Discovery Vol 7

2014 VOLUME 7

Research, Scholarship, and Creative Achievement at The University of Texas at San Antonio

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contents FEATURE STORIES Robotics of the Future

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Aging in a Social Context

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Preserving Architecture along the Camino Real de los Tejas 09

ON THE COVER

South African medical microbiology Ph.D. student Nontuthuko Maningi works with Dr. Luke Daum to prepare samples for review during her tuberculosis research.

The University of Texas at San Antonio President

Ricardo Romo

Vice President for Research

C. Mauli Agrawal

Assistant Vice President for Commercialization and Innovation & Chief Commercialization Officer

Cory Hallam

Assistant Vice President for Research Integrity

Michelle Stevenson

Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Project Administration

Can Saygin

Assistant Vice President for Research Support

Bernard Arulanandam

Connecting Research

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Where Does UTSA Stand on Cloud Computing?

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Big Data Analytics

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A Place in the Sun

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Alcohol-Fueled Research

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Navigating the Cybersecurity Battleground

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Demographer Aims to Investigate Cancer

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Heading Toward Breakthroughs

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Knowledge. Leadership. Service.

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Cutting-Edge Research, Cutting-Edge Institutions

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Dedicating Decades to Research

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Landscape for Learning

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Cibolo Preserve

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From Students to Scholars

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Resurgence of Consumption

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Making Sense of the Census

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Healing Blade

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Reaching Beyond

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Sos Agaian: UTSA’s 2014 Innovator of the Year

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Robotics of the Future Ashley Festa

Writers

What was once only in the realm of science fiction may soon become science-fact thanks to researchers at UTSA and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Mailing Address: The University of Texas at San Antonio Office of the Vice President for Research One UTSA Circle San Antonio, TX 78249

Preserving Architecture

Director of Communication for Research

Tim Luukkonen

Ashley Festa, Brian Willeford, Analisa Nazareno, Kathryn Jones, Kate Hunger, Tony CantĂş

Visit us on the web http://research.UTSA.edu

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Analisa Nazareno

Using modern GIS systems, historical data, and an eye for detail, UTSA architecture researchers are digitizing old San Antonio. Their ambitious plan? To document and recreate a virtual Camino Real de los Tejas.

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Heading Toward Breakthroughs Tim Luukkonen

UTSA continues toward Tier One research by being one of only a handful of universities in the nation offering courses in neurofeedback counseling.

Landscape for Learning Kathryn Jones

The Cibolo Preserve partnership offers researchers a unique outdoor laboratory to study anything from archaeology to geology and everything in between.

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RESURGENCE OF CONSUMPTION On one hand, Ebola killed approximately 5,000 people this year in one of the worst outbreaks in history. The world is in panic. On the other hand, 1.5 million people died last year from tuberculosis, the second-greatest killer worldwide due to a single-infectious agent. The world barely seemed to notice.

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Mind Drones and Worker Drones:

Robotics of the Future

By Ashley Festa

What was once only in the realm of science fiction may soon become sciencefact thanks to researchers at UTSA and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Scientists operating out of the Unmanned Systems Laboratory (USL) at UTSA will be able to harness the ability to control cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, just by thinking about it. The DoD recently awarded more than one million dollars in research grants to pursue various UAV research activities that could change how we use UAVs in both military and civilian applications to Daniel Pack, chair of UTSA’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mary L. Clark Endowed Chair Professor, and Yufei Huang, professor of electrical and computer engineering.

One of these projects focuses on detecting human brain waves through the use of electroencephalography (EEG) machines to control UAVs. In the same way your brain commands your hand to lift a cup of coffee to your mouth, Pack and Huang believe you will also be able to command a UAV to take off from a landing strip by simply thinking about it.

“In the example of moving the cup, you’re using thoughts to move muscles and nerves to execute that action,” Pack 3

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said. “Now, imagine you want a robot to move. You think it, and that motion is executed by the UAVs. It’s mind control.”

Huang has been able to capture brain wave signals related to directional commands for UAVs using EEG machines. His current experiments attempt to differentiate meaningful thoughts—such as thoughts for UAVs to move up, down, left, or right—from other, unrelated brain waves.

“Your brain activities are different when you’re thinking ‘left’ and ‘right’ versus thinking ‘up’ and ‘down’,” Huang said. “But when you’re thinking about a command, you can have other thoughts at the same time. We have to capture particular signals among all the other noises that exist.”

To do that, Huang’s experiment asks a subject to think about the concept of “left” repeatedly and later to think about the concept of “right” repeatedly. Then, with sophisticated signal processing algorithms, Huang attempts to classify the brain activity as commands for “left” or “right,” which, he said, would become the pattern for controlling a UAV.

The goal of the project for the DoD is to expand the capability of a human controlling a single UAV to using brain signals of a soldier to control multiple small UAVs for military operations such as collecting intelligence, performing surveillance, and conducting reconnaissance missions.

Current UAVs must have a ground station that relays instructions generated from a human operator to an aerial vehicle, but ground stations are static and can restrict soldiers and their units from moving freely.

Through the research currently being conducted, Pack and Huang hope to demonstrate the technology needed to create these mind-controlled drones within two years.

UAVs on a mission In addition to developing brain wave controlled UAV technology, Pack is trying to produce ways to make military and civilian operations safer, faster, and easier through the use of multiple, smaller drones versus using one complex drone. Pack adds that the benefit of using a UAV rather than a manned aircraft is simple: UAVs can handle dirty, dangerous, and dull responsibilities, jobs that are undesirable for humans to perform.

With the grants from the DoD, Pack and his team are focusing their research on discovering ways to use smaller, specialized UAVs to accomplish tasks that a more sophisticated—and expensive—UAV handles currently.

Using multiple UAVs, each equipped with a different capability, cooperative technologies offer flexibility and, often, a quicker response time. When working as a team, the specialized UAVs share information that provides the same, or better, intelligence as a single, more sophisticated UAV. These smaller UAVs collectively will be less costly than their souped-up counterparts because there’s less technology on board each aircraft. Although this means individual UAVs have fewer capabilities when used alone, collectively, they offer more options and potentially a higher payoff when they’re used cooperatively.

