UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
SPRING 2015 / RESEARCH
Heading in the right direction Also in this issue •Molecular memory •New takes on the Civil War •Canary in a coal mine, crab on a coastline
Office of Research University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti Research Communications Manager Elizabeth Renedo Director of University Communications and Marketing/ Chief Communications Officer Wes Hickman Office of Communications and Marketing Creative Director Bob Wertz Editor Chris Horn Magazine Designer Maria Fabrizio Contributing Writers Craig Brandhorst, Page Ivey, Liz McCarthy, Steven Powell Photographer Kim Truett Cover Artist Maria Fabrizio Website sc.edu/vpresearch To comment on an item in Breakthrough or to suggest an idea for a future issue, contact the University of South Carolina’s Office of Research at 803-777-5458 or email vpresearch@sc.edu The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, genetics or veteran status. 14002 UCS 10/14
The University of South Carolina is committed to sustainability in all facets of operation, including the production of publications such as this one, which is printed on paper certified by SmartWood to the FSC standards.
In this issue 4 / In Brief 8 / Heading in the right direction A USC orthopaedic physician and athletic training director are developing new strategies for addressing the serious issue of sports concussions.
12 / Molecular memory Memory and the corresponding
ability to learn socially acceptable behavior is dependent on key neural proteins. Michy Kelly wants to know how those mechanisms break down in disease states.
14 / New takes on the Civil War Three new books from
history faculty offer new vistas on an old conflict.
16 / Q&A with Nathan Richardson A law professor offers his take on environmental law and climate change.
18 / The art of science Up close — really close
— objects of nature become objets d’art.
20 / Canary in a coal mine, crab on a coastline An evoutionary biologist considers the dynamic chang es on South Carolina’s coastline and the conse quences for a number of species.
24 / In the pipeline Education professor Scott Decker thinks neurofeedback might hold promise for learning disabilities.
w
isit sc.edu/vpresearch V for more information
Prakash Nagarkatti, Ph.D. Vice President for Research University of South Carolina www.sc.edu/vpresearch
In the pages of Breakthrough, you can see how research conducted here at the state’s only Carnegie tier-one institution with “very high research activity” impacts the community directly. Our researchers are exploring the Carolina coast seeking opportunities to harness offshore wind to power communities without harming the environment, studying head injury to help make sports safer for young athletes, and searching for ways to better understand and treat devastating mental illnesses, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. But the impact of research doesn’t stop at those who ultimately benefit from the breakthroughs realized in the lab. It also extends to the students whose academic experiences are enriched through taking part in research. The Office of Research strives to inspire and enable students at every level, on every system campus, to take their learning beyond the classroom. At the University of South Carolina, tuition buys so much more than a top-notch classroom experience, great facilities and vital campus life. It also provides every student the opportunity to participate in research through programs including Magellan Scholars, which funds undergraduate research, and SPARC grants, which provide funding for graduate scholars’ research projects. Through these and other programs, students across all disciplines can engage their intellectual curiosity while they gain practical experience in research, grant writing and scholarship. As Gamecocks, our potential to impact the world through innovation has no limits.
2 / Breakthrough
Spring 2015 / 3
In brief
INNOVATION CENTER ON THE HORIZON IBM — one of the largest and most respected technology companies in the world — is partnering with the University of South Carolina and will take up residence on the Columbia campus. The partnership will create the Center for Applied Innovation, where experts from the university and IBM will work together to better serve higher education institutions nationwide and provide enhanced learning experiences for tomorrow’s college students. Global engineering giant Fluor Corporation will join IBM in the new facility and will be an adviser to the center. The center will initially be located in existing facilities on USC’s campus and is expected to move to a new office building in the Innovista Research District anticipated to open in 2016. “The Center for Applied Innovation is the realization of the university’s vision to advance higher education through strong, public-private partnerships,” said USC President Harris Pastides. “Through this collaboration with IBM and Fluor, USC students will have unique opportunities to learn both in and outside the classroom and further hone their IT skills.”
HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW: A NEW PLANT SPECIES The exclusive club of explorers who have discovered rare new species of life isn’t restricted to globetrotters traveling to the Amazon rain forests or the woodlands of the Congo River basin. Just ask USC biology professor John Nelson and alumnus Douglas Rayner — they’re having their membership cards stamped with a long-hidden plant found nowhere but South Carolina. The new species, dubbed Stachys caroliniana, debuted on the international botanical stage with a peer-reviewed publication describing its unique characteristics. It has taken some time for S. caroliniana to get its due, but that’s not surprising given the rarity of this new example of what is commonly called a hedge-nettle or woundwort. Rayner, who earned both master’s and doctoral degrees at Carolina in the mid-1970s, collected the first specimen of what is now known as S. caroliniana in 1977 in the northernmost reaches of Charleston County, south of the Santee River. Years later, Nelson found the plant growing on the north side of the Santee River in Georgetown County and was able to gather the information to make the case to the scientific community that this was a new species altogether. “It’s one of the most creative things you could ever do. I mean, I didn’t make the species, but I guess I’m introducing it to humankind,” Nelson says.
