UF Explore Magazine | Spring 2021

SPRING 2021

Digging For The Truth Finding Graves Helps Tulsa Bury Its Ghosts

Spring 2021, Vol. 26, No.1

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UF Research Helps Drive Florida's Tech Economy

Extracts

Revolution in the Field

Research briefs

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24 Missions to Mars

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Artificial intelligence leads the way in a sea change for agriculture

Optimally Positioned

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Neuroscientist Duane Mitchell is committed to elevating the Clinical & Translational Science Institute

Digging For The Truth

Black Voices in Research

UF Biodiversity Institute

Finding graves helps Tulsa bury its ghosts

Storytelling as a vehicle for change

Addressing unprecedented change

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The Conversation

42 About the cover: Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield continues a tradition of service at the C.A. Pound Human Identification Lab.

by John Jernigan 22 Photo Winter 2021

Women used to dominate the beer industry — until the witch accusations started pouring in

Kent Fuchs President David Norton Vice President for Research Board of Trustees Mori Hosseini, Chair David L. Brandon ‌Richard P. Cole Christopher T. Corr Sylvain Doré James W. Heavener Daniel T. O’Keefe Thomas G. Kuntz Rahul Patel Trevor J. Pope Marsha D. Powers Fred S. Ridley Anita G. Zucker Explore is published by UF Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. © 2021 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Ivan J. Ramos Writers: Joseph Kays Cindy Spence Karla Arboleda Web Editor: Karla Arboleda Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron Printing: RR Donnelly, Orlando Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org

Rodrigo Onofre uses a robot and UV light to suppress disease at a commercial strawberry farm near the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Balm.

Photo by Tyler Jones

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John Jernigan

UF Research Helps Drive Florida's Tech Economy

David Norton Vice President for Research

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University of Florida researchers conducted record amounts of research in 2020 despite the pandemic, and companies born of UF research continued to bring billions of dollars and thousands of jobs into the state.

Our faculty continued their unprecedented pursuit of new knowledge, and our technology transfer team made sure that knowledge fueled new treatments, new products and new companies.

Although most research was paused from March to May due to the pandemic, 2020 research expenditures still reached a record $942.2 million, and we continue to break records in 2021.

For example, the 2,794 proposals submitted in the first two quarters of the fiscal year are also a record high, and we’re on track to at least match last year’s funding record.

This is a real testament to the commitment of UF’s scientific community and to the professionals who manage the research enterprise.

UF Innovate also received a record 393 invention disclosures and signed a record 264 licenses and options. That activity will only add to the $12 billion in investment UF’s two business incubators have attracted to the region over the last 25 years.

The success of our incubators at nurturing young companies has been nothing short of astounding. With the university as the catalyst, hundreds of young companies have helped put Gainesville and Alachua County on the tech map.

The university’s 40,000-square-foot biotechnology incubator — Sid Martin Biotech in Alachua — has maintained 100% occupancy over the past five years and currently houses 15 companies. More than 100 businesses have gotten their start at Sid Martin and those companies have raised over $10 billion since it was established in 1995, more than $7 billion of that in the last decade. Sid Martin has been named Global Incubator of the Year by the trade organization InBia three times — in 2013, 2017 and 2020 — while no other incubator has been recognized more than once.

The Hub — our 106,000-square-foot incubator in the Gainesville Innovation District — currently houses 55 companies in markets such as software, web development, gaming, biotechnology, food sciences, customer services, mobile marketing and aerospace. The Hub anchors the 80-acre Gainesville Innovation District, which includes six other buildings.

Hub companies have brought in over $1.92 billion in investment in the past decade, and their employees earn an average annual salary of over $79,200, which is $26,606 higher than the state average.

COVID-19 has impacted us all in many ways, but as we move out of the pandemic the University of Florida is poised to continue its success at cutting-edge research and the beneficial technologies that emerge from that research.

Building Business On Innovation

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Sid Martin 7,900 Jobs

393

LICENSES/OPTIONS

DISCLOSURES

55

Companies

The HUB

$942.2M 10,000 Jobs UF Technology

RESEARCH

Expenditures

$2.4 Billion State’s Economy in 2019

#2 #5 #1

2020

Technology Licensing Agreements in latest AUTM* survey (FY19) Licensing Revenue of all tech transfer offices in latest AUTM survey (FY19) Most productive Tech Transfer Office in the country 2020, Bush Institute

Global Incubator of the Year in 2013, 2017 and 2020: Sid Martin Biotech

University of Florida

Economic Impact

Mixed-Use Incubator of the Year in 2019: UF Innovate | The Hub *Association of University Technology Managers

FY 2020 Stats

• 390 Inventions

• 16 Startup companies

• 264 Licenses

• 143 Issued US Patents

Licensing Revenue Streams over $1M in the past 3 fiscal years Gatorade – Sports Drink

Company Successes

Sentricon – Termite Treatment

• Axogen ($2.7 billion market cap nerve implantation market)

Brammer Bio – Gene Therapy

• Assembly Biosciences (valued at $290 million)

Axogen – Nerve Regeneration

• Celunol (acquired for $98.3 million by BP Oil)

Spark Therapeutics – Gene Therapy

• Florida Biologics/Brammer Bio, purchased by Thermo Fisher for $1.7 billion 2019

Sarepta – Gene Therapy AGTC – Gene Therapy

Outcomes

Shadow Health – Telehealth

• $7 billion in investment brought in to Alachua County

by Sid Martin Biotech and The Hub companies in last 7 years • 8,500 high-tech jobs created by incubation client companies • UF incubators have served 232 resident client companies over the past 25 years

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DeLuca Preserve

Gift of 27,000 acres provides unparalleled living lab

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ore than 27,000 rural acres near Yeehaw Junction in Florida’s southern Osceola County has been gifted to the University of Florida to protect one of the last natural areas of its kind and to serve as a living classroom and laboratory for students and faculty throughout the university, UF officials announced in November. Elisabeth DeLuca’s contribution is among the largest gifts of real estate ever to any university in the nation.

“Few things in this world are as precious — and threatened — as our untamed lands and the wild animals that live there,” DeLuca said. “We need to preserve what we can for the benefit of all of us. These acres are in good hands with the University of Florida, and it pleases me to know that UF will use them to learn more about our natural world and to train new generations of scientists and environmentalists.”

The property — which includes cattle ranchlands, citrus groves, wetlands and forests — is one of the last refuges for the endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow and hosts many other state and federally listed species such as the Florida panther, gopher tortoise and the red-cockaded woodpecker. The property provides a critical nature corridor between the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park and the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area.

The land is also a conservation focal area for the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area.

In addition to protecting threatened wildlife, UF will use the property to, among other things: measure hunting’s impact on the ecosystem to control wild boars; determine how cattle grazing affects plants, insects and animals; teach land and forest management; study water storage and conservation; and conduct student and researcher fieldwork. The site is expected to host classes ranging from plant and soil sciences to entomology and wildlife ecology. The ranch provides a centralized location for Extension-related services as well as offering a unique natural classroom for students taking part in Florida 4-H. The UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) along with numerous colleges within the university will direct research on the property. Some of that research, scientists hope, will help

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land developers, conservationists and policymakers learn how to balance growth, agriculture and preservation around the state. University officials believe work done there will also create opportunities for community collaboration and largescale research, which will set UF apart from its peer institutions.

“Elisabeth DeLuca’s generous contribution of such a significant property is a gift to all Floridians and really, to people everywhere,” said UF President Kent Fuchs.

“The preservation of this land and what it will enable our scholars to learn, teach and achieve will reverberate around the globe.”

In assuming ownership of the land, UF will maintain the current operational and revenue-generating activities taking place on the tract to ensure that it is financially self-sustaining.

In addition to donating the land to UF, the donor has placed a conservation easement on the property and has selected Ducks Unlimited, the world’s largest notfor-profit private organization dedicated to wetlands conservation, to be the recipient of this easement. In structuring the gift of land between UF and Ducks Unlimited in this way, the donor has created conservation protections while still making it possible for important teaching, education, and research to take place. Together, UF and Ducks Unlimited will ensure that the land remains protected and sustainable for generations to come, officials said.

“This Kissimmee Prairie landscape is in the Everglades headwaters, yet at the edge of central Florida’s tourism and development core and is now a permanently protected piece of the conservation puzzle,” said DU CEO Adam Putnam.

“For generations to come, students and researchers will make new discoveries alongside migrating waterfowl and endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and grasshopper sparrows on this massive outdoor laboratory. Future ranchers, waterfowlers, nature lovers and wildlife scientists will be able to apply what they’ve read in textbooks to what they’re observing on the landscape, thanks to Elisabeth DeLuca. This partnership between the University of Florida and Ducks Unlimited benefits waterfowl, wildlife and millions of Floridians who value clean water and the protection of the natural landscape.”

Scott Angle, UF’s vice president for agriculture and natural resources, said the Yeehaw Junction land’s diversity and large size will bring the university’s discovery and teaching to heights rarely reached in academic pursuits.

“This gift is a precious piece of Florida that will become the premier living laboratory for natural resource management research and study,” said Angle. “UF/IFAS researchers and students will have unprecedented access to a pristine area of diverse habitats to benefit conservation efforts.”

Language Genes Linguistics variation driven by genetics

R. Hurt/IPAC/Caltech

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An artist’s rendition of the two black holes orbiting each other in a gas disk that surrounds a supermassive black hole.

Missing Link

Gravitational wave observatories identify intermediate black holes

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researchers who helped confirm Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves observed a new type of black hole that challenges prior understanding of how the mysterious cosmic objects are formed across the universe.

The discovery, published in Physical Review Letters, identifies an intermediate mass black hole. The discovery serves as a connector, the missing link, between known categories of black holes: smaller black holes known as stellar mass black holes, and the largest black holes known as supermassive black holes.

Researchers observed the black hole using twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy. These detectors are calibrated to sense tiny changes of distances on Earth that are then interpreted through algorithms to make sense of the cosmic communication.

In the five years since the LIGO project discovered gravitational waves, scientists across the world have fine-tuned instruments measuring these gravitational waves to find new phenomena in space. The gravitational waves help reveal what happens in the universe and can tell us about how black holes are formed.

University of Florida scientists invented and developed the algorithm, called coherent WaveBurst, that detected the first and so far only intermediate mass black hole.

“This black hole teaches us about the universe in ways that we weren’t previously aware of,” said Imre Bartos, a UF assistant professor, who chairs the LIGO working group that is searching for intermediate mass black holes.

The UF team involved in this discovery includes Bartos, Sergey Klimenko, Guenakh Mitselmakher, David Tanner, Guido Mueller, Bernard Whiting, Paul Fulda, Steve Eikenberry and John Conklin, as well as David Reitze, who is also director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech that is responsible for the whole project.

Typically, there is a natural mass limit to black holes that can be anticipated and calculated using the mass of stars, as the gravitational collapse of stars forms the black holes.

The intermediate mass black hole is heavier than a black hole formed by the collapse of a star, but not as heavy as a supermassive black hole, meaning there is likely a different way black holes can form aside from stars colliding.

