N ’ S
GENOME
t
o
d
a
y
500M
N U M B E R of D N A BASES
I C B R
3000
c a n
SEQUENCE in ONE day
G IGA BY TE S
amount of DATA
I C B R can
P R O D U C E in O N E d ay
2500
NUMBER
OF
unique HYBRIDOMA
CELL LINES established in 25 years 26 Fall 2012
HumanHope Indeed, human medicine has been a major beneficiary of biotech’s boom over the last quarter century. Gene therapies and personalized medicine that were the stuff of science fiction are now a reality, and UF’s medical researchers have played a big part in advancing those innovations. Maureen Goodenow, a professor of pathology at UF, uses the labs at ICBR to sequence and analyze DNA for her research on HIV/AIDS. The analysis gives her a profile of how the virus changes as it moves through a population and even how it mutates over the course of a lifetime within the cells of an AIDS patient. That information, she says, is crucial for developing treatments and strategies to prevent its spread. John Aris, an associate professor in anatomy and cell biology at UF, studies cellular aging. He says that he has probably worked with staff in every division of the ICBR over the course of his career. He is interested in how genes control biological processes that effect longevity in cells, the building blocks of every living organism. He experiments with
“To
make a hybridoma ,
we put about
100
million
disease-fighting immune cells from an immunized mouse together in a tube with about
100
million
specially engineered tumor cells and zap them with electricity.”
—Linda Green
yeast cells because they have a relatively simple genetic makeup and a short lifespan that allows for observation over many generations of cells. Aris’ experiments require the use of special antibody-producing cells called hybridomas that are created in an ICBR laboratory. “To make a hybridoma, we put about 100 million disease-fighting immune cells from an immunized mouse together in a tube with about 100 million specially engineered tumor cells and zap them with electricity,” says Linda Green, manager of the hybridoma laboratory at ICBR. She and her staff sift through the fused concoction to select the most viable hybrid cells and then spend the next 3 to 4 weeks watching and caring for them as they develop. The resulting hybridoma cells can live forever and secrete antibodies that can be used to target certain proteins in other organisms, depending on what was used to immunize the mouse. The ICBR hybridoma laboratory has developed hundreds of different kinds of hybridomas over the years and maintains an impressive array of frozen hybridomas that have been used to research
Linda Green manages the hybridoma laboratory at ICBR.
population health issues in everything from manatee to flying foxes. In human medicine, the antibodies secreted by hybridoma cells are used to treat and diagnose disease, but Aris uses the mouse version as sort of a tracer to help him ferret out biological processes that cause his yeast cells to age and die. He relies on the proteomics division at ICBR to analyze the proteins at work as the cell goes through its various stages of decline during the normal aging process.
Proteomics is a relatively new technique of microanalysis that uses mass spectrometers to identify the proteins present in a sample the way a sequencer reveals genetic code. Think of it as a quality assurance check that verifies the instructions coded in DNA are carried out as written. The proteomics lab at ICBR houses an assortment of multi-million-dollar mass spectrometers engineered to sift through organic materials and identify the protein ingredients. Proteomics division Director Sixue Chen, an associate professor of biology, uses the equipment in his research with tomato and canola plants. He studies the function of plant stomata, the tiny pores on leaves that control gas exchange between the plant and the atmosphere. “Leaves are protected by a waxy coating on the epidermis, so stomata are like a gateway into the plant’s body,” Chen says. “We are looking for molecular switches that can control that gateway.” The gateway allows carbon dioxide, a necessary ingredient for photosynthesis, to enter the plant. However, while the gateway is open, precious moisture
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“We’ve
focused on genetic analysis
for a long time. realizing that
Now we are DNA and RNA
do
not always translate into the proteins that we expect.”
— Sixue Chen
Sixue Chen, director of ICBR's proteomics division.
