Fall 2018 Research Magazine

UP IN SMOKE | 16

WE THE PEOPLE | 26

POISON PILL | 32

A group of tobacco researchers upends traditional thinking on e-cigarettes.

In a new book, law professor Eric Segall examines the evolution of originalism.

Carbon monoxide is a deadly gas. It could also be a life-saving medicine.

GE O RG I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

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FA L L 2018

STARGAZING’S NEW AGE How the BIG DATA REVOLUTION has changed the way Georgia State scientists make discoveries about solar weather, faraway planets and the history of the universe. -----> Page 18

BEING A

NEXTGENERATION RESEARCH UNIVERSITY MEANS

✓ Driving INNOVATION ✓ COLLABORATING across fields of study

✓ Laying the groundwork for LIFE-CHANGING DISCOVERIES AS THE LARGEST PUBLIC RESEARCH UNIVERSITY IN GEORGIA, we’re checking all the boxes.

Learn more at

RESEARCH.GSU.EDU

CONTENTS

FORWARD 5 NOTEWORTHY 40 NOW YOU SEE IT 46

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THE MYTH OF ORIGINALISM

FROM TOXIN TO THERAPY

The digital age has given astronomers access to more information than ever before, and Georgia State’s astroinformatics team is mining new insights from the data deluge.

An interview with law professor Eric Segall, whose new book examines the doctrine of originalism and how it’s evolved from judicial theory to political weapon.

Professor Binghe Wang has spent years working to turn a poisonous gas into a medicine with the power to treat illnesses ranging from cancer to sickle cell disease to traumatic brain injury.

ASTRONOMY’S BIG DATA REVOLUTION

IMAGE COURTESY OF NASA COVER PHOTO BY TREVOR TRAYNOR

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GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FROM THE VICE PRESIDENT

A Place For Innovation IN THIS ISSUE of the Georgia State Research Magazine we highlight the university’s astroinformatics program, with special attention paid to what Regents’ Professor Douglas Gies rightly calls a “crown jewel” of research at the university: the CHARA Array.

Located across the country in Mount Wilson, Calif., CHARA — the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy — is one of the most powerful telescopes of its kind, allowing scientists to study stars in startling detail. It’s one of the most high-profile research facilities at Georgia State, but it’s by no means the only highimpact one.

For 20 years, we have operated one of a very small number of biosafety level four (BSL-4) labs in the country at a university. It’s where our faculty can safely conduct important research on select viruses and pathogens, working to design vaccines and treatments with the potential to save untold lives. And as Georgia State continues to grow our biomedical research portfolio, building more and better spaces for scientists to conduct their often-groundbreaking work is critical.

The third phase of our Science Park will soon allow us to expand the university’s research footprint. The

building, which is in the design stage, will join Petit Science Center and Research Science Center on our downtown Atlanta campus. When completed in 2021, it will contain eight floors of biosafety-commissioned labs, including a floor of BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs for infectious disease work.

Having the right facilities is vital for a thriving public research university, which is tasked with not only training the next generation of scientists, but finding solutions to complex problems and producing the inventions of tomorrow. As science and technology continue to reshape our world, investments in spaces like Georgia State’s Science Park will enhance the university’s reputation — and our shared future.

James Weyhenmeyer Vice President for Research & Economic Development

Publishers Don Hale, Andrea Jones Editor Jennifer Rainey Marquez Contributors Sonya Collins, LaTina Emerson, William Inman, Jennifer Rainey Marquez, Shaun Raviv, Nola Taylor Redd Creative Director Renata Irving Art Director Matt McCullin Designer Reid Schulz Contributing Illustrators Reid Schulz Contributing Photographers Meg Buscema, Carolyn Richardson, Ben Rollins, Steve Thackston, Trevor Traynor Send address changes or story ideas to: Jennifer Rainey Marquez, editor, Georgia State University Research Magazine P.O. Box 3983 Atlanta, GA 30302-3999 email: jmarquez@gsu.edu Georgia State University Research Magazine is published by Georgia State University. The magazine is dedicated to communicating and promoting the high level of research at Georgia State University, as well as the outstanding accomplishments of its faculty. © 2018 Georgia State University | 19-RES4561

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PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

FORWARD

A WEAPON AGAINST EBOLA 9 | SOCIAL MEDIA’S BIG IMPACT 12 | THE VAPE DEBATE 16

TREASURES OF TERMINUS

THE PHOENIX PROJECT, more than 100,000 artifacts collected by a team of Georgia State archaeologists, tells the city’s story through unearthed historical objects.

BY SHAUN RAVIV | PHOTOS BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FORWARD ARTIFACTS

Catalog No.: a82/173 Bullets from Battle of Atlanta, 1864; Union Army Williams Cleaner bullet (right)

T

HERE IS BURIED TREASURE at Georgia State University. Stacked high and deep in more than 500 boxes, thousands and thousands of artifacts — bullet casings from the Civil War, mystery tonics in antique glass bottles, creepy toys, fashion accessories, ancient grooming tools — tell the story of Atlanta’s history.

This massive array of objects is called the Phoenix Project, and Georgia State professors and students have been methodically studying, cataloging and mapping each item since 2011.

Collected all over the city between 1976 and 1980, the objects are the fruit of one of America’s earliest urban archaeological projects — the roving excavation that followed construction crews as the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) cleared land, leveled blocks and tunneled underground to build the first iteration of its rail system.

Jeffrey Glover, associate professor of anthropology, has curated the Phoenix Project for years in hopes of providing the public with a different kind of city history, a slice of Atlanta’s past through the lens of historical objects. The exact number of items collected is still unknown, but between 1976 and 1980 more than 100,000 were cataloged, making it the largest archeological collection ever associated with the city.

“I recognized there was a great opportunity and, in some ways, an ethical obligation to try to use this collection for research,” Glover says. “There’s a problem in archaeology where legacy collections sit in storage and never receive the type of research they deserve.”

While Glover and his team have fully reprocessed more than 20 percent of the collection, Georgia State alumna Lori Thompson calculated in 2016 it would take 4,750 person-hours to process the remaining boxes. That includes repackaging each item in polyethylene plastic bags, creating a digital catalog with a new purely numeric identification system, scanning all the notes and documentation, and mapping every bit of it.

A bottle from Jacobs’ Pharmacy, bullets shot during the Battle of Atlanta, the creepy doll head, a flour token and thousands more gems mined from the earth under our feet — these are rare clues to the wild history of a sleepy town once called Terminus that grew into a leading global city.

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Catalog No.: a3182/170 Porcelain doll head, c. 1900, made in Germany

Catalog No.: a1/172 Medallion, District Grand Lodge No. 18, Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America, Auburn Avenue

Artifacts Unearthed

Catalog No.: a56/152

The Phoenix Project contains more than 100,000 artifacts once buried beneath Atlanta

Capitola flour token, five cents, Atlanta Milling Co., c. 1930

Catalog No.: a3168/170 Kaolin clay pipe, c. 1890, manufactured by Duncan McDougall, Scotland

Catalog No.: a548/133 Pro–phy–lac–tic tooth brush, c. 1870–1890, manufactured by Florence Mfg. Co., Florence, Mass.

Catalog No.: a83/173 Pewter canteen, c. 1860

Catalog No.: p413/171 Glass iodine tincture bottle, c. 1900–1920

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FORWARD SELF-DEFENSE

Body, Heal Thyself How do cells repair damaged DNA? A Georgia State chemist finds it’s as simple as pinch, push, pull.

BY LATINA EMERSON | ILLUSTRATION BY REID SCHULZ

Acquired genetic mutations — or errors in our DNA — can occur at any time in a person’s life, the result of environmental factors such as radiation exposure or smoking. These mutations can affect the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of the body’s cells — eventually leading to serious illnesses like cancer. To prevent this from happening, cells have elaborate mechanisms to repair imperfections in their genetic code.

Ivaylo Ivanov, associate professor of chemistry, and his colleagues have worked to better understand the process of how the body repairs DNA, which could help scientists develop new ways to fix inherited mutations that cause diseases. They recently made a discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how a key enzyme — known as thymine DNA glycosylase (TDG) — initiates the repair process. TDG acts as the first line of defense by identifying the damaged base (the building blocks of the DNA double helix) and removing it using a “pinch-push-pull” mechanism.

Step 1 TDG scans DNA throughout the body in search of errors. Using molecular modeling, the researchers revealed how molecular instability can guide the enzyme on its search.

Step 2 When TDG finds a mistake, it zeroes in on the specific site. TDG pinches the DNA’s backbone, providing space for the damaged base to separate and flip out of the helix.

Step 3

TDG pushes the damaged DNA base out of its position in the DNA double helix.

Step 4

TDG pulls the damaged DNA base completely out of the DNA molecule and works as a pair of molecular “scissors” to cut it off. TDG then hands off the DNA molecule to other enzymes, which insert a correct base and complete the repair process.

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PHARM AID

THE HUNT FOR AN EBOLA DRUG Georgia State scientists have identified a chemical compound that may work against the lethal virus.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | ILLUSTRATION BY REID SCHULZ

IN DECEMBER 2013, a 2-year-old boy synthesis, and identified 56 that in a small village in Guinea fell ill and impeded virus activity while showing died. Days later his 3-year-old sister and limited toxicity to human cells. Of those, their pregnant mother also died. That three were particularly potent against was the beginning of the largest Ebola the Ebola virus, and one — benzooutbreak in recorded history, during quinoline — also showed antiviral activity which the virus spread rapidly across against other viruses, including the West Africa, killing more than 11,000 highly fatal Marburg virus and the Zika people in two years. virus. Their findings were published in Since then, scientists have been the journal Antiviral Research in March diligently working to create what would 2018. Identifying the compounds is be the first Food and Drug Adminis- part of a broader effort to better tration-approved vaccine or treatment understand how the Ebola virus grows for the deadly virus. At Georgia and then to develop new treatment State, professor and world-renowned strategies, Basler says. Benzoquinoline virologist Christopher F. Basler and his could eventually become an active colleagues are trying to uncover how ingredient in a drug aimed at Ebola, filoviruses, including Ebola, manage although Luthra cautions there’s still a to replicate while evading the body’s lot of work to be done. immune system.

