2023 Image of Research Program

2023 IMAGE OF

RESEARCH

Union Art Gallery March 20 to March 31, 2023 The Image of Research competition gives students the opportunity to engage creatively with their research, share behind-the-scenes views of their research processes, or portray their academic study in visual form.

IN LIGHT OF THE STORM My thesis work is centered on creating an updated severe weather ranking methodology. The goal is to then study and analyze the similarities among various outbreak environments to possibly allow for more accurate outbreak forecasts. Through Mississippi State’s severe storm methods field course, I was able to directly obtain measurements on pre-storm environments across the country. The image that I am submitting was taken directly after a major hailstorm, producing baseball-sized hail. This cloud formation is common in these types of storms due to the turbulence that they create. It creates a beautiful and almost otherworldly view.

Name: Adonte Knight Level: Master's Department: Geoscience

Working forests produce food, fiber, and ecosystem services which support benefits such as habitat for wildlife and safe recreation.

However, forests rely on healthy soils to provide these resources, and in the southeastern United States, surface mining has degraded the soils to the point where vegetation struggles to grow. This incentivizes the restoration of soil health on degraded land to support our forests. To test different restoration techniques, soil cores are collected and provide a glimpse into what the earth below looks like. Although many think of soil as just a brown hue, it can encompass colors ranging from black (organic matter) to red (iron) and even pink (heavy metals)! These vibrant soil cores are valuable not only to tell us about the chemical composition and soil health, but also visually displays the progress of our restoration work.

Name: Casey Iwamoto Level: PhD Department: Forestry

This image, taken at the Palace of Knossos in Crete, connects the past to the present by providing a glimpse of the palace ruins and a reconstruction of its destruction. My research looks at the immense social collapse that took place at the end of the Late Bronze Age in which palace sites such as this one were ransacked and burned to the ground. It is through looking at the ruins and the individuals who may have inhabited them that we can gain a better understanding of how this collapse may have happened, who may have been affected, and how life was able to continue after the tumultuous end of an era. Though this occurred 3000 years in the past, the ruins of such immense, powerful sites are still able to provide us with useful information about Mycenaean Greece at the palatial economy’s inception, height, and eventual collapse.

Name: Daniel Dillon Level: Master's Department: Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

Much of the focus in the field of forensic anthropology has been on developing better methods for decedent identification and determining more accurate time since death estimations within medicolegal contexts. Until recently however, there has been little emphasis placed on how socioeconomic considerations can be incorporated to better identify the role that inequality, through instances of social vulnerability and structural violence, plays in recovery times for individuals from different demographics. Further focuses on sociocultural and socioeconomic impacts in the field of forensic anthropology can help to connect the effects of systematic violence and vulnerability and emphasize how perceived stigmas for certain demographic groups can cause discrepancies in how politics, law enforcement, and medicolegal personnel assist and conduct casework through racial and socioeconomic factors. This image symbolizes a fraction of the multitude of individuals who identify within different demographic groups in the US, where individuals are recovered on disproportionate timelines.

Name: Elise Adams Level: Master's Department: Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a federally sponsored program administered by the Farm Service Agency which pays farmers annually if they agree to remove sensitive land from agricultural production for approximately 10 or 15 years and instead plant species that will improve environmental health and quality. The primary objectives of the CRP program are to improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, and provide wildlife habitat. In addition to these primary goals, CRP also promotes other ecosystem services such as micro climate, habitat fordifferent animal species including small organisms and wildlife, and so forth. This picture was captured in a CRP land in Mississippi State, showcasing a suitable habitat for fungi, mosses, ferns and graminoids. It is also a highlight of how a small parcel of CRP land can support a place to live for micro-organisms, which serves as a tiny forest nested in a larger forest.

Name: Htet Lin Naing Level: Master's Department: Forestry

‘MidSouth’ is a relatively low maintenance interspecific hybrid bunch grape currently grown in South Mississippi. While this cultivar is typically high in titratable acidity and produces a varietal red wine that is tart in flavor when fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, sequential or spontaneous fermentations using non-Saccharomyces from the skins of the grapes have the potential to improve the taste perception of this wine since some non-Saccharomyces can metabolize acid in wine. Wine was fermented with the addition of commercial S. cerevisiae at 3 days after harvest, 6 days after harvest, 9 days after harvest, or with no addition of S. cerevisiae. The sooner S. cerevisiae was added, the quicker the wine fermented; however, when the wine was made with no addition of S. cerevisiae it had a fruitier flavor and smoother mouthfeel. Thus, the question becomes “what species is this non-Saccharomyces, and will it consistently be there each year?”

Name: Haley N. Williams Level: PhD Department: Plant and Soil Sciences

Gopher frogs are a species in decline in the southeastern United States. These frogs spend most of their lives underground in burrows in longleaf pine savannahs, emerging each year to migrate to breeding ponds in late winter. As part of a multi-state effort to learn more about the movements and upland habitat uses of this rare species, I place radiotransmitter belts on frogs leaving breeding ponds in Alabama. More than just a froggy fashion accessory, these belts allow me to track where the frogs are going and what natural features the frogs are using in the landscape. By monitoring the movements and microhabitat uses of gopher frogs, we can work towards habitat management strategies, restoration efforts, and reintroduction of frogs within their historic range. This particular frog was resting under pine straw during its 1.5km journey to its cozy stump hole home in the uplands.