28 Fall 2012
can escape and dangerous pathogens can enter. Chen says that protein analysis is the perfect tool for his research because the new generation of technology allows him to monitor how proteins change during different stages of stomata operations. Older tools for protein analysis were too slow to keep track of a changing protein landscape in real time. “In the old days we could only get a series of snapshots of one or two proteins at a time,” he says. “But now we can track what hundreds of proteins are doing at once.” It is proving to be a useful tool for research across many disciplines. Chen is proud of the fact that the proteomics facility has been used by faculty to analyze a wide variety of samples, including viruses, manatee neurons, frog eggs, cow embryos, cancerous tumors and human saliva.
Tomato crops are big business for Florida growers. “We’ve focused on genetic analysis for a long time,” Chen says. “Now we are realizing that DNA and RNA do not always translate into the proteins that we expect.”
Crunching the Numbers Proteomics, like DNA analysis, generates bigger and bigger data sets as the machines used for research grow in sophistication. It’s creating a challenge for biotech research groups everywhere, according to Aaron Gardner, ICBR’s cyberinfrastructure director. His job for the past 11 years has been to make sure that ICBR stays ahead of the game.
“If
you think about
data storage as a water reservoir , we’ve gone from the capacity to contain the
L akes
Great
to the capacity
to contain the world’s oceans with room to spare.”
— A aron Gardner
“In 2000, we could fit a year’s worth of experimental results on a central computer that had less computational power and storage space than today’s average smartphone,” Gardner says. The requirements for storage have grown dramatically since then. “If you think about data storage as a water reservoir, we’ve gone from the capacity to contain the Great Lakes to the capacity to contain the world’s oceans with room to spare.” That capacity to adapt and grow with the times is at the heart of ICBR’s success over the last 25 years, says ICBR’s director. “One of the things we’ve been able to do here is maintain a corps of dedicated experts who keep a finger to the wind and make sure that we have the latest and greatest tools available to support our researchers,” Ferl says. “We keep good people here because we believe that a sound intellectual core is every bit as important as having the latest gear.”
Ferl is quick to acknowledge that ICBR’s might is an inheritance from a previous generation — a small group of faculty who fought hard in the 1980s to convince the university to “go big” when it came to biotech. “The investment has paid off,” he says. “ICBR has an impressive record of enabling 25 years of truly interdisciplinary research. But more importantly, we know we’re ready for the next 25 years.” Rob Ferl Director, Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (352) 273-8029 robferl@ufl.edu Related website: www.biotech.ufl.edu
Aaron Gardner, ICBR's cyberinfrastructure director.
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30 Fall 2012
By Sarah Carey
UF VETERINARIANS HELP AQUATIC MAMMALS SNARLED IN FISHING LINE
he North Atlantic right whale population is believed to be down to about 400 individuals, so when an average of 29 per year get entangled in potentially life-threatening fishing line, the implications can be catastrophic. But it’s not just whales. Marine mammal entanglement is a global problem that each year results in the death of hundreds of thousands of whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals worldwide, according to findings published in the journal Conservation Biology. The University of Florida’s Aquatic Animal Health program has played an increasingly active role in recent years in developing new knowledge relating to better ways of helping these animals, particularly right whales and dolphins — two species which, despite their
difference in size, experience similar problems with entanglement. Marine mammals are especially vulnerable to hazards in areas where fishing activity is high, whether for commercial fisheries or for sport fishing. They are struck by boats, affected by loud noises from ships’ sonar and engines and, of course, entangled in nets and fishing gear meant for more edible varieties like tuna, sardines, lobster and anchovies. Sometimes the damage occurs long after the fisherman has called it a day. “Someone may toss their monofilament line overboard. A line gets caught on a rock or an underwater piece of debris and breaks off, then waits in the environment for a passing animal,” says Dr. Mike Walsh, a veterinarian and associate director of the program. Walsh worked as head veterinarian at Sea World for 21 years prior to joining
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Florida coast is right whale nursery With only 300-400 in existence, the North Atlantic right whale is one of the the rarest of all large whales. Each winter many of these whales migrate to the Georgia and North Florida coasts, their only known calving area.
Average dimensions Length: 45-55 ft Weight: up to 70 tons Lifespan: Though little is known about the right whale's lifespan, it has been known to live up to at least 50 years
Callosities Natural calluses on the whale. The callosities appear white because of infestations of whale lice. The callosity locations are unique to each whale and assist in identifying individuals.
