Jacquline Plyler
RESEARCH THAT’S DOWN TO THE BONE Studying animal bones can lead to all kinds of discoveries. Two SCHC students traveled to Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town to study five-million-year-old fossil carnivores with cell biology and anatomy associate professor Adam Hartstone-Rose. Though their professional plans are different, these students both found rewards in their research.
HAN NAH S ELVE Y: “ I NSI DE O UT AN D BACK WAR DS”
Jacquline Plyler: “Challenging” The biomedical engineering senior is working with chemical engineering assistant professor Miao Yu to improve kidney dialysis. Doing tests with graphene oxide, a thin sheet of carbon that can act as a molecular sieve, Plyler wants to create and patent a design for a dialysis blood filter. Her earlier research strategy yielded valuable information — it didn’t work — but her work to figure out why and to devise a new plan of action for property testing was enough to win first place in the engineering and math division at Discovery Day 2014. “I learned a great deal about how to investigate why certain results are occurring, to not give up, to exhaust all resources, how to theorize why I’m receiving a result, and why this ‘mistake’ or ‘error’ can be learned from and be a good experience in the long run,” said Plyler. A Matthews, N.C., native, Plyler wants to earn a DVM and Ph.D., and do more biomedical research in veterinary medicine through designing her own devices and treatments. “The more progress my research makes, the more likely people’s lives can be improved despite being afflicted with a disease.” The SCHC awards its students more than $200,000 in research grants each year. Students are required to complete the research ethics course required of NSF and NIH researchers.
“One of the best ways to learn about medicine, anatomy or any living thing is to start from the inside to understand the outside, whether physical, hormonal or behavioral,” explains Selvey, a biology/anthropology senior whose mission is to improve captive settings for wild animals. Before traveling to South Africa, the Fort Mill native dissected a tiger, gorilla, hyena, caracal and serval in Hartstone-Rose’s lab to better understand mammalian anatomy. She also has studied bones at the Smithsonian Museum in Maryland and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and presented her research at three conferences. “We want our research to stimulate dialogue about the idea that animals — down to the bone — are changed by captivity, and that if we are going to preserve the animals from the wild that so intrigue us, we need to improve captive settings,” says Selvey, who is applying to veterinary programs and to do mammalian osteological research at the graduate level. “We are advocating on behalf of captive animals and hoping to scientifically support the notion that they are less changed and more healthy when given wild-type diets.”
T YLER ANTO N ELLI: “ S H OCKI N G” With plans for a master’s in biomedical sciences followed by a career in dentistry, the business/biology senior from Harrisburg, N.C., studied the effects of diet on the dental health of captive black-footed ferrets in his last trip to the Smithsonian. “It is shocking that the dental issues present in the ferrets we studied and the causes of these issues were neglected and unnoticed for so long,” Antonelli says. His research, the subject of his senior honors thesis, revealed that the soft, wet, ground meat diet fed to the animals wasn’t tough enough to develop strong teeth, leading to increased periodontal disease and calculus accumulation. That discovery will help Antonelli as a dentist because it shows what kinds of damage results to bone from calculus build up. “It also helps me see how diet can affect oral health, which is something I can pass on to patients.”
U NI V E RS I T Y O F S O U T H C A R O LIN A
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