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SIX NAMED BREAKTHROUGH STARS The Office of Research has named six assistant and associate professors recipients of the 2015 Breakthrough Stars award. The Breakthrough Stars program began in 2010 to recognize upand-coming junior faculty whose research and scholarly endeavors have already achieved noteworthy success. Each cohort of Breakthrough Stars has included faculty members from multiple disciplines, each of them relatively new in their scholarly careers but already making waves in the classroom, the lab and beyond.
ENTER THE ICE DRAGON: THE COOL FUTURE OF NANOFLUIDS Andy Hayes and Dale McCants have
“Taken as a group, these outstanding scholars are a reflection of the innovation and research excellence happening every day at South Carolina’s only Carnegie tier-one research institution,” said Prakash Nagarkatti, USC’s vice president for research.
been thinking small for quite some time. Now, the two mechanical engineering alumni are ready to go big — really big — and they’ve got some pretty cool ideas about how to do it. Hayes, who works for NASA as a
Jason O’Kane
College of Engineering and Computing
thermal engineer, and McCants, an instructor in the College of Engineering and Computing, are champions of nanofluid technology, which uses tiny, specially-shaped metallic nanoparticles suspended in liquid to increase heat transfer within
Aidyn Iachini
Sara Schwebel
College of Social Work
College of Arts and Sciences
an electronic system. They say the technology could one day be used to cool everything from motorcycle engines to computer server farms and large buildings. The two already have had success with their product Ice Dragon, a
Jason Hattrick-Simpers
College of Engineering and Computing
Xuemei Sui
Arnold School of Public Health
nanofluid cooling agent used by serious computer gamers seeking a competitive edge. Ice Dragon works by allowing gamers to overclock, or run their gaming systems faster, without overheating.
Northrop Davis
College of Arts and Sciences
Hayes and McCants say the next step is to demonstrate nanofluid’s viability as a cooling liquid for HVAC systems in buildings, where preliminary studies suggest they could reduce energy consumption by between five and 10 percent simply by swapping out traditional coolants for their product.
Spring 2015 / 5
In brief
WHAT MAKES THE FEATHER SOAR Dinosaurs became extinct some 66 million years ago, but that’s hardly the end of their story. One group of their modern-day progeny — birds — is a spectacular evolutionary success story largely because of the feather, which enables flight, provides camouflage and attracts mates. And as Matthew Greenwold, a postdoctoral associate in biological sciences at USC, and biology professor Roger Sawyer showed in a recent paper, a key to the feather’s success appears to be the variety and adaptability of the interlocking protein building
BLOWING IN THE WIND The answer to South Carolina’s quest for renewable energy might be blowing in the wind — about a dozen miles off the coast. The University of South Carolina’s Earth Sciences and Resources Institute (ESRI-SC) is partnering in a study of potential sites for offshore wind turbines that could generate enough electricity to power nearly six million homes. “Offshore winds are stronger and more consistent than land winds, and they average about 18 miles per hour off of the S.C. coast,” said ESRI-SC director and earth and ocean sciences professor Camelia Knapp. “That’s relatively high compared to much of the U.S. coastline.” The three-year, $750,000 project, funded by the Bureau of Ocean
Feather beta-keratin distinguishes birds from all other living creatures. Birds are the only organisms that have it, they have it in abundance, and together with the other keratins it gives them an edge that makes them nearly ubiquitous in a highly competitive world. “Feathers are strong, they’re flexible, they’re durable,” says Sawyer. “They can go through
Energy Management, will not only identify suitable geologic sites for
a 200-mph dive and sudden
anchored wind turbines but also try to locate cultural artifacts such as
recovery without fracturing, such
shipwrecks, hazardous artifacts such as unexploded military ordnance and
as seen for the peregrine falcon,
submerged prehistoric sites.
the fastest member of the animal
“We’re looking at the sites to ascertain whether there is hard ground,
kingdom. Perhaps we can mimic
soft ground, slopes and sand channels, fractures and faults, active zones of
these amazing properties in new
sediment transfer,” Knapp said. “Based on the results of the first year, we’ll
materials.”
zoom in on areas of interest to identify the most viable sites.”