Fluke Reaching only up to 10 mph, right whales are among the slowest swimming whales. They can dive to 1,000 feet and can stay underwater for up to 40 minutes.
Forty percent of the whale’s body weight is blubber.
Calves Females give birth to first calves after they are 9-10 years old. The calves are usually 14-15 feet long at birth and stay with their mothers for about a year.
Baleen Baleen, a filter-like barrier in the whale’s mouth, filters out tiny crustaceans by the billions. Right whales swim through the water with their mouths open, allowing water and plankton to flow through the baleen. An adult whale needs to consume a minimum of 400,000 calories a day.
White patches are unique to each individual.
Sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:, National Marine Fisheries Service, The American Cetacean Society, Encyclopedia Britannica, Sea To Shore Alliance.
UF’s faculty in 2007. He says the pricreatures. The National Marine Fishermary causes of injuries have shifted ies Service, in collaboration with private over time since Florida began banning organizations, now actively supports certain types of fishing, such as gill rescue efforts. Because the whales favorare integrated into the whole netting. “We North Atlantic right whales are shallow coastal water, they “Nowadays, often dolphins are most likely rescue and coordinate from found alone or in small can often be observed process from groups of one to three animals, the beach. to be entangled but bythey crab or monostart to finish with the players,” says havetraps also been filament lines,” he says. Jamison Smith, Atlantic Large Whale Even the largest mammals on Earth Disentanglement Coordinator for are vulnerable to the hazards. NOAA/NMFS. “Many of these cases “Big whales cut across vast distances are in Florida and Georgia and are well of ocean during migration and that orchestrated, with any number of groups brings them into constant contact with represented from state, federal, local and these very large nets, some of which nonprofit groups.” have anchor or buoy lines more than The biggest responses to entangle600 feet long,” Walsh says. ment situations are focused on right As awareness about the threats posed whales, which are critically endangered, to marine mammals by entanglement Smith says. has grown over the past 50 years, so Much of what is known about large have efforts to save the charismatic marine mammals is based on experience
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caring for animals in captivity, like killer whales at Sea World. That information doesn’t always WHY THEY ARE ENDANGERED translate into sound Right whales were named becausepractices Today, thefor righttakwhale’s main threats early whalers knew they were the are ship collisions and entangleing care of a much larger species. “right” whales to hunt. Their slow ments in fishing gear. speed meant they were easy to Marine mammal rescuers need the catch and their blubber-rich bodies Two to six whales are killed each floated after they were killed. After year, with half of them kind of information that university vet-killed by ship extensive whaling the whales were strikes or by entanglements. erinarydepleted researchers and biologists can threats considered for commercial Additional man-made purposes by 1750. include habitat degradation and provide in order to increase the odds pollution. Natural predators include of success. “After all,” Smith says. “You can only extrapolate so much from a 25-foot killer whale to a 50-foot right whale.” Historically, whale disentanglement has involved physical contact with the whale, which is dangerous and fraught with logistical complications. So scientists from UF, NMFS, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and others began working on a new technique that
North Atlantic right whale range along North America
Canada
United States Right whale sightings from 11/18/10 to 3/26/11
31°N Ga. Fla.
CALVING AREA During winter, pregnant females migrate to the warmer waters of Georgia and Florida to give birth. The whales return north to colder water during spring and summer.
JACKSONVILLE 30°N
81°W
OTHER RIGHT WHALE SPECIES RANGES North Atlantic right whale North Pacific right whale Southern right whale
WHALE SIZE COMPARISON Bottlenose dolphin Killer SIZE whale (orca) WHALE COMPARISON Bottlenose Humpback whale dolphin Killer whale (orca)
N.A. right whale
Humpback whale
Sperm whale Blue whale Blue whale
RECOGNIZING THE NORTH ATLANTIC WHALE G THE NORTH ATLANTIC RIGHTRIGHT WHALE Black, wide and notched fluke
otched fluke
V-shaped spray
V-shaped spray
could make the proposition safer for the animals and their rescuers. “We developed a two-pronged approach,” Smith says. “One part involved the creation of a drug delivery device capable of administering large amounts of drugs at a distance.” The second part involved coming up with the right drug cocktail for atsea sedations. That is where UF and Walsh’s involvement was key. “This is new ground we’re forging,” Smith says. “There hasn’t really been a push or a need to chemically sedate a free-swimming whale before.” Determining the right amount of drug to administer — enough to sedate the animal sufficiently to allow veterinarians to safely approach it, but not so much as to endanger the animal — was
Kyle Bentle; Florida Times-Union.
