UF Explore Magazine Spring 2016

SPRING 2016

Catch A Wave Physics Team Key To LIGO Discovery

Spring 2016, Vol. 21, No. 1

About the cover: Illustration of gravitational waves being emitted from the merger of two black holes. Full video at https://youtu.be/ZwnKIWjxHDI Illustration by Simon Barke

Dr. Kent Fuchs President Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research

Extracts

Lens of War

Research Briefs

Civil War historians reflect on photos from the conflict.

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22 Catch A Wave

Team Florida

UF physicists were leaders in the construction of LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves.

UF-led collaborations are transforming the way science becomes medicine.

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UF seeks to create a more inclusive environment for women in STEM.

Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu

The Chicken Came First

Solving for XX

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An early interest in agriculture has led to a lifetime of learning for Roy Curtiss III.

Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Nancy Schreck Writer: Cindy Spence Web Editor: Jewel Midelis

The Conversation Teaching Public Health.

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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 2016 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu

Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org

John Jernigan

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Board of Trustees Steven M. Scott – Chair David L. Brandon Susan M. Cameron Christopher T. Corr Paul Davenport James W. Heavener Joselin Padron-Rasines Rahul Patel Marsha D. Powers Jason J. Rosenberg Robert G. Stern David M. Thomas Anita G. Zucker

T David Norton

Vice President for Research

he confirmation last September of the existence of gravitational waves using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is perhaps the greatest example of teamwork in the history of science.

When a paper on the discovery was published in Physical Review Letters on Feb. 11, 2016, it contained 1,004 authors from 127 public and private universities, institutes and government laboratories around the world. Included in that list were 25 members of UF’s LIGO team, including David Reitze, the current executive director of the LIGO project, and Guenakh Mitselmakher, who pushed UF to join the project in 1995.

Just as LIGO depends on large teams of physicists, engineers, computer

scientists and astronomers, UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) depends on researchers from throughout the University of Florida and beyond to develop ways to more effectively and efficiently move new health-related discoveries from the lab to the bedside.

LIGO and CTSI are just two of many examples of the ways cross-disciplinary research is conducted at UF. As one of the world’s most comprehensive universities — with everything from agriculture to engineering and medicine to physics located on a single campus ­— researchers in any one of our 16 colleges need only walk across the street to pursue a new collaboration with a colleague in a field completely different from their own.

While Albert Einstein may have come up with the theory of general relativity and the existence of gravitational waves on his own a century ago, in the 21st century the best science takes advantage of our ability to share ideas almost instantaneously across the planet, so that a post-doctoral researcher in Italy can quickly reach a physics professor in Gainesville when he sees an unusual signal in the LIGO data.

World-Class Supercomputer HiPerGator 2.0 ranks among fastest

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he University of Florida is the home of the most powerful supercomputer in the state, the most powerful university supercomputer in the southern U.S. and the third-fastest university supercomputer in the country, according to the latest world rankings.

HiPerGator 2.0, the 30,000-core addition to the existing 21,000-core HiPerGator that went online 2 1/2 years ago, also ranked No. 114 in the world, according to the Top 500, the widely recognized list of the world’s fastest supercomputers since 1993. The compilation is available at http://www.top500. org/list/2015/11/.

“This is a ranking and an accomplishment that every Gator can take a lot of pride in,” said Elias Eldayrie, UF’s vice president and CIO. “Our world-class faculty have access to world-class computing, and they’re using it to crack the world’s toughest and thorniest issues.”

Speedwise, HiPerGator 2.0 is seven times faster than its predecessor, which was already capable of processing every federal income tax return in the U.S. in a fraction of a second.

To put things further in perspective, the expanded HiPerGator can hold: • More than all the books in the Library of Congress and the nation’s Top 25 public libraries (including the New York Public Library) combined — with about 86 million books to spare.

• Nearly 21 million times more than the computer program on Apollo 11 that put man on the moon.

• Nearly 40 years of HD-TV video.

But while power is important, it’s what researchers can do with that power that really matters, said David Norton, UF’s vice president for research.

“Solving the world’s most perplexing challenges is where HiPerGator shines,” Norton said. “This incredible machine makes it possible for our scientists to tackle climate change, hunger, poverty, disease and other puzzles in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.”

S. “Bala” Balachandar, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UF, knows firsthand what a boon HiPerGator is.

“Our goal is to focus all of our energies on the Laws of Motion, not on the computers,” Balachandar said. “International research alliances with universities in France and Japan mean we need the ability to compute, store and move Big Data. With HiPerGator we can do it all. That’s what you want — the most powerful computing machines at work for you.”

Caroline G. Storer, a Ph.D. candidate in UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation, said HiPerGator has made her work infinitely easier and faster.

“HiPerGator is mobile computing power and support at my fingertips,” she said. ”Using HiPerGator, I can analyze anywhere from one to 1 million DNA sequences from beetles around the world without worrying about the computing environment or resources. The ease and efficiency of using HiPerGator allows me to spend less time processing data and more time determining where new exotic pest beetles are arriving from and how they are spreading through a new environment.”

Elias Eldayrie, eldayrie@ufl.edu

Steve Orlando

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Back Power

Electrical stimulation relieves pain

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hile previous research has suggested that older adults may have a diminished capacity for experiencing pain relief, University of Florida researchers have found that with the correct dosage, electrical stimulation treatment can help ease back pain in older adults.

Neurobiological changes that happen with aging make it more difficult for older people to inhibit pain and experience relief. Electrical stimulation therapy could offer older adults with chronic pain an effective alternative to other treatments, including prescription painkillers, the UF researchers say.

The study is the first to compare response to transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation therapy, or TENS, across age groups.

Results were reported in The Journal of Pain.

The key to TENS’ effectiveness in older adults is ensuring they receive an adequate dose, or amplitude, of electrical stimulation, said lead investigator Corey Simon, a postdoctoral researcher in the Pain Research and Intervention Center of Excellence at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

“We found that TENS was adequate for relieving pain across the lifespan, independent of age. Everybody got better, both in clinical pain measures and experimental pain measures,” said Simon, who conducted the study with support from a UF CTSI training award as part of his dissertation research for a doctoral degree in rehabilitation science at the

UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “A key finding was there was an age difference in TENS dosage. Older adults needed a higher dosage to experience similar relief.”

In clinical settings, TENS dosage is often standardized based on its use in young and middle-aged adults. For the UF study, dosage was individualized, with participants receiving amplitude that they found to be strong, but tolerable, and not painful.

The UF study included 60 adults with chronic low back pain, including 20 young adults ages 18 to 39, 20 middle-aged adults ages 40 to 56 and 20 older adults ages 57 to 79, who received four sessions of TENS treatment over a three- to four-week period.

TENS therapy uses a small battery-operated machine that delivers low-voltage electrical current through electrodes placed on the skin.

It is commonly used to treat acute pain, including pain with childbirth, or chronic pain, such as osteoarthritis.

Scientists believe TENS works by activating the opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord.

Across all age groups, participants in the UF study experienced a 48 percent improvement in resting pain.

While wearing the TENS device, participants’ pain with movement was reduced by 34 percent and their physical function rating increased by 14 percent.

“This study is good news for people with pain because they need lots of treatment options and TENS is a low-risk option,” said senior

author Steven George, a UF associate professor of physical therapy and director of the Doctor of Physical Therapy program and the Brooks Rehabilitation research collaboration at the College of Public Health and Health Professions.

Earlier studies of TENS’ effectiveness in treating chronic low back pain showed mixed results, but those studies used lower doses and fewer treatment sessions, George said. Recent research has demonstrated that TENS can be effective with regular use, at higher amplitudes and for certain types of pain.

“TENS seems to be effective with reducing movementevoked pain,” George said.

“TENS is not a panacea. It’s not as if you put it on and then you never have pain again. It may be more helpful to apply it when you are doing some movements.”

Future work needs to compare the effectiveness of TENS to drug treatments for controlling chronic low back pain in older adults, Simon said.

“TENS is inexpensive, it is a conservative intervention and it is potentially safer for older adults where pharmacologic agents may pose a higher risk,” he said. “Comparing the efficacy of TENS to pharmacologic agents is an important next step for geriatric pain research.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Corey Simon, csimon@dental.ufl.edu

Jill Pease

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Sea Compounds Attack Biofilms

Potential cure for persistent infections

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esearchers at the University of Florida have developed potent new compounds with aquatic origins that may offer relief for the 17 million Americans affected by biofilm-associated bacterial infections annually.

The series of compounds known as the halogenated phenazines, or HPs, can kill dangerous bacterial biofilms present in recurring and chronic bacterial infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The discovery may one day offer a cure for persistent bacterial infections that are largely resistant to conventional antibiotic treatments.

“Using synthetic chemistry, we have developed a series of marine antibioticinspired molecules that target a problem conventional antibiotics are unable to address because cells housed within bacterial biofilms are tolerant

6 Spring 2016

of them,” said Robert Huigens, an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry at the UF College of Pharmacy and lead investigator of a study published in the Angewandte Chemie journal’s online edition. “We have been aware that biofilms greatly contribute to infections over the past 20 years, but there are no biofilm-eradicating therapeutic agents available. Discovering and developing potent biofilm-killing agents is the first step toward eradicating biofilms in patients.”

Biofilms are bacterial communities that accumulate and attach to surfaces, including live tissues in humans. The bacterial cluster is often slow or non-growing, encased in a protective layer of diverse biological molecules that form a ‘slime,’ and displays tolerance to every known class of antibiotic treatments available. Biofilm infections

affect almost every tissue in the body, and without a way to eliminate the biofilm, chronic and sometimes fatal infections develop over time.

Common biofilm infections include pneumonia in cystic fibrosis patients, chronic wounds and implant- and catheter-associated infections.

In the study, UF researchers tested in a laboratory the HP compound’s ability to eradicate biofilms of several major human pathogens, including MRSA; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis, or MRSE; and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, or VRE. In addition, HP compounds proved to have potent antibacterial activity against the slow-growing pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or TB. HP compounds not only proved effective in eradication efforts but also selectively targeted the biofilms

Dr. Rob Huigens, left, leads a team of UF researchers that developed potent new compounds that can kill dangerous bacterial biofilms present in recurring and chronic bacterial infections.

without breaking down the encasing cell membrane of healthy human cells.