6 / Breakthrough
blocks that feathers are made of.
hs Health Sciences
On target for better health USC recently landed one of the biggest competitive grants in its history to create a research center dedicated to drug discovery. Igor Roninson of the S.C. School of Pharmacy will direct the new Center for Targeted Therapeutics, overseeing an $11.3 million Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence grant from the National Institutes of Health over the next five years. The center is focused on cutting-edge approaches to developing new drugs. Long gone are the days of aspirin, the efficacy of which was discovered long before any of the molecular-level biomachinery of the human body was understood. Medical scientists now have a highly detailed map of biomolecules involved in health and in every manner of illness, from diabetes to cancer to heart disease, and they expand
that map in the laboratory every day. By knowing how a protein or lipid or some other biomolecule works in a properly functioning human cell or tissue, or how it’s involved when things go wrong, scientists can design a drug to interact with that biomolecule, changing its behavior in a way that improves a patient’s health. “This is research that leads to drugs acting on specifically defined molecular targets,” Roninson says. “The overwhelming majority of effort is now focused on targeted drugs, with one reason being that side effects can be unpredictable without targeting.” The approach for discovering new drugs with better side-effect profiles is highly interdisciplinary in nature. The center is bringing six new junior faculty members to the SCCP, the College of Arts and Sciences and the USC School
of Medicine. Each will be paired with a senior mentor in the center, which will include faculty from the Medical University of South Carolina, an SCCP partner. Roninson notes that the center will provide pilot grant opportunities to a wide range of disciplines across the university. “Investigators will be able to work in a new area they hadn’t considered before,” he says. “They might make a discovery that can turn their career in a new direction.” The size of the investment the NIH is putting into the new center reflects how success in drug discovery has changed in recent years. “Big pharma is notoriously short on ideas,” Roninson says. “It’s important to have corporate partnerships for clinical trials, but the most promising drugs originate in academic laboratories now.” Fall 2014 / 7
Front & Center
Heading in the right DIRECTION 8 / Breakthrough
Building a network
Sports aren’t a uniquely American pursuit, but there’s something to be said for the range of options available here. If you’re not into basketball, football, soccer or baseball, there’s always lacrosse, ultimate Frisbee, hockey and rollerball — and plenty more, in all sorts of professional, semi-pro and recreational settings. Every one of these sports involves intended or unintended contact, and with that comes the inevitable risk of an injury that is getting well-deserved attention at the moment: concussion. In the medical and scientific faceoff against this form of traumatic brain injury, the University of South Carolina has developed an extensive playbook to achieve success.
In 2001, USC Sports Medicine physician Dr. Jeffrey Guy founded an innovative program for extending the university’s reach to athletes of all ages: Sports Medicine for Athletes and Recreational Teams, or S.M.A.R.T. An assistant professor of clinical orthopaedic surgery, Guy often deals in the operating room with the after-effects of athletics gone awry, and with the S.M.A.R.T program he brought his department, the College of Education and the Department of Family and Preventative Medicine together to get ahead of the game, both to prevent injuries and to diagnose and deal with their effects quickly and appropriately. Twenty Midlands-area high schools, most with partnering middle schools, now participate in the program, which provides medical pre-screening for athletes preparing for varsity and lower level sports. It also puts USC athletic trainers on the fields of play and makes accelerated care available for those who are injured. Youth monitoring through the S.M.A.R.T. program is in addition to USC Sports Medicine’s coverage of not just the hundreds of student-athletes on campus, but also the club, intramural and recreational student population. And their reach also extends to Benedict College, S.C. State, Columbia College, Claflin University, Columbia International University and a consulting role with Coastal Carolina, Lander College, Coker College and USC Aiken. With that kind of access to central South Carolina’s sports world, the primary care physicians tasked with concussion care, Dr. Matthew Pollack and pediatric specialist Dr. Jeffrey Holloway, have their hands full because concussion diagnoses are growing in number. Getting in the field
More concussions is actually good news, though, because the uptick in cases is thought to reflect an increase in proper diagnoses rather than an actual increase in concussion incidence. Better diagnostic results reflect, in part, the success of programs like USC’s Department of Athletic Training, which is part of the College of Education and works closely with USC Sports Medicine. With more than 200 undergraduate majors, it’s one of the largest athletic training departments in the country, and the master’s-level program boasts 40 graduate students. With those numbers, the program is able to place athletic trainers and clinical trainees on all sorts of fields of play, from youth leagues to USC’s intramural competitions to football practices and Williams-Brice Stadium on game days. On-field assessment of head injuries gets players to medical experts quickly, which has literally proven to be life-saving. Several years ago, ESPNU produced a documentary on Caleb Lott, a certified athletic trainer and USC graduate student working the sidelines of a high school football game who swiftly assessed that a player had sustained severe brain trauma. The player was directed to Palmetto Health Richland in Columbia, which had a trauma team capable of identifying a brain bleed in progress and saved his life with an emergency operation. Spring 2015 / 9
Adapting new tactics
“We look at what it takes to get a concussion, and when we have these devices on the kids for an entire year, we can look certainly at the magnitude but also the frequency of the impact.” — Jim Mensch, Director, USC Athletic Training Program
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Near-immediate assessment is just one means of getting better concussion treatment out into the real world, and USC is pushing forward on another front: research to develop better prevention methods and improved treatments. Jim Mensch, director of USC’s athletic training programs, is leading a research effort that places small accelerometers behind the ears of youth football players and follows them over the course of the season. “We are part of six states in a large study,” Mensch says. “We look at what it takes to get a concussion, and when we have these devices on the kids for an entire year, we can look certainly at the magnitude but also the frequency of the impact.” They’re also able to correlate concussions with other variables. In age-restricted leagues, for example, there might be a 200-pound 12-year-old facing off with a 75-pound 12-year-old. In weight-restricted leagues, two players might be the same weight but differ by three years in age and maturity, and the research data can help organizers determine the safest way of matching up growing kids of all sizes and skill levels. “Something else we’re looking at this year is coaches,” Mensch says. “There’s a program for USA Football, called Heads Up, that teaches coaches how to design practices with certain drills that show them the right technique, teaching the kids not to lower their heads. We’re looking at how the players do with coaches who have gotten certification versus those that haven’t.”