Sperm whale N.A. right whale
a trial-and-error process that took place over several years, beginning in 2001. “The first early attempts at sedation were encouraging but not successful,” says Walsh. But a breakthrough came in 2009, when rescue teams successfully dosed a chronically entangled, emaciated North Atlantic right whale. “We had to finesse the ‘cooperative’ dose, which we finally did on our third attempt,” Walsh says. “Too much medication and we might overdose and harm the animal; not enough and the animal would not cooperate, would be difficult to approach and would not allow the cutting team to get access to the rope near the head.” Once the team succeeded in administering the proper dosage, they were able to remove lots of rope, Walsh says.
“BIG WHALES CUT ACROSS VAST DISTANCES OF OCEAN DURING MIGRATION AND THAT BRINGS THEM INTO CONSTANT CONTACT WITH THESE VERY LARGE NETS, SOME OF WHICH HAVE ANCHOR OR BUOY LINES MORE THAN 600 FEET LONG.” — MIKE WALSH
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“IT IS IMPORTANT THAT PEOPLE DON’T BLAME FISHING FOR ALL OF THE PROBLEMS. IN FACT, IT IS WITH THE HELP OF FISHERMEN ON THE WATER THAT WE OFTEN FIND THE ANIMALS IN THE FIRST PLACE. THEY ARE OFTEN OUR BEST CONSERVATIONISTS.”
But they had no way of tracking the animal or monitoring its progress once it was released. On three separate occasions disentanglement teams have attempted to dose whales so that they could be safely approached. Only twice have those attempts resulted in winning the animal’s cooperation, Walsh says. One of the whales died after seven days, and the scientists were not able to track the other. “We’re not sure how it did,” he says. “But it was still great progress in achieving the goal of getting closer to remove the line. After this first success in 2009, we realized we needed to verify that the sedation did not hurt the animals and that they survived the procedure.” Since whale and dolphin biologists and scientists had been using suction cups to attach tracking devices to the animal — devices that can tell them how often it is breathing, how deep it’s diving and even what it’s hearing — it was thought that this should be one
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Photos by Kent Morse
— MIKE WALSH
tool to use on the next animal to better study the sedation effects. The scientists at Woods Hole, including Dr. Michael Moore, developed the special drug delivery system and these unique data tags. “Our role was in coming up with the drug dosages and the parameters of evaluation to understand what the drugs were doing,” Walsh says. His team also provided basic pharmacology
information from UF’s anesthesia department to try to make the approach as safe as possible. With entangled dolphins, sedatives aren’t necessary because rescuers can physically capture and restrain the animals while entanglement material is removed. “The techniques for capture and restraint are well worked out without sedation,” Walsh says. “The only reason
for using it in the big whales is that we can’t physically restrain them.” Another difference between dolphins and whales in disentanglement efforts is that rescue teams frequently are able to go back and recapture dolphins after placing tracking devices on their dorsal fins. “In one case, a dolphin got entangled six times and we disentangled him four times,” Walsh says, adding that often
adult dolphins become entangled — most commonly in monofilament line — due to injuries affecting their dorsal fins. Others may involve entanglements around the base of the tail or newborns with line around the body, flippers and in the mouth. “It is important that people don’t blame fishing for all of the problems,” says Walsh. “In fact, it is with the help of fishermen on the water that we often find the animals in the first place. They are often our best conservationists.” Dolphins are often hit by boats and sustain damage to their dorsal fins. The injury makes them susceptible to entanglement due to a change in the dorsal fin from a smooth surface to an irregular one that snags the line. UF is currently collaborating with Woods Hole and other groups such as Marineland, Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, Volusia County Marine Science Center, Harbor Branch, Mote Marine and Clearwater Marine Aquarium to analyze the relationship between the presence of rope and line in the water and entanglement. Blair Mase, with the National Marine Fisheries Service Southeast Region, coordinates the Florida-based groups. Walsh and others from UF’s Aquatic Animal Health program, including Dr. Craig Pelton from Volusia County Marine Science Center, have helped to rescue five entangled dolphins off Florida’s Coast in 2012 — including an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin known to Florida west coast locals as Seymour. Seymour was first sighted in 2006 when he was still a young calf porpoising alongside his mom in the warm surf off the Isle of Capri. But all was not well; the calf had what appeared to be a bulbous growth encircling the base of his tail that affected the way he swam. Subsequent sightings revealed the growth to be scar tissue from monofilament line wrapped around his tail.