Prior to his study, most compounds that have been able to kill biofilms operate by punching holes in cell membranes, Huigens said.

“Previous biofilmeradicating compounds have been difficult to develop as they destroy cell membranes of both bacterial cells and healthy human cells,” he said. “Our discovery offers the potential for future drug therapies to selectively target the cells within biofilms without killing human cell types. This discovery could lead to a major breakthrough in biomedical research.”

The HP compounds developed by UF researchers

Mindy C. Miller

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originated in a marine environment. At the College of Pharmacy’s Center for Natural Products, Drug Discovery and Development, scientists are exploring the untapped biodiversity of the world’s oceans to aid in drug discovery and therapeutic treatments.

“In the center, we identify natural products with promising biomedical utility and oftentimes use them as a starting point to create compounds that are even more powerful or selective than what nature provides us,” said Hendrik Luesch, a professor and chair of the Uppercase Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy and the Debbie and Sylvia DeSantis chair in natural products drug discovery and development.

“This research is a prime example where the marine environment provided a template that upon further chemical modification resulted in excellent biofilm-eradicating agents. Through our expanding screening platform in the center, we were able to discover anti-tuberculosis activity for certain HP compounds, which opens up additional opportunities for drug development.”

A collaborative effort that included researchers from UF’s departments of medicinal chemistry, molecular genetics and microbiology, and epidemiology helped to learn more about the special biofilm-eradicating compounds that are also effective against TB. The team plans to continue synthesizing and developing the new compounds originating from the world’s oceans in pursuit of drug therapies that will finally offer a cure for persistent bacterial infections.

Rob Huigens, rwhuigens@ufl.edu

Matthew Splett

Shape Shifter Materials engineer wins presidential award

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ichele Manuel, a UF materials science engineer, has spent her career developing new metal alloys for the space and automotive industries.

In recognition of her pioneering work, President Obama recently awarded Manuel a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, or PECASE, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on early-career science and engineering professionals.

“These early-career scientists are leading the way in our efforts to confront and understand challenges from climate change to our health and wellness,” Obama said. “We congratulate these accomplished individuals and encourage them to continue to serve as an example of the incredible promise and ingenuity of the American people.”

A dozen federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America’s preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies’ missions. Only 106 researchers nationwide received the award this year.

“It is wonderful to be recognized for years of effort to drive research in alloy design,” said Manuel, who was one of only six nominated for the award by NASA. Manuel received her bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from UF and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She worked for NASA and General Motors before joining the faculty of UF’s Wertheim College of Engineering in January 2008.

Her research is focused on the development of self-healing, shape memory and radiation shielding metals for space applications and lightweight metals that will replace heavier steel and aluminum alloys in automotive applications.

“Michele is a visionary. Her extremely creative approach to research has distinguished her as an up-and-coming leader in her field,” said engineering Dean Cammy Abernathy. “She is an inspiration for the next generation of engineers that we are preparing at the college.”

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “these early career scientists and engineers represent some of the best and brightest talent in our agency and our university partners.

We are delighted to see them win this prestigious award, as their contributions will benefit our nation and advance the scientific frontiers.”

Michele Manuel, mmanuel@mse.ufl.edu

Michele Manuel

“Michele is a visionary. Her

extremely creative approach to research has distinguished her as an up-and-coming leader in her field.”

— Cammy Abernathy Dean of Engineering

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Process Speeds Mine Water

Purification now takes hours instead of decades

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leaning up the water left over from mining operations can literally take generations — 25 to 50 years on average — leaving billions of gallons of the precious resource locked up and useless.

Now, a University of Florida researcher has figured out how to trim that time dramatically — to just two to three hours, a potential boon to mining companies, the environment and global regions where water is scarce.

“I think the ability to save water is going to be really big, especially when you’re talking about China and other parts of the world,” said Mark Orazem a distinguished professor of chemical engineering in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

His team’s idea has attracted the attention of

the Minnesota-based Mosaic Company, which produces phosphate and potash for fertilizer and operates four phosphate mines in central Florida.

“It’s important for us to continually seek research that improves efficiencies of our processes,” said Paul Kucera, senior engineer adviser in research and development with Mosaic.

Mining operations use water for mineral processing, dust suppression and slurry transport. When they’re finished with it, the water holds particles of mineral byproducts, known in the phosphate mining business as clay effluent. In the case of phosphate mines that are so common in Florida, the clay effluent has the consistency of milk.

“It looks like a solid, but if you throw a stone into it, it’ll splash,” Kucera said.

That water is pumped into enormous settling ponds — some are as large as a mile square with a depth of about 40 feet — where the particles can sink to the bottom.

Florida alone is home to more than 150 square miles of such ponds.

But it’s a lengthy process because the particles are electrically charged. The particles’ like charge causes them to repel each other, which keeps them suspended in the water instead of sticking together and sinking to the bottom.

That means mining companies can re-use the water only a bit at a time — the part skimmed off the top.

Ideas for speeding up that process go back centuries.

In 1807, an early application of the battery invented

by Volta in 1800 showed

that clay particles moved in response to an electric field.

In the 1990s, an electric field was used to separate clay and water in batches, but that concept was deemed uneconomical.

Orazem’s design is different because it allows a continuous feed of clay effluent into a separation system. There, upper and lower plates are used as electrodes. An electrical potential difference is applied across the electrodes, creating an electric field, which causes the charged particles to move toward the bottom, where they form a wet solid called a cake. In the cake dewatering zone, the particles can’t move, so the water is forced to the top.

Mark Orazem, meo@che.ufl.edu

Steve Orlando

Pig Pen

Rooting swine a costly problem for cattle ranches

UF/IFAS

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8 Spring 2016

eral swine cost the Florida cattle industry at least $2 million a year in lost cattle production, according to a new study led by a University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researcher.

In fact, researchers believe they may have underestimated the amount of forage destroyed by feral swine, said Samantha Wisely, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and conservation. Furthermore, researchers kept their cost estimates to lost forage and did not include the cost of restoring range, controlling invasive weeds that feral swine spread and other costs.

“We suspect that the cost is nearly an order of magnitude higher, and our next project will document that more precisely,” Wisely said. Nationwide, feral swine damage and control costs more than $1.5 billion annually, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Understanding Rare Bonneted Bats I

nterest has grown in Florida’s largest bat since it was listed as an endangered species in 2013.

The Florida Bonneted bat is one of the rarest species in the world and only found in a few counties in South Florida, where it nestles in tree cavities, palms and buildings.

Its ears point forward over its eyes, and its fur ranges in color from brown to gray, said Holly Ober, a researcher with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Science.

“The Florida Bonneted bat was listed as federally endangered in 2013 and since then interest has grown considerably,” said Ober, an associate professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. “We don’t even know the exact geographic distribution or what type of habitat the bat occurs in. We do know this bat can only be found in South Florida.”

Ober and Robert McCleery, a wildlife ecology and conservation professor, are leading several projects to investigate the bat’s ecology. The team is using acoustic surveys to hear the bat at night throughout all of South Florida, she said.

“Then we are looking at where the bats roost and what they feed on,” Ober explained.

In 2014, biologists at Avon Park Air Force Range found one natural roost site, the first sighting since 1979.

Since then, Ober’s team has found two more sites: one in Big Cypress National Preserve in Collier County and the other in Babcock Webb Wildlife Management Area in Charlotte County. “We are trying to find out if they roost primarily in trees or are they more likely to make their homes in manmade structures,” she said.

A second part of the project is to observe population

trends, Ober said. “Over the course of the past 50 years, researchers have seen or heard very few individual bats, so we have no idea if they are increasing or doing poorly,” she said. “To determine if population trends are increasing or decreasing, we have to individually mark the bats with a passive integrative transponder, which is injected under the skin of the bat.

When the bat is recaptured, we know if it stayed in the same roost over time, moved to a new roost, or if it is a brand new bat we have never before seen.”

Ober and other scientists are also trying to develop a monitoring plan. “There is no standard protocol for this, so we are working in Everglades National Park to compare different approaches,” she said.

For example, team members are comparing the efficacy of putting an acoustic survey

Pigs hunt for food by turning over dirt with their noses — what scientists call “rooting.” They eat roots, grubs and basically anything they run across on the ground or under the soil, Wisely said.

“It’s amazing how much dirt they can move with their noses,” she said. “We have seen golf courses, lawns, wetlands and pastures torn up to a depth of almost 2 feet by rooting.”

For the study, Wisely’s team spent 14 months counting the number of plant species in rooted areas versus non-rooted areas in parts of

a 10,000-acre swath of cattle rangeland near Lake Placid.

The number of plants that cattle could eat decreased, and the number of weeds and plants that are poisonous to cattle increased after an area had been rooted.

In the study period, plants that were edible had not returned, suggesting that the pasture will remain damaged unless it is replanted or restored by the land manager, Wisely said. The remaining plants are often either toxic to livestock or compete with economically important grasses, making restoration costly because herbicides are

needed to remove undesirable plants before replanting with high-quality forage plants.

But Wisely explained why the pigs and hogs are sometimes on ranches.

Feral swine are a culturally important game species in the southeastern United States, she said. In Florida, feral swine are considered wildlife on public land. On private land, they’re designated as livestock. Pigs can be hunted year-round on some state wildlife management areas, but most have seasons and bag limits. On private lands, feral swine may be taken year-round with no bag

device on the roof of a car for three hours and driving, or putting such a device on a permanent post to survey in a single location for a much longer period of time.

Ober and other researchers are eager to learn more about the Florida Bonneted bat, which unlike other bats in Florida, gives birth many months of the year. And while many people only think about bats during Halloween, the mammals are vital to maintain ecological balance year-round, Ober said. “Bats consume a lot of insect pests.

They are the most efficient predator of nocturnal insects,” she said.

While bats are fascinating, Ober cautioned that Floridians should leave the bat research to scientists. “If you see a bat on the ground, it is either injured or ill,” she said.