Developing new strategies
USC researchers are also looking even further down the field for innovations. “With concussion, therapies just don’t exist other than rest,” says Troy Herter, an assistant professor in exercise science. “We assume that rest will help, but compare that, say, to someone who comes in after having a stroke. “Both involve brain damage. For stroke you want to get them out of bed, moving around, going to rehabilitation as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the outcomes tend to be, but you take the complete and total opposite approach with concussion.” Herter is leading a group at Carolina collecting and analyzing data in a pilot concussion study. It builds on his years of research on stroke, an ailment that is different from concussion but, Herter says, does share many similarities. Finding effective treatments requires better ways of determining which brain functions are affected by a concussion and to what degree. USC physicians are trained to administer the ImPACT test, a concussion assessment based on a roughly 25-minute computer exam that includes word and shape memory recall, speed in finding consecutive numbers randomly displayed on the screen and a series of questions about how the patient feels physically. “The ImPACT test is not an end-all be-all, but it gives us an extra tool to assess and evaluate,” says primary physician Holloway. “It can, for example, pick out that subset of the population that feels better, but their brain isn’t quite back yet.” Herter and his USC colleagues are taking an approach that goes beyond ImPACT, which is largely a cognitive test, using what are essentially video games designed to differentiate a user’s sensory and motor systems. Subjects interact with virtual objects through a robotic interface that simultaneously tracks hand and eye movements. This allows the researchers to quantitatively measure performance during increasingly complex tasks requiring skillful coordination. The scientists can then break down the results to show whether there are specific deficits in seeing, in moving or in thinking that might underlie a person’s inability to match their previous “high scores.” Being able to carefully measure all three systems, rather than just cognition as in the ImPACT assessment, the researchers hope they can develop new concussion therapies down the line, Herter says. “People will come in after a stroke and they’ll go through batteries of tests that say they’re fine. Then they’ll fill out a questionnaire and it’s a different story,” Herter says. “They say they have trouble driving the car or performing other daily activities. They’ll say, ‘I’m just not what I used to be,’ but they may still get a clean bill of health. “A similar situation might exist with concussion, but athletes will lie in order to return to the field of play. By developing objective assessments that mimic complex activities like sports, we can hopefully improve our ability to determine whether an athlete is actually ready to return to play.” Spring 2015 / 11
Molecular memory We often associate faulty memory with dementia or Alzheimer’s — the elderly person who can’t remember names or information. But when the brain’s molecular process for encoding memory isn’t working properly, the task of developing acceptable social behavior can be short circuited, as well, particularly for those with an autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. “Most of what we think of as ‘socially acceptable behavior’ is not an innate ability,” says Michy Kelly, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Neuroscience. “It’s all learned. So if something breaks down in your ability to form memories of your social experiences, there’s no feedback loop that helps you learn what is and is not socially acceptable. You don’t remember that people don’t like it when you get too close or talk too loudly in their face, so you keep on doing it.” Kelly’s research focuses on neural proteins that affect social behavior and a specific memory process called episodic memory that takes place in the hippocampus. Her lab group has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the PhRMA Foundation. “I’ve mostly been driven by fundamental questions of how the brain functions and what fails in neuropsychiatric dysfunction,” says Kelly, who began her career working in pharmaceutical research at Wyeth
12 / Breakthrough
and Pfizer. “I’m interested in the molecular mechanisms
simply feels isolated — the biomarkers can look the same,
that control memory and social behavior and how those
Kelly says. Her lab has found enzymes in the hippocampus
mechanisms break down in disease states.”
that could present promising targets for drug therapy to
Memory is created by changing how easily neurons communicate with each other across a specific circuit.
normalize episodic memory function and its corresponding role in learned social behavior.