Concerned members of the community and dolphin rescue workers statewide kept track of Seymour, so-named for his frequent sightings over the years, until 2011 when it became clear that his injuries had become life threatening. A crew decided that it was time to intervene and Mote Marine Laboratory’s dolphin rescue group led the mission to save Seymour in March 2012. “We wanted to be able to X-ray the tail during the rescue so we could weigh the options for taking him into rehabilitation against leaving him in his own environment to heal,” Walsh says. The stress of adapting to a new environment during rehabilitation can sometimes make things worse. Walsh found a local equine veterinarian, Dr. Darrell Harvey, with a mobile digital radiology machine to use for the mission. And on the day of the rescue, a team of UF veterinarians used it to send images back to Dr. David Reese, a UF veterinary radiologist. Reese quickly determined that the line wrapped around the tail was causing the swelling, and that the injuries would likely heal on their own without further treatment. Once the line was cut away and the injuries treated, the team weighed and measured Seymour, then tagged him and released him back into the wild. “For me, this speaks directly to the need for additional knowledge about musculoskeletal disease, particularly that which relates to injury and changes to the skeletal structure,” Walsh says. Mike Walsh Clinical Associate Professor of Aquatic Animal Health (352) 294-4199 walshm@ufl.edu Related website: http://aquatic.vetmed.ufl.edu
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ScienceQuest UF IS GIVING TEACHERS THE TOOLS TO MAKE SCIENCE CLASSES FUN AGAIN By Joseph K ays
A
ny parent who has ever watched a child struggle through middle school science knows that the right teacher can make all the difference. For tweens distracted by everything from hormones to iPhones, it’s a short distance from fascinating to boring. Mayra Cordero is one of those teachers who makes science fascinating. For a lesson on the food web, she assigned each of her students an organism, then connected them all with colored yarn. For a lesson on the properties of gases, she illustrated the concept by inflating and deflating a basketball. “It is not only about doing science and having fun; it is about what can we learn from the activities we’re doing. This is how students gain deeper knowledge about a specific scientific concept,”
Photos by Ray Carson and Eric Zamora
says Cordero, whose parents were both educators and who holds a doctorate in pharmacology. Cordero, a sixth-grade teacher at UF’s P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, is part of an experiment under way in the College of Education to breathe new life into middle school science. For years, education leaders have been watching the United States slip further behind other industrialized nations in K-12 science performance. But despite a lot of rhetoric about the importance of the so-called STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and math to the U.S. economy, funding for new teachers specifically trained in these subjects has been hard to find in these economically austere times.
The result is a generation of American students who rank far behind their peers from other countries in their mastery of science and mathematics. Scores from a 2010 Program for International Student Assessment report showed the U.S. ranked 17th out of 34 industrialized countries in science scores among 15-year-old students. Science education Associate Professor Rose Pringle, top right, shows middle-school science teachers how to engage students using a deflated basketball for a lesson about the properties of gases. The IQWST curriculum being used in the new program provides students with an opportunity to do more hands-on science, like dissecting perch and lamprey.