One possible explanation includes the collision of smaller black holes in an area so small these collisions happen by chance. The centers of galaxies are such locations, where tens of thousands of black holes can congregate within a light year from the center.

“We don’t totally understand where it is coming from or how it is formed, but this is the beginning of new physics,” said Klimenko, a UF professor who pioneered development of searches for intermediate mass black holes in LIGO. “Astronomers were making bets if such black holes existed or not, and people believed they could not exist, but we found it.”

Emily Cardinali

ore than 7,000 languages have evolved across the globe as different cultures have migrated, interacted with each other and isolated themselves. New research, though, suggests another factor has played a major role in the way these languages changed: genetics.

A study led by Kevin Tang, UF assistant professor of computational language science and the director of the Speech, Lexicon and Modeling (SLaM) Lab in the Department of Linguistics, highlights how gene variations can, over time, guide the course of an entire language.

While linguists have long studied how languages evolve, until recently genetics have been largely left out of the picture.

But in the era of big data, advances in genome sequencing, as well as the creation of massive typological databases, have allowed new insights into the relationship between our speech and our genetic code.

“We’re now looking at the actual hardware that allows us to be human,” Tang said. “This adds a missing piece of the puzzle. Big data is enabling us to detect these subtle signals.”

Tang and collaborators from Yale University and Brock University looked at a specific gene associated with how people process sounds. While a variation in this gene — known as an allele — may have a subtle effect on a single person’s speech, over time the allele’s prevalence in a group of people can have a long-term impact on how the whole culture communicates, causing them to favor certain sounds over others.

The researchers found that high prevalence of RU1-1 alleles in a culture was associated with its language having more “stop consonants,” sounds that involve the complete stop of airflow.

Meanwhile, those cultures in which these alleles were less common had more “nasal consonants,” or sounds made while airflow continues through the nose. Their findings suggest that these patterns are driven by stop consonants’ vulnerability to the loss of precision in the timing of neuron spikes compared to more robust nasal consonants.

Looking ahead, the researchers plan to examine more genetic variations that may have had an impact on language.

Read the full study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Andrew Doerfler

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Lying Eyes Butterfly, moth eyespots evolved separately

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he iconic eyespots that some moths and butterflies use to ward off predators likely evolved in distinct ways, providing insights into how these insects became so diverse.

A new study manipulated early eyespot development in moth pupae to test whether this wing pattern develops similarly in butterflies and moths. The results suggest that the underlying development of eyespots differs even among moth species in the same family, hinting that moths and butterflies evolved these patterns independently.

Influencing how eyespots form can lead to a better understanding of the respective roles genetics and the environment play in moth and butterfly wing patterns, said lead author Andrei Sourakov.

The blood thinner heparin is a chemical that can alter wing pattern development in moths. Even minute quantities can produce dramatic changes in eyespots, as seen in these io and polyphemus moths.

“Moths stumbled on a very successful evolutionary design over 200 million years ago,” said Sourakov, collections coordinator of the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.

“That’s a long time for evolution to take place. It’s easy to assume that things that look the same are the same. But nature constantly finds a way of answering the same question with a different approach.”

Sourakov and co-author Leila Shirai, a biologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil, analyzed eyespot development in io

and polyphemus moths, two species in the Saturniidae family. The eyespots in the two species responded differently to the study’s treatments, though the findings suggest the same signaling pathways were active. The researchers also found moths’ wing pattern development, which begins when they are caterpillars, slows just after they enter their pupal stage, a finding that echoes previous butterfly research.

Although io and polyphemus moths belong to the same family, heparin changed their eyespots in distinct ways. The io eyespot’s black disc dramatically expanded in all directions, while the salt-and-pepper patterning in the polyphemus eyespot spread in a single direction.

Honing in on the signaling pathways involved in eyespot development — the molecular cascade that produces pigmentation and pattern in moths and butterflies— is central to determining the similarities and differences between moth and butterfly development, Sourakov said.

Looking at DNA isn’t enough. Instead, scientists need to determine what happens after a gene is expressed to see if seemingly identical wing patterns truly are the same.

“Genetically controlled variation can look identical to environmentally induced variation,” Sourakov said. “Variation isn’t really produced by genes themselves, but by the intermediate product of the gene— in this case, molecular pathways.”

Sourakov and Shirai’s research expands on a 2017 study by Sourakov that showed

The blood thinner heparin is a chemical that can alter wing pattern development in moths. Even minute quantities can produce dramatic changes in eyespots, as seen in these io, top, and polyphemus moths.

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molecules in the blood thinner heparin influenced eyespot development in moths.

While heparin affected the boundaries of moth eyespots, the center remained unchanged.

In the new study, heparin triggered various changes in moth eyespots, including smudging and a shift in proportion.

Despite similar molecular interactions, however, the changes were inconsistent between the io and polyphemus moths, potentially due to the different ways their wing patterns are mapped out by genes.

Sourakov and Shirai were able to detect wing development was likely paused just after pupation by delivering varying doses of heparin to caterpillars and pupae at different developmental stages. They also found eyespot tissue transplanted to a different region of the wing during pupation could induce patterning.

Natural history collections are key resources in revealing which wing patterns took hold genetically and became visible in populations, Sourakov said.

“Collections are where it all starts and where it all ends, frankly,” he said. “We can generally look at collections as a window into evolution, helping us understand which changes are just lab results and which ones can actually be observed in nature. Variation in genetics and physical characteristics is the toolbox for the evolution of diversity, and diversity is what we study at the museum. Collections help us understand that.”

Halle Marchese

Although io and polyphemus moths belong to the same family, heparin changed their eyespots in distinct ways. The io eyespot’s black disc, top, dramatically expanded in all directions, while the salt-and-pepper patterning in the polyphemus eyespot spread in a single direction.

Crab Connection

Marsh crabs contribute to fragmentation

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recent study from the University of Florida found that sea level rise — combined with the burrowing and grazing activities of Sesarma, a native marsh crab — are causing salt marshes across the U.S. South Atlantic Coast to rapidly fracture and reorganize.

These findings, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the profound importance of this marsh crab in controlling how salt marshes are responding to sea level rise, challenging the long-standing paradigm that feedbacks between water flow, sediment processes and plants alone shape salt marsh evolution and response to climate change pressures, like sea level rise.

Researchers in the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment (ESSIE) within the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, led by associate professor Christine Angelini and doctoral student Sinead Crotty, found that Sesarma are accelerating the rate at which salt marsh tidal creeks lengthen in response to sea level rise, which is causing marshes to rapidly transform from expansive, contiguous grasslands to highly fractured patches of marsh.

“This crab, which excavates deep, complex networks of burrows, thrives where tidewaters rapidly flush across the marsh surface, and therefore, congregate in large numbers on the heads of tidal creeks where water flows are fastest. When they congregate in high-density fronts, they turn marsh soils into Swiss cheese

as a result of all of their burrowing and overgraze marsh cordgrass,” Angelini said.

“Through these activities, Sesarma is causing tidal creeks to rapidly incise across marshes, and is enabling predators, like red drum and blue crabs, to freely access the marsh, driving huge declines in the density of snails, mussels and other marsh invertebrate prey.”

Salt marshes occur along much of the U.S. East Coast, where land meets the sea. In the southeastern U.S. spanning North Florida to the Carolinas, where the study was conducted, there are nearly 2.5 million acres of salt marsh. This study estimates that these intertidal grasslands are under water for about an hour more a day now compared to 1999 as a result of sea level rise, a regime shift that is softening marsh soils to levels perfect for Sesarma burrowing.

“Salt marshes are vital nursery grounds for dozens of harvested species such as sea trout, red drum fish and blue crab. They clean coastal waters through their removal and sequestration of nitrogen and other pollutants, store large amounts of carbon and thereby mitigate climate change, and provide invaluable storm protection for coastal infrastructure through their stabilization of shorelines and baffling of storm surge and waves,” Angelini said. “The feedbacks that we discovered in this work suggest we may be losing these systems far faster than we thought.”

Andrew Altieri, ESSIE assistant professor, says direct human impacts to salt

marshes, such as development and climate change, still need to be addressed.

“We need to address climate change by studying and understanding nature so that we can see how we fit into the big picture,” Altieri added. “We knew that sea level rise was a threat to marshes, but these crabs flipped a switch that put loss of the marsh into overdrive. These synergies in nature would be overlooked if not for careful monitoring and experiments, which are needed to catch problems early on and mitigate their impact on salt marshes.”

In order to combat these changes, Angelini says that individuals need to look at it from a two-pronged approach from a local and global perspective.

“At the local scale, concerted efforts to help support coastal wetlands such as improving sediment delivery to the coast by removing dams and levees are needed to give these ecosystems a chance to survive in the face of sea level rise. On a global scale, we need collective action to reduce our carbon footprint from the individual to global human population level to counteract global warming that underpins sea level rise,” Angelini said.

This recent study stems from a line of research that Angelini started 12 years ago in collaboration with Mark D. Bertness, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, which has collectively revealed that Sesarma is shaping the evolution of salt marshes from Florida to Massachusetts.

Reba Liddy Hernandez

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Combating Colon Cancer Gut microbiota and inflammation may prevent disease

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olon cancer may be treated or even prevented by altering microorganisms in the intestine and by combating inflammation with a clinical treatment previously used to treat inflammatory bowel diseases, findings from a study led by University of Florida researchers suggest.

Inside a human gut reside trillions of microorganisms, which are collectively termed microbiota. Research has linked microbiota activity to a variety of diseases, from autism to cancer. Particularly in the gut, an abnormal microbiota can contribute to inflammation and colorectal cancer development.

“In this study, we really looked at the interaction between inflammation and cancer development, and how the gut microbiota is involved in this interaction,” said Ye Yang, Ph.D., lead author and an assistant scientist in the UF College of Medicine’s division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition.

Inflammation has also been shown to cause increased risk for cancer development, Yang said. Previous research has shown that people with inflammatory bowel disease have a higher risk of developing colorectal cancer — cancer that occurs in the colon or rectum.

Yang and his team studied how combating inflammation using an antiinflammatory treatment could affect colon cancer development in mice. Mice with colon cancer and inflammation were treated with an anti-inflammatory therapy known as anti-tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, therapy, which is a drug typically used to treat inflammatory bowel disease.

“We showed that if we gave mice this anti-TNF therapy, we could lessen the inflammation as well as colon cancer development,” Yang said. “We also found the composition and function of the microbiota changes a lot as a result of the treatment.”

The study found that after anti-TNF therapy, the microbiota was less capable of driving cancer development, Yang said.

Therefore, reducing inflammation changes the microbiota from a pro-cancer to an anti-cancer state.

The next step for the researchers is to look for microbial genes or pathways that are regulated by anti-inflammatory agents and affect cancer development, Yang said.

This study suggests further research needs to be done to understand interaction between certain therapies, the microbiota and cancer development.

“We need to pay more attention to the microbiota changes in response to inflammation-targeting drugs and figure out the best way to manipulate the microbiota for cancer prevention in patients,” Yang said.