For a memory to last minutes to hours, the brain only has
“Our research shows that the enzyme PDE11A4 is
to modify proteins that already exist within synapses, the
required for rodents to form memories for social experi-
connection points between nerve cells. However, for a
ences. Not only does PDE11A4 modulate social behaviors,
memory to last hours to a lifetime, a signal has to make it all
but social isolation seems to break down PDE11A4,” she
the way to the nerve cell’s nucleus to trigger the production
says. “We have also shown that PDE11A4 controls how well
of new molecules that are then sent all the way back to the
rodents respond to lithium, a classic mood stabilizer used to
synapses to “glue in” the memory.
treat patients with bipolar disorder.
With so many molecular mechanisms involved, it’s easy
“We have great hope that our findings will lead to new
to understand why our long-term memory is so vulnerable
treatments for patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder
to disease. The circuit that encodes memories for social
or an autism spectrum disorder. PDE11A4 is only expressed
experiences involves the hippocampus, a horse-shoe
in the hippocampus, mostly in the ventral/anterior portion,
shaped area of the brain where many types of memory are
so we like it as a drug target. The restricted nature of
processed.
PDE11A4 expression gives us hope that a PDE11A4 drug
“Think of a child on the autism spectrum. They seem
could provide symptom relief in the hippocampus without
unable to appreciate what is and is not socially-acceptable
causing unwanted side effects elsewhere in the brain or
behavior. We believe this may be due, in part, to faulty
body.”
memory encoding, which leaves him/her unable to form
“We hope what we’re learning will have relevance to
memories involving social cues,” Kelly says. “And it becomes
autism, schizophrenia as well as memory and learning
a vicious cycle. We tend to ostracize those who don’t
deficiencies,” Kelly says. “The whole reason I got inspired
act normally, so they have even less opportunity to learn
to pursue this line of research is the concept of the brain
appropriate behavior. And social isolation starts to break
encoding memory. That’s a fascinating thing in itself.”
down the molecular mechanisms in the brain even further.” It turns out that the human brain doesn’t care if a person is actually isolated from human contact or if the person Spring 2015 / 13
Book Corner
New takes on the Civil War
Three new books from history faculty explore the bloodiest conflict on U.S. soil
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“The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War,” by Mark M. Smith (Oxford University Press, 2014). From the boom of cannons firing on Fort Sumter to the smell of decaying horseflesh at Gettysburg to the bodily discomfort aboard the H.L. Hunley submarine, the Civil War represented a variety of profound sensory experiences. “The sheer concentration of soldiers and the technology of warfare took a toll on an unprecedented scale,” Carolina Distinguished Professor of History Mark M. Smith writes in “The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege.” “So, too, sounds, smells, sights, tastes and touches were overwhelming in scope and intensity.” But Smith doesn’t limit his sensory history of the Civil War to the battlefield. Rather, he takes the reader from the “mounting crescendo” preceding secession all the way through to the “deafening” silence” of postwar Charleston, exploring the full range of experience between.
“The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War,” by Don H. Doyle (Basic Books, 2014). McCausland Professor of History Don H. Doyle’s “The Cause of All Nations” examines the Civil War not merely as a domestic battle between the North and the South over the future of a fractured Union, but as a global ideological battle with far-reaching consequences. That battle was waged in print, public oratory and private conversation over basic principles: human equality, liberty and democracy versus aristocracy and slavery. The various differences in worldview that precipitated the Civil War date back to the American and French Revolutions, Doyle explains, and their resolution on the battlefields of Antietam and Bull Run mark a decisive moment in world history. As he writes in his introduction, “At stake were nothing less than the fate of slavery and the survival of the ‘last best hope’ for the embattled experiment in government by the people. America’s Civil War shook the Atlantic world, and its reverberations at home and abroad shaped the world we inhabit today.”
“Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina,” by Thomas J. Brown (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Despite the fundamental conservatism that gives monuments of the Confederacy such as Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery and the S.C. State House their power, they have played a significant role in how white Southerners have adapted to the varied challenges of modernity over the past century and a half. In “Civil War Canon,” associate professor of history Thomas J. Brown threads the politics of race, gender and economics into an astute examination of the role played by these Palmetto State landmarks in shaping white southern memory. “White southern memory encompassed many local variations, and South Carolina was peculiar in some ways and less peculiar in others,” Brown writes. “A central aspect of its exceptionalism was that the state looked back on a singularly long and intense engagement with southern nationalism. In that sense, the Civil War canon of South Carolina is uniquely typical of Confederate memory.” Spring 2015 / 15
en Energy es Environment & Sustainability
Q& A With Nathan Richardson School of Law University of South Carolina Nathan Richardson joined the University of South Carolina’s law school faculty last fall, leaving an environmental policy think tank in Washington, D.C., to further pursue his research and teaching interests. He focuses on environmental law and climate change, and hopes to put his expertise to work in serving the Palmetto State.