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While there’s been no shortage of ideas for reversing the trend, one thing is clear: the more knowledgeable a teacher is about science, the more he or she is able to engage students. But even in the best school districts there are teachers with little to no training in the sciences trying to keep one step ahead of their students in mastering the subjects. Lynda Hayes, Rose Pringle, Cordero and their colleagues at UF and in school districts around north Florida are hoping to reverse that trend by creating a cadre of highly trained science instructors who can educate and energize other teachers in their home districts with a new kind of science class. With the support of a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, 40 middle school science teachers in 20 school districts will earn master’s degrees in science education in two years. The program, called U-FUTuRES, includes 30 credit-hours of online and face-to-face instruction by UF professors. It is free for the initial cadre of teachers, with the NSF grant covering their tuition, valued at $21,000 each. Beyond the grant period, Hayes says the College of Education plans to continue offering the master’s degree program to support the state’s efforts to improve science education opportunities for Florida’s K-12 students. “As Science Teacher Leaders, they will then coach 400 middle school science teachers in their home districts,” says Pringle, an associate professor of science education. “Nearly Mayra Cordero engages her sixth-grade students during a lesson about the food web. UF chemistry Associate Professor Ronald Castellano, right, explains a concept to teachers Mayra Cordero, left, and Monica Wright during a special chemistry course developed for middle-school science teachers. Sixth-grade students at P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School weave a food web.
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60,000 middle school students will be impacted, primarily in high-poverty rural and urban areas.” Pringle and Hayes, P.K. Yonge’s director, say a key to the program is that it helps teachers in three ways — by strengthening their basic science knowledge, by providing them with proven science-specific practices for engaging students and by offering them a new, more hands-on curriculum. “Teachers cannot teach what they do not know. They have to know the science,” Pringle says. “So a major component of our institute involves nine credit hours of science content taught by UF professors. These science professors are teaching courses designed to deepen the teachers’ content knowledge, to really prepare them to go deep with the middle school science.”
UF physics Professor Selman Hershfield spent much of last summer giving the program’s first group of teachers a “crash course” in physics. “We had to develop a completely new course that was tuned to their knowledge level and their needs,” Hershfield says. “Too hard and they wouldn’t get anything out of it, too easy and they wouldn’t get anything out of it, so we had to hit the sweet spot. And it had to be in language that they can use with their students.” As the father of twin fourth-graders, Hershfield fully appreciates the difference a good teacher can make. And as a faculty member who sees thousands of freshmen in his introductory physics courses, he also appreciates the importance of reaching students early. “If you want more people in science
“WE WANT TO KEEP THEM ENGAGED SO THAT WHEN THEY GET TO HIGH SCHOOL THEY ARE MOTIVATED TO TAKE SCIENCE CLASSES AND THEN PURSUE A SCIENCE DEGREE.” — ROSE PRINGLE
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“IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM, YOU WOULDN’T HAVE PEOPLE START PLAYING FOOTBALL IN THEIR SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL. YOU WOULDN’T GET MANY GOOD FOOTBALL PLAYERS. IF YOU WANT GOOD SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS, YOU NEED TO START EARLIER.” — SELMAN HERSHFIELD
Elizabeth Burt, a sixth-grade teacher at Westwood Middle School, brushes up on her chemistry as a participant in the U-FUTuRES program at UF last summer.