Name: Krista Ruppert Level: PhD Department: Wildlife, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

Depicted in this image is a single live sperm surrounded by a sea of its fallen comrades. This photo was taken using a camera mounted to a fluorescent microscope and highlights the utility of fluorescence microscopy for measuring a critical metric when evaluating sperm quality: cell viability. Live cells fluoresce bright green and dead cells fluorescence bright red; when a cell dies, membrane integrity is lost and allows for the red fluorescent stain to enter the pores of the dead cell. At the Conservation Physiology Lab at MS State, we apply several assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to support conservation breeding programs for threatened amphibian species at zoos and aquariums all over the United States. Ultimately, ART is used to increase population numbers and to introduce new genetic diversity into endangered animal populations both in the wild and for animal species kept under human care.

Name: Li-Dunn Chen Level: PhD Department: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Entomology, and Plant Pathology

Name: Larra Myron Diboyan Level: Master's Department: Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

Name: Lacy Dolan Level: PhD Department: Wildlife, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

Working forests provide unique opportunities for biodiversity research, conservation, and management. At the landscape scale, working forests consist of a patchwork of different stand ages and characteristics that support a variety of flora and fauna communities.

This photo showcases an example, where the blooms of a shadeintolerant mountainmint plant provides nectar for a tiger swallowtail butterfly. Mountainmint cannot grow well under the shade of a dense tree canopy and relies on the removal of trees to allow direct sunlight to reach the ground. Without these conditions, many plants cannot grow and provide food and resources for wildlife such as pollinators.

Research is currently showing that the time of young tree growth is also an opportunity for blossoming life.

Name: Madalyn Stoecker Level: Master's Department: Wildlife, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

These columns of the common slime mold Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa bear external spores bound for propagation by insects and air currents. They occur exclusively on decaying logs. During the other parts of their life cycle they exist as single-celled microscopic amoebae and as a net of slime within the decaying wood. When the environment is suitably moist, they emerge and form these pillar structures, called fruiting bodies. The fruiting bodies are visible to the naked eye, between 2-3 millimeters tall, but here are magnified approximately 40 times larger. Species identification is traditionally determined by the shapes of these fruiting bodies, in this case appearing as dew-laden fingers; However, my work sequencing hundreds of genes reveals that morphology alone is not sufficient.

Many cryptic species hide behind the form you see here.

Name: Nicholas Fry Level: PhD Department: Biological Sciences

An Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) chick has hatched on a busy reservoir in northern Alabama. Little does she know, while she calls to a team of researchers for fish and hides in their shade on a hot summer day, that her life will become part of a large-scale project to better understand the ecology of her species. During my PhD, I have visited 91 Osprey nests in four southeastern states. Each nest is visited twice each year, to gather information on productivity, to collect DNA samples, and to place unique identification bands and GPS trackers on the birds. We banded 236 Ospreys and deployed 27 GPS transmitters, which allow us to follow these birds on their longdistance migrations to Brazil and Peru. It’s amazing to think this little chick will travel over 6,000 km each year on a round trip to South America and return to sweet home Alabama.

Name: Natasha Murphy Level: PhD Department: Wildlife, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

As a researcher working with mutant construction of Aeromonas hydrophila gene, the process of overlap PCR gel cutting is an essential step in my work. This process involves amplifying two separate DNA fragments with overlapping ends using PCR, then cutting the bands from an agarose gel and splicing them together to create a larger fragment. This technique allows me to precisely manipulate the genetic material of the bacterium to study its function and behavior.

By creating specific mutations in the gene of interest, I can explore the effects of these changes on the bacterial phenotype, including its ability to cause disease or survive in different environments. Overall, the overlap PCR gel cutting process is a critical tool in my research toolkit, enabling me to make precise and targeted genetic modifications to better understand the virulence of Aeromonas hydrophila.

Name: Saida Zinnurine Level: Master's Department: Comparative Biomedical Sciences

Molds are microscopic fungi that flourish on living tissues. They thrive in warm, moist environments and can grow on a variety of different foods, including bread, cheese, fruits, and vegetables. While some types of mold are harmless, others may produce mycotoxins that could cause foodborne diseases. In addition to the health risk, mold can result in food spoilage and unpalatability. This is a particular concern for the food industry, where spoiled or contaminated food may lead to outbreaks and product recalls. Researchers at the Department of Food Science work on isolating and characterizing mold in foods. They perform microbiological identification and classification of molds, which play an important role in monitoring food safety as well as food spoilage to prevent future contamination.

By identifying the specific type of mold present in a food product, the contamination source is determined, and further steps can be considered to prevent, manage, and control the risk.

Name: Zonia Elizabeth Caro Carvajal Level: Master's Department: Food Science, Nutrition, and Health Promotion