“We need to learn more about how “By the time the immune response the compound is actually working,” finally kicks in, the virus has replicated Luthra says, “and we have to evaluate so fast that you can’t fight it off,” says how a person’s genes may affect their Priya Luthra, assistant professor in the response to the drug.”

Institute of Biomedical Sciences and a Researchers are also still searching researcher in Basler’s lab. “And that’s for other molecules that may work when the disease takes hold.” against the virus.

One potential target for an Ebola “The search never stops,” Luthra says. drug would be the machinery and “The goal is to find a drug that could be activities required for RNA synthesis, a given prophylactically during the virus’s part of viral replication. incubation period and a drug that could Luthra and others in the Basler lab be given therapeutically after symptoms screened a library of 200,000 small begin and also a vaccine. You want all molecule compounds to identify these things so clinicians have a full potential inhibitors of Ebola RNA toolkit to use.”

Fighting Ebola in Animals There are five known species of the Ebola virus, four of which can cause the disease in people. The fifth, known as Reston virus, affects primates and pigs but not humans. It was discovered nearly 30 years ago during an outbreak in monkeys that were brought to an animal facility in Reston, Va., from the Philippines. Now, Basler has received more than $400,000 from the National Institutes of Health to study the Reston virus and how it differs from other strains of Ebola.

“We’re trying to better understand how the virus grows, how it replicates and how the disease that it causes in animals differs from what you see with Ebola,” he says. “If we can understand what’s different, that may suggest ways to reduce the severity of the disease.”

Basler and his co-investigator, Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, are also interested in a protein found in the Ebola virus known as VP35, which suppresses the body’s immune response.

The pair have identified mutations that can be inserted into VP35 to disable this function, preventing the virus from spreading. They plan to apply the same approach to engineer a Reston virus that doesn’t cause disease in animals.

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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UNFAIR HOUSING

BUYER BEWARE Rent-to-own financing practices have long preyed on minority homebuyers.

And according to professor Dan Immergluck, they’re making a comeback in African-American neighborhoods.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ

H

ow do you buy a house without ever from work he conducted for Atlanta Legal Aid really owning it? Contract for deed to analyze the activities of Harbour Portfolio, a (CFD) home sellers purport to offer a Dallas-based firm that has bought up thousands shot at homeownership to those shut of foreclosed homes in cities around the country. out of conventional mortgages, but there’s a big Immergluck identified geographic patterns of catch: the seller retains the legal title until the final Harbour’s sales and lending activities, uncovering payment is made, and buyers do not build equity. the reemergence of CFD sales in AfricanWith just one missed payment, buyers — who are American neighborhoods nationally and in Fulton in reality tenants — can void the agreement, losing County, Georgia. their homes.

Houses offered by contract sellers like Harbour The financing practice, though not illegal are often clustered in poor communities and in most places, is often exploitative. Contract in barely habitable condition. If buyers can’t sellers targeted African-American communities hold up their end of the deal — making monthly during the Civil Rights era, when redlining policies payments, quickly repairing and maintaining the prevented blacks from obtaining bank loans. home, and paying the taxes and insurance — the Since then, CFD lending has sometimes drawn seller can evict them, then turn around and resell the attention of federal regulators, but it hasn’t the property. completely disappeared. In fact, 50 years after “There’s a lot of incentives to churn these the passage of the Fair Housing Act, it is houses, because every time they get a new buyer reemerging in predominantly black neighborhoods, they get a new deposit,” says Immergluck. according to research by Dan Immergluck, While CFD purchases can be devastating to professor in the Urban Studies Institute at the individual buyers, Immergluck notes the lending Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. But practice may also harm communities. unlike in the 1950s and 1960s, when contract “Many of these companies are not interested selling was a locally financed operation, today’s in economic redevelopment or in helping lowCFD sellers are often private equity firms. income families find stable housing,” he says.

Imergluck’s study, published in the International “The practice perpetuates disinvestment in Journal of Urban and Regional Research, stems disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

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FORWARD CANINE THERAPY

UNLEASHING RECOVERY Researchers find that service dogs can ease veterans’ tough road back from combat HOW CONTRACT FOR DEED RIPS OFF BUYERS It’s not clear how often buyers end up losing their homes through CFD agreements, which, unlike traditional mortgages, don’t have to be reported to a federal regulatory agency. However, even if buyers manage to pay off the contract, the practice can still leave them vulnerable.

No inspection. Contract lenders often snap up properties in need of major repair and offer them “as is,” making the buyer responsible for swiftly bringing the home up to code.

“These are often houses that no bank would touch because they would never pass inspection or get insured,” says Immergluck.

But without an inspection, buyers may not be prepared for the real cost of fixing up the house.

Inflated values. The properties may be falling apart, yet they’re often sold for more than what they’re worth. How? “There’s no bank appraisal, which is a big check on the value of the home,” says Immergluck. “On top of that, the homes are priced without the deferred maintenance costs built in. Normally, if the roof is about to cave in, that would get uncovered in an inspection and affect the final sale price.”

High interest rates. Contract sellers may effectively charge interest rates as high as nine or 10 percent, twice the market rates.

ACCORDING TO THE RAND CENTER FOR MILITARY HEALTH POLICY RESEARCH, 20 percent of veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and these vets are increasingly turning to alternative therapies to manage their symptoms. One of the most popular is service dogs.

Despite the demand, however, more study is needed to determine whether service dogs — which require rigorous training that can take months and cost thousands of dollars — are effective at helping veterans cope. Ashli Owen-Smith, assistant professor of Health Policy and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Public Health, is one of those adding to the growing body of research. In a recent study, she found that trained service dogs can help reduce symptoms of stress — including suicidal thoughts — among U.S. military veterans.

Owen-Smith and her collaborators at Kaiser Permanente interviewed and observed 41 veterans in Oregon and Georgia with service dogs, along with eight caregivers recruited through service dog training agencies. Participants reported their service dogs reduced hypervigilance, a state of increased alertness that can bring about heightened anxiety and lead to exhaustion.

The service dogs also woke veterans from nightmares, which resulted in better and longer sleep.

In addition, the researchers found service dogs improved veterans’ emotional connection with others, community participation and physical activity, while reducing suicidal impulses and medication use.

Canine-centric therapy may not work for everyone. (In addition to the expense, some veterans may find it difficult to adjust to life with a service dog.) Still, Owen-Smith says that service dogs could help address some symptoms of PTSD and may be viewed as less stigmatizing compared with conventional treatments such as psychotropic medications.

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FORWARD Q&A

As the World Tweets Denish Shah, director of the Social Media Intelligence Lab, talks about how social media insights are changing the way companies — even cities — operate.

INTERVIEW BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | PHOTO BY BEN ROLLINS

You oversee the Social Media Intelligence Lab, which is part of the Institute for Insight at the Robinson College of Business. What kind of work is the lab doing?

Every day, there are millions and millions of conversations happening organically on social media platforms.

There’s a popular practice called social listening, which is really just paying attention to what people are saying when they talk about your company. Our lab goes a step further by inferring trends and patterns from those conversations, and deriving meaningful insights. What are the dominant conversation topics? What are the sentiments around those topics? To what extent do these conversations impact or help predict other events?

Data on social media can be very messy. Our goal is to build smart algorithms and develop methodologies based on machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques to extract relevant insights.

These insights can inform the way brands address substantive issues — whether it’s dealing with a crisis, engaging with consumers or improving their reputation.

You’ve been working with the City of Atlanta on a reputation-building project. Can you talk about that?

City reputation is increasingly becoming a big deal.

Cities compete with each other for resources, be it talent or investment from corporations — just look at how cities have been tripping over themselves to lure Amazon HQ2. The Social Media Intelligence Lab is working with the Metro Atlanta Chamber to build a real-time reputation tracker for the city.

What do you know so far about the way people view Atlanta?

There’s a huge difference between the perceptions of people who are here and those of people who live outside of Georgia, and especially outside the U.S. Recognition of Atlanta is very minimal internationally. People don’t know that we are a global leader in fintech, that we Shah is also the Barbara and Elmer Sunday Associate Professor of Marketing.

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are home to 15 Fortune 500 firms. The international That’s interesting given that lawsuits are often seen as audience to a large extent still thinks of us as “Olympics.” a negative — a drain on resources.

That’s true, but foodborne illnesses also cost a lot of You’re also looking at the role personality plays in money. We’re not saying you should always have litigation. But we are curious whether there is an social media engagement. Can you explain?

A lot of brands have conversations with consumers unintended positive impact on the psyche of consumers. on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If we can see that it enhances the perceived importance What we want to determine is: If you customize those or perceived urgency to practice food safety, then we can conversations based on users’ personalities, rather than look at other ways to create a similar effect. traditional factors such as demographics, can a brand While we’re on the subject of positive impact: more meaningfully engage digital media users?

Traditionally, companies have focused intensely on So brands might begin sounding more like the users profits. But you argue that the new focus should be customer well-being. they’re talking to?

Potentially. Rather than talking like robots, these days Customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a metric that basically brands tend to infuse their social media presence with looks at the total profit from the expected lifetime of character and personality. But what if brands were to a customer. Every firm works hard to maximize this deviate away from their core personality to more closely metric. But we believe that maximizing CLV is not match the personality of the end user? If a very formal sustainable unless the firms are also improving the brand — like CNN, for example — starts having personal well-being of those consumers. a casual conversation with a Millennial and a more formal conversation with a Baby Boomer, could that Why so? lead to more engagement than having the same formal Consumers are more information empowered than ever before. They don’t take what a brand is saying at face conversation with everyone? value. They do their own research and then they share How would you determine users’ personalities, though? that information with millions of other consumers on We’ve built an algorithm that can infer the personality social media. Millennials especially are very concerned traits of individuals based on how they communicate on about whether the companies whose products they social media: the kind of words they use, their patterns of consume are doing more harm than good — and as communications. Brands could use that information to a group, they represent the largest source of lifetime group consumers into different personality types. We’ve profits for a firm. If brands don’t wake up to this fact, in collected data from several top brands and found that, as the long term it’s going to hit them pretty hard.

In fact, we are already seeing evidence of this backlash of today, nobody is really varying their communications based on personality. So our next step would be to work in the case of processed food. Soda consumption in the with a brand and run field experiments to see how the U.S. has declined in the last 12 consecutive years, and big-name brands selling processed foods continue to practice plays out. experience drops in sales each quarter.