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you’ve got to start earlier,” he says. “If you want to have a good football team, you wouldn’t have people start playing football in their senior year in high school. You wouldn’t get many good football players. If you want good scientists and engineers, you need to start earlier.” While Hershfield was bolstering the teachers’ science knowledge, Pringle was introducing them to a new curriculum designed to get students more engaged in the classroom. “Unfortunately, many kids lose interest in science during middle school,” Pringle says. “We want to keep them engaged so that when they get to high school they are motivated to take science classes and then pursue a science degree.” Hayes says the team was fortunate to discover a new science curriculum developed at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University that was a perfect fit for what they were trying to accomplish. “They’d spent 10 years and $10 million from NSF developing this curriculum,” Hayes says. “It’s rare to find a
curriculum where that much time and money is invested in its development. It’s also rare that they had scientists, science educators and literacy folks working together on the curriculum, so they were really trying to bring the whole package together.” Hayes and Pringle say the new curriculum, called IQWST, gives students much more hands-on exposure to science, and is designed to reinforce concepts over multiple grades. It also dovetails nicely with Florida’s state science requirements. “We’re moving away from students being able to just repeat facts that they forget tomorrow anyway,” Pringle says. “This curriculum builds on itself so that they’re introduced to certain concepts in one unit and that’s reinforced and deepened in another unit, and that goes from sixth through eighth grade. So you have a bunch of kids who not only have the content knowledge but they also develop the skills, the values and the attitudes that scientists have.” Cordero is in the second year of testing the IQWST curriculum in her sixth-grade classes at P.K. Yonge.
“I would not go back teaching in my old traditional approach,” she says. “The students are learning to think about science concepts and finding answers to some of their questions on their own through inquiry.” Addressing concerns that science education has become too focused on definitions and terms, Cordero says IQWST has “more emphasis on the application of scientific terms than on memorizing these terms. By doing science they learn more about the process of how scientists work in real life. Using the vocabulary to explain real-life situations like ‘Why does the apple look red?’ allows the students to demonstrate what they have learned. It is not about learning vocabulary that they will forget in a week.” Hayes says the program specifically focuses on rural districts, which often don’t have the resources to promote science. “To catch up with our peers in other nations, we need to increase the size and diversity of our pipelines in science and math after high school graduation,” she says. “We must ensure that disadvantaged students in small, rural and high-poverty schools are afforded equal opportunity to succeed in a cuttingedge science curriculum before they reach high school.” Sharon Kinard, a science teacher in Putnam County, says she and her colleagues really appreciated the grounding in physics and chemistry they got from Hershfield, UF physics Professor Mark Meisel and chemistry Professor Ronald K. Castellano. “Anytime a teacher enters a classroom confident in his/her content knowledge and comfortable with the curriculum, it is a benefit to the students,” Kinard says. “I don’t believe any curriculum is perfect, but I see IQWST as the most complete, coherent and engaging I have experienced.” A few months into the new school
“TO CATCH UP WITH OUR PEERS IN OTHER NATIONS, WE NEED TO INCREASE THE SIZE AND DIVERSITY OF OUR PIPELINES IN SCIENCE AND MATH AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION.” — LYNDA HAYES
year, Kinard says the value of the training and the new curriculum is more evident. “I am more comfortable with the curriculum and with science in general,” she says. “I interviewed several students in one classroom and they talked about how much more they liked science. One young lady expressed an interest in chemical engineering as a result of her changed perceptions.” “Sixth-grade students are not thinking about college yet,” Cordero adds, “but I have received comments from some parents who say their children have acquired a particular love and interest in science because of the new ways of learning.”
Lynda Hayes Director of P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School (352) 392-1554 lhayes@pky.ufl.edu Selman Hershfield Professor of Physics (352) 392-9387 selman@phys.ufl.edu Rose Pringle Associate Professor of Science Education (352) 273-4190 rpringle@coe.ufl.edu
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Exchange Gainesville tech firms attracting big money By A nthony Clark Gainesville company RegisterPatient announced October 8 that it had secured a $4.1 million investment from venture capital firms. The next day, Alachua company AxoGen upped the ante with news of a $21 million investment. It was a banner week in what has become a banner year in financing for area technology companies. Eight area companies have announced financing deals totaling more than $50 million this year, all but one since May. That’s just what has been made public. The University of Florida’s Innovation Hub business incubator reported that its tenant companies secured a combined $7.2 million in private investments in the 10 months through June 30 and that many of the individual deals are confidential, Hub director Jane Muir said. After years of venture capital deals trickling into the area, the money is starting to flow. “You’re going to see more,” said Gainesville entrepreneur and investor Jamie Grooms. “This should not be a surprise going forward.” Grooms and others in the tech community say their reasons for optimism include: • The efforts of the University of Florida’s Office of Technology Licensing to shop research inventions to entrepreneurs and investors.