“Wear gloves to pick it up and take it to a county health department. If you handle a bat, it will try to bite you in self-defense. In rare instances, bats can have rabies.”

Holly Ober, holly.ober@ufl.edu

Beverly James

limit, and many landowners sell guided hunts or hunting leases to people. These hunts bring in about $12,000 to $20,000 a year in revenue, the study said.

Some pigs are removed from private land and sold either for meat or to be released on approved game reserves for hunting, Wisely said. As long as a person has a permit, he or she can transport pigs to approved private land.

Samantha Wisely, wisely@ufl.edu

Brad Buck

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a w h c a v t e a c UF physicists were leaders in the construction of LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves story by Joseph Kays and Steve Orlando photos by John Jernigan

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illions of years ago, far across the universe, two massive black holes engaged in an eons-long dance, their mutual attraction drawing them closer and closer, until, in an instant, the two became one. At that moment, they emanated out ripples in space and spacetime with energy equal to three of our Suns.

A century ago, Albert Einstein imagined just such a scenario in his head and in the mathematical equations on his blackboard, but he doubted humans would ever develop a way of measuring what he knew would be infinitesimally small disturbances by the time they reached Earth.

But over the last 30 years, teams of scientists at the University of Florida, the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and dozens of other universities and research labs around the world have been developing just such a detector. It’s called LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. LIGO is a pair of 4-kilometer-long, L-shaped laser rangefinders – one in Livingston, Louisiana, and another in Hanford, Washington.

A gravitational wave reaching the Earth will stretch one arm and squeeze the other by a mere ten-thousandth the width of a proton, knocking the laser beams inside them out of sync and creating a signal that can be detected.

On Sept. 14, 2015, a computer program called Coherent WaveBurst developed by University of Florida physics Research Professor Sergey Klimenko, Professor Guenakh Mitselmakher, students and postdoctoral fellows was monitoring LIGO when it detected two signals, seven-thousandths of a second (0.007 second) apart, at the Louisiana and Washington sites. The signals looked like just what Einstein predicted, but they seemed almost too good to be true. In fact, LIGO was still only doing test runs after a five-year upgrade.

Over the next five months, under the tightest security, LIGO scientists checked and rechecked their data, ultimately determining that the signals had to be from a gravitational wave. Using Einstein’s equations, they determined that the wave was caused by the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth.

As the largest project in the history of the National Science Foundation at more than $1.1 billion, NSF wanted to make sure it was announced with fanfare. So they scheduled a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 11, 2016, to coincide with publication of a paper in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. Before top science journalists and scientists in the room and watching online around the world, UF physics Professor David Reitze — on loan to Caltech to serve as executive director of LIGO — made the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves! We did it!”

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Professors Guido Mueller and Bernard Whiting with a scaled-down version of the LIGO optics.

Assistant Scientist Giacomo Ciani with LIGO prototype hardware.

Applause filled the room, and cyberspace: @BarackObama: “Einstein was right! Congrats to @NSF and @LIGO on detecting gravitational waves — a huge breakthrough in how we understand the universe.” @AlbertEinstein: “Today was a good day. #EinsteinWasRight #LIGO #GravitationalWaves” @NSF: “Since the mid-‘70s, NSF has been funding the science that ultimately led to #LIGO’s construction. #NSFLigo Today is an exciting day!!!”

“

Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves!

We did it!

”

— David Reitze

UF physics Professor Executive director of LIGO

12 Spring 2016

Stephen Hawking on Facebook: “My congratulations to the LIGO team on their discovery of gravitational waves … With LIGO’s increased sensitivity, we can expect many more detections, all improving our knowledge about how the universe works.”

UF’s LIGO contributions UF researchers first became involved in LIGO in 1995, when Mitselmakher approached his colleagues about a new project being developed by Caltech and

MIT. Among those who responded were Reitze and colleagues David Tanner and Bernard Whiting. During a visit to the LIGO lab at Caltech in 1996, the four committed the University of Florida to produce LIGO’s Input Optics, one of the most complex and diverse systems in the entire interferometer. In doing so, UF was the first institution outside the original Caltech-MIT collaboration to have an essential role in LIGO. Since 1996, the UF group has received more than $15 million from NSF for LIGO-related research activities, including instrumentation, data analysis and gravitational theory. UF’s LIGO instrumentation team, led initially by Reitze and later by Professor Guido Mueller, has also received $4 million for the design, construction and installation of the input optics of the initial LIGO detectors and nearly $6 million for the Advanced LIGO input optics.

The Advanced LIGO detector construction was completed in late 2014. An “engineering run” began in late August 2015 so that scientists could study detector performance and, if necessary, make small changes to

UF physics researchers continue to improve optics for future detectors in the department’s clean room.

procedures and operating conditions.

A full “science run” was scheduled to begin in late September.

On Sept. 14, everything changed.

Although still in test mode, LIGO was listening to the universe using Coherent WaveBurst when at about 5:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time it heard a signature “chirp,” as described

by Reitze and Gabriela Gonzalez, a physics professor at LSU and the LIGO spokesperson.

Within minutes, Coherent Waveburst sent an e-mail to Klimenko and his collaborators, notifying them that it had detected an event. Klimenko was halfway through his first cup of coffee when he saw the e-mail.

“When I saw this alert I was awakened in an instant,” he says. “It was spectacular.”

Klimenko says the speed with which Coherent WaveBurst detects a signal and notifies researchers is key to detecting and understanding gravitational waves by linking LIGO observations to other astrophysical “messengers” such as light waves, cosmic rays and neutrinos.

“Such a ‘multi-messenger’ approach can reveal crucial insights into the origin, life cycle and environment of the objects that radiate the gravitational waves,” he says. “Coherent WaveBurst reconstructs the sky location of a detected gravitational-wave signal that can be promptly shared with telescopes to search for a coincident electromagnetic counterpart before it fades away.”

The program calculated the rough sky location of the September 14 event within minutes and reported it to LIGO partner telescopes around the globe. Since only two detectors were operational it was only able to narrow the location to a swath of sky in the Southern Hemisphere, but when a third detector goes on line in Italy later this year, the three will be able to triangulate gravitational wave events much more precisely.

This will allow UF astronomers like Stephen Eikenberry, who joined the team in 2011, to use astronomical telescopes — including the Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands of which UF is a partner — to identify

Physics Professor David Tanner and Assistant Scientist Giacomo Ciani with LIGO prototype hardware.

and study light from the astrophysical sources generating the waves.

Klimenko, Mitselmakher and Whiting have also developed algorithms that promise to greatly simplify the challenging task of sorting through millions of astronomical images of stars and galaxies to identify the one object which corresponds to the gravitational wave event. These algorithms apply advances in computational data mining and machine learning, coupled with detailed UF simulations of the LIGO detector response to gravitational waves, to make this task faster, cheaper and easier to apply to a broad range of telescopes around the world.

“Four hundred years ago Galileo turned a telescope to the sky and opened the era of modern observational astronomy,” Reitz said. “I think we’re doing something equally important here today. I think we’re opening a new window on the universe, the window of gravitational wave astronomy.”

Related websites: http://www.phys.ufl.edu/ligo https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/ligoevent/

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UF seeks to create a more inclusive environment for story by Cindy Spence photos by John Jernigan

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women in STEM

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Stephanie Cruz and Jeremy Magruder

tephanie Cruz did a double take when she entered one of her computer science classes at the University of Florida in the first week of fall 2015. A woman was teaching it. A woman also was teaching the next class — and the next.

Cruz, now a senior, went from a college career in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering with no women professors to three in the first week of classes.

“It was nice to finally have female professors,” Cruz says.

Jeremy Magruder, a civil engineering student in the last year of her doctoral program, is ending her studies, and has never had a woman professor in her field, although she has had women professors in electives.

Such is the experience for women in STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — at UF and across the nation: a mixed bag.

But UF President Kent Fuchs, just two weeks into his new position in January 2015, signaled that change is coming.

He praised engineering Dean Cammy Abernathy and a leadership team that then included two women assistant deans, but said UF can do more to foster a supportive climate for women in STEM. “We won’t have more female engineering leaders without more female engineers,” said Fuchs, an electrical engineer himself, at the Gator Engineering Leadership Summit.

An assortment of projects campuswide are aimed at increasing women student and faculty participation in STEM, among them two large grants for a combined $6.2 million that are pending before the National Science Foundation, in hopes that science can yield solutions.

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Total earned Master’s degrees

Total earned Bachelor’s degrees

Men 740,357

Women 993,872

Men 293,301

Women 443,154

Total earned Master’s degrees

in all engineering fields

Total degrees earned in all engineering fields

Women 9,339 Men 31,943

STEM in Higher ED

Women 14,658

Total Earned Ph.D.’s in all

Men 63,441

engineering fields

Total Earned Ph.D.’s Women 1,898 Men 6,580 Women 29,513

Men 30,334 NSF 2014.

“

We get them in the door, but they go right out the door, and that’s a real shame. We can’t afford to exclude half our population from helping us solve our big problems: food, water, security, health care, energy. Without them, we’re doomed.

”

­— David Hahn

16 Spring 2016

The quest has prompted some unusual collaborations, including one that may be the first of its kind — certainly on campus and perhaps nationally — between the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, or MAE, and the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.

Chair David Hahn was mulling over statistics on undergraduate enrollment in MAE, the largest department on campus at 1,700 students, and didn’t like what he saw. Women account for 16 percent of the students in MAE, above the 12 percent average nationally in the major but below the 20 percent overall enrollment for women in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

“Why is MAE underrepresented compared to women in engineering in general?” Hahn asks, adding, “An even bigger question is, why is engineering in general underrepresented with women when they are half of the university’s students?”

Hahn remembered meeting Bonnie Moradi, director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, at a class for campus leaders and particularly remembered her answer to a roundtable question about what she valued in a leader. “Bonnie’s comment was ‘I like a leader that can stand up for the people who aren’t necessarily included.’”

The comment resonated. What if women in engineering did not feel included? Hahn and Moradi brainstormed, and today they are seeking a $1.3 million NSF grant, based on research they started with a Seed Opportunity Fund grant from the Office of Research.

Moradi welcomed the chance to develop a model that could solve UF’s problem and perhaps be useful in the global issue of women’s low participation in some STEM fields.