For example, search-and-rescue missions that use only one UAV have much lower odds of finding a missing person when there is a vast area being searched. Despite having numerous capabilities, that technology-laden UAV can only cover a limited area. Alternatively, by using a cooperative UAV system, a search team can cover more territory in the same timeframe. By communicating what Discovery 4

has been covered, these specialized UAVs can intelligently narrow the search field more quickly and raise the chances of finding a missing person.

“By utilizing the resources that are distributed among a team of UAVs,” Pack said, “UAVs can complete a task more effectively than with one UAV that has all the resources on a single platform.”

By working together, the aircraft can collect and deliver the same information the more advanced UAV can provide.

“With multiple UAVs, you have multiple ways to carry out a mission, which offers flexibility,” Pack said.

“Cooperative systems allow you to maximize resources in a timely manner. Using only one UAV, you might need multiple orbits [to complete a mission], which may not be desirable. Multiple UAVs wouldn’t necessarily need multiple rounds, so they could provide the necessary information quicker.”

One of the current challenges for his research involves creating ways for UAVs to cooperatively capture the salient features of an unknown environment. Since each UAV carries different observation capabilities, each will gather different types of information during a mission and the varying information must be combined together.

“For robots to do anything, they have to first sense the environment that they’re operating in correctly, but individually, they’ll sense things very differently,” Pack said.

His research aims to answer questions such as how the UAVs coordinate their movements appropriately for different tasks, how their sensing capabilities can 5

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be combined effectively, and what information they should communicate among themselves to minimize the bandwidth usage.

“What and how they communicate will determine the effectiveness of a team,” Pack said. “We are trying to discover knowledge of the interplay among three challenging tasks of a team of UAVs: sensing, control, and communications. How do we do this in an optimal way?”

Pack’s research aims to advance the UAV technology for sensing and communicating intelligence by streamlining and maintaining lines of communication between UAVs throughout a mission. So far, Pack and his team have designed a controller that ensures UAVs will remain connected and able to disseminate information to one

By working with the Lone Star Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Center at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Southwest Research Institute, Pack plans to expand his team’s UAV research scope and applications even more.

UTSA’s impact on the future

another as multiple aircraft are trying to conduct various UAV missions.

“The controller we designed will guarantee the minimum amount of information UAVs can send and receive,” Pack said. “The controller’s job is to move the UAVs so they will be able to share necessary information, regardless of how many UAVs are working together.”

Pack enlists the help of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral associates, and other faculty members to conduct his experiments. These researchers also collaborate with other educational institutions, as well as the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and U.S. Naval research labs.

Pack and Huang hope that their discoveries will lead to the creation of a new discipline within the College of Engineering, which they said could also draw collaborators from the Colleges of Sciences, Education and Human Development, and Business. Pack also hopes to establish a new research center at UTSA dedicated to developing technology for unmanned aircraft systems.

“As an educator, it’s my job to train and bring up the next generation of engineers and scientists working in the field of complex autonomous systems,” Pack said. “I want to encourage students to be involved and participate in these endeavors in the classroom and labs to advance our knowledge.”

With all of the advancements being made by Pack and Huang, one thing is clear: UTSA is at the vanguard of drone research.

Let’s just hope that science fact doesn’t push the boundaries of science fiction so far that Skynet becomes self-aware.

Yufei Huang, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Yufei Huang’s expertise is in the areas of computational biology, computational neuroergonomics, statistical modeling, and Bayesian methods. He is currently focusing on uncovering the functions of mRNA methylation using high-throughput sequencing technologies, microRNA functions and target identification, brain-machine-interaction using EEG, and deep learning algorithms and application. He was a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award in 2005, Best Paper Award of 2006 Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering Conference, and 2007 Best Paper Award of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Lab, and Qatar National Research Fund. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, BMC Systems Biology, EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and International Journal Machine Leaning and Cybernetics.

Daniel Pack, P.E., Ph.D.

Department Chair for Electrical and Computer Engineering Mary L. Clark Endowed Chair Professor Daniel Pack’s research interests are in cooperative unmanned aerial systems, sensorbased intelligent control, robotics, pattern recognition, embedded systems, computer security, and engineering education.

He has co-authored six textbooks on embedded systems and published more than 130 book chapters, technical journal/transactions, and conference papers on unmanned systems, cooperative control, robotics, pattern recognition, and engineering education. He is the recipient of a number of teaching and research awards including Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year Award, Frank J. Seiler Research Excellence Award, Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Professor Award, Academy Educator Award, and Magoon Award. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Colorado and currently serves as Editor-at-Large for Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems and as an associate editor for IEEE Systems Journal.

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Aging in a Social Context

By Analisa Nazareno

W

hat do you call research that is informed by a researcher’s life experience? Christopher Hajek, an associate professor of communication at UTSA, calls it “mesearch.”

And because of his “mesearch” on the gay male community, Hajek earned a $5,000 Internal Research Awards (INTRA) Grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research at UTSA. Hajek claims there is a dearth of research on issues facing gay men from the ages of 40 to 53, and he is filling that void with his current research focus: “Gay Men in Early Midlife: The Roles of Social Creativity and Communication with Younger Men in Identity Formation and Health.”

“This series is looking at gay male midlife identity, how they manage their identity, and how they self-enhance or feel better about themselves at this point in their lives, relative to younger men. That’s the ‘mesearch’ part of my work,” Hajek said.

Hajek interviewed 40 men in four different U.S. cities to learn how they

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communicate between generations.

His inquiry centered on how men adjust to midlife and how they relate to younger generations.

“Some men have a negative midlife experience, and that leads to the desire for positive distinctiveness as an older man, or to try to regain younger status,” Hajek said, summarizing his research. “So if they want to regain younger status, they will often try to converge—that is, try to approach the younger man’s style or manner of speaking. Or, if they want to accentuate differences to self-enhance, they will consciously attempt to distinguish themselves as midlife gay men.”

Hajek has written two papers on his findings that have been accepted for publication. One is an empirical study on midlife identity that has been published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, and another is an analysis on how gay men at midlife cope with their aging through communicative accommodation strategies with younger men, which will be published in Language & Communication.