This study, “Amending microbiota by targeting intestinal inflammation with TNF blockade attenuates development of colorectal cancer,” was published

Antibiotic Options New drug could provide bioterror protection and cure infections

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n the medical and military fields, antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be formidable foes. Now, University of Florida Health researchers and their collaborators have a $75 million grant to identify a new, unique antibiotic that will protect public health.

Funding from the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency will be used to study 28 compounds, eventually narrowing them down to one drug and a backup candidate that can destroy bacterial pathogens that would otherwise evade current antibiotics. The benefits should be twofold: Creating a compound that could be used to address a bioterrorism event while also treating stubborn infections among the public or hospitalized patients.

“We’re working to identify new and distinct therapeutics to treat diseases in general and address certain subclasses or organisms that could be misused,” said Henry Heine, an associate professor at UF’s Institute for Therapeutic Innovation in Orlando, part of the UF College of Medicine.

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The Aerobiology Core at the UF Institute for Therapeutic Innovation facilitates the evaluation of therapeutics in various inhalational infection models.

Heine and his UF collaborators will work with scientists at Curza, a biotechnology company in Salt Lake City that is developing the antibiotic. The UF Health scientists’ and physicians’ main roles will be analyzing the selected compounds’ effectiveness against various bacterial pathogens in preclinical models. That should ultimately lead to advanced therapeutic testing and human clinical trials, the researchers said.

Researchers say there is an urgent need to develop a novel antibiotic that can be used against high-consequence bacterial pathogens as well as common bacteria.

The development of new antibiotics by major pharmaceutical companies has been relatively uncommon even as drugresistant bacteria have emerged. Among the work that will be done at UF is a technique known as the hollow fiber infection model, which allows scientists to model

Starving Algae Denying nutrients kills cyanobacteria

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in July by Nature Cancer. It was coauthored by UF Health Cancer Center members Christian Jobin, co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Therapeutics and Host Response research program and senior author, and Raad Gharaibeh, director of microbial genomics with Rachel Newsome, a graduate student in the UF College of Medicine’s division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition. The study was funded in part by the UF Health Cancer Center and the National Institutes of Health.

Marilee Griffin

changes in drug concentrations over time, as they would occur in humans.

“We can actually study how a drug kills the bacterium and also how it prevents or suppresses the emergence of antibiotic resistance. It’s another arrow in the quiver of drug development,” said George L. Drusano, a professor and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Innovation.

UF is one of the few universities in the country with the combination of specialized research equipment and evaluative tools for testing new antibiotics, according to Drusano. Then, there is UF’s human expertise: The research will rely on complex mathematical models to optimize drug treatment and reduce drug-development risks and poor therapeutic outcomes. In the field of high-consequence bacterial pathogens, Drusano is one of a handful of mathematical experts worldwide.

Curza will have a significant scientific challenge of its own — making chemical changes to the compounds that will be tested in UF Health’s laboratories.

Late-stage testing in preclinical models will be done at a Department of Defense laboratory.

Doug Bennett

s large blooms of toxic blue-green algae have become an annual phenomenon in Florida’s freshwater lakes and rivers, as well as other places worldwide, University of Florida researchers have identified a new method to control its growth.

Pollution and warm water temperatures during the summer months create a favorable environment for algae growth. The blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, threatens drinking water supply, fish and wildlife, agriculture, tourism and human health.

Yousong Ding, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry in the UF College of Pharmacy, is exploring new cellular targets for controlling undesirable microbial growth, which is broadly related to drugresistant microbial infections and toxic cyanobacteria blooms. In a study published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Chemical Biology, Ding’s research team identified the enzyme dihydroxyacid dehydratase, or DHAD, as a target for inhibiting microbial growth.

“We found a way to essentially starve the cyanobacteria of an important nutrient essential for their growth,” Ding said.

“If we can control cyanobacteria bloom development, then we can regain our ability to keep these harmful algae out of Florida’s freshwater lakes and rivers.”

DHAD enzymes are used by microbes as well as plants to produce branchedchain amino acids, or BCAAs. All lifeforms require BCAAs to grow and survive, and cyanobacteria have to make BCAAs on their own. Ding’s research team used chemicals to block the function of DHAD enzymes, which in turn prevented the production of BCAAs and eliminated cyanobacteria growth.

BCAAs are essential to humans and animals. However, humans and animals do not have the needed enzymes, including DHADs, to produce BCAAs on their own. Instead, the BCAAs must be acquired through diets by eating plants, fruits and meats.

“Since humans and animals do not have the DHAD enzyme to make BCAAs, we can use inhibitors to target only cyanobacteria blooms in lakes or rivers without harming people or fish,” Ding said.

DHAD has applications beyond controlling algae growth. As infectious microbes also use DHADs to produce

“We found a way to essentially starve the cyanobacteria of an important nutrient essential for their growth.”

— Yousong Ding

Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria

BCAAs for growth, survival and infections, UF researchers believe the enzymes are a new target to develop novel types of antimicrobials to address the drug resistance crisis. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve in response to medications and become resistant to treatments. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports at least 2.8 million Americans are infected with antibioticresistant bacteria or fungi annually.

If pathogen growth can be controlled, similar to cyanobacteria, then Ding is optimistic that new medicines can be developed to target microbial infections.

“We have largely lost the ability to control damaging microbial growth, and we see it in the antibiotic resistance and algae problems in Florida,” Ding said.

“This new finding offers an encouraging new strategy to selectively inhibit the DHAD enzyme and ultimately address some of society’s biggest environmental and medical challenges.”

The study was published in ACS Chemical Biology in July.

Matthew Splett

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Hutia & Humans

Drone Discovery

Rodent helped indigenous Bahamians

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eet the Bahamian hutia. A species of rodent that can reach the size of a full-grown rabbit, they just might hold the key to helping us understand the behavior and lifestyles of indigenous humans in the Bahamas.

In a study published in PLOS One, a group of researchers from UF share their findings that these hutias were physically moved from their native Bahamas to the Turks and Caicos Islands by the Lucayans, the indigenous people who once called the islands home. The work was conducted by Michelle LeFebvre and William Keegan from the Florida Museum of Natural History, Susan deFrance and John Krigbaum with the Department of Anthropology, and George Kamenov from the Department of Geological Sciences.

For the Lucayans, hutias might have served as something like an ancient Roomba, collecting waste as they roamed around.

“When you have those animals in close proximity to humans, they’re benefitting from how humans are using the land,” deFrance said. “They’re consuming vegetation that people are discarding or keeping in their gardens.”

To uncover this connection, the researchers conducted an isotopic analysis of hutia bones and tooth enamel recovered from archaeological sites located in both the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. This revealed that some hutia consumed plants cultivated by the Lucayans. The team then analyzed the strontium isotopes of the tooth enamel, comparing the archaeological results with

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modern hutia skeletal remains that were brought from the Bahamas to live in a museum research lab in Gainesville for several years.

“The hutia that grew up in the Bahamas and moved to Gainesville as live animals had their strontium values change,” Krigbaum said.

What this showed the team was that the hutia — with their unique, ever-growing molars — mirrored the local signature of their environment. This demonstrated the sensitivity of strontium isotopes and the need to be cautious when analyzing archaeological rodent teeth to interpret potential changes in location for various species.

The evidence strongly points to indigenous people moving the hutia from the Bahamas to the Turks and Caicos Islands, but the question remains — why?

“Changing an animal’s geographic distribution is a big deal,” LeFebvre said. Tragically, the Lucayans were wiped out due to enslavement by Spanish explorers, leaving minimal records and this mystery.

While archaeological evidence usually seen in the domestication of other animals — like the remains of pens or posts for an enclosure — has yet to be found on the sites examined in this study, this may be because hutia were simply too slow to demand human containment.

With more papers and studies in the pipeline, the team hopes to shine a light on this period of human history and see what else we might learn from these rabbit-sized rodents.

Scott Rogers

Laser technology finds lost settlement

U

sing drone technology, a team of UF researchers has uncovered how an ancient Florida village played a pivotal role in pre-Columbian geopolitics.

In research led by anthropology doctoral student Terry Barbour, the team discovered that the settlement on Raleigh Island, located on the northern Gulf coast of Florida, operated as a major producer of beads made from seashells from about 9001200 AD. The beads, used in rituals at the time, were highly prized in communities as far from the coast as the lower Midwest.

“In form, scale and purpose, the Raleigh Island settlement has no parallel in the archaeological record of the American Southeast,” said Ken Sassaman, Barbour’s adviser and the co-creator of the study.

Sassaman is the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of Florida Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology.

The researchers used drones to survey the ancient settlement in a fraction of the time traditional methods would have taken. Working with UF partners at the GatorEye Unmanned Flying Labora-

Hibernation Switch Insect study offers new research opportunities

I

t’s a scientific question straight out of a science fiction novel: Can the biological impulse that prompts a dormancy period in some living beings be activated in other organisms, including humans?

This question is among several that University of Florida researchers are pondering after their new study modeled what regulates metabolism in an insect called the flesh fly during its dormant, or diapause, phase. The flies enter into a state of massive “metabolic depression” that is regularly punctuated with “periodic metabolic arousal,” following a pattern shared by some mammalian hibernators.

Dan Hahn, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences entomology professor who co-authored the study along with assistant research scientist Chao Chen, said that he and Ohio State’s David Denlinger, also on the research team, thought up

tory, the team equipped the drone with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanners that quickly collected architectural details and topographic data with unprecedented resolution.

The LiDAR shed light on how the settlement — a complex of at least 37 residential spaces surrounded by 4-meter-tall ridges of oyster shells — was organized to make beads in the very place where shells were found. In several of the living spaces, the researchers’ excavations uncovered ample evidence of large-scale bead production.

The Raleigh Island settlement is one of the few coastal communities where such extensive craft production has been found.

“What we have here is a settlement at the source of this raw material at the time when marine shell was starting to become a heavily demanded social item,” Barbour said. “The fact we have strong evidence of bead manufacture at a site with equally impressive architecture to guide us in understanding how production was organized socially makes this place really special, and as of now the only place like it we are aware of.”

The findings have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of the study some 15 years prior. To get the needed expertise in cellular metabolism, the physiological entomologists recruited the help of Matt Merritt, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the UF College of Medicine, and his postdoctoral researcher Rohit Mahar.

“This study gives us greater fundamental understanding of how dormancy is regulated,” Hahn said. “Nobody exactly knows what regulates these periodic wakings and entering back into metabolic depression in mammalian hibernators.

One of the things that’s special about our study is that we’ve identified one of the regulatory mechanisms for the switch between metabolic depression and periodic arousal in the flesh fly. We want to understand what regulates dormancy and arousal from dormancy for all of the possible downstream applications.”

For the field of entomology, Hahn offers an example of what could be possible if dormancy could be induced or broken in insects whenever needed.

“If you could produce biocontrol insects, such as parasitoid wasps, at a steady rate and store them in dormancy until you need them, it could be a major eco-

A drone equipped with Light Detection and Ranging quickly collected architectural details and topographic data about the Raleigh Island settlement just north of Cedar Key, Florida with unprecedented resolution. The images revealed rings made of oyster shells surrounding 37 residences.