She suggested integrating feminist scholarship on subtle gender bias with social cognitive career theory, which aims to explain how students develop

“

Conventional wisdom often is not supported by data, so our job is to apply a higher level of scrutiny to those ideas. Rather than relying on stereotypes — this is how women are, this is how men are — we will apply scientific theory and research informed by feminist analysis.

”

­— Bonnie Moradi

career interests and make choices about careers and how they achieve success.

Moradi and Hahn say applying feminist analysis and science to the issue is key. People have strong convictions about their ideas on gender, reinforced by personal experiences. But conventional wisdom has failed to explain why women do not enroll in some STEM fields in the same numbers as men, especially as institutional barriers have fallen.

“Conventional wisdom often is not supported by data, so our job is to apply a higher level of scrutiny to those ideas,” Moradi says. “Rather than relying on stereotypes — this is how women are, this is how men are — we will apply scientific theory and research informed by feminist analysis.”

A Leaky Pipeline If STEM fields are viewed as a pipeline, more women than men leak from the pipeline as they travel through the academy. Overall, women graduate from college at a higher rate than

men, according to NSF’s 2014 biannual report, Science and Engineering Indicators. Women earned 993,872 bachelor’s degrees in 2011, the latest year in the report, compared to 740,357 for men.

A disparity shows up in engineering and some other sciences, however: • In all engineering fields, women earned 14,658 bachelor’s degrees, men earned 63,441.

• Overall, women earned significantly more master’s degrees — 443,154 to 293,301. However, women earned 9,339 master’s degrees in engineering, men earned 31,943.

• Overall, women earned 29,513 doctoral degrees, men earned 30,334.

In engineering, women earned 1,898 doctorates, men earned 6,580.

• In the STEM workforce, women cluster into different fields than men, with women representing 58 percent of the social science work force and 48 percent of the life science work force, but 13 percent of the engineering work force and 25

percent of the computer science and math work force.

• In the academy, women make up less than 25 percent of full-time full professors who hold science, engineering and health doctorates, according to NSF figures for 2013.

Hahn said the attrition of women in engineering has dire consequences because their design perspective is lost, and Moradi points out that early airbags actually were dangerous to smaller women and children because the design was based on an average-size man.

“We get them in the door, but they go right out the door, and that’s a real shame. We can’t afford to exclude half our population from helping us solve our big problems: food, water, security, health care, energy. Without them, we’re doomed,” Hahn says. “Getting women to our doorstep, and then losing them, is even worse than not getting them to the doorstep. They were right there, we almost had them. What’s happening?”

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Opening Doors Attrition in engineering is a problem for all students, men included, and that’s one focus of a White House initiative aimed at keeping students in STEM. UF was one of 10 universities asked last year to participate in the initiative. But attrition is much higher for women STEM students.

Hahn says engineering saw an influx of women students as institutional barriers began to fall in the 1970s. Still, they were not necessarily welcome, say Angela Lindner and Linda Parker Hudson, who studied engineering in that era.

Hudson, known as the first lady of defense because she was the first woman CEO of a defense company, was one of two women to earn an engineering degree at UF in 1972. Hudson says role models like Abernathy, appointed UF’s first woman engineering dean in 2009, are invaluable.

“For me, there were no women role models,” Hudson says. “I was the first woman to ever hold almost every job I had.”

Hudson said it was important to her that she succeed: “If I failed, no other woman would have the opportunity.”

The success of Hudson and Lindner, who got a chemical engineering degree in the 1980s and an environmental engineering degree in the 1990s, set the stage for the women who came after. Lindner, a former associate dean in engineering and now an associate provost, says she has seen UF’s freshman class of women engineering majors grow each year, to about 25 percent in 2015, above the national average. One reason the pipeline leaks in engineering is a happy reason: the lure of the job market. Unlike some fields, even other STEM fields, engineers with bachelor’s degrees get great jobs.

Women like Hudson and Lindner helped overcome institutional barriers

18 Spring 2016

for women engineering students, and enrollment rose in the 1970s, before it hit a plateau. Enrollment rose again in the 1990s, then plateaued again. This plateau, Hahn says, has been stubborn.

To investigate the reasons, Hahn and Moradi have used the seed funding to gather a wealth of information – 10 years of data on women students’ AP credits, internships, class combinations, grades and more. They will mine 6,000 datasets for information that might predict attrition and help them devise interventions. Are there setbacks, struggling in calculus or physics, for example, that play a larger role in attrition of women? A “B” in physics might be viewed as positive by a male student, but perhaps as an ominous sign by a female student, they say.

Anne Donnelly, director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and one of 15 recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring recognized by the White House in 2015, says women who leave engineering have equal or higher GPAs than the men who stay, so ability is not the issue.

Moradi and Hahn agree.

“Is there a combination of subtle gender bias and a perceived academic setback that changes the whole course of their career?” Hahn asks.

Seeing women who have survived and entered the academy is important, Lindner says, recalling a story, an object lesson of sorts, from one of UF’s pioneer women in engineering. The woman professor, now retired, told Lindner that she once asked her preschool-age son what he wanted to be when he grew up and suggested being an engineer. His response? “No, mom, girls do that.”

“His mom was an engineer, so he viewed women as engineers,” Lindner recalls. “So the message is that we need strength in numbers, and then people’s perceptions will change.”

From left to right: Jerone Dunbar, Edward Dillon, Wanda Eugene, Professor Juan Gilbert, Associate Professor Shaundra Daily, Brianna Posadas, Elizabeth Matthews, Olabode Anise, Adam Dalton, Jasmine Bowers, Chris Crawford, Sanethia Thomas, Jessica Jones, Kara Gundersen, Dekita Moon, Tiffanie Smith.

“

There was always one

person at every stage, and the person in front left footprints in the sand.

They had each other all

”

the way through.

­— Juan Gilbert

See It, Be It One person who has taken that message to heart is CISE chair Juan Gilbert.

Although the odds were against him — from 2000 to 2011, computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded to women nationwide declined 10 percent, according to NSF — Gilbert has transformed the CISE department, which he says has the highest number of women of color on a computer science faculty in the country.

“It is a very different environment here than anywhere else in the country, if not the world,” says Gilbert, adding that the department promoted a woman to full professor in 2015, a first. “We’re the largest producer of African-American Ph.D.s. in the country, and the majority of them are women.”

Gilbert says he learned a valuable lesson observing his Chinese classmates

in graduate school. He wondered how they managed to learn a new language, adapt to a new country and excel in their studies. The answer, he says, is that they created a community.

“There was always one person at every stage, and the person in front left footprints in the sand,” Gilbert says. “They had each other all the way through.”

Isolation, Gilbert says, is the downfall of Ph.D. students who are not in the majority. He resolved when he became a professor to always recruit two minority students at a time, so no one would ever be isolated. He also gave his students a say in who was recruited into the lab, and the women students took it to heart.

“It morphed. The women in the lab said, ‘We’re very happy here, so we’ll recruit more people,’ and that’s how it all began.”

Jessica Jones, one of nine women out of 12 total doctoral students in Gilbert’s lab, can vouch for the environment.

Having women at each stage is key; what does a woman computer science professor look like?

“You can’t be it, if you’ve never seen it,” says Jones, who is on a Department of Defense fellowship and has aspirations to be an astronaut.

Gilbert says some male administrators make a key mistake with good intentions. They set out to hire a woman.

“A woman. One woman. That’s the problem,” Gilbert says. “If you isolate people, you increase the chances they’ll leave.

“It’s not that these guys have something against women. If anything they have a blind spot; they never see them because it wasn’t part of their development through their own curriculum,” Gilbert says. “They just don’t see them.”

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Ellison Langford

Christine Larkins, Marissa Gredler and Kelsey Lewis are all members of the research group in Martin Cohn’s lab.

Gilbert says cluster hires, like his move from Clemson with five faculty, two postdocs and 20 Ph.D. students, change an environment almost overnight. Oftentimes, he says, people will move in a cluster who will not move for a “token” appointment.

Jones says recruiting for Gilbert’s lab is easy.

“Dr. Gilbert is an example of someone who just decided that computer science can look more than one way,” Jones says. “Brilliant computer scientists can come in all genders, all races.”

Martin Cohn’s lab is another place where women are leading the way.

Cohn, a developmental biologist in the UF Genetics Institute, says he didn’t necessarily intend that 16 of the 19 people in the lab would be female, it just worked out that way.

“I know that my selection criteria are simple — I really want the best people in the lab,” Cohn says. “I just want to do science with great people. Not just great science — great people.”

Cohn recognizes that his lab mates face challenges he didn’t face, so he has invited female colleagues to lab meetings to discuss their careers, how much the women want to “lean in,” and how best to go about it.

“My experience as a man in science has just been different,” Cohn says. “I 20 Spring 2016

haven’t been asked the same kinds of questions that women are asked. And the questions they were asking me I couldn’t answer.”

The Balancing Act The only advice Jones says she would not seek from Gilbert is advice on worklife balance. Having women faculty members is important to women graduate students, who are at an age when dating, marriage and family collide with classes and research, she says.

For role models, Jones has a woman professor who is a mother, another who is single and can talk about dating, another she can turn to for advice on negotiating and job searches.

“They would give me a nuanced answer I might not get from a male faculty member,” Jones says.

Jones says her only five minutes of doubt about computer science came in high school.

“I took a computer science class, and I walked in, and it was all guys.

They were all talking to each other, but nobody acknowledged me. I didn’t feel like I belonged,” Jones says. “I was ready to walk out when the teacher walked in. She was a woman. I wonder what I would have majored in if she hadn’t walked in.”

Donnelly says even with mentors, women graduate students often face issues their male counterparts do not.

Doctoral programs already experience high attrition, but being a woman and being a parent increases the risk. At UF, there is a support group, Ph.D. Moms, also open to dads.

“Family burdens don’t go away just because you’re a female Ph.D. student,” Donnelly says. “I had two Ph.D. students, women, who were taking their mothers to chemotherapy while they were students.”