Those findings and the research sponsored by the INTRA grant are the foundation for his next step, in which he will be researching aging, sexual behavior, and HIV transmission prevention for midlife and older Latino men. He said in addition to learning about how gay men communicate with younger

men and adjust to midlife aging, his research could help health policy researchers answer questions about how to prevent the spread of HIV. To further his research in this arena, Hajek said he will be applying for a grant through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new NIH grant Hajek hopes to earn will allow him to delve deeper into issues often overlooked by the research community. Although HIV is a well-researched topic, its correlation to midlife aging and intergenerational communication isn’t well documented.

“What are some of the unique challenges for midlife gay men who are either trying to avoid HIV infection or have a HIV infection?” Hajek asks. “What are the implications for their intergenerational communication and sexual behavior with younger men?

Basically, I’m looking at where HIV intersects with aging, and I’m looking at ethnicity as well.”

Hajek said he plans to consult with the San Antonio AIDS Foundation to answer questions that might be helpful for that organization, whose mission is to provide care for people with HIV/AIDS, and also to prevent the spread of HIV. Findings from Hajek’s preliminary research indicate that if gay men in their midlife stages are having age-related social identity crises or insecurities, they may be more willing to engage in risky

behavior in order to identify with, or gain acceptance from, younger men.

“I want to look at some of the midlife gay men who are no longer as cautious (about protecting themselves against HIV). Specifically, I am researching Latino men as an underrepresented population in studies on aging and HIV,” Hajek said. “Are there effects of age-related depression that might be influencing their willingness to take risks with their health? There are likely many issues at play in older gay men’s lives that can inform HIV transmission prevention.”

Hajek’s research is as necessary as it is controversial.

It casts a critical eye on a social category (i.e., gay men) that some already take issue with. But it is precisely this kind of research that adds value to the academic community and the world as a whole.

“I acknowledge that some scholars of gay male culture may be uncomfortable with some of my findings that highlight areas of weakness or self-destructiveness among some gay men. But I think it is essential that we courageously face those cultural dynamics that could lead us to take unnecessary risks with our well-being,” Hajek said.

“We can’t just buy into the current mindset among many (especially younger) gay men that, with new treatments, HIV is just like diabetes.

It’s not.”

Christopher Hajek, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Communication Christopher Hajek’s research is grounded in intercultural and intergroup communication in a variety of social contexts. This focus was sparked by his academic and professional experiences in Italy and Hawaii, and his U.S. Peace Corps teaching experience in Rwanda immediately prior to that country’s genocide. Dr. Hajek’s current research concerns health and social disparities for gay men, taking into account age identity and intergenerational communication, and their roles in gay men’s well-being. His past intergroup and intercultural communication research has spanned topics ranging from gay-heterosexual interactions, to patient-physician encounters, to attitudes toward police officers across multiple world cultures. Dr. Hajek has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and chapters in edited books on these topics.

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Preserving architecture along

By Analisa Nazareno

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the Camino Real de los Tejas Using modern GIS systems, historical data, and an eye for detail, UTSA architecture researchers are digitizing old San Antonio.

Their ambitious plan? To document and recreate a virtual Camino Real de los Tejas.

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A native of Italy, Angela Lombardi felt the warm familiarity of home when she first strolled through the streets of San Antonio and visited the city’s historic missions.

Lombardi, an assistant professor of architecture at UTSA, is a historic preservation specialist. She earned her doctorate at The University of Rome, and served as one of the main investigators for historic preservation research projects in Lima, Peru.

And in all of these cities where she has lived and worked, she can see common patterns emerge in architecture.

“I can identify the construction techniques, the form of the churches, and the layout of the churches; they have elements in common with the ones from the Mediterranean world,” Lombardi said. “We see these religious structures, but we also see city settlement patterns.”

Settled as a Spanish presidio, downtown San Antonio’s street and development patterns have a likeness to other Spanish urban settlements throughout the new world. And with the emphasis on agriculture, Spanish settlements developed along water sources in San Antonio in porciones, much as they developed along other settlements in the Camino Real de los Tejas in Texas and Louisiana, as well as the Camino Real in California, and the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro in New Mexico.

And while these developments and construction patterns are welldocumented for the two historic routes in California and in New Mexico, Lombardi said much work needs to be done to preserve and document the architecture and development along the Camino Real de los Tejas.

The Grants for Research Advancement and Transformation (GREAT) program, sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research at UTSA, has awarded Lombardi $20,000. With those funds she is leading a team of UTSA architecture researchers who will create an online database of historic 11

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landscape features related to the Spanish settlement of San Antonio.

Lombardi’s colleague, Shelley Roff, an associate professor specializing in medieval Mediterranean architecture, will analyze and interpret original Spanish documents pertaining to the architecture, mapping, and settlement of San Antonio.

As Roff works on the analysis and interpretation of the Spanish documents, Azza Kamal, an

assistant professor of research in the Department of Architecture focusing on urbanism and a geospatial analysis specialist, will develop the geographic information systems [GIS] database.

The database entails photos, documents coding the structural and landscape features, maps, and visual models; Kamal will work to make the database accessible to historic preservationists, urban planners, academic scholars, and the general public.

Together, the researchers will develop GIS modeling to recreate historic structures as they may have appeared centuries ago and document the structures as they appear today.

“What we call this is a virtual reality model, so it’s not just a picture, but you draw the buildings in three dimensions on the computer, and that way you can look at it from all sides,” Roff said. “When you create a model like this on a computer, it actually is a form of historic preservation, because you are documenting the site, inch by inch, exactly as it is today.”

In addition to documenting and digitizing their findings on the missions, the street and development patterns in San Antonio, and the acequias—or water streams, the three

researchers hope the work they do will demonstrate to larger, outside funders the type of historic preservation documentation that can be done all along the Camino Real de los Tejas.

“Right now, we’re doing a twodimensional, digital model along with a digital imagery database, and we’re doing the geographic identification and documentation of the master plan, linking the image to its location,” Kamal said. “We are introducing the methodology, focusing on the historic core of San Antonio, but we would like to apply this methodology to other sites, which will require more funding.”

