SAS Talks Program Book - Spring 2019

Public Impact Research How Does Research Make the World a Better Place?

SPRING 2019 May 7, 2019

IRIC ATRIUM

4:00 – 7:30 PM

Program 4 p.m. – Welcome and Introduction to Public Impact Research Janet E. Nelson, Vice President for Research and Economic Development 4:15 p.m. - Presentations 1) 2) 3) 4)

5)

“Detection of Tick-borne Diseases Using Non-Uniform Electric Fields” by Ezekiel Adekanmbi, doctoral student in chemical engineering in the College of Engineering “The Vaginal Microbiome in Health and Disease” by Larry Forney, university distinguished professor of microbiology, bioinformatics, and computational biology in the College of Science “Carbon Sink or Carbon Source: It’s All about One Number” by Tara Hudiburg, assistant professor of ecosystem ecology in the College of Natural Resources “Sustainable Aquaculture and Hardy’s Hierarchy of Feeds” by Ronald Hardy, university distinguished professor of animal and veterinary science in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and director of the Aquaculture Research Institute “Fusing Practice and Scholarship for Public Health Impact” by Helen Brown, clinical associate professor of public health and nutrition, exercise, sport, and health sciences in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences

5:00 p.m. –Remarks and Networking Janet E. Nelson, Vice President for Research and Economic Development 5:30 p.m. – Presentations 6)

7)

8) 9)

“Public Emotions, Public Memory” by Jennifer Ladino, associate professor of English and director of undergraduate studies in the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences “Envisaging the Future Together: Stakeholder-driven Scenarios and Solutions in Idaho’s Magic Valley” by Andrew Kliskey, professor of forest, rangeland and fire sciences in the College of Natural Resources and co-director of the Center for Resilient Communities “Border Effects of Payday Lending Policy” by Stefanie Ramirez, assistant professor of economics in the College of Business and Economics “Putting the ‘Public’ in Public Impact Research” by Alan Kolok, professor of fish and wildlife sciences in the College of Natural Resources and director of the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute

6:15 p.m. - Closing Comments and Networking Janet E. Nelson, Vice President for Research and Economic Development

College of Engineering presents:

“Detection of Tick-borne Diseases Using Non-Uniform Electric Fields” by Ezekiel Adekanmbi, Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering

Presentation Synopsis: Most people know that Lyme disease, caused by tick bites, is a significant public health threat, but many do not know that tick bites can also cause another disease called “babesiosis” (or piroplasmosis), which is similarly debilitating and can even be life-threatening. This presentation will explain cutting-edge efforts in biomedical engineering to discern distinctive electrical properties in the parasites that cause Lyme disease and babesiosis, enabling early detection of the diseases and facilitating treatment.

Bio: Ezekiel Adekanmbi is a fifth-year doctoral student in chemical engineering, working in the lab of Dr. Soumya Srivastava. A 2011 graduate of the University of Lagos, Nigeria, he earned his M.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Idaho in 2016 and will complete his Ph.D. at Idaho in 2019. He works on the production of multi-module fluidic devices for early diagnosis of diverse diseases. The president of the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA), he received first place earlier this year in the inaugural Idaho Statewide 3 Minute Thesis competition in Boise.

College of Science presents:

“The Vaginal Microbiome in Health and Disease”

by Larry Forney, Department of Biological Sciences Presentation Synopsis: The effectiveness of antiviral drugs depends to a considerable extent on the bacteria present in the human microbiome.

This presentation will explain how mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, biologists, physicians, and other scientists work together to study microbial ecology within the human body, working with funding agencies and corporate partners to identify medical applications for this work, particularly in the context of the vaginal microbiome and women’s reproductive health.

Bio: University Distinguished Professor Larry Forney is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology with academic appointments in the Department of Biological Sciences and the program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Idaho. For more than 20 years, he has been studying the microbial ecology of women’s urogenital tract to understand how the composition and function of indigenous microbial communities reduce the risk of disease and promote health.

College of Natural Resources presents:

“Carbon Sink or Carbon Source: It’s All about One Number” by Tara Hudiburg, Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences

Presentation Synopsis: Plants take up carbon and store it in ecosystems, specifically in wood, leaves, and soil. Carbon cycle scientists seek a single number that describes “ecosystem carbon uptake,” information essential to our assessment of what’s happening with global climate change.

The AmeriFlux network, a distributed system of PI-managed ecosystem sensors, measures carbon, water, and energy fluxes in ecosystems across the Americas and gathers data used by modelers to understand the changing world. This information is useful for high school teachers developing a Forest-Climate Interventions curriculum, state agencies responsible for managing public lands and natural resources, officials from the forestry industry, and congressional representatives. Today’s presentation will explain the process of carbon cycle science and how it produces information needed by various public audiences.

Bio: Tara Hudiburg is an assistant professor in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences, specializing in ecosystem ecology, carbon cycle science, biogeochemistry, land use change, land management, and climate change. She joined the faculty at the University of Idaho in 2014 after finishing her Ph.D. in Forest Science at Oregon State University and completing a post-doc in plant biology at the University of Illinois.

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences presents:

“Sustainable Aquaculture and Hardy’s Hierarchy of Feeds” by Ronald Hardy, Department of Animal and Veterinary Science and Aquaculture Research Institute

Presentation Synopsis: Working with government agencies, researchers from Idaho’s Aquaculture Research Institute have used selective breeding to develop trout that can subsist on plant-based feed and have collaborated with industrial partners to develop such food sources for aquaculture. This research has led to fundamental discoveries about fish digestion, gene expression and microbial communities in selected trout, while also responding to the global demand for food security. The goal of this work is sustainable food production for the future.