It is difficult to boost the numbers of female faculty if women take time out to have children, or raise a family, because they are not in the pipeline long enough to navigate the process of getting a faculty job, then getting tenure, Donnelly says.

“It’s one thing to have numbers, but are we keeping them, and are they happy?” Donnelly asks.

Social Media Women in STEM have often sought support from each other, and one group at UF is WISE, Women in Science and Engineering, which sponsors camps and workshops.

Social media helps the group connect with women and do outreach, notes

#ILookLikeAnEngineer adviser Emily Sessa, a biology assistant professor.

Like other women scientists, Sessa also has noted the profound effect of social media on exposing sexism in STEM. Twitter, she says, has become a tool for accountability.

In 2014, space science made history when the Rosetta mission landed a spacecraft on a comet. A male Rosetta scientist gave interviews wearing a shirt covered with scantily clad women and made suggestive comments (“Rosetta is sexy, but I never said she was easy.”) He apologized.

In 2015, Nobel prize winner Tim Hunt expounded on the “trouble with girls” in laboratories, saying they either fell in love with a mentor or were reduced to tears by criticism. Hunt lost his honorary professorship.

Suddenly, conversations women scientists had been having by the water cooler went not only public, but viral, shining a light, Sessa says, on longstanding issues.

Sessa refers to the Rosetta incident as #shirtgate, just one of the hashtags that generated over 50 million views. “The fact that people don’t understand why a shirt covered with naked women might be offensive … it’s great that women are more than 50 percent of biology bachelor’s degrees, but it’s frustrating that this stuff still happens.

“In the past, these things would not have gone beyond the department or campus,” Sessa says. “Twitter exposed these incidents in a way they had not been exposed in the past. Few people would have believed Hunt’s comments, but he was on tape, and then on Twitter, and then in the news. Twitter is a really powerful tool for overcoming these kinds of things.”

Sessa, a specialist in the evolution of ferns, says she is one of the lucky women in science. She had mentors who were women or who were strong advocates for women in science. At UF, the

biology faculty, both men and women, suggest women for openings, and the department chair is a woman.

She says she is both an optimist and a feminist. Although it’s great that women are 59 percent of biology bachelor’s degrees nationally and at or above parity in fields like medicine, attitudes need to change along with the numbers.

“Women need to be respected in ways that they’re not,” Sessa says.

“Fundamentally, we need to change the way we think about and speak about women, and men.”

Social media can also reinforce positive messages and create community.

In 2015, a hashtag took Twitter by storm, when a California engineer, told she didn’t look like an engineer should look, tweeted a photo of herself with #ilooklikeanengineer.

What is an engineer supposed to look like? At least 100,000 ways, and counting. The hashtag did not disappear into the Twitterverse. Women — and men — still post to the hashtag today. Among the tweeters was alumna Linda Parker Hudson.

Hudson says she was moved to tweet because she felt it was important that engineers not be stereotyped. “Engineers come in all shapes, sizes, ages, types, genders,” Hudson says. “Anybody can do it.”

Ellison Langford contributed to this story.

Juan Gilbert Professor and Chair of Computer and Information Science and Engineering juan@ufl.edu David Hahn Professor and Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering dwhahn@ufl.edu Bonnie Moradi Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research moradib@ufl.edu Related websites: http://wise.group.ufl.edu/

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H

istory professors J. Matthew Gallman of the University of Florida and Gary W. Gallagher of the University of Virginia have engaged in countless conversations with their colleagues over the years about the importance of photography to the study of the Civil War. “People who study the Civil War era spend an enormous amount of energy thinking about and talking about photographs,” the two write in the introduction to their new book, Lens of War. “Yet, we seldom take the photograph as our subject and we almost never share personal reflections beyond our normal academic writing.”

So several years ago they asked several dozen colleagues to select one photograph taken during the Civil War that held special meaning for them and write about it.

“We wondered what would happen when scholars of the Civil War era were invited to reflect about photographs and photography in unfamiliar ways,” they write.

The result is a collection of 27 photos and accompanying essays by scholars whose numerous volumes on the Civil War have explored military, cultural, political, African American, women’s and environmental history. The essays are organized into five areas: Leaders, Soldiers, Civilians, Victims and Places.

“Taken together, the photographs suggest something of the range of subjects that the war’s photographers selected, and the roster of authors reflects the wide range of scholars who share our passion for the Civil War, and for Civil War photography,” the authors write.

J. Matthew Gallman is a professor of history at the University of Florida and author of Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, and Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front.

Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia and author of nine books, including Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty, The Union War, and Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. To learn more and order the book, visit http://www.ugapress. org/index.php/books/lens_war/

22 Spring 2016

✯

LENS

OF WAR

✯

Civil War historians reflect on photos from the conflict

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Union soldiers in the Peninsula Campaign, James Gibson, May, 1862.

Leaders

▲

Three Roads to Antietam: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Gardner Alexander Gardner October, 1862

J. Matthew Gallman Professor of History, University of Florida.

SHARPSBURG

▲

“Although we do not know precisely what the two were thinking as Gardner produced this wonderful plate, we do have a sense of the broader discussions during the short visit. Lincoln was dissatisfied with McClellan and urged that the Army of the Potomac take the conflict to the Army of Northern Virginia at the first opportunity.

McClellan had little respect for his superior’s grasp of the difficulties of warfare and was frustrated that he had not garnered the abject praise that he felt his victory deserved. Gardner clearly understood that the moment was momentous.”

GETTYSBURG

Soldiers Three Confederates at Gettysburg Mathew Brady July, 1863 “There they stand, perhaps the three most recognizable Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. Who are they? No one really knows … Where are they? They are west of the town of Gettysburg, standing along Seminary Ridge …

Most probably, the image was captured on July 15, 1863 by Mathew Brady or an assistant …

Whether they were stragglers or deserters, these three Confederates standing on Seminary Ridge were also prisoners of war ... I still don’t know very much about those three Confederates … I don’t know why they lost touch with the comrades or why they found themselves on the wrong side of the Potomac River … Nor do I know what fate awaited them. In each case, it’s a matter of what might have been … which, when you think about it, is what so much of Gettysburg is about.”

Brooks D. Simpson ASU Foundation Professor of History, Arizona State University

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Civilians A Family in Camp

▲

Mathew Brady Late, 1861 “Much of the appeal of this image lies in the fact that it captures so many different aspects of the war: photography early in the conflict, the material culture of camp life, and the role of women … I am drawn to this photograph time and time again because it offers an endless source of contemplation and emotional appeal. I cannot help but be fascinated by the myriad details, from the ceramic pitchers that seem out of place in a military encampment to the hole in the woman’s sweater that suggests her humble origins. But it also leaves me with more questions than it answers: … What became of this family?

Did the soldier survive? We will never know. Even so, their image serves as a poignant reminder of how far-reaching the war was even from the outset, how intimately it affected families — even Union families ostensibly far from the front lines — and how families in turn affected the Civil War.” Caroline E. Janney Professor of History, Purdue University

26 Spring 2016

WASHINGTON D.C.

▲

REMINGTON

Finding a New War in an Old Image Timothy H. O’Sullivan Mid-August, 1862 “In mid-August 1862, shortly before the Second Battle of Bull Run, one of the photographers on Mathew Brady’s staff captured what has become one of the most ubiquitous and heavily used images of the Civil War era: a photograph of five African Americans crossing the Rappahannock River near present-day Remington, Virginia …

The picture O’Sullivan took … invites viewers to reconsider our more popular understandings about the war, its combatants, and especially the process by which a war for Union came to be a war against slavery … Timothy O’Sullivan probably had no idea what he captured with his camera that summer day … but with the perspective and insights of time and a rich historical record, a 21st-century audience can see beyond the surface of O’Sullivan’s enduring image to catch an important glimpse of a different war, one fought by those who have too often been dismissed as historical bystanders.

The details, of course, have always been present in the image, just as slaves were always a part of a war that dramatically remade a nation. The challenge is to see what’s on the page and to read, as anthropologist Ann Stoler has advised, with (not against) the archival grain.”

Susan Eva O’Donovan Associate Professor of History, University of Memphis

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Victims Andrew J. Russell and the Stone Wall at Fredericksburg

▲

Andrew J. Russell May, 1863

Earl J. Hess Steward W. McClelland Chair in History, Lincoln Memorial University

28 Spring 2016

FREDERICKSBURG

▲

“Less than 24 hours after the fighting stopped, a photographer set up his equipment and exposed one of the most haunting photographs to emerge from the Civil War … this one was exposed literally within a handful of hours after the killing stopped. Moreover, the ground would be given up before the end of the day … This photograph can tell us a great deal about combat in the Civil War, but it warrants examination for what it hides as well as for what it shows. Aspects of terrain, the care of the wounded, and the experience of combat all are open to us if we take a technical approach to the photograph … This is a picture that lies at the end of the chain of links that begins with competing interests, reflected in the divisive, intransigent politics, and continue through propaganda, jingoism, saber rattling, brinksmanship, mobilization, deployment, maneuver, and engagement … In the case of ‘A Harvest of Death,’ in its relation to the billions of words written by participants in and narrators of the Civil War, I know one picture can haunt them all.”

ATLANTA

Places The Book or the Gun? George N. Barnard September, 1864 “In early September 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered Union Army photographer George N. Bernard to report to Atlanta … Before putting the city to the torch, Sherman wanted Atlanta to be photographed … At the center of Barnard’s frame is an ‘auction house,’ plastered with the banner ‘Auction & Negro Sales’ … The most arresting thing about the image, however, is the lone figure at the

center. Though reprinted often, it wasn’t until the photograph was digitized and blown up that it became widely recognized that the soldier is African American. His rifle is leaning against the building, and two rocks have been drawn up to serve as his chair as he reads from a book … For here is the whole of the war in a single tableau — a war fought so that men capable of thinking and reading and dreaming might never be sold as things.”

Stephen Berry Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era, University of Georgia

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30  Spring 2016

photos by John Jernigan

Team Florida story by Joseph K ays

UF-led collaborations are transforming the way science becomes medicine

D

avid Nelson is a team player.

“I’ve always enjoyed team sports,” Nelson says, “Growing up, I hated cross country, I hated swimming. I played basketball and volleyball and focused most on soccer.”