Lombardi said she would like for the historic features of each of the sites along the Camino Real de los Tejas to eventually link to one another,

so users can compare and contrast how certain common architectural or development features are represented in different parts along the route.

“The longterm goal, actually, would be to create a management plan for this cultural heritage,” Lombardi said. “If we can identify traces where these landscape patterns and structures exist, there should be a sort of common management plan for all these cultural structures, which can lead to preservation.”

It is an ambitious plan, but with the 300th anniversary of the San Antonio missions approaching in 2016, the three architecture researchers feel history is on their side.

Angela Lombardi, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture Angela Lombardi focuses her internationally-based research on the management of built-heritage.

In 2013 and 2014 she represented UTSA as a professor for the Archaeological Site Management Workshop held in Erbil, Iraq, which was dedicated to Iraqi professionals, organized by the World Monuments Fund, and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Her lectures focused on international principles for heritage management and conservation, and stone conservation.

Editor of the book LIMA, Historic Center. Analysis and Restoration (2012), she is currently investigating the cultural landscape of San Antonio, Texas. Previously, she has worked on the material conservation of the Cathedral of Siena, the Cathedral of Pienza, and on Lebanese archaeological sites.

Azza Kamal, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture Azza Kamal’s teaching, research, and practice manifests her passion for sustainable communities and buildings. Her most recent research work centers on advanced spatial modeling using geographic information systems [GIS] in housing assessment, neighborhood stabilization, and sustainable urbanism. She has expertise in unplanned communities, self-help housing policy, and urban morphology. With more than 15 years of academic experience, preceded by nine years of architectural practice experience in land development, community design, and mixeduse projects, Kamal has overseen and participated in multiple funded studies. Through linking research, teaching, and community engagement, Kamal endeavors to strengthen the connections between students and the local communities to improve the quality of life and the sustainability of the infrastructure for our neighborhoods.

Shelley Roff, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Architecture Shelley Roff teaches the architecture and urbanism of the medieval Mediterranean, and is the 2009 recipient of the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Core Curriculum Teaching.

Her research and teaching interests include medieval and modern Spain and the history of women in architecture and construction. Roff is also the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Her research and scholarship focuses on civic architecture and the role it plays in the urban economy. Her forthcoming book is Treasure of the City: Public Construction in Late Medieval Barcelona, for which she was recently awarded a research grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and U.S. universities.

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CONNECTing Research UTSA chemist and SwRI automotive scientists team up to develop catalysts that lower noxious emissions from vehicles.

By Analisa Nazareno

Automakers have until the year 2025 to meet the new average fuel efficiency standard of 54.5 miles per gallon for the fleet of vehicles that they offer. One of the problems they will have to solve before then is how to develop better catalytic converters that will operate efficiently at lower temperatures.

Catalytic converters transform unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen into less toxic carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen. The problem? Current catalytic converters will not work as well with more fuel-efficient vehicles, which emit lower temperature gases.

UTSA Assistant Professor of Chemistry Zachary Tonzetich and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Principal Scientist Gordon Bartley believe they can solve this problem by replacing the catalysts normally used in SCR catalytic converters—iron, copper, and vanadium— with ruthenium.

Tonzetich is an academic and an expert in catalysts, with a special interest in ruthenium. Bartley works in the Engine, Automotive, and Vehicle Research Division at SwRI, using technology that tests the efficiency of catalysts and catalytic converters.

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“Ruthenium has long been known to be active in a number of catalytic reactions,” Tonzetich said. “My lab is going to be making new compounds of ruthenium designed to model what the ruthenium will look like on actual automobile catalysts, so we can do in-depth fundamental studies of the reactions that are taking place.”

Meanwhile, Bartley’s laboratory will use the technology he developed at SwRI to test how the ruthenium compounds might respond in a vehicle’s catalytic converter.

“If we can achieve good efficiencies at lower temperatures, it opens up a whole avenue of progress,” Bartley said. “So that’s the goal. And there’s good science that shows that ruthenium has the potential for that.”

The duo teamed up to compete for a Connecting Through Research Partnership Program (CONNECT) grant, and were awarded $125,000 to conduct their research. Tonzetich will use some of the funds to hire

graduate students that will help develop the ruthenium catalysts, and Bartley will use funding to test the catalysts at SwRI. The CONNECT Program is a collaborative effort between UTSA and SwRI with the goal of funding the highest caliber of research.

The two investigators said the CONNECT grant has offered them the opportunity to think outside of their daily operations. For Tonzetich, he is learning the value of communicating the practical uses of the science that has fascinated him throughout his career.

“It’s creating connections for me, and it’s got me thinking about new things,” Tonzetich said. “And it’s going to give my students the sort of experience that they would not normally get through an academic graduate program, namely a chance to work on real world problems and the opportunity to work with scientists outside the university.”

For Bartley, the grant provides him an opportunity to mentor future scientists and to be involved with academia again.

“Universities are cool. Students are cool,” Bartley said. “I’m excited about the opportunity to actually work with up-and-coming scientists and help them come to a better understanding of what all this is about and how you do this work.”

In addition to grooming student scientists and preparing them for a future in practical scientific careers, the ruthenium catalyst project has the potential to be widely used and to decrease the amount of toxins released into the environment.

“As opposed to my other research, which is very academic in nature, this project has real, tangible, practical applications,” Tonzetich said. “We’re talking about improving on technology that everybody uses every day, our vehicles. So certainly, if we can develop a very effective catalyst, there’s tremendous potential for wide applicable use.”

Tonzetich and Bartley said if they are successful in finding a promising ruthenium compound, they hope to continue their work by applying for outside funding with the federal government, which set the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 2011.

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Where does UTSA stand on

Cloud Computing?

By Kate Hunger

When Paul Rad talks about what the future holds

for cloud computing, his enthusiasm is matched only by his certainty that humankind will be nothing short of amazed.

“Cloud is at the earliest stage of adoption,” said

Rad, director of applied research—cloud and big

data in the Department of Computer Science. “It’s a

phenomenon that is going to change the shape, not only of industry, but of our lives.”