16 / Breakthrough
What do you study in environmental law?
in how we choose fuels and how the electric power sector
There are two main thrusts to what I do. One is the regula-
works. That’s been mostly a state regulated thing with a little
tion of the electricity sector at the federal level. A lot of this
bit of federal involvement. So this is new territory for the
regulation has come out of the Clean Air Act, which is an old
EPA, but it does have the responsibility under the Clean Air
law that has been repurposed to address problems related
Act for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is contro-
to climate change. It includes some new rules proposed by
versial because the EPA hasn’t been in this game before and
the Environmental Protection Agency that might result in
because everything related to climate is controversial. It has
sweeping changes — big shifts away from coal toward gas or
the potential to significantly reduce emissions. It’s necessary
maybe nuclear and renewables to make electricity.
for the president to fulfill promises his administration made
I’m also interested in oil and gas but that’s mostly low-level,
as far as [greenhouse gas] reductions as part of a deal that
state regulation. Most oil and gas law in this country is state
was made with China last year. And it’s the first and biggest
law. My work has looked at how regulation in different states
step in going through the U.S. economy sector-by-sector in
has or hasn’t changed in response to really large increases in
trying to reduce emissions.
[oil and gas] production due to fracking. Is this an area of law that is constantly changing? Almost everything that I study at the federal level is existing law. In fact, the Clean Air Act in its modern form dates to the 1970s. Under the law, Congress pushes a lot of authority to the EPA. Even though the text of the law was written a long time ago, what that means in practice is that it’s still evolving today in big and important ways. Some states are changing the way that they regulate shale development, not just because of environmental risk but because there is oil and gas development happening in places that didn’t have it before. It’s really interesting to see those different approaches and how they work or don’t work and reflect the different values and preferences of the people locally. What are you focusing on now? The biggest area of my research now is federal regulation under the Clean Air Act specifically aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel such as coal plants and natural gas plants. The fossil fuel power sector is the biggest, single greenhouse gas emitting sector in the economy. More emissions come from coal and gas plants than from any other area, including cars and trucks. It’s natural for the EPA to look at that as the first place to regulate. If you can find
How did you get interested in this area of the law? I’ve always been interested in the environment. I spent a lot of time growing up outside, and I’m also kind of an energy and infrastructure nerd. I like systems and understanding the way that they work. In law school, I had great teachers and professors for energy and environmental law who really got me passionate about it. It was a really interesting time to be a lawyer [in this area of law] because people thought there would be new legislation on a cap-and-trade bill that would really change the energy landscape. But that didn’t happen, so, instead, policy has had to be cobbled together from all these other tools, and it really takes a lawyer to understand it. Are you still involved on the policy side of this research? I try to be. I’m hoping to do that more in South Carolina to try to understand the energy policy here. I’ve tried to make myself available to anyone that I can be helpful to. Ultimately it will be the states who are responsible for complying with the EPA rules. South Carolina, to its credit, is on top of this. It’s built a group of stakeholders to try to understand what perspective to take at the proposal stage. I’ve been in limited contact with that group and hope to work with people there more.
a way to get emissions down from those power plants, you might be able to do it, if not more cheaply, then more simply. EPA has proposed rules called the Clean Power Plan that apply to this electric power sector to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Why are these rules important? They are doing this through a part of the Clean Air Act that has almost never been used before. So in spite of it being a really old law, there’s new legal territory to research. Traditionally, this hasn’t been the EPA’s role, getting involved Spring 2015 / 17
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TH E ART O F SCI EN CE
The Ocean — Up Close When people see photographs by marine science senior Julia Bennett, they might think the pictures are of a distant galaxy. But her art captures a much closer frontier — magnifed images of sea plankton, which form the foundation for all sea life. “I was always doing photography and marine science simultaneously but separately. This is the first time I have been able to bridge them,” says Bennett, whose exhibition was on view earlier this year at the Columbia Museum of Art. The images, captured in-microscope, invite viewers to observe samples of plankton from an abstract visual framework and to consider artistically, and perhaps scientifically, the oceans surrounding us. Bennett achieves her otherworldly pictures by manipulating the microscope’s light sources. By approaching the project from an aesthetic point of view, she seeks to make viewers stop and wonder. “These pictures frame the ocean as an unexplored frontier right here on Earth. It’s an environment that should be explored, preserved and not used as a resource of exploitation,” she says.