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• Support from higher education,
business and government to provide startups with the information and connections they need to build a company.
• State retirement fund investments in early-stage companies to lure private money.
• A growing community of tech startups in medicine, engineering and lately information technology.
With a large enough quantity of early-stage companies comes enough quality to draw the investment dollars, said Bob Crutchfield, who runs the Gainesville office of Harbert Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Birmingham, AL. “Gainesville probably has more entrepreneurial activity going on per capita than anyplace else in the state,” he said. Harbert had been researching investment opportunities and working with UF’s tech licensing office for years before opening an office in 2009 at UF’s Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator after investing in tooth-care ingredient company NovaMin Technologies. The firm has since moved its local office into the Innovation Hub and led the RegisterPatient deal. Venture capital firm MPM Capital of Boston also has opened an office in the Hub.
Grooms — who co-founded both RTI Biologics and AxoGen — said there was a time when companies had to go outside the area to seek funding in venture capital hotbeds such as Boston, California or New York. Even then, deals were hard to close because of Gainesville’s location. “They look around the table, ‘Who’s going to Gainesville for a board meeting?’ No one raises a hand. That barrier’s been broken. Then the conversation becomes, ‘Let’s put an office in Gainesville.’” Grooms currently is serving as CEO of the Florida Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research, which provides mentorship and state funds of as much as $300,000 to match private investments into companies that spin out of university research around the state. The agency has funded 15 companies so far, including Shadow Health in Gainesville. Florida universities receive $2 billion in research funding a year, and UF gets the largest share, so most of the spinout companies are here, Grooms said. David “Whit” Whitney of Energent Ventures came to graduate school at UF in 2009, having already spent 10 years in venture capital in Silicon Valley. He said he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of entrepreneurial activity here and got involved as a mentor and investor. He is the UF College of
ora Eric Z am
UF engineer Peter Ifju of Prioria Robotics.
Engineering’s entrepreneur-in-residence and has invested in student startups such as Grooveshark, Trendy Entertainment, Altavian and Quilt. “Gainesville has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and innovation, and when that is present, an investor sees dollar signs,” he said. Whitney said he has seen more awareness from young entrepreneurs of the importance of developing products that can get to the market quickly and attract customers. “That’s the old-fashioned way of doing business, but the digital age caused us to lose focus of that,” he said. “Free is not a sustainable business model.” Crutchfield said venture capital firms typically invest money from institutional investors such as state pension and retirement funds that want a small portion of their portfolio in high-risk, high-reward assets, as Harbert does for Florida. They typically form a syndicate of two or more
venture capital firms on each investment. Harbert invests in companies when they are ready to go to market and need the capital to ramp up. A syndicate typically will take a 25-35 percent ownership stake and join the board of directors. “Then we will help a company through our experiences, our resources and our relationships,” Crutchfield said. Harbert was lead investor in the RegisterPatient deal. Crutchfield said the firm invested at an earlier stage than usual, but an electronic medical records corporation that wants to integrate RegisterPatient’s software into its own motivated it to take a deeper look, “and then we loved what we saw.” The firm also brought in a new CEO in Jana Skewes, who had built a couple of successful health care IT companies, to work with founder David Williams. Crutchfield said venture capital firms plan to hold a company for four
or five years. In Harbert’s case, the firm assumes the deal pays off with a merger or acquisition. With RegisterPatient, the sale could be to a large hospital system or an electronic medical record company. When NovaMin was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for $135 million, Harbert made 10 times its original investment, Crutchfield said. “Gainesville is doing a remarkable job in incubating and advancing early-stage companies to a point where you’ve created a critical mass of quality investable companies in your area,” he said. “The second part is that Florida in general is doing a wonderful job of attracting venture capital to the state by investing in quality firms and really putting money to work in Florida.” Reprinted with permission from the Gainesville Sun.
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University of Florida neuroscience Professor Gerry Shaw combined his research on neurodegenerative disease with his interest in photography to create this microscopic image of a brain cell with red, green and blue biomarkers of proteins and DNA.