Rad directs UTSA’s Cloud and Big Data

Laboratory which, at 10,000 COREs, is the largest

Open Compute cloud platform in an academic setting.

He is also vice president of research at Rackspace,

Inc. His joint-employment is an example of a new way

the university is collaborating with industry, said UTSA Vice President for Research C. Mauli Agrawal.

“The barriers between industry and academia

are coming down,” Agrawal said, adding that the university has high expectations for its role in advancing cloud computing.

“We want to be on the frontier of cloud computing,

especially open cloud,” Agrawal said.

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UTSA is one of several partners in the Chameleon Project, which in August was awarded $10 million by the National Science Foundation to create an experimental cloud computing testbed. Called “Chameleon,” the testbed will enable researchers to develop new cloud architectures and applications. Rad, a co-principal investigator, will lead training and outreach efforts for the project. Other partners include The University of Chicago, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University, and Northwestern University.

Rad is working with faculty to bring their projects to the cloud. His work at UTSA is to build a model of cloud computing that can be expanded to other universities, while helping to grow a trained and sustainable pool of local tech talent.

“The same way that we open source and create the community, there is the opportunity to create open research at the university,” Rad said of the inspiration for the collaboration.

“Clouds are very complex, and we thought bringing the expertise to the table to help the university accelerate those things was very important,” Rad said.

Cloud computing harnesses the computational firepower of remote computer networks to manage massive amounts of information, from email to photo storage to the back end of entire companies. It’s almost impossible to engage in the modern day world without sharing—and storing—personal information on the cloud.

“Look at the way we watch a movie today versus 10 years ago,”

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Rad said. “You have Netflix—Netflix is on the cloud. We don’t walk into the bank anymore; it’s all online. Cloud is the second evolution. The same way that web technology changes the shape of our life, cloud technology will change humanity from a perspective that now you have enough capacity of computation that you could do gene sequencing on your fingertip.

“That’s what makes cloud computing attractive,” Rad continued.

“It’s about the amount of computation that is available, and not just to a select number of people. It’s kind of like electricity. You don’t think about it anymore. It’s available to you at your house, the number of lights that you want. Just imagine when every single person has access to that huge amount of computation in their hands, how that is going to change their life.

This is just the beginning.”

Aside from building cloud architectures, UTSA is also concerned with security. Raj Boppana, interim chair of the Department of Computer Science, is researching the impact of reduction of quality attacks on cloud computing. He said UTSA is well-positioned to become a premier destination for education and research in cybersecurity, cloud computing, and big data.

“We are already on the map with cybersecurity, and we are well on our way in the area of cloud computing,” he said. “We have a lot of momentum at this point.”

In fact, UTSA’s Institute for Cyber Security uses the cloud as its main experimental domain,

UTSA Cloud

said ICS Director and Professor of Computer Science Ravi Sandhu.

ICS researchers were also trained on OpenStack—an open source cloud computing software invented

by Rackspace and NASA, and ICS operates FlexCloud—a cloud computing lab that enables research into security challenges in the cloud environment.

“By having a number of students working in the cloud, they can help each other,” Sandhu said. “The learning curve is very steep. By having a critical mass of people working together, they can benefit from each other.”

Storing massive amounts of data on the cloud raises questions about security. Knowing how to head off an attack when a technology, such as the cloud, is so new is difficult.

“You don’t know what the real problems are until you deploy some technology and see what kind of trouble it attracts,” Sandhu said.

“We are already happily storing our photographs, our emails, our personal thoughts, and everything else—it’s all in the cloud,” he added.

“In a sense, the cloud providers have to demonstrate they are worthy of that trust, and that they can take better care of it than we can.”

The Cloud and Big Data Laboratory will help researchers discover what’s next in the cloud, while leveraging a fierce amount of computational capacity to facilitate research at a much faster rate. From where Rad sits, the pace of innovation in the cloud is stunning.

“Even in the next five years, it’s hard to imagine where this technology goes,” he said.

Security: Insider Threat

By Tony Cantú

Cybersecurity has been a topic of national debate the last few years. In 2014, companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, and Apple have all been subject to security breaches. All of these cyberattacks have one thing in common—attacks from external sources.

However, the actions of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden shed light on other forms of cybersecurity breaches when he released confidential national security data while working within the NSA. Rather than attack the system from the outside, Snowden exposed a breach in security from within—the insider threat.

Renowned for its cybersecurity research, UTSA is at the forefront of preventing such attacks in the future by analyzing data before it’s too late.

UTSA Associate Professor Nicole Beebe of the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security is working with students conducting research and developing software that would detect computer user patterns indicative of electronic hoarding, which is often a precursor to insider threat activity. Early detection of such massive data gathering could prevent exfiltration— the unauthorized transfer of data from internal computers to external sources.

“What we’re trying to do is detect impending exfiltration before the data leaves the organization,”

Beebe said. “We do this using computer forensics techniques to detect users with anomalous amounts and types of data on their workstations.”

The federally funded research aims to develop open source software that would detect data-gathering aberrations, alerting cybersecurity professionals to possible electronic hoarding. Surprisingly, the government does not have safeguards in place like this that are capable of detecting the wholesale amassing of information to prevent data theft.

“It’s a huge concern,” Beebe said. “Our approach detects anomalies in user data storage profiles over time, as well as users relative to others in their role in their organization.

“Most people’s machines have a pretty static amount of data when you look at it over time from the perspective of data types,” she said. “The software would detect statistical anomalies in users’ workstations, alerting security professionals of electronic hoarding and possibly spying.”

UTSA was recently ranked No. 1 in the nation in cybersecurity in a survey of technology security professionals conducted by the Ponemon Institute, a preeminent research center dedicated to privacy, data protection, and information security policy.

Nicole Beebe, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Information Systems and Cybersecurity With more than 15 years of industry and government experience in information security and digital forensics, Nicole Beebe is a nationally renowned expert in her field. She holds four professional certifications in cybersecurity and digital forensics, as well as a private investigator license to continue conducting real-world digital forensic investigations to keep her skills current and relevant for the classroom. She serves on the board of directors for The American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery, and is a member of seven other professional organizations and associations. Beebe also serves on the board of referees, reviewers, and/or technical program committees for approximately 10 peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Currently, Beebe’s research and teaching interests lie in digital forensics, information security, and data analytics.