W
Fall 2014 / 19
hs Health Sciences
Canary in a coal mine, crab on a coastline Steve Borgianini is looking millions of years into the past with his research, but what he learns about days long gone has plenty of relevance to the here and now. An evolutionary biologist, the USC Beaufort associate professor is interested in the original fish-out-of-water story — how fish evolved to climb onto dry land. Any sea-dwelling creature that’s eyeing a permanent move onto terra firma has a lot of evolutionary work to do, from learning how to breathe oxygen not dissolved in water to learning how not to dry out to conquering gravity without water buoyancy. But given that life originated in the oceans, it’s clearly been done before. And there’s no better place than coastal South Carolina to study the many steps involved in the ocean-to-land transition, Borgianini says. That’s because South Carolina’s coastline is unusually flat with few freshwater inputs, making for estuaries that extend very deep inland. The transition from ocean water to less-salty estuaries to freshwater flowing from the inland rivers covers considerable horizontal distance. And owing to residential and commercial development, there is now a living evolutionary laboratory, in a sense, set up adjacent to the S.C. coast. Buildings and impermeable roads and other surfaces have replaced forests and soil that once absorbed much of the precipitation from storms in the area. Water that used to take days, weeks, or years to recharge shallow aquifers and then trickle into estuaries is now diverted all at once as storm runoff. “It’s kind of hard to think of freshwater as a toxin, but in our 20 / Breakthrough
system it is,” Borgianini says. “It’s a great place to study saltwater-freshwater dynamics in estuaries and how altering patterns of flow in estuaries can impact the current species assemblages there.” One organism he focuses on is the red-jointed fiddler crab, Uca minax, which appears to be in the midst of an evolutionary journey from surf to turf. In its early larval stage, the crab still needs saltwater to survive, but this crustacean lives its whole adult life in the semiterrestrial environment at the fringes of the estuary, where rain, groundwater seeps, and freshwater streams and rivers create the freshwater habitat this crab seems to prefer. By studying the effects that inundations of freshwater have on species like fiddler crabs, on the phyto- and zooplankton that serve as the base of the aquatic food web, and on the communities of plants and animals in the same environment, Borgianini is gleaning insight into the evolutionary ladder that sea critters must climb to leave behind the salty life and life aquatic. He’s also looking toward the future of the Lowcountry’s marine ecosystems — and the entire world’s coastline, for that matter. Coastal construction often short circuits the “water cycle” that brings freshwater intrusions into estuaries, and the sea level rise predicted for coming decades will bring brackish water further inland everywhere. Understanding how shifts in the saltwater-freshwater balance will affect ecology is crucial to trying to ascertain ways to minimize environmental consequences. “I don’t think we can engineer our way out of this,” Borgianini says. “We’re going to have to deal with the circumstances that come along with it.”
Fall 2014 / 21
hs Health Sciences Fresh air in a crowded world
Whether it’s the flu, truck emissions or an anthrax attack, Shamia Hoque is on a mission to keep people safe when the air they breathe in this highly interconnected world is a hazard. And airborne hazards are everywhere — meaning there are just as many opportunities to thwart their spread, provided someone asks the right questions. If a co-worker returns from a vacation carrying TB, for example, can the disease’s reach be diminished by good office design? Can a teacher open the windows in a classroom without making students sick from the exhaust fumes of schoolbuses idling nearby? If an under-the-weather airline passenger is later found to have SARS, which passengers might merit quarantine and what precisely needs to be cleaned to ensure no one else propagates an epidemic? Hoque is an expert in understanding how airborne species — including gases such as carbon monoxide, particles of soot, pathogens like the H1N1 virus or aerosols like weaponized anthrax — behave in complex, real-world environments. 22 / Breakthrough
An assistant professor of civil engineering, Hoque develops computer simulations that predict where, how fast and in what concentrations these particles move. The computer models simultaneously take into account details such as furniture arrangements, ventilation register locations and the volume flowing through the air-handling system as well as how the particles’ toxicity might decrease over time. The models can be helpful both reactively and proactively, she says. Her dissertation examined the 2001 anthrax attacks on Congress, during which positive anthrax tests came back even from areas that were thought to have been cleaned. “One thing I want to do is take these detailed models that only I can understand and transform them into something simple, like an app,” she says. First responders could then plug in rudimentary information to find the most high-risk areas to focus on, while a more detailed analysis could subsequently identify unexpected places, such as ductwork, that might merit particular scrutiny.
Hoque has even received interest from the Department of Homeland Security for using her computer models forensically. From the residue locations of an airborne pathogen discovered after the fact, for example, Hoque might be able to reconstruct the time and place that it was first released. And proactively, an analysis can show which workspace designs best isolate airborne pathogens so that large-scale spread of winter colds (or worse) might be prevented in an office space. Or how adding a series of half-walls to an architect’s blueprint might reduce patientto-patient infections in a hospital under construction. As the built environment — the indoor and outdoor areas where people work, live and recreate — grows, the interdisciplinary movement to make its buildings, parks and interior designs integrated and energy-efficient has created close quarters for everyone. Shamia Hoque is part of the team ensuring that that togetherness can be as safe as possible.
am Advanced Materials Freeze-drying allergens USC chemical engineering professor Mike Matthews co-founded CarboNix LLC in 2006 with partner and engineering alumnus Al Quick. They were recently issued two patents for their allergen removal system that eliminates some of the underlying causes of severe allergies and asthma attacks. The heart of the system is CO2. “We originally started working with carbon dioxide for sterilizing engineered tissues,” he says. “But we found that our CO2 technology can be used to remove or deactivate a broad spectrum of the common asthma triggers found in people’s homes — in their carpets, their bedding, their upholstered furniture. We want to give doctors and patients a new intervention to help them reduce their attacks from asthma or severe allergies,” says Matthews. “We provide something that no current interventions will do.”