Bio: Ronald Hardy is a university distinguished professor in the Department of Animal and Veterinary Science, where he is an expert in animal nutrition, specifically fish nutrition. He was a professor in the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington and a research scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle before he came to the University of Idaho in 1996 to serve as director of the Aquaculture Research Institute in Hagerman, Idaho.

College of Education, Health and Human Sciences presents:

“Fusing Practice and Scholarship for Public Health Impact� by Helen Brown, Department of Movement Sciences Presentation Synopsis: Preparing culturally responsive evaluations of public health issues for tribal communities and communities of migrant workers requires special relationships between academic researchers and the communities they serve. This presentation will explain the highly collaborative research process for studying obesity risks and other public health concerns, where community members play an active role in providing data and designing appropriate interventions that will lead to positive behavioral change.

Bio: Helen Brown is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Movement Sciences, specializing in such areas as nutrition environmental assessment and monitoring and food security, community participatory action research for healthy active living, and student engagement in global health promotion and community development. She came to the University of Idaho in 2006, having worked previously as a tribal nutritionist for the Oneida Tribe Community Health Center in Wisconsin and as program director for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Supplemental Nutrition Program at the Native American Health Centers in San Francisco and Oakland, California.

College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences presents:

“Public Emotions, Public Memory” by Jennifer Ladino, Department of English

Presentation Synopsis: Our emotions — including our emotional responses to places — are more complex and more interesting than you might think. Often the emotional, or “affective,” dimension of experience is deeply mixed, with joy or patriotic pride converging with a sense of guilt or anger. This presentation emerges from the book Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (2019), which explores “affective dissonance” at seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West. This book was written not only for a scholarly audience, but for the general public and for NPS administrators and staff members.

Bio: Jennifer Ladino, who came to the University of Idaho in 2010, is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English. A scholar of American culture who focuses on various aspects of the environmental humanities, she is particularly interested in the application of affect theory to literary and cultural topics in the American West. Her previous monograph is Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (2012). She also co-edited Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018).

College of Natural Resources presents:

“Envisaging the Future Together: Stakeholder-driven Scenarios and Solutions in Idaho’s Magic Valley”

by Andrew Kliskey, Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences and Center for Resilient Communities Presentation Synopsis: What does the future look like, and who should be involved imagining and designing the future? The essential ideas, research questions, and framework for a “socialecological-technological systems approach” to forecasting and “hindcasting” the nexus of food, energy, and water necessarily involves diverse stakeholders, not only university researchers. The Center for Resilient Communities works closely with dairymen, cheesemakers, energy industry representatives, tribal leaders, sugar beet industry representatives, and multidisciplinary academics to imagine the future of the Magic Valley in southern Idaho. This presentation will describe the process of developing a conceptual model of place-based social-ecological systems.

Bio: Andrew Kliskey serves as project manager for “A Social-EcologicalTechnological Systems Approach to Waste Reuse” and co-director of the Center for Resilient Communities at the University of Idaho, where he is also a professor in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences and the Department of Landscape Architecture. He came to Idaho in 2013 after completing his doctorate in geography at the University of Otago (New Zealand), serving as a post-doc at the University of British Columbia, and teaching at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and the University of Alaska in Anchorage. He specializes in community response, resilience, and adaptation to environmental change.

College of Business and Economics presents:

“Border Effects of Payday Lending Policy”

by Stefanie Ramirez, Department of Economics

Presentation Synopsis: This presentation will explain how proximity to state borders has an effect on the economics of alternative financial services, such as the payday lending industry.

The industry is regulated by state-level policy, and this research — which asks whether existing policy is having its intended impact — specifically aims to reach not only other economists, but state policymakers and regulators of financial institutions. The financial crisis of 2008 highlighted the existence of alternative financial services, intensifying and expanding interest in this topic.

Bio: Stefanie Ramirez, who teaches such subjects as industrial organization, microeconomics, macroeconomics and experimental economics, joined the economics faculty at the University of Idaho as an assistant professor in 2014 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. She was serving as a research assistant for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., at the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

College of Natural Resources presents:

“Putting the ‘Public’ in Public Impact Research”

by Alan Kolok, Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences and Idaho Water Resources Research Institute Presentation Synopsis: Studies of the impact of agriculture on water quality are not only produced by academic researchers and presented to the public but performed by members of the public engaged in “citizen science.” This presentation will explore the effectiveness of training methods for citizen scientists currently learning to measure nitrates in agricultural runoff. In regions like the American West, we cannot put enough professional scientists into the field to collect simultaneous water samples across vast expanses; but through the citizen science approach, it may be possible to send thousands of people into the field on the same day, helping to answer watershed-scale questions about the spatial geography of nitrates.

Bio: Alan Kolok is professor of fish and wildlife sciences and director of the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute. He earned an M.S. in Fisheries Science at the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in Environmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and he came to the University of Idaho in 2017 from the University of Nebraska, Omaha. His work encompasses such fields as comparative physiology, molecular biology, public health, water resources, and the crowdsourced data revolution. An editor for the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, he has also recently published the books Modern Poisons: A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Toxicology and Twist, the latter of which is a science fiction novel in which prions go terribly wrong.

Thank you!

Join us in December for ORED’s next round of SAS Talks To suggest speakers for future events, contact: Jana Jones, Executive Director of Economic Development, Office of Research & Economic Development Phone: 208-364-4568 Email: janajones@uidaho.edu

www.uidaho.edu/sas-talks

Cover image courtesy of Jeremy Tamsen