Discovery 18

According to Shephard, engaging students at

“the earliest possible

stage� to think about the 21st-century challenges of energy and water is crucial to developing both excitement and enthusiasm about

alternative energy, and they will bring that

excitement into the classroom.

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By Kathryn Jones

Grant lights the way for solar research, minority student career paths The sun’s rays bounce off a grid of glass atop the Durango Building at UTSA’s downtown San Antonio campus. These solar panels not only harness energy and generate savings for UTSA, but also exemplify the nation’s push to develop solar energy technology and train students for jobs in the industry.

UTSA’s Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute (TSERI) received a major boost to meet those goals in fall 2013 when it won a three-year, $750,000 award through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SunShot Initiative.

TSERI will use the SunShot DISTANCE (Diversity in Science and Technology Advances National Clean Energy in Solar) award to develop solar energy technology and recruit and train underrepresented minorities for jobs in the field.

The initiative is part of President Barack Obama’s plan to cut carbon pollution and spark clean-energy innovation, while also increasing the diversity of students pursuing careers in solar industry. “We want to create awareness of the great things about solar energy and research opportunities, and we want to inspire students to go into that field,” said Hariharan Krishnaswami, UTSA assistant professor of electrical engineering and project principal investigator.

The university is partnering with St. Philip’s College to expand its solar energy curriculum and mentor students.

“They have one of the best programs in training solar technicians, and the industry wants them,” Krishnaswami said about St. Philip’s. He hopes some of those students will transfer to UTSA and obtain engineering degrees.

Currently, UTSA offers about 15 courses with a solar energy component. Through the grant it plans to add more course content, broaden an outreach internship program,

and generate a stream of undergraduate and graduate students to seek and land jobs in an industry that has created 20,000 new jobs in the United States since 2010.

Les Shephard, TSERI director and holder of the McDermott Distinguished Chair in Engineering, said engaging students at “the earliest possible stage” to think about the 21st-century challenges of energy and water is crucial to developing both excitement and enthusiasm about alternative energy, and they will bring that excitement into the classroom.

Besides nurturing students, the institute’s other passion is to position San Antonio—which boasts one of the state’s largest concentrations of solar photovoltaic systems—as a global leader in sustainable energy. UTSA and St. Philip’s College together own four grid-connected photovoltaic systems with a combined output of more than 700 kilowatts.

Under the project, UTSA researchers will develop a prototype for an N-port power electronic converter, a device that takes solar energy from the panels and converts it to feed energy into the electrical grid. The ultimate goal is to reduce the converter’s size and cost. “The research component is really innovative and part of the reason for the DOE initiative,” Krishnaswami said.

Such research opportunities for students and faculty not only develop skills for employment but also create a pool of experts with connections to industry and to the national research labs, as well as the DOE. That “spirit” of innovation tends to attract other innovators, which “spins off into other things in our economy,” Shephard added. “That’s a way we can compete with other, larger universities—and better serve our community at the same time.”

Discovery 20

Alcohol-Fueled

Research

By Kathryn Jones

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Research on alcoholism in Guatemala nets

Pezzia a national prize The first time Carla Pezzia traveled to Guatemala, she saw evidence of alcoholism in the streets. “It’s lot more public there,” said Pezzia, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from UTSA. “People are more visibly intoxicated—and a lot of people are talking about it, too.”

In 2004, she had worked on an alcohol intervention program in Dallas with trauma patients and continued her research in public health issues, education, and social justice for disenfranchised groups in Latin America. She went to Guatemala in 2010 and 2011 to research alcoholism recovery, drug addiction, and other mental illnesses in a country ravaged by years of civil war, poverty, crime, and social violence.

What she found led to a dissertation titled “Sober Self: Discourse and Identity of Recovering Alcoholics in the Western Highlands of Guatemala.” Chosen from entries nation wide, it won the first place 2014 Kurt M. Landgraf Outstanding Dissertation Award—named for the president and chief executive of the Educational Testing Service. The award was presented at the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education conference in Costa Mesa, California.

“Dr. Pezzia’s award-winning dissertation in sobriety and alcoholism is groundbreaking,” said Jill Fleuriet, associate professor of anthropology, and Pezzia’s doctoral advisor. “It combines phenomenological philosophy with applied anthropological and epidemiological methodologies to document the experience of sobriety among the Kaqchikel Maya, a medically underserved, socioeconomically marginalized indigenous group in Guatemala.”

Pezzia’s research took her into people’s homes in Panajachel,

Guatemala, a scenic town of 16,000 to 18,000 residents situated on the shore of Lake Atitlán and framed by volcanic mountains. Many of those afflicted with alcoholism are indigenous people of Mayan descent. They wanted to tell their stories to someone who would listen and raise awareness, Pezzia said.

Certainly, social issues have contributed to over-drinking, but so has the availability of cheap, high-alcohol-content spirits such as quetzaltecca, which has been described as “akin to rocket fuel,” and cuxa, the Guatemalan equivalent to moonshine—often made at home and illegal to sell.

Historically, alcohol was used in Mayan rituals. Advances in distilling heightened alcohol content, and in the late 19th century alcohol was used as a “tool of subjugation” in labor camps, Pezzia said. When workers returned to their hometowns, many brought their drinking habits with them. “It becomes part of the day-to-day and normal when you do have issues like extreme rates of poverty, civil wars, and social violence, and patterns of drinking have been established,” Pezzia explained.

The so-called “macho” Hispanic culture may entice males to try alcohol, but that stereotypical explanation is “overplayed,” Pezzia said. The issue is much more complicated, she added: “When you have someone who is not able to provide for his family as well as expected, there might be feelings of inadequacy. That might contribute to drinking and then toward violence to let out frustration.”

The town has several Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but 12-step programs don’t help everyone, especially “when you have underlying issues such as mental issues from years of civil war,” Pezzia said. Evangelical Christian churches also have influenced some people to quit drinking. But many towns lack basic psychiatric care and counseling needed for alcoholism recovery, she added.