Sciences. Barbour and Sassaman’s collaborators on the project were Angélica Almeyda Zambrano and Eben North Broadbent, the co-directors of GatorEye and UF’s Spatial Ecology & Conservation Lab; Ben Wilkinson, UF assistant professor of geomatics and LiDAR expert; and Richard Kanaski, an archaeologist and Regional Historic Preservation Officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For Barbour, collaborating with researchers across the UF campus and beyond emphasized the wider impact of his work.

“It forces you to create a product that is not only useful and relevant to your work personally, but also to those you work with,” he said. “This has, without a doubt, been an experience that will help me as I move into the professional sphere.”

nomic benefit and a major advance for biological control,” said Hahn, who along with Denlinger is also part of a United Nations international working group that seeks to improve insects’ use in biological control.

A species that may be key to investigating these ideas is Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly.

“One of our larger goals is to test whether we could induce deep dormancy in different stages of the fruit fly lifecycle as a proof of concept for what we learned about pupal diapause in the flesh fly.

These two species are more than 90 million years diverged from one another,” Hahn explained, before contemplating further: “So if we can make it work there, how could it be translated to vertebrate cells?”

Hahn says known mammal hibernator species like the ground squirrel may share the same triggers as flesh flies to enter periods of dormancy and periodic arousal, but further research is needed.

“I encourage my colleagues who study mammalian hibernators to explore whether periodic arousal could be regulated the same way in their systems,” he said.

“The reason we think mammals could regulate their dormancy-periodic arousal cycles similarly is that all the pieces that are being regulated in these insect cells are regulated in everybody’s cells, if you look at the fundamental cellular biochemistry.”

While applications for this work are still far off, in Hahn’s view this line of basic research could lead to the possibility of inducing and breaking dormancy at will in a wide range of organisms, from improving breeding programs for endangered butterflies to inducing dormancy in human organs to extend the time for transplant, or keeping amputated limbs viable long enough for reattachment.

“These are the things that I dream about — how can we improve society somehow with this science,” Hahn said.

“The building blocks that we’re putting forward today could lead to those sorts of advancements.”

The study, “ROS and hypoxia signaling regulate periodic metabolic arousal during insect dormancy to coordinate glucose, amino acid, and lipid metabolism,” is published in the journal PNAS.

Andrew Doerfler

Kristin Romaguera

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Missions to

MAR S

NASA/JPL

By Alisson Clark

14 Spring 2021

"Serving on any NASA mission is the greatest experience I could possibly dream of."

A

strobiologist Amy Williams’ mind is on Mars.

Williams, a University of Florida geology professor, recently joined her second Mars mission: After serving on the Curiosity rover team since 2009, she’s now a participating scientist on the Perseverance rover, which touched down on the red planet on Feb. 18.

“Serving on any NASA mission is the greatest experience I could possibly dream of,” she said.

Her proposal to search for signs of ancient life on Mars was one of 13 selected by NASA from over a hundred submissions.

Williams joined the Curiosity mission as a graduate student at age 24. As a principal investigator on Perseverance, she’s able to return the favor, offering her graduate students places on a mission to Mars. Now, when students share their aspirations, she’s happy to say, “Would you like to work on Mars? Oh, good. I can help you with that.”

Doctoral student Denise Buckner calls Perseverance “the coolest thing I have ever done” — which is saying something, as Buckner came to UF from NASA. "Astrobiology is very interdisciplinary, so I had to study many different space-focused subjects throughout my academic career to get here,” she said.

After an undergraduate degree in aviation operations and a master’s in space studies, Buckner worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. When she heard about Williams’ research, Buckner applied to study with her at UF. "I wanted to learn more about geology and how it can teach us about how to look for life on other planets,” she said.

“Conducting research on another planet

— Amy Williams

and exploring places no one has ever explored before is the most exciting work I can possibly imagine."

Doctoral student Lydia Kivrak started dreaming about Mars when the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed in 2004, when she was in second grade.

“I remember reading about them and playing Flash minigames about them on the NASA website,” she said.

Now she’s part of a Mars mission, one with unparalleled opportunities: The rover’s SHERLOC and SuperCam instruments use spectrometers, lasers and cameras to allow Williams’ team to search for evidence of life in organic matter on Mars, investigating discoveries in nearly real time.

“As soon as the data can be downlinked from Mars, we're able to evaluate if we're looking at organic matter, and what kind of organic matter it is,” Williams said. “My dream would certainly be to find really conclusive evidence for ancient life on Mars.”

The first step: changing the clocks. A Martian day, called a sol, is 24 hours and 37 minutes long, so the Perseverance team will live on Mars time to keep the mission synchronized.

“As you start to progress 37 minutes forward every day, eventually you're getting up at 11 p.m. and going to work.

So you're making your coffee at a time

you may not be used to making your coffee,” Williams laughed.

The pandemic is forcing the scientists to collaborate remotely instead of gathering at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. On landing day, Williams joined the rest of the Perseverance team online, watching the rover’s progress and listening to NASA’s livestream during entry, descent and landing, known as EDL. “The big trick with EDL is that there is a 14-minute delay for that information to come to Earth, and it takes roughly seven minutes for all of entry, descent, and landing to complete. So basically whatever has happened on Mars has already happened when we first start receiving the data,” she said.

Once those nerve-wracking minutes were past, Williams was able to get down to searching for signs of life. But Curiosity and Perseverance aren’t her only Mars projects. She’s also informing the next decade of Mars missions as part of the National Academies’ Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey, where she’s part of a team of 15 Mars scientists who help NASA prioritize missions for 2023-2032.

“It's a dream come true to have this be my job,” she said.

Amy Williams Professor of Geology amywilliams1@ufl.edu

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16 Spring 2021

Digging For The Truth Finding graves helps Tulsa bury its ghosts

P

John Jernigan

By Joseph Kays

hoebe Stubblefield’s parents grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and even though she visited the city every summer as a child, she knew little about the race riot there in 1921 that wiped out the flourishing Black community of Greenwood and left as many as 300 people dead.

“There was no discussion about the race riot when I was a child. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I heard any family history,” she recalls.

“Then my mother says, ‘Oh, yeah, your Aunt Anna lost her house.’”

Stubblefield, a forensic anthropologist and interim director of UF’s renowned C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, says her story is not unusual, which has made the search for the graves of Black people killed in what has become known as the Tulsa Race Massacre that much more challenging.

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Photos provided by the City of Tulsa.

Phoebe Stubblefield closely examining a small object during the October 2020 Oaklawn excavation.

“It was like secret knowledge,” Stubblefield told PBS NewsHour in 2020. “I get the impression that, often, Black people — especially when moving around — dealt with horrors by not talking about them.”

According to historical accounts, in 1921 the Greenwood District of Tulsa was a thriving African American community known nationally as “the Black Wall Street.” Although many of the residents worked in the white community, they returned to Greenwood to live and conduct their business. Churches, schools, banks, clothing and dry goods stores lined the main streets of Greenwood, while homes occupied the side streets.

But on May 30, a young Black man named Dick Rowland found himself alone in an elevator with a white woman in downtown Tulsa. Exactly what happened will never be known, but the next day police arrested Rowland and began an investigation.

18 Spring 2021

Aerial view of the July 2019 excavation in Oaklawn Cemetery.

According to an account from the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, “an inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between Black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland.

Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.”

In 2001, the Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 reported that, “At the eruption of violence, civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies. In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts that were themselves illegal. Public officials provided firearms and ammunition to individuals, again all of them white. Units of the Oklahoma National Guard participated

in the mass arrests of all, or nearly all, of Greenwood’s residents.

“They removed them to other parts of the city, and detained them in holding centers. Entering the Greenwood district, people stole, damaged, or destroyed personal property left behind in homes and businesses. People, some of them agents of government, also deliberately burned or otherwise destroyed homes credibly estimated to have numbered 1,256, along with virtually every other structure — including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library — in the Greenwood district.

“Despite duties to preserve order and to protect property, no government at any level offered adequate resistance, if any at all, to what amounted to the destruction of the Greenwood neighborhood. Although the exact total can never be determined, credible evidence makes it probable that many people, likely numbering between 100-300, were killed during the massacre.”

“

It was like secret knowledge … I get the impression that, often, Black people — especially when moving around — dealt with horrors by not talking about them.”

— Phoebe Stubblefield

Physical investigation team members search the backfill pile, October 2020.

About 24 hours after the violence erupted, it ceased, but 35 city blocks of Greenwood had been burned to the ground.

Suppressing History Stubblefield says that despite the enormity of the event, in the weeks, years and decades that followed, the Black community sought to quickly rebuild and the white community sought to repress the story.

“Immediately after the massacre, Tulsa leaders tried to pass a fire code restriction to prevent rebuilding, but it was so restrictive that other city leaders said even the white people wouldn’t be able to build,” she says. “Leaders in Greenwood urged people to rebuild as fast as they could, to put anything on their property before city leaders could come up with another restrictive code.”

So life returned to a new normal, and

as the years went by people forgot, and just to make sure they didn’t remember, by the 1960s Stubblefield says “the city and state of Oklahoma were actively suppressing awareness of the riot.”

Historians have spent years searching for a copy of the May 31, 1921 edition of the Tulsa Tribune, which is purported to have had an incendiary story about Rowland’s arrest on the front page. But original copies of the newspaper have never been found, and the story was redacted from a microfilm copy made in the 1950s.

It wasn't until 1997, when the city established the race riot commission, that details of the event began to emerge. But while the commission answered many questions about the massacre and the events surrounding it, the question of how many members of the Greenwood community died and where they were buried continued to haunt the city.

As the 2021 centennial of the massacre approached, Tulsa Mayor G.T.

Bynum initiated the 1921 Graves Investigation, saying: “The only way to move forward in our work to bring about reconciliation in Tulsa is by seeking the truth honestly. As we open this investigation 99 years later, there are both unknowns and truths to uncover. But we are committed to exploring what happened in 1921 through a collective and transparent process — filling gaps in our city’s history, and providing healing and justice to our community.”

As one of the nation’s leading forensic anthropologists, Stubblefield was a natural addition to the Graves Investigation. She leads skeletal recovery and analysis for the Physical Investigation Committee, which is chaired by historian Scott Ellsworth, who is also in charge of identifying viable sites. Oklahoma State Archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck is in charge of archaeology.

The team, which includes several other UF alumni and graduate students, is excavating in cemeteries and other locations

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“

As Dr. Maples’ last graduate student, I am proud to return to continue his traditions in forensic analysis, while expanding the lab’s interests in research.”

John Jernigan

— Phoebe Stubblefield

From top: Reconstruction of the grave map for Oaklawn Cemetery.

The original map and cemetery logbook are lost.

Headstone of Eddie Lockard, who was found dead near the Tulsa airfield on June 6, 1921.

20 Spring 2021

where eyewitness accounts, mortuary records and other reports indicate Black victims of the massacre may be buried.

In 2019, Stackelbeck and a team of experts from the Oklahoma Archeological Survey, based at the University of Oklahoma, began using a variety of tools, including remote sensing, at three initial target sites from the race riot commission report — Oaklawn Cemetery, Newblock Park and Rolling Oaks Cemetery (formerly Booker T. Washington Cemetery).