He played soccer so well that he had his sights set on the U.S. Olympic team until an injury derailed that dream and put him on the road to medical school.

Today, Nelson is captaining UF’s efforts to build teams that are changing the way Florida and the nation move new medical advances from laboratories to hospitals and doctors’ offices in the fastest, most efficient way.

As director of UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, or CTSI, he’s helping to move clinical trials into the 21st century, where massive investments in electronic health records and big data are now making it possible for doctors and patients and pharmaceutical companies and government agencies to get a much better understanding of which drugs and devices are the safest and most effective for which patients, at a fraction of the cost and time.

Since 2009, the CTSI has received two awards totaling more than $42 million through the national Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, which is led by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the NIH.

The National Institutes of Health define clinical trials as “research studies that explore whether a medical strategy, treatment, or device is safe and effective for humans.”

Over the past half century, regulations aimed at ensuring these trials are conducted safely and ethically and that the results are free of bias, either accidental or intentional, have caused them to become ever more complicated and expensive.

At the same time, the explosion in growth of new drugs and devices has resulted in a simultaneous expansion in the number of trials. Since 2000, when NIH initiated its online submission process called clinicaltrials.gov, there have been nearly 207,000 studies registered.

“The current clinical trials infrastructure in the United States is broken,” Nelson says. “The cost of a clinical trial has outpaced inflation by four fold in the last decade, and the number of patients being enrolled per dollar has decreased significantly. So we’re spending more and more money to enroll fewer and fewer patients.”

At a 2009 workshop on clinical trials hosted by the National Academy of Medicine a number of participants lamented that most clinical trials are conducted in a “one-off” manner, meaning “the necessary components of a trial … are brought together for a discrete period of time and disbanded once the trial is completed,” according to the workshop report.

“Some workshop attendees suggested that efficiencies could be gained by streamlining the clinical trials infrastructure so that those investigating new research questions could Explore 31

CTSI Director David Nelson, Tracking and Evaluation Director Russell Bauer and Director of Strategy and Communications Claire Baralt.

Translational science orchestrates each stage of the journey

Pharmacy Dean and Personalized Medicine Director Julie Johnson

from scientific discovery to improvements in health.

32  Spring 2016

Nelson, Biomedical Informatics Director William Hogan and Community Engagement and Research Director Linda Cottler.

quickly draw on resources already in place instead of reinventing the wheel for each trial,” the report continued.

And that’s exactly what Nelson and his colleagues are doing.

CTSI was established in 2008 shortly before the Affordable Care Act began requiring U.S. health-care providers to move toward electronic medical records. Nelson says the requirement, and the hundreds of millions of dollars of economic stimulus money that went to support it, have had a profound impact on the system.

“UF Health spent more than $100 million to put in our electronic health records system, and that investment has occurred throughout the country at most academic health centers,” he says. “But now we’re able to electronically capture things like medication, adverse events, clinical outcomes that we couldn’t track before.”

And that has resulted in the opportunity to change the way clinical trials are conducted, allowing researchers to collect all manner of data during the regular course of health care, in doctors’ offices and hospitals.

Among the innovative programs Nelson and his colleagues in the institute have put together over the last eight years are:

Personalized Medicine – uses genetic testing to identify the best medication for patients.

OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium – links UF with other universities, health systems and patients around the state to address health challenges like concussion screening, hypertension and teen smoking.

HCV-TARGET – tracks hepatitis C patients worldwide to determine the best treatment options.

“All of these efforts are really about building populations of people whose electronic health record data can be used to do clinical research, either at a disease specific level, like hepatitis C, which has been my own research interest, or at a population level, like in the state of Florida,” Nelson says.

Getting Personal Nelson says the first opportunity to test the way rapid advances in electronic health records and big data could be applied to translational research came when College of Pharmacy Dean Julie Johnson proposed moving genomics research on which she’d been working for a decade into the real world.

“It all started with our personalized medicine program,” he says. “Julie came to me and said ‘I think we can do something really unique about

taking science and translating it into health care.’”

Johnson and her colleagues in the UF Center for Pharmacogenomics had spent years identifying genes that impacted how different people respond to certain heart medications.

In mid 2012, UF Health began doing a simple genetic test for interventional cardiology patients. The test indicates whether an individual is among the about 30 percent who don’t respond to an anti-clotting drug commonly prescribed following a catheterization for blocked heart vessels.

Last November, Johnson and Associate Professor Larisa Cavallari reported at a meeting of the American Heart Association that the risk of major cardiovascular problems such as death, heart attack, stroke or blocked stent was significantly reduced among patients with the genetic variation who were prescribed an alternative drug.

In addition to preventing medical complications and saving lives, genotyping has significant implications for the business side of health care.

According to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2012 the average expenditure per person for heart conditions was $4,852 per person. Simple genotyping that costs several hundred dollars can prevent a heart attack by getting a patient on the correct medication early.

“You don’t have to prevent a lot of heart attacks to achieve a cost savings,” Johnson says.

In 2013, NIH awarded the program $3.7 million to implement genotypeguided therapy for other medications.

The funding also expands the program to community-based physician practices and health systems in Florida.

“UF Health was the perfect testing ground for understanding how to execute the program and get it to work,” Nelson says. ”The University of Florida

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OneFlorida The success of the Personalized Medicine Program inspired Nelson and his colleagues to pursue opportunities to tap into even larger pools of patients.

“There are a lot of questions you can answer with 10 patients or a hundred patients, but some studies require thousands to hundreds of thousands of patients,” Nelson says, “so to really look at long-term outcomes in larger populations we needed partners who have similar aspirations and goals to the University of Florida.”

CTSI researchers had begun collaborating with the FSU College of Medicine in 2009 on two initiatives that leveraged FSU’s distributed medical school model, which places medical students at six regional campuses around the state, where they interact with patients in a more rural community-based healthcare environment than UF Health.

By 2013, CTSI also was ready to expand its statewide initiatives, so it also partnered with the University of Miami, Orlando Health, Florida Hospital, Health Choice Network, Bond Community Health Center Inc., Tallahassee Memorial Regional Health System, Miami Children’s Health System and WellFlorida Council to create OneFlorida. The Florida Department of Health and the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration are also collaborators.

Among the initiatives OneFlorida is developing to streamline clinical trials are a statewide Institutional Review Board to evaluate all projects involving human subjects and a statewide consent form so patients can authorize their medical data to be used for research by all the partners.

“Eventually we can follow outcome data in 10 million patients that is linked to inpatient and outpatient health records, data from the DOH on vital statistics, and billing data to really think about a whole new way to do large, population-based studies very efficiently,” Nelson says.

The success of OneFlorida led to another award of more than $7.5 million from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, or PCORI, to integrate OneFlorida into a national initiative called PCORnet that includes 13 clinical data research networks nationwide. The OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium includes 22 hospitals, 914 clinical practices and 4,100 physicians, providing care for close to 40 percent of Floridians. This grant is lead by Betsy A. Shenkman, co-director of the CTSI, and William Hogan, the CTSI’s director of biomedical informatics.

OneFlorida initially will focus on high blood pressure, teen smoking and two rare genetic diseases, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Phelan-McDermid syndrome.

The Florida consortium also will contribute to the national network by allowing researchers access to more than 10 million deidentified and secure health care records through the OneFlorida Data Trust, so they can locate individuals who wish to participate in research and conduct studies more efficiently.

Jesse S. Jones

was our petri dish for experimenting and figuring out how to, in this case, implement genomic medicine into healthcare.”

Betsy A. Shenkman

Hep C Just as Johnson has spent a good deal of her career working on personalized medicine, Nelson has spent his working on hepatitis C, an insidious virus that quietly destroys the liver. Because carriers can have it for years with no symptoms, an estimated 150-170 million people around the world now have it, including an estimated 3.5 million in the U.S. Hepatitis C wasn’t even identified until 1989, so research on it was still in its infancy when Nelson graduated from residency in 1993 and secured a fellowship at UF, where hepatitis C pioneer Gary Davis was building a research program.

“I was fortunate to have started in this field just as the virus had been discovered,” Nelson says. “At that point there were no treatments. It is amazing that in a little over two decades we have evolved from discovery of a virus and massive worldwide disease to a curative therapy for most patients.”

Today, there are several different drugs available that can cure patients of the disease in as little as 8 to 12 weeks, with few side effects. But with these cures come new questions — which of these drugs works best on which patients, and how do we ensure that everyone who needs these expensive drugs has access to them.

“Because so many people were sick and dying from hepatitis C, the FDA fast-tracked the approval of many of these new drugs,” Nelson says. “The field moved so quickly that it didn’t provide doctors and patients with all the data they needed to make fully informed decisions.”

Thanks to their work in the CTSI, Nelson and his colleagues understood that they could use electronic health data to compare and contrast treatment outcomes for large populations of hepatitis C patients.

So Nelson and his colleague Dr. Michael W. Fried at UNC-Chapel Hill created HCV-TARGET, a collaboration among 104 academic and community sites in 31 states, Puerto Rico, Canada and Europe, as well as partnerships with multiple industry sponsors, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the patient advocacy community.

In 2011, HCV-TARGET established a national registry to observe patients undergoing hepatitis C treatment and coordinate real-world monitoring on a national scale for new therapies as they enter the market. To date, HCVTARGET sites have enrolled more than 8,000 patients and garnered over $30 million in support from leading pharmaceutical companies, including Abbvie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Gilead, Janssen, Merck and Vertex.

The success of HCV-TARGET also led to a $15.48 million award last October from PCORI to study the effectiveness of three medications used to treat hepatitis C. Nelson is leading the five-year, randomized clinical trial to compare the recently approved oral medications to determine if one of them is more effective at curing hepatitis C. Partners include the Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan. About 3,750 patients at approximately 36 sites nationwide will be randomly assigned one of the medications.

Researchers also hope to learn more about the drugs’ side effects and whether they work equally well in real-world conditions when used by a diverse group of patients that includes minorities and people with other medical conditions.

“There is not a single study in the world right now that has compared any of these all-oral therapies against each other. These drugs are already in use, so we want to understand their safety and

Because of our “unique diversity and demographics, we can study diseases and challenges today that the nation as a whole will face 10 years down the road.