You’re also working with Timothy Lytton, professor in the College of Law, to evaluate how social media Is there a standard way to measure consumers’ feelings about whether a brand makes them better off? influence food safety practices.

What we’re really looking at is how litigation influences We’re actually working to quantify that right now. We conversations around food safety and ultimately started by asking consumers how different products and consumers’ risk perceptions around foodborne illnesses. brands positively impact different dimensions of their Our question is, when government food safety warnings well-being: Is it making you healthier, is it making you are accompanied by lawsuits against major food more productive, is it helping you save money? We have manufacturers or restaurant chains, do consumers tend developed a new metric called CLIMB (Customer Life IMprovement from a Brand) to quantify the extent to to be more compliant?

We believe that social and news media may be which consumption of a brand is improving customers’ playing a role, so we’ve begun analyzing data during lives. The goal is to equate that score to financial periods of foodborne illness outbreaks. Our hypothesis performance of firms over time.

Right off the bat, we’re seeing extremely strong is that when a litigation occurs — regardless of whether it goes through a trial — it could reinforce the perceived intrinsic loyalty towards brands that have a very high importance of food safety through conversations on life-improvement score. That’s because consumers feel social media, which in turn could lead to better food a deep sense of gratitude towards brands that help improve their lives. safety practices by consumers.

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FORWARD GRAY MATTER

MINDING THE BRAIN The university’s Neuroscience Institute celebrates a decade of discovery

BY SONYA COLLINS | PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

In 1998, neuroscience research in Atlanta was transformed by a jaw-dropping $37 million.

The grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation to fund the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN), established by Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience Elliott Albers and Tom Insel, then director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University. (The interinstitutional collaboration is also supported by the Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Atlanta University Center’s four member schools.)

“At a time when Georgia State was not a heavyweight in research, this was the biggest single grant ever to come to us,” says Nancy Forger, professor of neuroscience.

The CBN brought in diverse faculty and fostered scientific study across disciplines. It also lay the groundwork for the university to create its own hub for neuroscience education and research. In 2008, Georgia State founded the Neuroscience Institute (NI), among the first such centers in the nation. Even today, an independent neuroscience department or institute remains a rarity at public universities.

“The Institute solidified the leading role that the university held in social neuroscience,” says Walter Wilczynski, founding director of the Institute and professor of neuroscience and psychology. “It made us a major player in that world both nationally and internationally.”

In the decade since, the NI has become one of the most interdisciplinary centers on campus.

“It was meant to be the focal point of interactions among people who did neuroscience-related work

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No brains were harmed in the making of this cake.

across the university, no matter their background,” says Forger, who now leads the Institute.

The faculty come from 17 departments, including “some you wouldn’t even think of, like religious studies,” says Forger. Their research ­— so far an estimated 500 publications in peer-reviewed journals — has made the Institute a leader in the fields of behavioral neuroscience, neuroinflammation and sex differences in the brain.

Among their biggest discoveries is that serotonin, long believed to decrease aggression, has the opposite effect in women. Faculty in the Institute have also revealed that women metabolize morphine differently from men and thereby require higher doses for pain relief. More recently, NI researchers found that social stress — such as discrimination — alters bacteria in the gut. Looking ahead, the faculty anticipate a new focus on translational research.

“At the Neuroscience Institute, we truly embody the idea that science and training should span departmental boundaries,” says Wilczynski. “Some of the most important work in our field comes out of collaboration.”

MULTILINGUALISM

BUILDING A

WORLD Georgia State is leading the way in training teachers for dual-language classrooms

BY SONYA COLLINS

ne in 10 students in the U.S. is an Englishlanguage learner, and by 2060 nearly one in five residents is expected to be foreign-born. For teachers, that means classrooms filled with children conversing in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and Arabic.

The state of Georgia recently has become part of a shifting educational model that recognizes speakers of English and speakers of other languages have a lot to teach — and learn from — each other.

“Research is very clear: Well-structured bilingual education provides the best learning outcomes both for English learners and for English speakers learning a new language,” says Sue Kasun, assistant professor of language education and director of the university’s Center for Transnational and Multilingual Education, introduced by the College of Education and Human Development last year.

Not a new concept nationwide, duallanguage immersion classrooms began cropping up around the state in the last decade. In the model, English speakers and speakers of a partner language — most often Spanish — learn together. Students spend half their school day studying English, language arts and social studies in English and the other half studying science, math and the partner language in that language. Experts say that having speakers of English and the partner language study side-by-side gives students

an authentic context for practicing their developing language skills.

With the Center for Transnational and Multilingual Education, the university is spearheading the effort to prepare Georgia educators to teach in these classrooms.

(Fifty public and charter schools in the state offer dual-language immersion in Spanish, Chinese, French, German or Japanese.)

“People are crossing borders, both physically and metaphorically, more each day,” says Kasun. “Our work, in part, is an effort to increase the multilingualism of all people in recognition of how we are coming into greater contact with each other, whether it be through immigration, travel or language learning.”

While other universities have centers that focus on pedagogical research into language teaching and learning, the Center for Transnational and Multilingual Education is a pioneer in its emphasis on the cultural implications of living in an increasingly globalized world.

“We want to focus on transnational capacity-building that everyone could benefit from, so that we understand each other better the world over,” she says.

The center has begun to build a body of research into best practices in the duallanguage classroom that its faculty will impart to future teachers.

Yet Kasun says, “Before we even get to pedagogy, caring, openness to other backgrounds and wanting to support all kids is the first step to good teaching.”

$ MILLION

Grant money awarded to faculty to advance duallanguage immersion education

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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FORWARD VAPING

In two new studies, Georgia State researchers upend traditional thinking on e-cigarettes.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | ILLUSTRATION BY REID SCHULZ

IN

THE LITTLE OVER A DECADE that e-cigarettes have been on the market, they’ve gone from an obscure quitsmoking aid to a ubiquitous “lifestyle” product that’s particularly popular among young people, thanks in part to a major manufactuerer’s slick, youth-oriented marketing campaign.

This has created a divide among public health experts and policymakers about the best way to regulate what is now a $ 5 billion industry in the U.S. Because while vaping may be a safer, healthier alternative for smokers who want to quit, it’s also attracting teenagers and young adults who otherwise might never light up.

Now a recent study by faculty at the university’s School of Public Health casts doubt on vaping’s major purported health benefit — helping smokers ditch cigarettes. The researchers examined the responses of more than 850 smokers who

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participated in an initial survey in 2015 and a followup survey a year later, and found that 90 percent of those who used both traditional cigarettes and e-cigarettes were still lighting up at the end of the year.

This may be because smokers just don’t find e-cigarettes satisfying, says lead author Scott Weaver, a research assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics.

“A lot of e-cigarettes, particularly the older generations available in 2015, simply aren’t as effective at delivering that hit of nicotine, so smokers just give it up,” he says. Weaver also notes that some smokers use e-cigarettes — which are sometimes allowed in places that ban traditional cigarettes, like offices or restaurants — as a way to supplement their nicotine intake.

However, there’s a newer type of e-cigarette that comes very close to mimicking cigarettes’

ability to deliver a potent dose of nicotine with each puff — JUUL. Released in the U.S. in 2015, the product took off two years later as more and more consumers took up vaping. Today, JUUL commands nearly 70 percent of the retail e-cigarette market — more than Marlboro had at the peak of its popularity.

While Weaver and his team say that JUUL could potentially be a more powerful tool to help smokers quit, in a separate study university researchers have found that it’s also designed as a powerful temptation for young people.

“In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control published data showing a sharp decline in e-cigarette use among high school students and young adults, and yet anecdotally we’re constantly hearing reports about this new product that all the kids are using,” says Jidong Huang, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of health management and policy. “Part of our motivation in conducting this research was to evaluate whether the national survey was really capturing the JUUL consumer.”

According to Huang, the discrepancy may be because many teens and young adults who vape do not identify as e-cigarette users.

“A lot of teens are using JUUL, but they don’t think they’re using a tobacco product and they’re not reporting it,” says Huang. “They think of it as technology product — a new gadget.”

That the JUUL device more closely resembles a flash drive than a cigarette doesn’t help.

Teenagers may also be naive about just how much nicotine they’re getting. JUUL uses a prefilled e-liquid cartridge known as a “pod,” which comes in a variety of flavors (mango, mint). Just one pod contains more than twice the amount of nicotine in a pack of cigarettes.

Huang and his colleagues examined JUUL’s sales data and marketing campaigns, and found that — despite the company’s insistence that its product is intended for adult smokers who want to quit — JUUL has been marketed primarily via social media channels such as YouTube and Instagram that are disproportionately used by teens and young adults. The company has used social media influencers to promote the product to their followers and relied on interactive marketing campaigns such as “DoIt4Juul,” a popular hashtag that encourages people to post and share photos and videos of themselves using JUUL.

WHAT ABOUT REGULATION? For years, e-cigarettes have been subjected to regulation at the state or city level, meaning that taxes, bans on vaping in public places and minimum legal age to purchase have varied around the country. (The Food and Drug Administration gained the authority to regulate the products’ labeling and advertising in 2016.) But what impact have these regulations had on the use of e-cigarettes and other tobacco products and perceptions of safety? Georgia State researchers recently received $1.4 million to lead a four-year project to analyze the effects of attempts to regulate e-cigarettes.

“There is a gap in understanding how to regulate or deregulate e-cigarettes in the most optimal way from the perspective of public health,” said Michael Pesko, an economist in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and the project’s lead. “We also don’t understand what spillover effects vaping regulations might have on other health behaviors.”

Since the study was published, the Food and Drug Administration has declared teenage use of e-cigarettes “an epidemic.”

While JUUL has promised to stop featuring youthful models in its ads and to work with social media platforms to remove teencentric content, the FDA says that’s not enough. E-cigarette makers need to prove they can keep their products out of the hands of minors. “[JUUL] knows if they keep up with this strategy they’re going to run into trouble,” he says. “But if you walk into any school and ask a student about JUUL, they know. The message is out.”

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STARGAZING’S NEW AGE

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How the BIG DATA REVOLUTION has changed the way Georgia State scientists make discoveries about solar weather, faraway planets and the history of the universe.