Based on anomalies in ground-penetrating radar scans, in July 2020 the team began test excavations in a section of the city-owned Oaklawn Cemetery, but after eight days of digging, no remains were found.

In October, they moved to another area of the cemetery, a potter’s field where funeral home records and other documents from 1921 indicated at least 18 African American massacre victims were buried.

During that excavation, the team found evidence of at least 12 coffins holding human remains. Stubblefield says

weather conditions were deteriorating in October, so the team secured the excavation site and returned the soil that had been removed. She says the team hopes to return in June to resume excavating.

While the team appears to be closing in on recorded burials, it is reports of mass burials of perhaps hundreds of people that continue to challenge the researchers.

Two areas near a railroad track — The Canes and Newblock Park — are of particular interest.

“There are eyewitness statements that members of the National Guard brought in a rail car covered with bodies and that they were moved downhill into a trench,” Stubblefield says. “Aerial photos show that there was a bluff that was there then, and it’s still there now, so that supports these accounts.”

She says The Canes is now a homeless camp with a lot of younger trees that would have grown up after the massacre.

Newblock Park is near a sewer lift station, so there has been considerable disturbance to the ground over the years, but she remains hopeful.

Williams M aples’ Legacy

From top: Physical Investigation team members discuss the pattern of burials in Trench A (left to right: Heather Walsh-Haney, Kary Stackelbeck, Lee Bement, Deborah Green (behind) and Phoebe Stubblefield).

Geologist Deborah Green points out trench features to Phoebe Stubblefield.

Artifacts recovered from the July 2019 Oaklawn excavation.

Although most of the Pound Laboratory’s work is in service to law enforcement investigating active cases, Stubblefield’s participation in the Tulsa Massacre project continues a long history of forensic anthropology at UF. Stubblefield was completing her master’s degree at the University of Texas in 1993 when a friend attending the UF College of Law, remembering her interest in forensic anthropology, sent her a copy of “Dead Men Do Tell Tales,” an autobiography by renowned UF forensic anthropologist William Maples.

Maples had built an international reputation through his involvement in historical cases, such as the one to determine if President Zachary Taylor had been poisoned with arsenic and the investigation of remains found in Russia that Maples confirmed to be of Czar Nicholas II and his family.

But it was Maples’ many contemporary cases that intrigued Stubblefield.

“I could see that he had an active career. He had a well-developed lab. I knew based on his activity that he would have a wealth of experience,” she says. “I could see when I read Dr. Maples’ book that I had a strong chance to get knowledge directly. To understand what a gunshot wound looks like, or a stab wound looks like, in different qualities of bone or with weathering; to learn how force is transmitted through a whole skeleton; or how an intact skeleton can vary for one individual to another, you have to experience it.”

So she applied to UF and was admitted, as Maples last graduate student before he died in 1997. She completed her doctorate in 2003, then spent 15 years in the anthropology department at the University of North Dakota before returning to UF as a research assistant scientist in the Pound Lab that Maples established.

“As Dr. Maples’ last graduate student, I am proud to return to continue his traditions in forensic analysis, while expanding the lab’s interests in research,” she says. “I have a collegial and interdisciplinary focus that I foresee will bring new collaborations to the Pound Lab. I have a growing interest in interdisciplinary research within anthropology, especially in exploring the intersection of cultural anthropology with forensic science.”

And that is exactly what she is doing in Tulsa, where a history of segregation, of KKK rallies and lynchings provide context for the massacre, the rebuilding and the silence that endured for almost a century.

Stubblefield says that if remains are found, it will be up to an oversight committee made up mostly of residents from the Black community to decide what they want done with them. One decision will be about conducting DNA analysis.

“There’s a long history of using Black bodies for research, so I’m trying very hard to keep the analysis on site and do whatever I can to involve the people of Tulsa,” she says.

Stubblefield says there would be considerable genealogical research needed to identify potential relatives, and although she would like to try to conduct DNA analysis, “I want the Black people of Tulsa to decide.”

Phoebe Stubblefield Research Scientist and Interim Director C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory phoebes@ufl.edu Related Website: https://caphil.anthro.ufl.edu/

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Downtown view of smoke plume rising from the Greenwood District.

A group of white men walking down the streetcar tracks in downtown Tulsa.

A group of men standing beside a railroad freight car and watching smoke rise in the distance.

A row of Craftsman-style Little was left of the Greenwood District.

22 Spring 2021

Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921

Greenwood District

Mt. Zion Baptist Church engulfed in flames.

Several African Americans, probably being detained.

A group of African American men being marched down a street toward a detention center.

homes on fire.

A group of African American men and women standing in the middle of a dirt road, most likely at a checkpoint.

Photos provided by the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum.

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Revolut

in the Fie

24 Winter 2021

i on

ld

Artificial

intelligence leads the way in a sea change for agriculture

By Cindy Spence

O

n the experimental farm at the University of Florida’s Southwest Florida Research and Education Center, the fourth revolution of agriculture in is high gear.

Drones fly over citrus groves, counting and categorizing trees.

On the ground, robotic arms collect pests from tree branches to determine which trees need to be treated.

Multispectral imaging collects spectral data from tomato plants, the better to detect diseases like target spot and bacterial spot before they spread throughout a field.

Ground-based remote sensing equipment scours groves, up one row and down the next, to survey for green vs. ripe fruit.

Machines straddle rows of peppers, sensors spotting and spraying weeds only as they encounter them.

And behind the scenes a new cloud-based software called Agroview sucks up all the data, analyzing it and synthesizing it into chunks that scientists ­— and farmers ­— can use to make better decisions.

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First Revolution

Agricultural Revolution

— Yiannis Ampatzidis

Chemicals

Third Revolution

Second Revolution

K

ing Citrus

Mechanization

Genetics

Fourth Revolution

“Artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, big data analytics, the internet of things.

This is no doubt the fourth agricultural revolution. We are going to see these technologies in the field very, very soon.”

Artificial Intelligence

26 Spring 2021

UF agricultural engineer Yiannis Ampatzidis says artificial intelligence ­— the convergence of new tools for data collection with cloud computing to analyze the explosion of information ­— is changing the face of agriculture in a way that is nothing short of revolutionary.

“Revolution is the perfect word,” says Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering in Immokalee at the SWFREC, a part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“Artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, big data analytics, the internet of things. This is no doubt the fourth agricultural revolution,” Ampatzidis says. “We are going to see these technologies in the field very, very soon.”

In the first agricultural revolution, mechanization ­— tractors, harvesters and such ­— changed life on the farm.

In the second, chemicals ­— fertilizers and pesticides ­— drastically increased yields. In the third, genetics produced hybrid plants, boosting yields yet again.

What will artificial intelligence capabilities do for agriculture in the fourth revolution? A better question, Ampatzidis says, is what won’t they do?

Todd Motis, a manager at Chemical Containers, an agricultural equipment designer and manufacturer, says the scope of research at UF and the SWFREC is large.

“What they’ve already done is just the tip of the iceberg,” Motis says.

The AI explosion was in progress in 2020 when J. Scott Angle took the helm as the new vice president for agriculture and natural resources. He has been impressed at the scope of AI applications, research and outreach at UF. “AI is the next technology that will change agriculture in a profound way,” Angle says.

Automating even basic chores pays off, Angle says, and Ampatzidis says that is especially true for citrus, Florida’s signature crop. For example, just creating a tree inventory for a grove is expensive and time-consuming.

“Before automation, an inventory required driving throughout a field with two people, one looking left, one looking right, and they would have counting devices or clickers, and if they see a big tree they click one clicker, and if they see a small tree they click another one,” Ampatzidis says. “They need to mindfully count.”

Mapping systems, like Google maps, help, but they are not precise enough and are often five to 10 years old.

“Even if you open Google maps, imagine you have a field with 50,000 trees.

Can you count them all?”

The clickers also don’t register all the variations in sizes, or gaps between trees.

Manually counting trees on just 1,000 acres can cost up to $14 an acre. Using drones, the time can be reduced by 90 percent and the cost by 60 to 70 percent, Ampatzidis says.

Once the drone images are uploaded into Agroview, the grower can access much more than just a tree count.

Tyler Jones

Yiannis Ampatzidis

Agroview processes and analyzes the visual images to provide information such as tree height, canopy size, stress condition, and gaps where trees need to be replanted. The grower can also search for specific categories, for example, all the trees less than 7 feet tall.

A ground-based system that can be paired with Agroview can detect and count fruit, even immature green fruit, which is difficult because green fruit is the same color as the leaves. This helps the grower monitor growth, predict yield and prepare for harvests. Agroview can also determine plant nutrient concentration and develop fertility maps that create management zones for precision agriculture applications.

Growers, understandably, are eager to get their hands on Agroview, which UF Innovate named Invention of the Year.

Angle says AI will leverage the capabilities of other technologies. For example, mechanization has been around a long time, waiting for the technologies that

Technology can reduce the time involved in a tree census by 90% and reduce costs by 60-70%.

will make machines smarter. And smart mechanization will become even more important in the face of labor shortages, he says.

“We’ve always had the mechanical part, let’s say, for picking a peach,” Angle says.

“We’ve got claws that can reach out, grab it, pull it off the branch, throw it into a bin. The problem is, is that peach ripe, ready to be picked? That’s a hard question.

“A human can determine that easily,

but a robot can’t. Secondly, when you grab that peach, if it’s ripe and you put too much pressure on it, you’ll squish it.

And if you don’t apply enough pressure, it’ll drop out of the claw.

“So that’s a question for AI to solve for us. Every peach will become a specific calculation,” Angle says. “I think in the next couple of years, we’re going to see robots in our orchards and our groves harvesting a lot of our crops.”

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L Cristina Carrizosa

eading with AI

“We (in IFAS) don’t understand the machine learning side, and they don’t understand the biology side, but when you’re looking at the same problem together, each side brings different viewpoints.

And so in some ways the misunderstanding of one side actually brings new ideas to the group as a whole.”

Tyler Jones

— Diane Rowland

Angle agrees with Ampatzidis about the revolutionary nature of AI in agriculture and sees AI as having perhaps more impact in agriculture than in some other arenas.

In manufacturing, for instance, large companies like automakers deploy advances as they occur. Large agricultural companies do as well. But while there are no mom and pop automakers, there are thousands of mom and pop agricultural producers.

Angle says AI will level the playing field for all producers, big and small.

“Right now, sophisticated information is generally only available to the largest producers, the biggest corporate farming and forestry operations, because they can afford it,” Angle says. “Smaller producers have not had access to a lot of this. What AI is going to do is open up a tremendous amount of knowledge, but also decisionmaking based upon that knowledge, to everyone. It’s a great equalizer when it comes to agriculture, forestry and natural resources.”

Agronomy department Chair Diane Rowland, director of the Center for Stress Resilient Agriculture, says putting AI into

Diane Rowland

28 Spring 2021

Edwin Remsberg

the hands of even the smallest farmers is the goal of a new, four-institution grant from the National Science Foundation.

Rowland and David Arnold, of UF’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, are UF leads on the $26 million grant designed to help farmers grow more crops with fewer inputs, such as water, chemicals and energy.