So Florida is an ideal place to solve some of these challenges.

”

— David Nelson

effectiveness and how they’re working in diverse populations,” Nelson says.

Nelson estimates that by studying the efficacy of the three drugs as part of the normal course of the patients’ health care, they’ll be able to cut the per-patient cost of the clinical trial from $28,000 to $1,000.

Nelson says the pharmaceutical companies get very important safety and regulatory data on their drugs that can be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration; physicians, patients, health care systems and insurance providers get very quick data on how safe and effective the drugs are; and the FDA gets the best safety and performance data available.

“It’s one of those rare things where every stakeholder wins.”

Nelson says that with all these projects, Florida offers a crystal ball for the rest of the country.

“Because of our unique diversity and demographics, we can study diseases and challenges today that the nation as a whole will face 10 years down the road,” he says. “So Florida is an ideal place to solve some of these challenges.”

Claire Baralt and Doug Bennett contributed to this story.

David Nelson Professor of Medicine nelsodr@ufl.edu Related website http://www.ctsi.ufl.edu/

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36  Spring 2016

The Chicken Came First AN EARLY INTEREST IN AGRICULTURE HAS LED TO A LIFETIME OF LEARNING FOR ROY CURTISS III STORY BY CINDY SPENCE PHOTOS BY JOHN JERNIGAN

W

hen Roy Curtiss III won the Chicken of Tomorrow contest in 1950, he helped change the course of poultry history. “Tomorrow’s” chicken became today’s chicken, the source of 95 percent of chickens on American dinner plates.

Many poultry scientists would have retired on this achievement, but Curtiss not only was not a poultry scientist, per se, he was only 16.

The Chicken of Tomorrow contest, though chronicled in upstate New York newspapers, is not on Curtiss’ curriculum vitae, although he counts it

as one of his proudest moments. What is on his C.V.: 385 publications, 37 U.S. patents, 10 pending, three licensed vaccines for poultry and a raft of research, including new ways to use microbes to combat intestinal inflammation and even cancer.

He once was called a “60-year-old superstar of science,” then, a “70-year-old superstar of science.”

With his flowing white ZZ Top beard, he could be a rock star of science and, at 81, his head is overflowing with ideas, many prompted by his recent move to the University of Florida and the diverse, sometimes wacky, issues that face the state.

Explore 37

“Every year, 3 billion doses of one of my vaccines are used in broiler chickens, laying hens, and off-label in turkeys to vaccinate against salmonella.”

Nancy Schreck

— Roy Curtiss III

A little over a year into his work at UF’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and after unpacking six tractor-trailers of lab equipment, Curtiss is busy working on ideas to tackle the pythons invading the Everglades and combat fish diseases. He thinks Florida vegetables can taste better, and kidded UF’s Harry Klee, a star in tomato research, “I started working with tomatoes before you were born, man.”

He is casting a wide net for collaborators, and why not? His work in microbiology and molecular genetics has applications in a broad range of disciplines, all open to him at UF, one of only a handful of universities with agricultural, medical and veterinary colleges on one campus.

“This place is a goldmine,” Curtiss says. “So many people with diverse interests. It was a slam dunk to come here.”

TAMING SALMONELLA One of Curtiss’ main tools in developing vaccines is harnessing salmonella’s extreme virulence, using it to help, rather than harm its host.

38 Spring 2016

Salmonella No doubt, salmonella is fearsome, the number one cause of food-borne illness in the world. In addition to food poisoning, the bacteria can cause typhoid fever and gastroenteritis, among other illnesses, some fatal. Prime transmission sources are poultry, eggs and pork.

Curtiss, however, says salmonella’s aggressive efficiency at infecting a host also makes it a particularly good tool for vaccine delivery. The trick is to get salmonella into cells and then turn off its nastiness before it can cause harm.

A normal vaccine uses a weakened or killed version of a pathogen. When it is introduced into the body, the immune system recognizes the pathogen, shifts into gear, and subdues an infection before it can do harm. The antibodies produced to fight the infection remain in the body, providing protection against future infections.

Curtiss genetically engineered live salmonella bacteria that enter the host, carrying the DNA of an infectious agent. Most recently, he has used genes from the bacteria that cause pneumonia,

and that vaccine is ready for clinical trials. Once in the host, salmonella ordinarily would become a proteinmaking juggernaut, entering and killing cells in its path. Curtiss, however, programmed the salmonella genome to shut down genes whose expression would cause harm and turn on other genes to synthesize proteins that induce immune responses. This primes the immune system to fight the targeted infectious disease agent whose genes are expressed by salmonella.

Programming the salmonella to selfdestruct adds another safety feature that keeps salmonella from persisting in the body or surviving if released into the environment.

The vaccines can be administered orally, rather than by injection, making them less expensive and easier to dispense, particularly in resourcepoor areas of the world. Eliminating a syringe and needle, for example, saves more than $1 per dose. Curtiss also says large quantities can be manufactured quickly and freeze-dried, adding to their shelf life. The pneumonia vaccine,

for example, is designed to be portable and safe for infants, protecting them from one of the leading causes of death in the developing world. That research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and with a $15 million Grand Challenge in Global Health grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The technology has potential in preventing other diseases, too, such as tuberculosis, typhoid fever, influenza, hepatitis and AIDS. Curtiss has used the same technology to develop an immunocontraceptive vaccine. In this case, salmonella ferries genes for sperm or egg proteins, and those proteins prompt an immune response that blocks fertilization. In mice, the effect is reversible, but in some cases the offspring are rendered infertile, so more work would be needed to perfect the vaccine for human use.

Still, he says, that might be just the ticket to solve the python invasion in the Everglades, where the infertility of later generations of pythons would not be a concern.

“I’m all for trying to make an impact where I can,” Curtiss says.

Curtiss holds patents on vaccines for farm animals — pioneering the first plant-based vaccine — and has others in mind. Vaccines for farm animals, he says, can go a long way to mitigating the societal problem of antibiotic resistance, and boost human health, too.

Many illnesses are caused by pathogens transmitted from animal to human, through foods like meat, poultry, eggs and milk. Chickens, pigs and cattle can be vaccinated against E. coli or salmonella with an intranasal spray or via their drinking water, controlling the infections at the source and keeping harmful microbes out of the food chain.

“Every year, 3 billion doses of one of my vaccines are used in broiler chickens, laying hens, and off-label in turkeys to vaccinate against salmonella,” Curtiss says. “Transmission of salmonella from poultry to humans has decreased substantially. People probably don’t think about it, but I have the pleasure of knowing I’ve had an impact on that.”

Vaccinating farm animals also decreases the need to use antibiotics to keep livestock healthy. About 60 percent of antibiotic use in the U.S. is for agriculture.

You can eat your chicken dinner in peace, in part thanks to Curtiss, although he still recommends hand washing during food preparation and thorough cooking.

In 2015, he turned his attention to cancer. He knows salmonella well and thinks he can use the bacteria’s unusual appetite for cancer cells, especially in tumors, to good effect. For salmonella, a cancerous tumor is like a feast. Salmonella microbes normally multiply slowly, dividing perhaps twice in a day, Curtiss says. But in the presence of cancer cells the bacteria divide every hour, gorging on a tumor and becoming a potent weapon.

As with his vaccines, the trick will be a balancing act: how to keep salmonella safe for a patient but deadly for a tumor. In mouse studies, Curtiss has engineered salmonella bacteria to avoid healthy cells, unleashing their Explore 39

Nancy Schreck

Campylobacter toxins and other lethal weapons only inside the tumor.

Curtiss is also developing a poultry vaccine against campylobacter, the second most common cause of food-borne illness in humans, and is exploring how to use strains of cyanobacteria, which derive their energy from photosynthesis, to develop biofuels.

In collaboration with a colleague at Arizona State University, he sent vaccine samples to the International Space Station to see if microgravity prompts a biological response that might be useful. He wonders, too, whether there is a way to use vaccine strategies to alter the microbiome to make animals and humans healthier?

Microbes and vaccines derived from them are the key to human health, he says.

Preventing disease, rather than diagnosing or treating it, is the way to improve the human condition.

“If we want to reduce health-care costs we need to prevent diseases. We can do that by changing the environment, changing what we eat, and all the rest,” Curtiss says. “But in terms of infectious diseases, vaccines are the way to go.”

AN ERA BEGINS Curtiss says he has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and that might have been true in 1956 when the freshly minted graduate of Cornell, armed with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, attended a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. Also in attendance were others who would become luminaries in the nascent field they gathered to

discuss. They would be among the first generation of scientists to call themselves molecular biologists.

The double helix structure of DNA had only been discovered in 1953, and science was pulsing with the possibilities. Curtiss, who got his microbiology Ph.D. in 1962, was among the eager young scientists. By 1973, when the first breakthroughs in recombinant DNA were published, Curtiss had a thriving research program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. It had become increasingly clear to him that recombinant DNA, combining two DNA strands that do not occur together naturally to create new genetic material, could hold controversy.

“The original recombinant DNA advisory group had no public representative and no plant person,” Curtiss says. “We needed a process by which we could involve more people.”

By 1975, Curtiss had joined with many scientists around the world in voluntarily suspending their experiments using recombinant DNA, as controversy swirled about genetic engineering. About 150 scientists agreed to meet in Asilomar, a peaceful, coastal conference center in California, to hash out how to move forward with a technology that appeared to hold great promise, but perhaps hazards as well.

Were guidelines needed, and if so, what kind of guidelines?

The conference did result in guidelines, and research resumed, although controversies continue.

THE UF COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE CELEBRATES ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY IN 2016 1970s

1971: Florida Governor Reubin Askew

appoints Dr. C.E. Cornelius as

the college’s first dean.

1976: Charter Class of 40 students is

admitted to the college.

1977: The college establishes Florida’s

first wildlife medicine service.

1980s

1980: College’s charter class graduates

and the college is granted full

40 Spring 2016

accreditation from the American

Veterinary Medical Association.

1982: The nation’s first neonatal foal

intensive care unit is opened by

specialists in equine medicine.