By Nola Taylor Redd | Photo by Trevor Traynor

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stronomy was one of the first professions to use computers. When Halley’s comet made its 1758 pass, astronomers divided up the computations required in order to determine its orbit. More than 150 years later, around the time that Georgia State was founded in 1913, Harvard astronomer William Pickering became the first to employ human “computers” — women paid low wages to sort and classify objects in glass-plate photographs.

Today, highly sensitive space telescopes such as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory collect more than a terabyte (or one million million bytes) of data every day, more than any human can successfully sift through. To keep up with the data deluge, astronomers must now use complex algorithms, machine learning and immense computing power. Yet these whopping data sets are also making it possible for scientists, including researchers at Georgia State, to mine incredible new insights about life in our solar system and beyond.

How’s the Weather Up There?

As Earth’s closest star, the Sun does more than provide our planet with light and heat. The solar wind carries a constant cache of charged particles into our planet’s path, while powerful plasma explosions hurl chunks of solar material that can damage satellites, blow out electrical grids and harm astronauts.

In 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm dumped enough energy into the Earth’s atmosphere to power disconnected telegraph machines and push the Northern Lights as far south as the Caribbean. A milder

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event in 1989 tripped the circuit breakers in Quebec’s power grid, causing a nine-hour blackout.

Concerned that massive solar storms could damage the infrastructure of the U.S., Congress recently passed the Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act, which outlines rules and responsibilities for government agencies to research, forecast and respond to solar weather events. The action was spurred in part by a 2008 report by the National Research Council, which estimated that the cost of space-weather induced outage

could run as high as $2 billion during the first year alone, with recovery times running as long as a decade.

“It’s a cascading effect,” says Rafal Angryk, professor of computer science at Georgia State University.

The loss of electricity would shut down gas pumps, making it impossible for drivers to deliver food to grocery stores. Densely populated cities would be especially hard hit, says Angryk.

“Chaos would kick in,” he says. “If you have no electricity or communications, things go downhill very quickly.”

Along with astronomy professors Piet Martens and Stuart Jefferies, Angryk is working to build an interdisciplinary astroinformatics team to study space weather and space climate using big data. Their effort is funded by Georgia State’s Next Generation Program, which strengthens core and emerging research with strategic importance to the university.

Their first goal, says Martens, is to make headway in understanding and predicting the mechanisms behind solar storms. Rather than the fundamentally physics-based approach researchers have relied on in the past, they’re incorporating big data by designing algorithms — computer

processes that can perform calculations and automated reasoning tasks as well as process data — to interpret the information gathered by solar telescopes.

By linking together images of the Sun preceding a flare, the researchers can look for signs that suggest an impending explosion. Already, they’ve picked up hints that might help expand the lead time for warnings. Once the researchers have a working detection method to pinpoint hot spots likely to produce flares, they can hand it off to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to put out alerts.

“The more time you can give the decision-makers, the better,” Angryk says.

For instance, knowing that a flare is incoming could allow power companies in the most likely affected areas to disconnect long transmission feeds for a short time rather than take a damaging hit that could take the system offline for years.

Several thousand miles south, Jeffries is probing the solar atmosphere in Antarctica, where during certain times of year, the Sun is visible for up to 24 hours a day.

Over the past three decades, Jefferies has traveled to the

POLAR TREK

Over the past three decades, professor Stuart Jefferies -------------> has traveled to the South Pole nine times to examine the Sun’s atmosphere at different layers, from its inner core to its outer chromosphere.

PHOTO COURTESY OF STUART JEFFERIES

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South Pole nine times to examine the Sun’s atmosphere at different layers, from its inner core to its outer chromosphere. The time it takes light to travel from each of those layers to the Earth helps him map the Sun’s structure and study changes in its atmosphere. The data can also be used to study the internal structure of the Sun, much like physicians use ultrasound to look inside our bodies.

Eventually, he hopes to help unravel the mystery behind the corona, an outer atmospheric layer that is enigmatically millions of degrees hotter than the Sun’s surface. Solving this puzzle could help scientists study and predict weather events such as coronal mass ejections, huge expulsions of plasma and charged particles from the corona.

Like NASA’s space telescope, Jefferies’ instrument generates lots of data. Over the course of 50 days, the telescope snaps four images every five seconds, for a total of nearly four million images over the observing run.

Using an algorithm, he sorts through the wealth of images to find the best within a group. (Jefferies estimates that today he can process the same amount of data in an hour that 20 years ago would have taken four days.) This type of mass sorting can help him identify anomalies that he might not otherwise spot if he had to search through each image individually — assuming he could complete such a monumental task.

“This new approach is about extracting the best possible information,” Jefferies says. “Big data lets us get more out of the observations than we ever could before.”

OUR EYES ON THE SKIES

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Two-thousand miles from downtown Atlanta, Georgia State operates a best-in-its-class telescope that’s changing the way scientists see the stars.

Secrets of the Stars In addition to collecting colossal amounts of information on a single star, astronomers can also use big data to study billions of stars in one swoop. These large surveys provide researchers with information about not only the locations of stars but also their sizes, ages and other characteristics.

In the past, massive stellar maps would be sketched by astronomers as they slowly slewed their telescopes across the sky or photographed on glass plates that were categorized by hand. Today, most telescopes are connected to computers, capturing digital images that have a resolution about 10 times greater than the best television screens. This granular detail allows scientists to tease out precise information that could have been easily overlooked in the past.

For the last 15 years, Distinguished University Professor Todd Henry and his team have been pulling together a grand three-dimensional map of all of the stars located (relatively) near the Sun, focusing on roughly 6,000 stellar systems. Understanding nearby stars helps place our Sun in context, he says.

“The sample has shown that the Sun is larger, hotter and more massive than 90 percent of all stars,” says Henry.

“Nearby stars can also reveal what the universe is made of,

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PHOTOS BY TREVOR TRAYNOR

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The Mount Wilson Observatory sits more than 5,000 feet above Los Angeles, where the high altitude reduces atmospheric disruptions and ocean winds push away clouds to keep the sky clear. Founded in 1904, it’s where Edwin Hubble proved the universe is expanding and Nobel Laureate Albert Michelson first measured the speed of light in kilometers per second. Decades later, Georgia State began planning its own unique instrument to take advantage of the location, the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy — or CHARA — Array.

The CHARA Array was designed and built by a team led by Hal McAlister, a professor who was the array’s first director. (McAlister retired in 2015, and Theo ten Brummelaar is now the director of the array.)

It uses a process known as optical interferometry, which incorporates signals from multiple telescopes to create a high-resolution image. Six telescopes spread across the mountain collect light, which travels through precisely placed vacuum tubes to combine at a central location.

Together, the one-meter telescopes simulate a single 300-meter instrument — making CHARA the world’s most powerful optical interferometer, says Douglas Gies, Regents’ Professor of Astronomy and center director.

“If astronauts were playing frisbee on the moon,” he says, “CHARA would be able to see the frisbee.”

Using CHARA, researchers can examine the minutiae of stars, probing down to the starspots on their surface.

These precise observations can help astronomers better understand the solar cycle (the Sun’s 22-year-long period of activity) and even make predictions about the strength of upcoming cycles, which can affect long-term plans for human space exploration. They can also provide insight into what to expect from the Sun as it evolves over the next 4.5 billion years.

Clear California weather means CHARA is open almost every night from February until the end of December. (The instrument shuts down for maintenance during January, when the mountain tends to get snow.)

Each day, the CHARA team sets up the telescopes in the appropriate configuration for the evening viewing.

While astronomers are urged to come to the mountain for their first observing session, they can communicate with the CHARA team from Atlanta or one of the five collaborating universities: the University of Michigan, the University of Sydney in Australia, the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and France’s l’Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur and l’Observatoire de Paris.

In 2016, scientists at CHARA also received nearly $4 million from the National Science Foundation to provide scientists around the world with greater access to the instrument. After 18 months, the research becomes part of the public database, available for anyone to use.

In addition to documenting the diversity of stellar surfaces, researchers have used CHARA to enhance observations from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and measure stars’ sizes. By comparing the size of a star and an orbiting exoplanet, for example, they can determine the planet’s radius, helping to unlock information about whether it’s a rocky world like ours or a gaseous giant like Jupiter.

“It’s a fantastic place to learn about the stars, their evolution and their properties,” Gies says. “It’s a real jewel of research at Georgia State.”

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and the diverse natures of the many different types of stars that make up our galaxy.”

When Henry’s team started the work in 2003, this meant taking a new dive into old data, poring through existing databases and analyzing glass plate photographs taken as far back as the 1950s to determine which stars may be closest to the Sun. One big clue to a star’s location is its velocity. Just as a car in the next lane appears to be traveling faster than one along the horizon, stars that are speedy relative to the Sun are more likely to be our closer solar neighbors.

“If it’s moving fast, chances are it might be nearby,” Henry says.

While Henry is focused on stars near the Sun, Sebastien Lepine, professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft to better understand the movement of stars. By tracking stars’ migration backward, he hopes to determine where they were born in the galaxy.

Most stars form inside stellar nurseries, dense regions of gas and dust where gravity draws individual clumps together to form collections of newborn stars. Eventually the stars separate from their siblings, but their divergent paths can provide insights into where they started out. This in turn can improve scientists’ understanding of how the Galaxy evolved and formed its various structures, such as the Milky Way’s distinctive spiral arms.

Lepine has compiled information about roughly 2.5 million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy into a catalog he calls Superblink, which combines data from different sources to create detailed profiles of stars’ motions, colors, temperatures, densities, ages and other characteristics.

By studying a large population of stellar objects instead of just a handful, scientists can tease out how stars change as they age, which could provide new insight into the Sun’s past and future.

In 2013, the European Space Agency launched the Gaia spacecraft to make a census of the stars in the Milky Way. In 2018, they released results of this mission, revealing an unprecedented three-dimensional map of more than one billion stars in the Galaxy.

A Search for Alien Worlds Anyone who has spotted the bright glint of Venus in the night sky knows that humans have been studying the Earth’s nearby planets for as long as we could look up.

Beyond our solar neighborhood, there may be thousands more faraway worlds. But scientists still aren’t sure exactly how planets form — and to better understand them, we have to find them.