Rowland is leading the agricultural sensor systems team, and she says a collaboration that began four years ago with engineering researcher Alina Zare is a sign of the benefits of AI. In her agronomy lab, her team was looking at root function and wanted to move beyond understanding the architecture of crop roots.

“We were using the tools we have traditionally used, and I knew that we were not gathering the information in as complex a way as we could,” Rowland says.

The results were amazing, she says.

Researchers had been able to see differences with their eyes, but unable to statistically quantify how the differences occurred, the minute changes in the process of a plant transitioning from a well-watered plant to an over-watered or under-watered plant, for instance.

Rowland says last year’s $70 million partnership with NVIDIA, which includes the gift of one of the fastest supercomputers in academia, will change logistics for researchers, and that will change research outcomes.

“For example, in our root work with Alina, we had 17,000 images that had been hand-traced on a computer. You can imagine the person hours if we added them up,” Rowland says. “I envision the NVIDIA computing power allowing us

“What AI is going to do is open up a tremendous amount of knowledge, but also decision-making based upon that knowledge, to everyone. It’s a great equalizer when it comes to agriculture, forestry and natural resources.”

— J. Scott Angle

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managers that have the problems AI can address,” Angle says. “I think it will show up a little faster than most people think.

I think we’re just a couple of years away.

“It will greatly expand access to information, so that what GM and Boeing have access to today, a homeowner will have access to in the future. That’s why I call it the great equalizer.”

R

ow Crops

Tyler Jones

Cristina Carrizosa

to basically crunch all of that very, very quickly. So we should be reaching solutions at a much faster pace.”

The collaboration between the College of Engineering and UF/IFAS has also been fun to watch, she says.

“It’s really amazing to watch students.

We bring in engineering students and bring in agronomy students, and they sit at a table and look at a problem together. We (in IFAS) don’t understand the machine learning side, and they don’t understand the biology side, but when you’re looking at the same problem together, each side brings different viewpoints. And so in some ways the misunderstanding of one side actually brings new ideas to the group as a whole,” Rowland says. “That process is the key to making these advances. It has to be done together.”

Angle says the 12 UF/IFAS research and education centers throughout the state and the extension offices in all 67 counties will allow AI to quickly get into the hands of the producers that can use it and eventually onto Floridians’ kitchen tables.

“We have regular communication with farmers and foresters and natural resource

Rodrigo Onofre uses a robot and UV light to suppress disease at a commercial strawberry farm near the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Balm.

30 Spring 2021

In Florida’s fields of tomatoes ­— the state’s third-largest crop ­— drones are the newest workhorses.

Using multispectral and hyperspectral imaging ­— far more sophisticated than inspection by the human eye ­— drones outfitted with cameras can measure reflected solar radiation to detect diseases.

Ampatzidis and UF plant pathologist Pamela Roberts found the system could identify two scourges of tomatoes ­— bacterial spot and target spot ­— with around 90 percent accuracy.

In a 20-minute flight, about 60 acres of tomato fields can be scanned, a huge time savings for growers, who otherwise would manually have to check for the disease row by row.

The system also detects disease at a very early stage, which is critical for growers, and can distinguish between bacterial spot and target spot, so the right chemical ­— and the right amount of chemical — can be used. Based on the data gathered, Ampatzidis says the team also has developed AI models to predict diseases in other vegetable crops as well as tomatoes.

The diseases are chronic, occurring every season, Roberts says, and the two together can cost tomato farmers about $5 million a year.

Roberts has been working with tomatoes for 20 years and said a solution like this is long overdue.

Tyler Jones

Another technology is being tested on peppers. Ampatzidis calls it a smart sprayer because the apparatus travels above a row and, using machine vision and AI, sprays herbicide when it spots a weed, such as portulaca. It doesn’t spray when it spots non-target plants, like the peppers themselves or sedgegrass. The smart sprayer saves both money and chemicals, helping the farmers and the consumers who buy the produce.

Rowland says technologies like hyperspectral imaging also help in harvesting crops like peanut.

“Peanut grows underground, so predicting when it should be harvested is very difficult. With a corn plant, you can go out and take a look at the ear and say ‘yeah, it’s ready,’ but with peanut you can’t do that,” Rowland says.

When peanut growers dig their crop, they go through a painstaking process to determine what is mature and what’s not, removing the outer skin of the hull and looking for colors ­— white, yellow, orange, brown and black ­— to see if a pod is mature.

“It’s a huge amount of work and laden with error,” Rowland says. “But with hyperspectral imaging, we can tell which pods are mature or not.”

Hyperspectral imaging can also be used in a shelling plant to detect peanuts that are hiding aflatoxin, a fungus, underneath the hull. Aflatoxins are associated with liver cancer, so keeping aflatoxincontaminated peanuts out of the food supply has health benefits.

Ampatzidis says UF agricultural engineers recently started working with a company in Tampa, Harvest Croo Robotics, on an autonomous robotic harvester of strawberries, a crop with such severe labor issues that some growers have considered not planting as opposed to planting and letting unpicked crops rot in the fields.

“We need to develop these technologies and use artificial intelligence to be competitive and compete in a global market,” Ampatzidis says.

B

Setting up an agricultural drone at a crop field.

eyond the Farmers’ Almanac

Agroview, a cloud-based application, aggregates data from drones, satellites, sensors and imaging equipment. Agroview can take disparate information and produce maps of fields or groves, showing trees and gaps between trees, tree height, canopy size and leaf density. It can also estimate plant nutrient concentration and ­— in the near future — predict yield and fruit quality. In row crops, it can also show spacing and overlay data about where pests have been detected, allowing it to create a tool called a prescription map, which offers detailed instructions on where to apply fertilizers and pesticides to best effect. Agroview is now on generation 4, and Motis says it provides a foundation for further development.

Prescription mapping and smart sprayers are not only good for growers’ budgets, they are good for the environment, too, because reducing pesticides and fertilizers means less chemicals seeping into Florida water supplies.

“With this system, we will be able to treat every tree on a per-tree basis,” says Motis, who worked in turfgrass, ornamentals, citrus and other crops before joining the family business.

“Every tree, every vegetable plant will have its own name. For the first time ever, we will be able to treat in a way that the tree utilizes every nutrient, and that means less runoff into water supplies. Cost savings may drive sales, but the best reason to do this is to protect our water.”

Motis sees the potential to develop industry-specific technologies as well, and Ampatzidis agrees.

Ampatzidis says the AI revolution will act as a multiplier effect for all the previous agricultural revolutions. For example, drones can collect phenotype data, which can be fed into software to find the trees and plants that perform the best from a genomic standpoint. He says he is looking forward to collaborating with plant geneticists.

“The strength of UF is that we have all these faculty from different disciplines that can help us to better develop these AI models,” Ampatzidis says.

In the Fourth Agricultural Revolution, soil and water and weather still matter. But data ­— and data-based decision-making ­— is king.

Yiannis Ampatzidis Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering Southwest Florida Research and Education Center i.ampatzidis@ufl.edu

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John Jernigan

32 Spring 2021

Optimally Positioned Neuroscientist Duane Mitchell is committed to elevating the Clinical & Translational Science Institute

By Joseph Kays

D

uane Mitchell’s team at the University of Florida is a world leader in understanding how the body’s own immune system can be marshaled to fight cancers, especially brain cancers, in children and adults.

It’s a big job, managing grants, directing clinical trials, writing journal articles, courting donors and countless other things.

At home, he and his wife have three young boys of their own to raise.

So when he was approached about also applying to be the director of UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, he could have been forgiven for saying he had too much on his plate.

Instead he jumped at the opportunity.

“I was so impressed by the University of Florida’s commitment when we came here from Duke eight years ago, that I saw this as an opportunity to take some of what we've learned about using the extraordinary translational research capabilities of the university and contribute in a more meaningful way to helping the institution as a whole continue to develop and to elevate those capabilities in ways that will benefit not only my own research program but open up opportunities for other programs,” Mitchell says.

Mitchell credits David Nelson, the CTSI’s founding director and now senior vice president for health affairs and president of UF Health, and CTSI co-director Betsy Shenkman with doing transformative foundational work that has the institute “optimally positioned” to advance healthcare for many different groups moving forward.

In 2009, UF was awarded a five-year, $26 million Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health to accelerate scientific discovery, enhance medical care, produce highly skilled scientists and physicians and foster partnerships with industry. The university used an additional $23 million in funding from UF Research and $70 million from the College of Medicine to construct a state-of-the-art building to house the CTSI and the Institute on Aging.

In 2010, the CTSI partnered with Florida State University’s

College of Medicine to expand community-based clinical research, which led to creation of the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium in 2013. In 2015, UF received a second, $17.5 million CTSA award and added FSU as a partner to continue developing OneFlorida. To date, the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium has facilitated more than 125 projects studying areas as diverse as obesity, cancer, hepatitis C, hypertension and substance abuse. In 2019, UF and FSU received another five-year, $29 million CTSA award to expand their collaboration, further developing and aligning expertise across the two universities to address complex health challenges in the communities they serve.

“A big emphasis for me going forward is to stay really focused on the areas where we can have the greatest improvement in the health of the constituents in the communities that we serve,” Mitchell says. “We want to leverage the data infrastructure that's been built and developed over the last 10 years, the collaborations and the interconnectivity between all of the colleges here at UF, but also the collaborative partners of OneFlorida throughout the state, where we can play a meaningful and lead role in advancing health initiatives and the health priorities for Florida.”

Mitchell says UF Health’s expansion in north and central Florida, including Jacksonville, Orlando and The Villages retirement community, as well as the CTSI’s relationship with the FSU College of Medicine and other Florida health systems, provides countless new opportunities for impactful clinical and translational research.

“The learning health system that Betsy Shenkman and others have been developing is based on the idea that we should be learning something from every patient we engage with that helps us change practice patterns and improve health,” he says. “By adding new patient populations in Jacksonville, Orlando and The Villages, we now have access to even more demographically, socio-economically and geographically distinct populations to learn from, and to study how to deliver high quality care in these distinct environments.”

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Although no organization could have fully anticipated the impact of COVID-19, Mitchell says the events of 2020 “have really shown in an extraordinary way how the CTSI is positioned to nimbly and quickly respond to pressing healthcare needs and bring the full leverage of the resources that the University of Florida has to bear upon a pressing problem. We really have tapped into every existing infrastructure piece and communications link and collaboration that already existed in order to respond to this pandemic, and we've been able to rapidly stand up and foster new initiatives in record time because of the extensive capabilities that CTSI has.”

For example, when the pandemic hit, CTSI quickly established a research task force with more than 40 experts from across the UF campus in fields ranging from virology and informatics to epidemiology and infectious disease. The task force developed working groups to advance areas of COVID-19 research and to keep the community informed on progress. The institute also awarded more than $2 million in seed grants to get projects going quickly while researchers pursued additional federal funding.

“We were able to tap a huge, diverse array of expertise imbedded throughout our colleges in Gainesville, Orlando and Jacksonville, and with our collaborators at FSU, to identify very specific areas that were being challenged by the pandemic and very specific research initiatives that could try to address those challenges,” Mitchell says.