Pezzia, who now is an assistant professor of human sciences at The University of Dallas, said she hopes to return to Guatemala in 2016 and delve deeper into the issues of alcohol, societal problems, and public health concerns such as stigmas about suicide and mental illness.

“Raising awareness was one of my key goals,” Pezzia said of her research. “I presented my dissertation to several organization leaders in the area in the hope that when they think of developing programs, they will understand the complexities of the situation and not think so narrowly.”

Discovery 22

Navigating the Cybersecurity Battleground

By Kate Hunger

UTSA has spent more than a dozen years developing its cybersecurity program into a robust research and education powerhouse that is ranked No. 1 in the nation.

The ranking came from a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute for Hewlett-Packard. The survey asked approximately 2,000 information technology and security professionals to select and rank the top five academic programs in the nation from a pool of 403 educational institutions. The results were announced in February.

“I think, honestly, it is recognition that is a long time in coming,” Vice President for Research Mauli Agrawal said. “We truly deserve it. It is very gratifying to see that, nationally, we are being recognized for the depth and quality in cybersecurity that we have here at UTSA.” Some of that recognition was on display last summer when a delegation of UTSA administrators, faculty, and industry partners visited the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Health and Human Services, and offices of the White House to share UTSA’s plans and learn about national cybersecurity priorities.

“It did create a little bit of a sensation across the nation,” Agrawal said. “They had heard of us because of [the survey].”

Agrawal said a strong cybersecurity program creates a ripple effect felt far beyond the university, in the form of better-paying jobs and an improved overall quality of life in the community.

“That is the role that UTSA has to play as the largest public university in San Antonio,” Agrawal said. “Not just workforce development, but economic development.”

Closer to home, there are additional signs that the survey results are drawing notice.

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“I probably get three or four emails a week from people who want to know about the program because they heard about the survey,” said Glenn Dietrich, professor and director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Infrastructure and Security (CERI2S) in the College of Business. “The security program itself has an outstanding reputation with the companies that hire our students,” including the CIA, FBI, Raytheon, and other top employers.

Students are graduating with job offers in hand and hefty paychecks in store.

“Our students get paid a lot when they graduate,” Dietrich said. “They get offers in the 70(K)s. For a 22-yearold with no experience, that’s not too shabby.”

UTSA also has been designated by the DHS and the National Security Agency (NSA) as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance / Cyberdefense Research, as well as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance / Cyberdefense Education.

In addition to a range of educational and research programs, several key faculty hires have elevated the program’s reputation, said Raj Boppana, professor and interim chair of the Department of Computer Science.

The creation of the Institute for Cyber Security, founded in 2007 and led by Professor of Computer Science, Ravi Sandhu, was a game changer.

“It literally put us on the map of cybersecurity,” Boppana said. “Dr. Sandhu is one of the top 10 cybersecurity researchers in the world. That also helped us gain some reputation and visibility in terms of the research.”

Multidisciplinary Education One key to success is the multidisciplinary approach the cybersecurity program has taken. The program has grown from its birthplace in the College of Business to include the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Students have a wide range of academic programs from which to choose, including bachelor’s degrees in cybersecurity and master’s and doctoral concentrations within the College of Business, to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science with concentrations in computer and information security, to a range of security courses with the College of Engineering.

The resources available to students include the Open Compute Certifications and Solutions Lab, which certifies that hardware from Open Design Manufacturers meets standards. The certifications lab was the first activity of

What’s more, the field is a job seeker’s gold mine.

“Analytics is an emerging academic discipline that shows a tremendous amount of promise for future jobs,” Sanders said. “It’s probably the discipline with the most job offers for graduates.”

The Research

The Institute for Cyber Security, established with a $3.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, draws faculty and student researchers from the colleges of Sciences, Engineering, and Business. ICS researchers collaborate with universities, government, and industry in basic and applied research. Sandhu said ICS has dramatically increased the cybersecurity research footprint, with research projects including secure information sharing, social networks, secure data provenance, botnet and malware analysis, and attribute-based access control.

Students leave UTSA wellprepared for careers in a field that has more job openings than graduates to fill them, Sandhu said.

The most serious cyberthreats are not the rather frequent, wellpublicized hacks to pilfer consumer credit card data, he said, adding that the retail cyberspace is unlikely to improve in terms of safety.

“The consumers have a relatively safe cyberspace already, which isn’t to say it’s perfect. It’s not going to get perfect because the cost would be astronomical, and most importantly, it would hold back innovation completely,” Sandhu said The biggest threats are to national security, intellectual property, and critical infrastructure, which Sandhu said will require visionary leadership and collaboration from government and the private sector.

“At that level we have a serious problem,” he said. “We are not safe there. To some extent, we have not had a major catastrophe; we haven’t had a digital Chernobyl. It’s not clear how to address that.”

“Our students are exposed to the latest hardware

designs and latest industry trends, but it also helps us interact with industry.” the Cloud and Big Data Laboratory, which uses Open Compute hardware on OpenStack software and is the largest Open Compute cloud platform in an academic setting.

“Our students are exposed to the latest hardware designs and latest industry trends, but it also helps us interact with industry,” Boppana said of the certifications lab’s impact.

The university has pushed the program forward with an expanding menu of academic courses and degree programs. A new master’s degree in data analytics in the College of Business will be available in the fall 2015, pending approval. College of Business Dean Gerry Sanders said it makes sense to leverage the university’s strong security and cloud computing resources to maximize the capacity to analyze big data.

“Cybersecurity is, as the name implies, all about protecting data in an Internet world.

Cloud computing is just distance computing; it’s allocation of where things happen,” Sanders said. “The key piece here is actually analytics. Analytics is the way in which we transform raw data into valuable information.”

Traditional analytical models break down when presented with massive amounts of data, which means finding new ways to extract valuable data is necessary, Sanders said.

“Analytics is an emerging academic discipline that shows a tremendous amount of promise for future jobs. It’s probably the discipline with the most job offers for graduates.”