Russel White, associate professor of astronomy, is hunting for new exoplanets (planets orbiting a star outside our solar system) by analyzing thousands of young stars and looking for periodic changes in their velocities. A slight “wobble” in velocity could be caused by the gravitational pull of a planet. Demonstrating regular wobbles over time could prove the presence of a new world.

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“By looking at young stars and searching for any young planets that might exist around them, we’re trying to understand how these systems come into existence and how these star systems evolve over time,” White says.

These observations could give scientists better insight into the structure of our own solar system and help them search for signs that planets orbiting other stars are potentially habitable.

Henry is also hunting for exoplanets by tracking the movements and velocities of stars, with a special emphasis on nearby stars. Surveying our nearest stellar neighbors for planets is important because their close proximity makes them ideal for more detailed follow-up observations, including a search for the presence of life.

“ Our scenario of how planets formed was based on our solar system. Now that we have more planetary systems to study, we’re getting evidence of how dynamic and chaotic the formation process can be.” -------------> Russel White

“Our scenario of how planets formed was based on the properties of planets in our solar system,” White says.

“Now that we have more planetary systems to study, and we can see that their characteristics are very different, we’re getting evidence of how dynamic and chaotic the formation process can be.”

When you study something as mind-bogglingly vast as the universe, scale is paramount. To construct accurate narratives about how a galaxy forms or a star is born, without the ability to watch these events unfold in real time, requires an expanded way of thinking. It also requires an astronomical amount of information, billions of detailed observations from which scientists can extract patterns and insights.

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

Today’s instruments are churning out exponentially more data about the cosmos than ever before, as each generation of telescopes is many times more powerful than the last. The sheer volume has presented a challenge: finding the signal in the noise. To make sense of all that output requires a new kind of scientist — one that can collaborate with large teams, design equipment and algorithms and dig through ever-expanding data archives.

“It goes without saying that the more information we have, the more we can potentially know,” says Jefferies.

“The hard part, and the exciting part, is figuring out the best questions to ask and how to ask them. The potential that we’ll be able to discover something remarkable, something surprising, is greater than it has ever been.”

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THE MYTH OF 26 |

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INTERVIEW BY WILLIAM INMAN | PHOTO BY MEG BUSCEMA

ORIGINALISM

In a new book, law professor Eric Segall examines the contentious doctrine of “originalism” — the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that claims to follow the document’s original meaning — and how it’s evolved from judicial theory to political weapon.

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“The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring,” said the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

Scalia was perhaps the most vocal champion of originalism, a group of theories that suggests judges are bound to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution as it was ratified in 1789 (or 1868, after the adoption of the 14th amendment granting citizenship and civil rights protection to all Americans — including former slaves). Though Scalia died in 2016, his originalist convictions are shared by the justice who filled his seat, Neil Gorsuch. (President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, also identifies as an originalist.) Originalist judges portray themselves as the opposite of “judicial activists,” judges who rule based on their personal belief system rather than the law.

The problem, according to Eric Segall, the Kathy and Lawrence Ashe Professor of Law at Georgia State, is that many self-proclaimed originalists — including Supreme Court justices — are themselves living constitutionalists (1) using the label “originalist” to achieve politically desirable results.

Segall has published a career’s worth of material on the U.S. Supreme Court, and his latest book, “Originalism as Faith,” offers a comprehensive history and analysis of the originalism debates. In addition to a previous book, “Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court Is Not a Court and Its Justices Are Not Judges,” Segall’s research and opinions on originalism have appeared in the Harvard and Cornell law reviews, as well as the New York Times and other media outlets.

Here, he discusses the basis of his book and why he thinks it’s a matter of faith that an originalist judge, or any judge for that matter, will apply the law based on the Constitution’s original meaning.

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(1) Living constitutionalism is the understanding that the Constitution may be interpreted in different ways by different generations.

How did originalism become such a dominant judicial theory?

The movement can be traced back to the 1970s, when Judge [Robert] Bork (2) took the position that the Supreme Court should not strike down state or federal laws unless either constitutional text or the Constitution’s original meaning required it. He also advocated for strong deference to political decisions made outside the courts. But few people who claim to be originalists subscribe to that theory today.

How has it changed since?

A big change occurred in the 1990s after conservative judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush flooded the judiciary.

They liked the label of originalism, and they needed a method to justify conservative decisions in cases involving federalism, gun rights and freedom of speech rights, among others. But most of these cases could not be justified under the old deferential originalist approach. Today originalism is a label used by scholars and judges to justify conservative or libertarian ideals.

A big part of my book is devoted to suggesting that those new theories of originalism are no different than living constitutionalism theories because they do not include strong deference to state and federal laws.

Is the current portrayal of originalism strictly partisan, then?

Another section of the book is devoted to describing and demonstrating that all Supreme Court Justices, whether left, left-center, center, right-center or right, decide cases the same way — based on their values. If the original meaning of the Constitution supports their arguments, conservative or not, they will use that interpretation.

However, if justices care enough about a case, they won’t retreat from a result they want just because the original meaning of the text doesn’t support it. In this sense, there is no real difference between [Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and Scalia (3).

Is there an example of a justice taking an opposing view to originalism?

In the 1990s, term limits became a huge political issue in this country, and the state of Arkansas tried to put term limits on members of Congress. Eventually, the issue went to the Supreme Court in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (4).

Justice [Anthony] Kennedy sided with the liberals in this case, which struck down term limits, 5-4. Now, Kennedy did cite some historical sources, but even on this important issue, he mostly relied on his value judgment that the Congress needed a uniform national identity separate from the states.

He said that if each state could have different qualifications for members of Congress, it would disrupt that national identity. I’m not defending that.

He may be right, or he may be wrong, but he didn’t pretend to base his decision on the opinions of people living 200 years ago.

Didn’t the Court use originalism in the 2008 Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller (5)?

Both Justice Scalia’s majority opinion and Justice [John Paul] Stevens’ dissenting opinion spent many pages canvassing the history of the Second Amendment. Historians, however, have not been kind to either justice’s efforts.

It is not a coincidence that the five conservatives found that the Second Amendment protected a private right to own guns while the four liberals did not — even though all nine of them reviewed much of the same history.

So we can’t depend on the Supreme Court to go by the book?

There is no such thing as going by the book. How do you go by the book when interpreting due process, equal protection, establishment of religion or cruel and unusual punishment? There is no book for that. These are matters of values all the way down.

(2) Robert Heron Bork was solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice from 1972 to 1977 and was well known for his belief in originalism theories. He was nominated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987, but his nomination was controversially defeated by the Senate with a 52-48 vote. He famously said, “The truth is that the judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else.”

(3) Ruth Bader Ginsburg is known for applying living constitutionalism to her decisions while Antonin Scalia was considered a staunch originalist (though Segall argues he did not vote that way).

(4) In U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, the Supreme Court invalidated a state constitutional amendment passed by Arkansas voters in November 1992. The amendment, called “Term Limitation Act,” effectively limited executive officers and state senators to two four-year terms and state representatives to three two-year terms.

(5) In 2008, provisions of a District of Columbia law criminalized the carrying of an unregistered firearm and prohibited the registration of handguns. The law also stipulated that lawfully owned guns must be kept in homes, disassembled and unloaded.

The law was struck down 5-4 in the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, and the case is widely seen as an example of originalism in practice because the Court held that the Second Amendment is an individual right intimately tied to the natural right of self-defense.

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What do you hope readers take away from the book?

I hope people understand that the theories preached by Bork and other early originalists never took hold. There’s an idea in this country that Supreme Court justices may only invalidate state and federal laws if they do so based on text or history, but we know that most of the time text and history do not justify their decisions.

We know the values of 1787, when we had slaves and women had no rights, or the values of 1868, when we had segregation and women couldn’t even vote, do not decide cases today. If our values can be symbolically linked to old values, I’m all in favor of that. But old values don’t help us decide whether cell phones are subject to searches based on modern technology or whether presidents can execute American citizens suspected of being terrorists when no judge has adjudicated that claim.

Affirmative action, for example, cannot be viewed through 1868 values because the whole idea of equality for African-Americans, even after the 14th amendment, has changed dramatically. Let’s not pretend we’re deciding cases based on the ideals of a societies that supported segregation, slavery and the oppression of women.

If a law is patently unconstitutional, then it is within a judge’s authority to strike it down. On issues reasonable people can disagree about, like the constitutionality of abortion, gun control, affirmative action and campaign finance laws, we should be allowed to vote.

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“There’s an idea in this country that Supreme Court justices may only invalidate state and federal laws if they do so based on text or history, but we know that most of the time text and history do not justify their decisions.”

A DOCTRINE’S ABIDING ALLURE An excerpt from Segall’s book “Originalism as Faith” Why do some Supreme Court justices and lower court judges so often talk about the importance of originalism in their decisions but consistently vote for non-originalist outcomes? The answer may be that for many legal actors (law students, lawyers, judges, law professors), and for the public, it is a matter of faith that only something called “originalism” can constrain judges.

In one recent survey, 70 percent of the people polled thought the Supreme Court is a political body “too mixed up in politics.” On one level, the American people are not naïve when it comes to wrestling with the confluence of law and politics in the Court’s decisions. There is nonetheless great resistance among the people to fully embrace that perspective of the justices. The Court’s popularity has dipped in recent years, but it still is far more popular than Congress or the president.

To accept the realist critique would, in the eyes of many observers, undercut the rationale for allowing judges to strike down acts of more accountable governmental officials. Although many legal realists disagree that their critique fatally undercuts the rationale for judicial review, legal academics and most originalists need to be able to justify the Court’s decision-making on the basis that preexisting text, or other positive law materials, drive the justices’ opinions.

As [Columbia Law School professor] Jamal Greene has put it, “the selling of originalism” is to a large degree centered around the idea that only strong fidelity to text and original meaning can support unelected judges possessing so much power in our constitutional, representative democracy. But this idea glosses over major disconnects between the rhetoric of originalism and real-life constitutional interpretation by judges deciding actual cases.

Since the 1980s, the label “originalism” has been an effective political tool employed by some (certainly not all) conservatives and libertarians to justify the appointment of judges whose politics and values they prefer. The claim that originalist judges “apply, not make the law,” appeals to the public’s wish to believe the justices are above normal politics (even if at some level the public knows that isn’t true). © 2018 by Eric Segall. Used with permission from Cambridge University Press.