He adds that because of the CTSI’s reputation, NIH has repeatedly called on UF to rapidly set up and execute high-priority national clinical research initiatives for the state of Florida through the OneFlorida network.

“That ability to activate large-scale clinical research studies through a multi-institutional network in a matter of a few weeks is an extraordinary capability that leverages the foundational relationships that have been built through the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium,” Mitchell says.

As the pandemic has worn on, research has evolved from developing better tests and equipment to developing treatments and vaccines. But, Mitchell says, another key component is making sure the public knows about, trusts and has access to those treatments and vaccines.

“That's a huge challenge for the healthcare system,” Mitchell says, adding that CTSI’s Community Engagement Program led

by Linda Cottler, and its established relationships with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and College of Journalism and Communications, has uniquely positioned it to share information with hard-to-reach and underserved communities, like rural or inner-city populations, and migrant workers.

Artificial Intelligence In the midst of the pandemic, UF announced a major initiative to become the nation’s leading university in the field of artificial intelligence. Thanks to $50 million in gifts from 34 Spring 2021

"A big emphasis for me going forward is to stay really focused on the areas where we can have the greatest improvement in the health of the constituents in the communities that we serve."

— Duane Mitchell

John Jernigan

Pandemic Response

alumnus Chris Malachowsky, and NVIDIA, the computer graphics company he co-founded, UF’s HiPerGator is now one of the world’s most powerful AI computers. With support from the state, the university is building a state-of-the-art data science building and hiring at least 100 new faculty members in artificial intelligence. It is also retooling the curriculum to offer AI courses in every college. ”We have an extraordinary opportunity to capitalize on the AI initiative to understand how to more effectively deliver healthcare solutions to the citizens of Florida,” Mitchell says.

In particular, he envisions using AI to link healthcare experts with educational experts to improve the health of young people.

“I think we have an opportunity to think about the integration of health Information as well as education information to impact the health of current patients, as well as the next generation, and use AI as a real enabling tool to give us glimpses into how to do that.”

Mitchell cited the work of David Tran, chief of neurooncology and associate professor in neurosurgery, as an example of someone who is leveraging machine-based learning and AI tools to identify novel targets for gene therapy in brain cancer.

“Our group is using HiPerGator’s data management and algorithm tools to analyze the genomics of cancers as they relate to a patient's own immune system to identify new targets for immunotherapy, not just for brain tumors, but for multiple solid cancers.”

Mitchell anticipates the CTSI “facilitating the handshake” between researchers from many different fields as they figure out how to use AI to improve health.

“I think one of our really important roles is to increase investigators’ awareness of our university’s AI capabilities and provide networking opportunities,” he says. “Hopefully CTSI will be a clearinghouse for many new partnerships.”

Racial Equity After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, UF President Kent Fuchs said the university would use the 2020-2021 academic year to focus on the Black experience, racism and inequity. UF Research and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer created a Racial Justice Research Fund that has so far committed nearly $1 million “to support research and scholarship that will inform understanding of the Black experience, racial justice, diversity, equity and inclusion on campus and beyond.”

Among the recipients of that funding is the CTSI’s Diversity and Cultural Competence Council, or DC3, which was organized to look at issues of inclusion, diversity, equity and access within clinical research, particularly in the training and education of the healthcare research workforce.

“Access and inclusion have been central themes at CTSI long before I got here, but this past year, with the clear focus and

highlight on these pressing issues, we have elevated our commitments in this area,” Mitchell says.

In January, the DC3 hosted the inaugural Black Voices in Research Storytelling Event, a platform for Black biomedical researchers and research professionals to amplify their stories. Five UF biomedical researchers shared their stories in a livestream that was recorded and shared widely.

“This project harnesses the universal, culturally relevant power of personal storytelling, grounded theoretically in the life story tradition to amplify and celebrate the Black scientists and biomedical professionals' experience – that is, Black voices in research at UF,” Mitchell says, adding that he anticipates more such programs in the future.

“Biomedical research is integral to translation of scientific findings to healthcare policy and clinical bedside practice,” he says. “Biomedical professionals who themselves identify as Black, and understand issues relevant to the Black community, are most qualified to produce culturally sensitive research.”

Discovery Research Mitchell says that his own career as a laboratory to clinical translational researcher has fueled his passion for leveraging very basic research in fields like chemistry and engineering and moving it to human applications.

“The University of Florida has extraordinary capabilities in many areas like neuroscience, diabetes, and precision medicine, and I am committed to advancing CTSI as a place that can accelerate discoveries into treatments for patients,” he says.

An important accelerant of biomedical research is a strong and expanding philanthropic base that supports promising discovery work, Mitchell says. He credits philanthropy with enabling much of the basic and translational discovery work before it is ready for consideration for funding by government or industry.

He cited as examples the Lillian S. Wells Foundation and the Harris Rosen Foundation, which together have donated more than $25 million to support brain research at UF. “Our ability to really go after high-risk, high-reward research has been driven by philanthropic support,” he says. “Once you have the data and the underpinnings of a hypothesis that looks like it's worthwhile, then you can seek extramural funding, but philanthropy can be critical to getting to that point.”

Mitchell aims to leverage his role as CTSI director to increase awareness and philanthropic support for the outstanding clinical and translational work being advanced by UF investigators.

David Norton, UF’s vice president for research, calls Mitchell “a tremendous asset for our university,” and was so impressed by his skills that he also recruited Mitchell to serve as an assistant vice president for research.

“Not only is he a world-class researcher in brain cancer,” Norton says, “but he possesses a remarkable acumen for bringing teams together to address challenges that no single scientist, or single institution, can address.”

Duane Mitchell Director, UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute duane.mitchell@neurosurgery.ufl.edu Related Website: https://www.ctsi.ufl.edu

"I think one of our really important roles is to increase investigators' awareness of our university's AI capabilities and provide networking opportunities. Hopefully CTSI will be a clearinghouse for many new partnerships."

— Duane Mitchell

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Black Voices In Research Storytelling as a vehicle for change

I

n January, the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute hosted “Black Voices in Research,” an online storytelling event featuring five Black members of the UF biomedical research community. The program was developed by the CTSI’s Diversity and Cultural Competency Council, known as DC3.

“This event is a call to listen more deeply, to be present with one another and to invest in each other and our experiences,” said Duane Mitchell, director of the CTSI. “There is something unique to learn from each storyteller, and it is our hope that this event will be the beginning of a new chapter in our continuing mission to promote an inclusive, diverse, accessible and equitable community here at the University of Florida and within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.”

Here are excerpts from each of the presenters. To hear more, visit www.ctsi.ufl.edu/2020/09/28/black-voices-in-research-storytelling-event/

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Shantrel Canidate Shantrel Canidate is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology. She is a social and behavioral scientist and epidemiologist with an extensive background in HIV outreach, public health research and intervention training for clinical-based studies.

“I am no stranger to adversity challenges or setbacks. For as long as I can remember, I have been turning life's lemons into lemonade. I have managed to defy the odds and achieve success, all while living in my truth. I am the descendant of a generation of Black sharecroppers born and raised in rural Georgia.

“As a little girl, I would attend adult education classes with my grandmother and great aunt, who were over 50 but who both believed that it was never too late to achieve an education … I quickly realized that education was a key to a better life. With this knowledge, I began to set educational goals that would break generational curses and form generational blessings.”

Canidate pursued that education with purpose, ultimately earning a master’s of

public health and a doctorate in social and behavioral sciences. But the road was not easy, and after becoming a new mother, she and her husband decided to move to Daytona Beach to be closer to family.

“We commuted over 200 miles to and from work each day for almost a year and a half. During that time I experienced many challenges. I watered the road with my tears, doubted my abilities and even contemplated giving up a career in academic research.”

Ultimately, Canidate was hired as a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and returned to Gainesville to pursue her research on HIV in the African American community.

“My research is focused on eliminating HIV disparities among African Americans. I want to empower African Americans to learn about the impact of HIV across all levels and to come together to combat this disease together. More importantly, I want to inspire people. I want someone to look at me and say ‘You know what Shantrel, it was because of you that I did not give up.’”

"I quickly realized that education was a key to a better life. With this knowledge, I began to set educational goals that would break generational curses and form generational blessings."

— Shantrel Canidate

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Erica Guerrido Erica Guerrido is a research and compliance administrator in the Office of Research Affairs at the UF College of Medicine in Jacksonville. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of North Florida’s Brooks College of Health.

Guerrido recalls many incidences in her life where people treated her like she didn’t belong.

“One of the things that I have noticed about being Black and intelligent, and Hispanic in my case, is that it tends to cause other people to become uncomfortable.”

Growing up in Iceland, where her mother was stationed at a U.S. military base, Guerrido recalls clearly the sting of others underestimating her. As graduation approached for the 20 students in her high school class, she learned that she was in the running for valedictorian.

“I had two classmates who just knew that they had it in the bag … They were going to be number one and number two and nobody else was going to have that opportunity or that chance. When we

got the announcement that I was in the running, it's like their whole world stood still. There's no way that I … daughter of a single, Black woman could have been in the running.”

Guerrido was named valedictorian, but the experience changed her.

“That experience kind of colored the rest of what would happen in my life, seeing how people react when they think that only they have a right and a privilege to something” There were other incidences, she says.

“When I got my first official grown-up job after college, someone I love told me that I only got it because I was Black, and that the place that I was working needed to check the diversity box just to say that they had someone Black on the staff.”

More recently, Guerrido recounted an incident where some co-workers treated her like “hired help,” leaving her to carry a large box of materials instead of offering to help.

“I will admit that these experiences have made me question myself … but they don't define me,” she says.

"One of the things that I have noticed about being Black and intelligent, and Hispanic in my case, is that it tends to cause other people to become uncomfortable."

— Erica Guerrido “The term going around now is Black Girl Magic, and that's what I have …

These examples have made me the strong and resilient woman that I am today.”

Samuel Inkabi

"There is a saying that until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. I believe that time is now."

— Samuel Inkabi

38 Spring 2021

Samuel Inkabi is a graduate research assistant in biomedical sciences. He holds a master’s in experimental and medical biosciences from Linkoping University in Sweden and a bachelor’s in biochemistry from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

Inkabi says several experiences motivated him to pursue a biomedical sciences degree, including a project observing transmission of diseases in Ghana and an undergraduate project looking for leukemia therapies.

“Understanding the many lives that have been lost and continue to be lost due to leukemia and to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the story of treating, if not curing, leukemia not only inspired but motivated me to make research my profession.”

“Obviously, there are not a lot of Africans involved in research,” he says, but he

hopes that succeeding in science, maybe even winning a Nobel Prize, “will serve as an inspiration for the upcoming generation from Africa to also pursue research as a career.”

Inkabi started his research career at the University of Florida studying the disparity in the pathogenesis of laryngeal cancers between whites and Blacks and is now studying a microbe that has been implicated in oral infections.

“There is a saying that until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. I believe that time is now. Having found our voices, we minorities are capable of telling our stories better, and one way of telling our stories is through the diverse research studies we do, because our stories have a great contribution in solving the problems we have as a people and that is why diversity in research is important to me.”