1985: As a result of embryo transfer

techniques performed at the

college, identical twin lambs are

born, each with a natural resis tance to a parasite that has long

plagued Florida’s sheep industry.

1987: A $5 million grant from the U.S.

Agency for International Develop ment expands biotechnology

research aimed at developing

vaccines and improved diagnostic

tests for two major livestock

diseases, anaplasmosis

and babesiosis.

1990s

1993: A $750,000 grant from Walt

Disney World aids UF research

into potentially devastating

respiratory disease in the Florida

gopher tortoise.

1995: A $530,000 equine drug study

funded by the state’s Division of

Pari-mutuel Wagering aims to

update standards in the horse

racing industry.

1996: Dr. Michelle Leblanc develops

breakthrough treatment for

mare infertility using naturally

occurring hormone, oxytocin.

1999: In first-ever procedure performed

on a bird, UF zoological

INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNEY

“We’ve been doing genetic manipulation for 10,000 or more years. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

— Roy Curtiss III

Curtiss acknowledged the rising tensions and recognized that fear of the technology would need to be addressed.

Rather than handling it with PR, he used science. He went to work and created weakened mutants that selfdestruct if they escape the lab, the basis of his vaccine technology today.

“I’m a genetically modified thing, my chickens were, my plants were,” Curtiss says. “We’ve been doing genetic manipulation for 10,000 or more years.

I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

Today, the word “pioneer” is often attached to his name, but for his part, there is more pioneering yet to do. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014, the American Society for Microbiology gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, putting him in a select group that numbered only 20 with his award.

veterinarians implant an artificial joint in a rare Siberian crane.

2000s

2000: College’s unique Aquatic Animal

Health program receives an

$810,000 state grant with

the Whitney Laboratory for Marine

Bioscience to establish a unique

training program in marine mam mal health.

2001: Racing Laboratory earns national

accreditation, becoming one of

Curtiss recalls the backyard in upstate New York, where he grew the sunflower that won him a blue ribbon at age 5, and where his first thoughts about why tomatoes came in different colors led him on a journey into Mendelian genetics. His first work testing for salmonella in poultry was in 1948 in high school. And then there’s the chicken of tomorrow.

After World War II, the problem was skinny chickens. He figured he could get fatter chickens with hybrid vigor and crossed a White Cornish English breed with a White Plymouth Rock American breed. Today, we buy them in the supermarket, thanks in part to his 4-H project. He went on to Cornell, where he traded chicken and eggs for hamburgers and pork chops from his classmates in animal sciences and for ice cream with classmates in dairy science.

His youthful reading material was the Burpee seed catalog and a shelf full of every Cornell extension bulletin he could get his hands on. Academics might call his approach interdisciplinary; indeed, today he might, too. But the boy in the backyard might have called it curiosity. Science is a smorgasbord to Curtiss, and it’s an approach that has served him well since childhood. He has been a microbiologist, a geneticist, an immunologist, a vaccinologist, a molecular biologist, a student and a truant. About the only thing he has given up is truancy.

“I used to have fun with the IRS

only a handful of institutions

to hold that status.

2002: Dr. Janet Yamamoto develops

a feline AIDS vaccine.

2003: Zoological medicine clinicians and

pathologists play key role in first

diagnosis of West Nile virus

in alligators.

2004: Dr. Elliott Jacobson leads collabo ration to create database of sea

turtle blood to aid rehabilitation

groups in better assessing sea

turtle health.

and put down a different occupation on my tax return every year,” Curtiss says. “One year, I put down bacterial gynecologist. I’m in a small group of people who know a lot about the sex life of microbes.”

He says there is way too much to do to retire, and too many stories to tell, many including a chicken.

Curtiss says his father was fond of motorcycles and careened into a ditch one day while giving a ride to his sweetheart, who was to become Curtiss’ mother. As she climbed out of the ditch, his mother-to-be issued an ultimatum: “It’s me or that motorcycle, take your pick.” The reason for the crash?

“I’m here today, you see, because a chicken was trying to cross the road, and my father hit it,” Curtiss says. “And my father was wise enough to give up his motorcycle.”

His mother also is due some credit for his work ethic, his lab actively recruiting students, as one ad says, for his “research family.” On his mother’s 90th birthday, the whole family together, she announced her retirement.

About 16 months later, she died.

“That was my mother’s last lesson, and a valuable one,” Curtiss says with a twinkle. “Don’t retire.”

Roy Curtiss III Professor of Infectious Diseases and Pathology rcurtiss@ufl.edu

2004: Dr. Cynda Crawford discovers

equine influenza virus in dogs

probably resulted in eight racing

greyhound deaths. The new

pathogen is now known as canine

influenza virus.

2005: Dr. Janet Yamamoto reports an

unexpected link between viruses

that cause feline and human AIDS.

2010s

2010: A $58 million, 90,000-square-foot

Small Animal Hospital opens,

tripling existing space and

providing new technology

and capabilities.

2014: A new equine sports performance

complex is completed, becom ing the only facility in Florida to

offer complete diagnostic and

treatment capabilities through

the equine lameness and

imaging service.

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Jesse S. Jones

TEACHING PUBLIC HEALTH

BY ERIC BLACK

C

hronic conditions, such as Type II diabetes and hypertension, account for seven in 10 deaths in the United States each year. And by some estimates, public health factors, such as the physical environment we live in, socioeconomic status and ability to access health services, determine 90 percent of our health. Biomedical sciences and actual medical care — the stuff doctors do — determine the remaining 10 percent.

Clinical medicine can treat patients when they are sick, but public health provides an opportunity to prevent disease and poor health. But too often, medical students don’t get to learn about public health, or how to use it when they become doctors. That means many of today’s students aren’t learning about health care in a broader context.

WHY DOCTORS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH What should a physician do if patients are unable to visit a physician because their workplace doesn’t give them sick days? What about an obese individual who has trouble following healthy eating recommendations because their neighborhood doesn’t have a grocery store?

If we want the next generation of medical professionals to understand why some patients have an easier time following a care plan than others, or understand what causes these conditions so we can prevent them, medical schools need to look toward public health.

Epidemiology, a core discipline within public health, emphasizes the study and application of treatment to disease and other health-related issues within a

42 Spring 2016

population. It is focused on prevention, which means understanding what makes people sick or unwell.

You might hear about epidemiologists who work on figuring out how infectious diseases spread. But they also study obesity, cancer, how our environments affect our health and more.

So a doctor with training in public health would have an understanding of how environmental, social and behavioral factors impact their patients' health. These physicians might also draw on other medical professionals to treat individuals who are sick, and prevent sickness from occurring in the first place.

Medical schools recognize that their students should learn more about public health. But according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), about one-fourth of 2015 medical school graduates report that they intend to participate in public health-related activities during their career, and nearly one-third of graduates report that training related to community health and social service agencies was inadequate.

PUTTING PUBLIC HEALTH INTO MEDICINE But this is slowly starting to change.

For instance, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), which all medical school applicants in the US take, used to focus on just physical and biological sciences and verbal reasoning.

But in 2014 the MCAT added a new section on the psychological, social and biological foundations of behavior. The idea is to provide students with a foundation to learn about what public health scholars call the social determinants of health. These are conditions and

environments in which we are born, work, live and interact with others.

Expectations for students transitioning from medical school to their postgraduate residency are also starting to change.

The AAMC has a list of 13 activities that medical school graduates are expected to be able to do on their first day of residency. The activities (called Entrustable Professional Activities, or EPAs) integrate, among other core competencies, principles of public health into everyday practice. They include guidelines for working with individuals who have different belief systems, patient-centered practice and understanding how to access and use information about the needs individuals have and the community resources available to them.

HAVING STUDENTS MAKE HOUSE CALLS At the University of Florida, where I teach, population health-based topics are integrated into our medical school curriculum, and also into curricula for other health professions.

Each fall, 700 first-year health science students studying everything from dentistry to clinical psychology, health administration, pharmacy, nursing and more take part in a service learning project with local families.

Students complete coursework about public health, but they are also assigned to work with a family through the year.

Students make a series of home visits, which means that they can see, firsthand, how the family’s home environment shapes their health. Because the project includes students from all the health professions, it helps them understand each other’s roles and responsibilities in providing care.

90%

Public health factors — the physical environment we live in, socioeconomic status and ability to access health services — determine 90 percent of our health

10%

Biomedical sciences and actual medical care — the stuff doctors do — determine the remaining 10 percent.

In these visits, students get a chance to see the myriad factors that can make it easier or harder for a patient to follow the care plan their doctor prescribes. Students may learn that their patients have priorities in life that come before monitoring their own health. And for many students, this may be the only home visit that they make during their entire career.

For instance, a team of our students were humbled to learn that one of the patients they visited, a woman with severe hypertension and Type II diabetes, put her desire to provide Christmas presents for the six grandchildren she was raising over her medication adherence or her glucose monitoring. She was more focused on her grandchildren than spending time on monitoring her health and taking medications.

These home visits show students how complex their patients' lives really are. And that gives these future doctors a perspective on their patients that they may never get in a clinical visit.

OTHER MEDICAL SCHOOLS PUTTING PUBLIC HEALTH ON THE AGENDA The University of Florida isn’t the only medical school investing time and energy to explore new methods to teach students about public health.

Some are adopting dual-degree models that allow medical students to earn degrees in both public health and medicine. Often, these programs extend students' training by 12 months, but some institutions, like the University of Miami and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, have developed four-year dual-degree programs.

Other institutions, such as the University of Illinois and Florida International University, are integrating population and public health perspectives throughout their curricula, to make sure that all students learn about public health.

Erik Black Assistant Professor of Pediatrics ewblack@peds.ufl.edu

This column originally appeared in The Conversation, an online service that provides a vehicle for academics to address issues of the day and share their research. To read more columns by UF faculty, visit http://theconversation.com/institution/university-of-florida

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Hundreds of members of the University of Florida community participated in 352Creates on Feb. 26.

From the Florida Museum of Natural History to the UF Student Health Center and UF Health Shands Hospital, students, faculty and staff worked with members of the Gainesville community on coloring books, sidewalk art, rock painting and dozens of other projects.

Photos by Kristen Grace and Hannah Pietrick