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Leaking from a faulty furnace or fireplace, carbon monoxide gas can kill. But scientists are finding that — given in small, targeted doses — it also has the power to treat illnesses ranging from cancer to sickle cell disease to traumatic brain injury. How one Georgia State professor is working to unleash the molecule’s healing benefits.

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Written by LATINA EMERSON

Illustrated by WILLIAM DAVIS

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Smokers don’t suffer as often from ulcerative colitis, a chronic disease that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. Statistical analyses also show that smokers are less likely to develop preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure and damage to other organs, most often the liver and kidneys.

Why would a cigarette habit, which has been shown to harm almost every organ and system in the body, offer even a modicum of benefit? It’s likely because smokers get extra exposure to carbon monoxide — a colorless, odorless gas that’s produced by the burning of just about any combustible material, including cigarettes. Although carbon monoxide can be toxic in large doses (you probably have a carbon monoxide detector blinking somewhere in your home), scientists have discovered it also can have positive effects, reducing inflammation and protecting cells against injury.

Although the curative powers of carbon monoxide have been demonstrated for nearly a century, experts have yet to create a drug that taps the molecule’s potential. That may one day change, thanks in large part to the work of Binghe Wang, Regents’ Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Diagnostics & Therapeutics, who is using chemistry to transform carbon monoxide gas into a form of precision medicine.

Wang has developed a unique way to safely deliver small amounts of the molecule to the exact place in the body it needs to go. So far, results suggest that his carbon monoxidebased medicines will one day be used to treat cancer, reduce the risk of complications after organ transplants and help repair tissue after a heart attack or traumatic brain injury.

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Carbon monoxide gas was first discovered in the late 1700s, but it took more than 100 years for scientists to realize it could have the capacity to heal. Since then, research has been hindered by the gas’s noxious reputation.

“I’ve spent many, many years of time trying to convince people that it’s not just something to avoid,” says Leo Otterbein, one of the leading scientists studying carbon monoxide’s therapeutic uses and Wang’s frequent collaborator.

The earliest explanation of how carbon monoxide affects the body was published in 1865 by French physician and scientist Claude Bernard. He posited that carbon monoxide’s toxic effects occur when it combines with hemoglobin (a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body), displacing oxygen molecules and decreasing blood oxygen content. When people die of carbon monoxide poisoning, they’re really dying of oxygen starvation.

Yet there were also early hints that the molecule had beneficial effects. In 1932, a scientist named J. Argyll Campbell was trying to find a way to shrink tumors in

rats. After he exposed the animals to carbon monoxide gas, he noticed the tumors got smaller. Unfortunately, instead of celebrating his findings as a treatment for cancer, he assumed the tumors were growing more slowly because the animals were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.

“Little did Campbell know the animals were fine,” says Otterbein, professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who began studying carbon monoxide 20 years ago as a graduate student.

In one experiment in the late 1990s, Otterbein exposed a group of rats to lethal doses of oxygen and a second group to the same concentration of oxygen with a small amount of carbon monoxide gas blended in. Several days later, the rats who received carbon monoxide were the only ones still alive. Carbon monoxide appeared to trigger a protective response in the animals’ lungs.

Around the same time, scientist Fritz Bach, a pioneer in transplant research, designed an experiment to test whether carbon monoxide could help prevent complications after organ transplants. During the study, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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An Unexpected Cure researchers in his lab removed hearts from mice and transplanted them into rats, then exposed those rats to carbon monoxide gas.

“I was in touch with the post-doc, who would email me every day and let me know whether the mouse hearts were still beating,” says Otterbein. “In the rats that were exposed to normal air, the mouse hearts failed within five to seven days.

Then came day eight, day 10, day 14, and the ones that were treated with carbon monoxide were still going.”

Another important breakthrough came in 1967, when Ronald Coburn, now emeritus professor of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, showed that small amounts of carbon monoxide are actually formed inside the body during the breakdown of heme, an important compound in hemoglobin.

What’s more, the body seems to increase production of carbon monoxide as a defense against stressors. In the 2000s, English scientist Peter Barnes and his colleagues found the amount of carbon monoxide in the breath samples of patients suffering from sickle cell anemia, diabetes, asthma and heart disease to be much higher than that in healthy individuals. As the patients were treated and recovered, however, their carbon monoxide levels went down.

Yet despite mounting evidence of carbon monoxide’s promise as a therapy, researchers remained skeptical that most patients would agree to pump a poisonous gas into their lungs — even in controlled doses. Then in 2001, a pair of Italian scientists invented something called carbon monoxide releasing molecules, or CORMS, that could be administered orally. By delivering carbon monoxide via a molecule that could be swallowed, delivered intravenously or applied topically on the skin, the researchers felt they could overcome its negative stigma.

To create the molecules, they incorporated chemical elements called heavy metals.

“Carbon monoxide loves certain metals — like the iron in hemoglobin — and binds to them naturally,” says Wang. “It seemed like an effective way to deliver the molecule throughout the body.”

There was just one problem: Heavy metals can be toxic in large doses, and since the body has no way of getting rid of them, the more you take, the more they accumulate.

“It was a huge obstacle to developing a clinical application,” says Otterbein. “Then along comes Binghe, who says, ‘I have a solution. I have a new way to do this.’’’

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Some of the many health conditions that could be treated with a carbon monoxide-based medication ORGAN TRANSPLANT COMPLICATIONS After a transplant, there’s a risk the organ will fail or be rejected by the recipient’s body. Inflammation, which causes damage to tissues, is a major contributing factor. In animals, carbon monoxide has been widely tested in kidney, liver, heart and lung transplants and found to significantly improve outcomes. Studies have also found that exposing newly harvested organs to appropriate levels of carbon monoxide preserves the organs for longer periods of time.

ULCERATIVE COLITIS This chronic disease causes inflammation and sores in the inner lining of the large intestine. Wang and other scientists have found that carbon monoxide, known to be a powerful anti-inflammatory, is an effective treatment.

SICKLE CELL DISEASE A group of inherited disorders that predominantly affects African-Americans and people whose ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, sickle cell causes red blood cells to become hard, sticky and misshapen. Studies have found that carbon monoxide can help sickle cells become round again, reducing complications associated with the disease, which include reduced blood flow, infection and stroke.

TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY A bump, blow or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury can disrupt the normal function of the brain.

Research suggests that carbon monoxide can be used to limit damage from brain injury in part by stimulating neurogenesis, or the growth of new nervous tissue.

HEART ISCHEMIA-REPERFUSION INJURY Heart attacks occur when an artery that supplies oxygenrich blood to the heart is blocked. But when the blockage is cleared, the sudden restoration of blood flow can result in additional tissue damage and inflammation, a complication known as ischemia-reperfusion injury. Studies have found that carbon monoxide tremendously reduces the injury by curbing inflammation and promoting tissue repair.

About five years ago, Wang was browsing through scientific literature and became intrigued when he learned what a toxic gas was doing in the human body.

“It was such a counterintuitive idea,” he says. “As a chemist, my curiosity was piqued.”

Wang dove into the existing research and came to believe carbon monoxide plays a very critical role in regulating normal physiological functions. Yet he also realized that there hadn’t been a real effort to design a safe, effective drug that could be used pharmaceutically.

“I saw so much potential in this small molecule,” says Wang, who in 2003 was named an Eminent Scholar in drug discovery by the Georgia Research Alliance, a nonprofit organization that coordinates research efforts between the state’s public universities and the private sector. “But there was a tremendous amount of medicinal chemistry that still needed to be done.”

At the time, there was no good way to deliver carbon monoxide to humans for therapeutic use. Inhaling the gas was practical only in well-controlled environments, such as hospitals. While the metal-based compounds were great research tools, their potential toxic effects posed many limitations.

Other researchers had developed organic molecules that could release carbon monoxide — but only in the presence of light, which won’t work inside the human body.

Wang sought to design a way to turn the gaseous molecule into a pill that could be given precise doses, or dissolved in a solution for intravenous therapy or injection. The challenge required his team to invent new chemistry to “tether” carbon monoxide to a solid material that was safe for human consumption — and then break the tether on demand.

Using this new method, Wang has made different types of carbon monoxide “prodrugs” — inactive compounds that must undergo a chemical process in the body before releasing active pharmacological agents.

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One prodrug starts releasing carbon monoxide once it reaches the bloodstream or the gastrointestinal system. Another prodrug will deliver carbon monoxide once it encounters a particular pH, a measure of the acidity or basicity of a solution. The prodrug is stable in the stomach, but once it gets into the lower gastrointestinal tract — where the pH is higher — the molecule is released.

A third prodrug system emits carbon monoxide in the presence of reactive oxygen species, unstable molecules that can bind to other molecules in the body and damage them. Elevated levels of reactive oxygen species are found in two types of tissues — inflamed tissues and cancerous tissues.

Wang has found that carbon monoxide can make cancer cells more sensitive to traditional chemotherapeutic agents, improving the treatment’s effectiveness.

As a result, “doctors may be able to use lower doses of chemotherapy, which can be

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damaging to healthy cells as well as cancerous ones,” says Wang.

He and Otterbein have collaborated on several studies of the prodrugs. Wang develops the molecules and delivers them to Otterbein to research in animals.

“His way of packaging the molecules is unique,” says Otterbein. “The idea of a pill is not truly new, but he’s developed a way to create something that doesn’t have heavy metals and that will release carbon monoxide in specific places in the body. To be able to target the liver or the lung or the heart — that’s very, very powerful.”

They’re working on ways to use carbon monoxide in organ transplants, to reduce the risk of organ rejection or injury.

“We’ve known for years that carbon monoxide [gas] is very, very good for preventing organ rejection after transplant,” says Wang. “What we didn’t know is whether these molecules would have a similar effect.”

PHOTO BY STEVE THACKSTON

Pick Your Poison Three other toxic substances with lifesaving applications — Binghe Wang

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February, Wang and Otterbein were able to show that the molecules helped protect a transplanted kidney against injury.

A more recent paper published in Nature Chemistry in May found the carbon monoxide prodrugs protected mice against acute liver failure.

“It was very potent, maybe 10 to 30 times more effective than traditional drug delivery,” says Wang.