Tiffany Danielle Chisholm Pineda

"You didn't even know you had those lenses in front of you affecting your thoughts, your views and even your beliefs. I'm here to show you what those lenses potentially could be and to help you remove them."

— Tiffany Danielle Chisholm Pineda

Tiffany Danielle Chisholm Pineda has held multiple positions at the University of Florida over the last 25 years, including as education coordinator for the university’s institutional review boards that review all human subject research and now as regulatory specialist with the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, where she helped to establish the Diversity and Cultural Competence Council.

“I was put in a position to use the intersectionality of my position as a research professional, a woman and a person of color to start to tailor the conversation with research professionals.”

Pineda compares understanding of different cultures to getting your eyes tested for new glasses.

“As the doctor flips the lens and asks A or B, B or C. Lens A is growing up in in the Midwest, not knowing any people of a different or diverse culture. Lens B

may be going to a predominantly white institution. Lens C could be the portrayal of Black people on TV … You didn't even know you had those lenses in front of you affecting your thoughts, your views and even your beliefs. I'm here to show you what those lenses potentially could be and to help you remove them.

“Listening to the voices, is me acting as your ophthalmologist, whispering lens A may need to be removed, lens B may need to be removed, lens C may need to be cleaned, not in a punitive way, but in a helpful way, so that you can show up as your fullest and greatest self as you interact with the research community.

“I know that we all have multiple lenses, but I am here to share my story so that you can look and see what needs to be done to evolve, to grow, to clean or even throw away your lenses so that these stories are no longer being told, even in 2021.”

Erika Moore Erika Moore is the inaugural Rhines Rising Star Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Duke University and a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

“I cannot recall a time when I walked into a classroom or into a lab and there weren't hushed whispers or subtle questioning of why I was present. These hushed whispers and questioning … spoke louder than words … I wondered if maybe I could prove to them that I belonged, but I also quickly learned that it was more important to prove it to myself that I belonged in these spaces.”

As she neared the end of her graduate education Moore found herself at a crossroads.

“Life as a stressed out professor was not for me, or so I thought. I sought industry internships, a safe harbor to divorce myself from feeling like an other in academia, but the shoe did not fit for me in industry, and so, like Goldilocks, I went in search of other opportunities – consulting, too big; higher education, too many lumps; leadership development, too small. I fought even considering a career as an academic, but one day it dawned on me that the only way to create a space for Black women who felt similarly othered or similarly uncomfortable walking into classrooms or laboratories was to become a leader in those classrooms.”

"I cannot recall a time when I walked into a classroom or into a lab and there weren't hushed whispers or subtle questioning of why I was present."

— Erika Moore Explore 39

UF Biodiversity Institute | Addressing unprecedented change |

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By Karla Arboleda

am Soltis has spent her adult life studying the Earth’s living things, first from the perspective of plants and in recent years on a broader scale as she and her husband, Doug, have worked to create a “Tree of Life” that organizes and illustrates how all living things interact.

But as scientists came to understand the catastrophic impact of global climate change and the unprecedented loss of plant and animal species, she began looking for a better way of understanding and communicating this unprecedented challenge.

“The remarkable diversity of species and environments in our natural world is declining rapidly as the human population expands and landscapes are modified,” Soltis says. “Insufficient information and policies are in part due to the slow rate at which biodiversity data are gathered, and the difficulty in accessing the information once it is available.”

So, in 2016, Soltis led establishment of the UF Biodiversity Institute, with a vision to “accelerate the discovery of, improve the understanding of, enhance the conservation of and disseminate information on the planet’s biological diversity.”

Today, nearly 100 scientists and scholars affiliated with the institute are collaborating to understand the relationship between plants and animals, climate change and the sustainability of natural and human environments.

“UFBI also gives us an opportunity to pull people from what we thought of as being isolated parts of the biological sciences together, because they really do represent a continuum,” Soltis says.

Among the institute’s initiatives are encouraging research and training around discovery of new biodiversity; using big data to describe, understand, explain and predict patterns of biodiversity; and translating knowledge on biodiversity into action – including

40 Spring 2021

conservation, policy, law and education. UFBI promotes interdisciplinary research through seed grants that jump-start new collaborations and research projects. Since 2017, the institute, in collaboration with the UF Informatics Institute, has awarded a total of $460,000 to researchers across campus.

For example, the institute funded a collaboration among scholars in the Tropical Conservation and Development Program, the Department of Geography and the Levin College of Law on a project to assist indigenous communities in the Amazon with biocultural policy and decision-making.

A joint grant from the Biodiversity and Informatics institutes funded a project to evaluate the quality of data submitted through iNaturalist, a platform where citizen scientists submit pictures, videos or audio of biological sightings to be identified by plant and animal experts.

“Citizen scientist contributions … with some extra quality controls can still be useful in biodiversity studies, since they cover otherwise underexplored areas, such as central Africa or Southeast Asia,” the researchers wrote in a paper in PLOS One last May. “Citizen scientist data collections have the advantage of being quickly updated, and the many eyes of volunteer contributors may even be able to discover species in locations where they were not previously observed.”

The close relationship between the Biodiversity Institute and the Informatics Institute is reaping dividends for both as the university pursues new research and recruits new faculty under the Artificial Intelligence Initiative.

With a powerful new supercomputer now online and collaborators from the Informatics Institute, Soltis says UFBI members are keen to use AI to advance their research.

"I see digitization as a huge opportunity to help broaden participation in science.

If we could deliver content to people virtually, we have a much better way of reaching people who could benefit from the types of work we do and who might want to join the field."

— Pam Soltis

“AI is opening exciting new opportunities in many areas of biodiversity science, from the use of camera traps to monitor wildlife movements to scoring thousands of plant specimens to detect changes in flowering date in response to climate change,” she says. “UF’s AI Initiative will bring new faculty to campus and will build on the strong start that UFBI scientists have already made in this field.”

Soltis and other faculty in the institute have long been involved in iDigBio, a massive UF-led National Science Foundation effort to digitize and share data for the estimated 1-2 billion specimens in the nation’s natural history museums, so they are primed to take advantage of UF’s new capabilities.

“I see digitization as a huge opportunity to help broaden participation in science,” Soltis says. “If we could deliver content to people virtually, we have a much better way of reaching people who could benefit from the types of work we do and who might want to join the field.”

Soltis says that training the next generation of scientists is another top priority for the institute, so in 2016 it began supporting 9-month fellowships that “are geared toward mid-Ph.D. students,

nominated by their departments, whose dissertation projects could particularly benefit from interdisciplinary opportunities with faculty, post-docs and students outside their departments or programs.”

Among the research topics on which the five 2020-21 fellows are focusing are the impact of fragmented landscapes on carnivores in India; the fate of South Florida’s critically imperiled pine rockland ecosystem; how habitat-forming marine organisms like coral and sea urchins respond to environmental changes; the role of ants in ecosystems around the planet; and the bird ecology of fragmented cloud forests in Peru.

Soltis is a strong proponent of effective science communications, so the fellows are also required to maintain a blog about their research. During the pandemic, several of the fellows wrote about how the campus shutdown enabled them to reconnect with nature.

“About six months ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I started going for hikes around Gainesville to spend time outdoors,” wrote Mahi Puri, whose work focuses on analyzing behavioral adaptation patterns in carnivores. “Being a wildlife biologist myself and having been away

from working in the field for almost a year, these hikes allowed me to be around nature again.”

Lauren Trotta, who studies South Florida ecosystems, wrote about how nighttime walks around the UF campus helped her to appreciate the different world that comes out after the sun sets.

“During these walks, the familiar verdant backdrop shifted into darkened shadows against the night sky and I began to discover an entirely new diversity of sounds, smells and creatures.”

As the UFBI completes its first five years, Soltis says, “we have facilitated new collaborations, supported interdisciplinary events, including with the arts and humanities, trained students, and more, and we’re looking for exciting new things to come during the next five years and beyond.”

Pam Soltis Director, UF Biodiversity Institute psoltis@flmnh.ufl.edu Related Website: https://biodiversity.research.ufl.edu

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Women used to dominate the beer industry — until the witch accusations started pouring in

By Laken Brooks

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Getty Images

hat do witches have to do with your favorite beer?

When I pose this question to students in my American literature and culture classes, I receive stunned silence or nervous laughs. The Sanderson sisters didn’t chug down bottles of Sam Adams in “Hocus Pocus.” But the history of beer points to a notso-magical legacy of transatlantic slander and gender roles.

Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women’s work — that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, emerged from their connection to female brewers.

A routine household task

Exiling women from the industry

Humans have been drinking beer for almost 7,000 years, and the original brewers were women. From the Vikings to the Egyptians, women brewed beer both for religious ceremonies and to make a practical, calorie-rich beverage for the home.

In fact, the nun Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in modernday Germany, famously wrote about hops in the 12th century and added the ingredient to her beer recipe.

From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale — and, later, beer — was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins.

Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks.

Some enterprising women took this household skill to the marketplace and began selling beer. Widows or unmarried women used their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money, while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business.

So if you traveled back in time to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and went to a market in England, you’d probably see an oddly familiar sight: women wearing tall, pointy hats. In many instances, they’d be standing in front of big cauldrons.

But these women were no witches; they were brewers.

They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain.

Just as women were establishing their foothold in the beer markets of England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, the Inquisition began. The fundamentalist religious movement, which originated in the early 16th century, preached stricter gender norms and condemned witchcraft.

Male brewers saw an opportunity. To reduce their competition in the beer trade, these men accused female brewers of being witches and using their cauldrons to brew up magic potions instead of booze.

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A 1916 illustration of the witch from the German children’s fairy tale ‘Hansel and Gretel.’

Men still run the show Unfortunately, the rumors took hold.

Over time, it became more dangerous for women to practice brewing and sell beer because they could be misidentified as witches. At the time, being accused of witchcraft wasn’t just a social faux pas; it could result in prosecution or a death sentence.

Women accused of witchcraft were often ostracized in their communities, imprisoned or even killed.

Some men didn’t really believe that the women brewers were witches. However, many did believe that women shouldn’t be spending their time making beer. The process took time and dedication: hours to prepare the ale, sweep the floors clean and lift heavy bundles of rye and grain. If women couldn’t brew ale, they would have significantly more time at home to raise their children. In the 1500s some towns, such as Chester, England, actually made it illegal for most women to sell beer, worried that young alewives would grow up into old spinsters.

The iconography of witches with their pointy hats and cauldrons has endured, as has men’s domination of the beer industry: The top 10 beer companies in the world are headed by male CEOs and have mostly male board members.

Major beer companies have tended to portray beer as a drink for men. Some scholars have even gone as far as calling beer ads “manuals on masculinity.”

This gender bias seems to persist in smaller craft breweries as well. A study at Stanford University found that while 17% of craft beer breweries have one female CEO, only 4% of these businesses employ a female brewmaster — the expert supervisor who oversees the brewing process.

It doesn’t have to be this way. For much of history, it wasn’t.

Laken Brooks Doctoral Candidate, English lakenbrooks@ufl.edu

To read more articles by UF faculty, visit https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-florida-1392

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