Carpets, upholstery and fabrics can harbor dust mites and all sorts of other allergens.
In the patented process, intensely cold carbon dioxide is sprayed onto fabric, killing mites and deactivating many of the proteins that can cause allergic reactions.
Soon after it hits the
The fabric never
fabric, the carbon
gets wet, preventing
dioxide is removed
the dampness that
by vacuum.
new critters find so alluring.
Fall 2014 / 23
In the pipeline
New approaches to learning disabilities
Scott Decker understands all too well what it’s like to be a child labeled as learning disabled. The former school psychologist was once in classes for slow learners before someone realized he simply learned differently. He ended up in accelerated classes for gifted students. “Learning how to read, do math and write are as critical as walking and breathing in our society,” Decker says. “So if you don’t have those basic skills, you are at a tremendous disadvantage.” Decker, now an assistant professor of psychology at Carolina, researches how we can better identify children who learn differently and find for them an alternate path to success. Typical learning disability diagnoses come through an hours-long evaluation process that happens when a seemingly bright child cannot perform well in school. That’s what happened for Decker as a student, and he has conducted and even created many of those diagnostic tests as a school psychologist. “I got into academia, so I could figure out how we can do it better,” he says. Turns out, learning disabilities are all in your head, or rather the brain. By watching brain activity when a child is attempting a thought activity that causes difficulty, like reading or math, researchers can distinguish children with learning problems with 90 percent certainty. 24 / Breakthrough
“Brain activity changes considerably when the child attempts to do the work that is a problem for them,” Decker says. “They’re not being defiant or not trying, you can see their brains are not functioning as well on those tasks.” However, the identification of the problem can be the path to treatment, Decker says. “Research has shown that it is possible to change brain activity through neurofeedback,” he says. “How do they do it? No one knows, but it does happen.” Decker has been awarded an ASPIRE grant from the University of South Carolina’s Office of Research to see whether he can help improve the identification of children with learning disabilities and find successful treatments. “That’s been my passion and my goal throughout my career: How do we use neuroscience to improve education for children and to use it to help children with disabilities?” Decker says. “If you have two children who can’t read, one might be because of language and the other might be because of vision. And the brain activity measures might help us determine that.” Decker thinks neurofeedback could be used to treat many disabilities, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as an alternative to using medication or trying to create some other accommodation for the disability. “If you can teach kids with learning disabilities how to reallocate their attentional resources to make their brain work differently, then over the course of time, you might actually improve how their brain processes information that is needed for reading, for math, for writing,” he says. “This would be actually fixing the underlying problem rather than treating symptoms.” Decker admits that is a bit of a controversial study area, determining whether disabilities can be managed through neurofeedback or if medication is necessary. Even so, he says, his work on whether brain scans can identify certain deficiencies is well worth the time. “An EEG test takes 20 minutes versus a really good evaluation for learning disabilities that takes about five hours,” he says. “If I could save time on testing, yet provide better identification and treatment options, that would be a useful service for children.”
Celebrating Ten Years of Discovery for Every Discipline
Magellan Scholar: Discovery for Every Discipline Science – Technology – Engineering – Math – Visual Art – Communication – History – Theater – Music Social Sciences – Medicine – Marketing – Business
Initiated in 2005, the Magellan Scholar program is celebrating a significant milestone this fall: 10 years and $3 million in funding for more than 1,000 undergraduate research projects. These numbers hint at a larger story of ‘Discovery in Every Discipline,’ and we invite you to visit uof. uof.sc/MagellanTen to get the big picture. Featuring photo galleries, news and stories of Magellan Scholars past and present, MagellanTen is your portal to the program’s 10th anniversary celebration slated for November. Join us and embark on your own voyage of discovering the array of fascinating undergraduate research projects at the University of South Carolina.
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As a Gamecock, my determination has No Limits. Yan Tong, faculty Computer Science and Engineering
A huge smile, a nervous grin, a devious wink or a deadpan gaze— facial expressions reflect our moods and let others know how we’re feeling. But what if a computer could do the same thing: recognize our feelings by the expressions on our faces? Yan Tong, a computer science researcher, is focused on computer vision and pattern recognition. She’s cataloging thousands of facial manifestations with the goal of programming computers to recognize certain emotions. If successful, her work in could help teach autistic children, improve online instruction or even detect impaired drivers. Yan’s study is just one way USC research is turning science fiction into science fact.
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