Next, he plans to investigate whether carbon monoxide can be used to prevent chemotherapyinduced toxicity, harmful side effects to healthy cells caused by many chemotherapy drugs. Studies have found that the molecule can help minimize or eliminate the heart damage caused by chemotherapy, and Wang wants to know more.

“To take on something like this, which is an entirely new area that had not yet been explored, carries a lot of risk,” says Wang. “But that’s what makes it fun as well.”

Though a number of clinical trials involving carbon monoxide therapy have been completed and others are underway, the process of assessing safety and efficacy is a lengthy one. It could be years before a Food and Drug Administration-approved carbon monoxide treatment is available to patients. Still, Wang is determined to see his work make an impact.

“A lot of important discoveries end up sitting in academic papers without ever making the leap to a clinical setting,” says Wang. “Carbon monoxide’s potential has been known for decades, but we’re still trying to arrive at pharmaceuticals. My hope is that our research can speed up the process so that patients can finally benefit.”

ARSENIC On the big screen, it’s been used to murder countless no-good husbands and inheritance-hoarding relatives, but arsenic also plays a key role in cell growth and reproduction. In the 1930s, arsenic was shown to be effective against chronic myelogenous leukemia, a type of blood cell cancer that most often affects older adults. Today arsenic trioxide, an FDA-approved chemotherapy drug derived from arsenic, works by slowing or stopping tumor growth.

MUSTARD GAS Nitrogen mustard gas was stockpiled by several nations during World War II to be deployed as chemical warfare agents, but it was never used in combat.

Yet its discovery also opened a new era in cancer chemotherapy. Nitrogen mustard, now a FDA-approved cancer treatment, binds to the DNA of tumor cells, preventing replication and leading to cell death.

VENOM Though it’s not yet an approved treatment, snake venom contains compounds that may bind to the membranes of cancer cell, interfering with their ability to multiply and spread throughout the body. The diabetes drug exenatide uses a synthetic form of proteins extracted from the venom of Gila monsters.

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NOTEWORTHY SE L EC T FACU LT Y HONOR S A N D ACCOM PL ISH M E N TS

ANDREW YOUNG SCHOOL OF POLICY STUDIES Ann-Margaret Esnard, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Public Management and Policy, has been named associate dean for research and strategic initiatives.

Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey, associate professor of political science, has received the Nasir Jones Fellowship from the Du Bois Fellows program at Harvard University to continue her scholarship about rap music and black political attitudes.

David Iwaniec, assistant professor in the Urban Studies Institute, has been named to the executive team leading the Urban Resilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network, a National Science Foundation project working to build sustainable, resilient and equitable futures.

John Burrison, Regents’ Professor of folklore, was inducted as a fellow of the American Folklore Society.

Cathy Yang Liu, associate professor of public management and policy, is co-editor of the book “Metropolitan Governance in Asia and the Pacific Rim,” which captures the regions’ urban policy and public management developments while recognizing their heightened economic and political importance.

The Center for State and Local Finance has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to evaluate the impact of later-age college degrees on wages, employment and retirement.

BYRDINE F. LEWIS COLLEGE OF NURSING & HEALTH PROFESSIONS Dan Benardot, professor emeritus of nutrition, authored the American College of Sports Medicine’s “Nutrition for Exercise Science.”

Xiangming Ji, assistant professor of nutrition, has received a grant extension for his study “Metabolic Reprogramming in Patients with COPD,” funded by the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute.

Regena Spratling, associate professor of nursing, has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research to develop Web-based intervention for the caregivers of medically fragile children.

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES Ashwin Ashok, assistant professor of computer science, has received a grant from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Robotics and Automation Society to build an underwater robot to monitor water quality in pipelines.

Tim Crimmins, professor of history and director of the Center for Neighborhood and Metropolitan Studies, and Glenn Eskew, professor of history, have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct workshops for teachers on Atlanta landmarks and civil rights history.

Scott Crossley, professor of applied linguistics, and his collaborators have received $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education to research the development of an online platform for the automated assessment of writing education technology.

Harcourt Fuller, associate professor of history, and Renée Schatteman, associate professor of English, have been awarded Fulbright fellowships. Fuller will travel to London and Jamaica to work on his study of Queen Nanny, the 18th-century leader of the Jamaican Maroons, and Schatteman will travel to South Africa to work with award-winning author Sindiwe Magona.

Maurice Hobson, associate professor of AfricanAmerican studies, has received the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council’s Award for Excellence in Documenting Georgia’s History for his book “The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta.”

Andrea Jurjevi, lecturer in the Department of English, has been named a Georgia Author of the Year for full-length poetry by the Georgia Writers Association.

Tony Lemieux, professor of global studies and communication and director of the Global Studies Institute, has been awarded an American Council of Education fellowship.

Georgia State faculty: Share your research news with us. Send your noteworthy accomplishments to the editor at jmarquez@gsu.edu.

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SELF EXPRESSION

MAKING SPACE FOR YOUNG BLACK VOICES With Black Girls WRITE, assistant professor Gholnecsar Muhammad recreates a 19th-century literary tradition for modern-day students

IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY, book clubs didn’t originate with Oprah. Nearly 200 years ago, black literary societies began forming in cities across the Northeast, touting intellectualism as a means for self-improvement and self-empowerment.

“They endorsed the idea that your character was defined by what you read and wrote about and how you thought about the world,” says Gholnecsar Muhammad, an assistant professor of middle and secondary education who began studying the groups while earning her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Inspired, Muhammad began devising a program for black students that would reflect the same literary values. She describes her creation, Black Girls WRITE, as a modern-day iteration of these historical spaces.

PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

Each summer, girls between the ages of 9 and 17 come together to read, write and critique each other’s work.

“We don’t talk about our degrees, our experience or our grades,” she says. “We just talk about who we are as writers.”

Muhammad also works to help students develop their sense of identity — it’s one of her four main goals for the program. (“WRITE” stands for Writing to Represent our Identities, our Times and our Excellence.)

“Each day I want them to learn something about themselves,” she says. “Who they are and their experience, and how that lines up with what society says about who black girls are supposed to be. Because here they have the space to push back on society’s views.”

The program is designed around skill development (becoming better writers), intellectual development (learning through texts) and criticality (understanding oppression, social justice and power in the world). Muhammad has integrated these four goals into a literacy framework, which she calls HILL — for building curriculum to students’ Histories, Identities, Literacies and Language. It’s now being used in schools in Harlem, where she spent two years training teachers in her methods.

“Typically, when educators are in classrooms, they focus on skills and knowledge,” she says. “They’re definitely not focused on criticality, and they don’t really create spaces where youth can develop a strong sense of self. Yet every child, especially in adolescence, needs to make sense of who they are.”

That’s one reason why Muhammad says her culturally and historically responsive framework can be applied in many different kinds of classrooms.

“I argue that if you get it right with youth of color, who have been historically marginalized in schools, you can get it right with other groups, too,” she says. “It’s about what language arts teachers can do differently to engage young people — and also get them reading and writing at proficient levels.”

Her work has earned praise from education researchers. Last year, Muhammad received the Outstanding Urban Education Research Award from Georgia State’s College of Education and Human Development, and in 2018 she was recognized by the University of Illinois-Chicago’s College of Education as its alumni researcher of the year.

Next, Muhammad is developing a cultural responsiveness training pilot program and model for teachers in New York City schools, which recently hired her as part of its $23 million initiative to fund anti-bias training for city educators. She’s also working to expand the capacity of Black Girls WRITE. “Writing sometimes is pushed under the rug in schools,” says Muhammad. “I teach the girls about the power of language, what it can do for your life, your personal development, your career, your future.”

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NOTEWORTHY Harold McAlister, Regents’ Professor emeritus of astronomy, has received the Michelson Lifetime Achievement Award. This prize recognizes outstanding achievement in scientific research and facility development in optical interferometry, the area of astronomy devoted to measuring extremely fine details of stars and their environments.

Jennifer Craft Morgan, associate professor of gerontology, has been elected president of the Southern Gerontological Society.

Hang Shi, associate professor of biology, has received more than $2.8 million from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study the mechanisms that cause obesity.

Alexandra Smirnova and Xiaojing Ye, professors of mathematics, have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to improve the accuracy and efficiency of numerical algorithms for solving largescale inverse problems.

Akinyele Umoja, professor and chair of AfricanAmerican studies, co-edited the book “Black Power Encyclopedia: From ‘Black is Beautiful’ to Urban Rebellion.”

COLLEGE OF THE ARTS Gilad Rabinovitch, assistant professor of music theory, published “Gjerdingen’s Schemata Reexamined” in the Journal of Music Theory. The article examines the relationship between a historical keyboard training model and the creative work of 18th-century European musicians.

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Joe Feinberg, associate professor of social studies education, has been elected to the board of directors for the National Council for the Social Studies.

Daphne Greenberg, professor of adult literacy, has received nearly $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to study adult literacy programs across Georgia.

Jacob Hackett, clinical assistant professor of middle and secondary education, and Nadia Behizadeh, assistant professor of adolescent literacy, have received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Improving Teacher Quality State Grants Program to train local middle school teachers to incorporate social justice content into their curriculum.

Tim Kellison, assistant professor of public policy and sport, has received a grant from the International

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Olympic Committee’s Olympic Studies Centre to examine how host cities view the environmental impact of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Min Kyu Kim, assistant professor of learning technologies, and Yinying Wang, assistant professor of educational leadership, have received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to study how students become leaders when learning online.

Brett Wong, assistant professor of kinesiology and health, has been awarded $1.5 million by the National Institutes of Health to better understand health disparities in the black population in the U.S. COLLEGE OF LAW Sylvia Caley, professor emerita, has received the Linda Lowe Health Advocacy Award from Georgians for a Healthy Future for her exemplary work to establish and direct the Health Law Partnership, a medical-legal collaboration that provides free legal services to lowincome children and families.

Jessica Gabel Cino, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law, Andrea A. Curcio, professor of law, and Kim D’Haene, director of academic success, along with the Office of Institutional Research, have been awarded a grant to study the relationship between LSAT scores and law school grades, predictors of law school success beyond the LSAT and associations between LSAT scores and later commitment to pro bono work.

Nicole G. Iannarone, associate clinical professor, has been named president of the Atlanta Bar Association.

Timothy D. Lytton, Distinguished University Professor of Law, has been elected to the American Law Institute, an independent organization producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and otherwise improve the law.

Jonathan Todres, professor of law, spent the spring 2018 semester at University College Cork in Ireland as a Fulbright Scholar researching children’s rights.

Anne Tucker, associate professor of law, has been named an affiliated research faculty of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for her work on impact investments.

Leslie E. Wolf, professor of law and director of the Center for Law, Health & Society, has been named a Distinguished University Professor. This honor recognizes faculty who have an outstanding record continued on pg. 45

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IMAGE OF CROSS IN FRONT OF SCHOOL IN THE LAB

PROTECTING THE LITTLEST LUNGS Respiratory syncytial virus sends thousands to the hospital every year and can be fatal for the very young and old — but there is no treatment. Professor Richard Plemper is working to change that.

IT’S ONE OF THE MOST COMMON respiratory infections in children, second only to the common cold. (By age three, just about every kid has been exposed at least once.) But for some young patients, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, can be highly dangerous, causing severe breathing problems and landing them in the hospital or worse.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every year in the U.S., RSV leads to more than 57,000 hospitalizations among children under age 5. A 2017 study found RSV infection is significantly associated with a higher risk of death than the seasonal flu, although the virus is most dangerous for premature babies and those with other chronic conditions or weakened immune systems.

But even full-term, healthy babies can be at risk for hospitalization, and elderly people are also vulnerable.

Despite the potential severity of an infection, RSV has something else in common with your run-of-themill cold: There is no vaccine or effective treatment.

Just one medication is approved to prevent severe illness in some high-risk patients, and it’s extremely expensive and only sparingly applied.

“The younger the patient population, the more challenging drug development is, because the margin of safety must be so high,” says Richard Plemper, professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. “Yet the clinical need is huge.”

Plemper is among those working to fill that need.

He received a $2.2 million grant earlier this year from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop effective, affordable therapies for RSV. PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

He says designing a treatment for RSV or other RNA viruses is tricky because the genome of these viruses can change very rapidly in response to environmental conditions. This makes it easy for the virus to develop resistance to drugs.

“RNA reproduction is more error-prone than copying DNA, meaning mutations are often introduced during replication,” Plemper says. “These errors are random, but if a mutation appears that happens to block the drug in any way, that genome will have a massive advantage and take over.”

Combination therapies, or treatments that use more than one medication, can reduce the likelihood that drug-resistant strains will emerge, making them essential for clinical success. Plemper has developed a pair of compounds that can interrupt the virus’s ability to replicate, and this funded project will determine whether the drug candidates are effective at treating the infection in mice, particularly when used in conjunction with one another.

Both compounds target an enzyme that makes copies of the virus’s genetic template and is necessary for replication. Yet each targets the enzyme in a different way, meaning the medications could be used simultaneously.

One drug uses a modified version of substrates — the molecule upon which the enzyme acts — to essentially poison it. A second drug binds to the enzyme and presses a brake pedal on its activity.

“Now we want to know whether the drugs act synergistically — when we put them together, does it magnify the effectiveness?” Plemper says. “What we want is to create a superforce against RSV.” GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

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BOOKS

RADICAL FUTURES In his recent book, “Arabic Science Fiction,” associate professor of world languages and cultures Ian Campbell examines how the genre has framed traditional Arab culture — and the role of science and technology in it.

You say that Western science fiction has some roots in Arabic literature. How so?

Science fiction, as we generally understand it here in the West, uses what we call “estrangement,” or reflecting one’s own society in a distorting mirror. For example, Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic “Stranger in a Strange Land” is about a human who is raised by Martians and then comes to Earth as a young man. The book forces the reader to examine how an outsider would view human culture.

Yet the idea of the intelligent outsider originates from a 12thcentury Arabic text, where a child raised alone by animals visits civilization. Because there are very few formal protections for freedom of speech in Arab societies, modern Arab writers of literary fiction are accustomed to using literature as a means of what we call “estranging” a critique, by reflecting one’s own society in a distorting mirror.

What are some of the issues that this estrangement is meant to critique?

A big issue is Arab society’s decline as the world’s dominant scientific power. The precursors for all of what we think of as the modern sciences were developed a thousand years ago by Arabic-speaking Muslims. As a result, Arabic science fiction engages in what I call “double estrangement,” in which the texts are reflecting not only society or politics but also the barriers to once again embracing their scientific heritage. A dominant trope in early Arab science fiction novels is, “Why did we retreat from our heritage? What would it take to get us back there?”

The answer in the early books is always something like nuclear catastrophe or world-spanning plague or ecological disaster. The cost is too great. So typically, whatever disruptive scientific or technological innovation the book contains will be eliminated by the end of the text — this is called “patching” the narrative. In one famous example, a mountainside collapses on top of a cryogenics lab. Only recently has this pattern begun to change.

Why is that?

Because in the 21st century you’ve really started to see Arabic-speaking people engage in real scientific and technological innovation. When that happened, this idea of patching was largely abandoned by people writing science fiction. Today, Arabic science fiction is not trying to show the corrupting influence of technology, but rather challenging the status quo by saying, “This is what we’re going to have to deal with. If we’re going to join the community of scientifically advanced nations, we’re going to have to usher in change.”

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ALSO ON SHELVES….

“Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch”

by David Bottoms In his 10th collection of poems, Bottoms, professor of English, explores familiar themes including spirituality, aging and family.

“Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies” by Gina Caison Caison, assistant professor of English, examines how the Native American response to white nativism in the South helped shape the region’s identity.

“Social Norms and the Theory of the Firm: A Foundational Approach” by Douglas E. Stevens Drawing on a growing body of research, Stevens, director of the School of Accountancy, analyzes the importance of social and moral norms to firms and capitalist markets.

COVER COURTESY OF PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

NOTEWORTHY

of scholarship, as well as a history of substantial contributions to the university and their profession.

INSTITUTE FOR BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES Sang-Moo Kang, professor, has been awarded $225,000 by the National Institutes of Health to develop a safer, more effective vaccine for human respiratory syncytial virus, the leading cause of hospitalization among infants in the U.S. Jian-Dong Li, professor and director of the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, has received more than $2.9 million from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to develop new treatments for otitis media, or inflammation of the middle ear.

J. MACK ROBINSON COLLEGE OF BUSINESS Vikas Agarwal, the H. Talmage Dobbs, Jr. Chair and Professor of Finance, and his co-authors have received the Best Paper Award from Wharton Research Data Services for their paper “Why do mutual funds hold lottery stocks?”

Charlotte Alexander, associate professor of legal studies with a secondary appointment in the College of Law, has received the Holmes-Cardozo Award from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business for the best submitted conference paper on any topic.

S. Tamer Cavusgil, the Fuller E. Callaway Professorial Chair and director of the Center for International Business Education and Research, has received the Hans B. Thorelli Award, which recognizes an article that has made significant, long-term contribution to international marketing theory or practice. Cavusgil and his co-authors received the award for “The Influence of Competitive Intensity and Market Dynamism on Knowledge Management Capabilities of Multinational Corporation Subsidiaries,” published in the Journal of International Marketing in 2005.

Rajeev Dhawan, the Carl R. Zwerner Chair of Economic Forecasting and director of the Economic Forecasting Center, has received a Certificate of Forecasting Excellence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for Best GDP Deflator Forecast made at the 2017 Automotive Outlook Symposium.

Brian Park, assistant professor of managerial sciences, and his co-authors have received the LVMH-Singapore Management University Luxury Research Conference Best Paper Special Prize for “The interactive effect of status-maintenance goal and political conservatism on luxury brands.”

Arun Rai, Regents’ Professor, the J. Mack Robinson Chair of IT-Enabled Supply Chains and Process Innovation, the James A. Harkins III Professor in Information Systems and co-founder of the Center for Process Innovation, has been reappointed editor-inchief of Management Information Systems Quarterly.

Denish Shah, the Barbara and Elmer Sunday Associate Professor of Marketing and director of the Social Media Intelligence Lab, has received the Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy Research from the American Marketing Association.

PERIMETER COLLEGE John Weber, associate professor of mathematics, is a principal investigator in Project SMILES, or StudentMade Interactive Learning with Educational Songs for Introductory Statistics, which uses songs to help students learn statistical concepts. The project was featured in the STEM-for-All Video Showcase.

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH Shanta Dube, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, has been named to the Board of Advisors of the Georgia chapter of the Childhood Domestic Violence Association, a national nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of childhood domestic violence and developing resources to serve survivors. She has also been appointed a member of the Policy Committee for the Association of Teaching and Prevention Research.

Michael Eriksen, dean and Regents’ Professor, has been named to the 2019 Leadership Atlanta class, which includes representation from industries such as nonprofits, government and media.

Colin Smith, clinical assistant professor of health management and policy, has been named president of the Georgia Public Health Association.

Claire Adams Spears, assistant professor of health promotion and behavior, has been elected co-chair of the complementary and integrative medicine special interest group of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

Daniel Whitaker, professor and director of the Division of Health Promotion and Behavior and director of the of National SafeCare Training and Research Center, served on the steering committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Community Preventive Services Task Force, which recently released its recommendation for interventions to reduce perpetration of intimate partner violence and sexual violence among youth.

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NOW YOU SEE IT

WHEN CELL DIVISION GOES WRONG Mitosis — the orderly process of cell division — is a complex sequence of events choreographed by different pieces of the cell’s machinery. One of the most critical is the centrosome, which is an organizing center for microtubules, hollow tubes that keep the cell’s shape intact and direct the movement of chromosomes as a cell splits in two. Normal cells contain a single centrosome, which is copied once per division cycle. In cancer cells, however, multiple centrosomes can emerge. Led by professor Ritu Aneja in the Aneja Lab, researchers are studying whether the presence of multiple centrosomes — or even a single centrosome that is abnormally large in structure — may be a biomarker for cancer. In this photo of an ovarian cancer cell, the cell nucleus appears blue, the microtubules are red and the centrosomes have been stained green. After staining tumor samples to make the centrosomes visible, the researchers can derive a so-called Centrosome Amplification Score, which could provide clinicians with more information about whether the cancer is likely to be aggressive or reoccur.

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IMAGE COURTESY OF KARUNA MITTAL

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