Research projects in CERI2S include cyberphysical systems, biometric research, reverse malware engineering, insider threat, network security, and intrusion protection and detection, as well as projects involving vulnerability assessments of companies and the SmartGrid, Dietrich said.

“We are interested in looking at Web traffic to see if there’s any pattern in the data, people trying to break in,” Dietrich said. “We also teach policy. What policy should Discovery 24

the target have had in place to prevent that? People and policies are the biggest source of exploits.”

Having faculty with real-world experience lends depth to our program, said Associate Professor of Information Systems and Cybersecurity, Nicole Beebe. Earlier in her career, Beebe was a computer crime investigator both while on active duty and as a reservist with the U.S. Air Force.

“Very early on, key cybersecurity faculty at UTSA were interested in moving the program forward,” said Beebe, whose research interests include digital forensics and insider threat. “Back then [in 2001], very few universities had formal programs in information security, and even fewer had an appreciation or vision for digital forensics. This long-term, forward-thinking vision is part of the reason we’ve done well.”

The College of Business added a minor in digital forensics last fall, which gives students tools to identify and potentially lessen the insider threats to companies, Beebe said.

“The problem with the insider threat is the person already has access and intimate knowledge of the organization,” Beebe said. “When an insider threat materializes, it is much more devastating to the organization. The average is nine months to a year before it’s ever detected. Organizations tend to have our periscope up and alert to the outside, but fail to see the threats from the inside.”

Outreach and a Pipeline

Before ICS and CERI2S, before cloud computing and open source hardware and software, UTSA had the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security. Established in 2001, CIAS has trained state and local governments to assess their security and develop programs according to the CIAS Community Cybersecurity Maturity Model.

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“Cities and states need to be prepared to address cyberthreats,” said Greg White, CIAS director and professor in the Computer Science Department.

CIAS also created the National Collegiate Cyberdefense Competition which its run since the first competition in 2005. The competition allows teams to test their skills at protecting and managing a network.

In addition to the collegiate competition, CIAS runs the cyberdefense portion at the national competition of CyberPatriot, a high school cyberdefense competition now in its seventh year. Both competitions have involved thousands of students and serve as a significant recruitment tool and pipeline. Agrawal credits CIAS with raising the profile of the cybersecurity program.

UTSA is one of five universities that make up the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium, which received a grant from DHS in the fall of 2013 and was created to help states and communities develop viable and sustainable cybersecurity programs. Collaboration is essential in improving security, White said.

“It’s the right thing for the nation to do,” White said.

“There is so much that needs to be done that we don’t have the time, nor does the federal government have the time, to duplicate effort.”

In the meantime, the research continues and with it, the potential for discoveries that could change the field. The broad application of cyberresearch ongoing at UTSA makes advances all the more possible, Dietrich explained. He used the transistor as an example of an invention whose full potential was realized with the arrival of another invention—the integrated circuit, or microchip.

“It took the second invention,” Dietrich said. “That’s pretty typical. Seldom does one invention change the world, but two or three put together do.”

Demographer Aims to Investigate Cancer

By Analisa Nazareno

When a demographer marries years of U.S. Census and cancer incidence data, the results can show where the “cancer hot spots” are in a region, which can signal that something unusual has happened in a community.

That’s what Corey Sparks, assistant professor of demography at UTSA, found when he analyzed U.S. Census and cancer incident data for 36 South Texas counties, and discovered one particularly hot spot at the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.

“The reason we know that there are elevated incidents of cancer there is because we compared the number of cases we observed with the number we expected to see,” Sparks said. “And what you see in the neighborhoods around the area of the old Kelly Air Force Base is much higher—two to four times the risk of cancer there on average. And when you see places like that with high rates of cancer, persistently high over time, something is going on over there.”

The chemical ground water contamination that residents and advocates believe is linked to the high rates of cancer at the former Kelly Air Force Base has been well documented. The Air Force has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the chemical spills, build water treatment plants, install barriers, and haul away contaminated soil.

And while the known cancer risks at the former base are also well documented, Sparks wants to perform the same investigation on incidence of cancer and census tracks throughout the state of Texas to discover other “cancer hot spots.”

“There has never been a study done that has been as comprehensive as this for the state as a whole,” Sparks said.

Sparks won a UTSA Summer Seed Grant, which he is using to apply for a two-year, $200,000 grant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With the NIH grant, Sparks seeks to expand his research to include

the entire state of Texas. He is proposing to analyze the 1.4 million incidents of cancer that occurred throughout the state from the years 1995 to 2010, and compare it to Census data, looking at race, gender, and other potential factors. “[At Kelly Air Force Base] We were able to take information on ground water contamination and link it to the high rates of liver cancer,” Sparks said. “That’s one specific type of cancer and one specific neighborhood.

This [NIH] study will expand that principle and look at places with excess cancer rates across the state and across different types of cancer.”

Through his investigation, Sparks hopes to discover how cancer types relate to race, gender, and other factors. Sparks said while researchers throughout the nation have conducted similar studies in other states, no such study has been done with Texas data.

“Texas has the second-largest population in the nation, and we have tremendous diversity,” Sparks said.

“We have a different population than that which exists outside of the state. Other studies don’t include the state of Texas, effectively leaving out a giant segment of the U.S. population from these discussions.”

Similar studies discovered high rates of cancer among African Americans in Detroit, leading public policy analysts to discuss cancer’s correlation to air born industrial pollution, as well as the high death rate among African American men with cancer.

“This information has an application because people in county health departments are going to be interested in knowing what we have in our back yard, whether we have a level of cancer that is four to five times the level that should exist, and what is causing that,” Sparks said.

“What I expect is a lot more questions. The first goal is to identify where these places are and then to focus on specific hot spots and learn as much as we can about these places.”

Corey Sparks, Ph.D.,

Associate Professor, Department of Demography Corey Sparks has become an expert in the areas of demographic estimation, spatial analysis and other quantitative methodologies. He holds a dual Ph.D. in anthropology and demography from The Pennsylvania State University. Sparks participates in a broad range of interdisciplinary research including topics such as health disparities, food insecurity, cancer epidemiology and anthropological demography. He has received funding from several federal funding agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and National Science Foundation.

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Heading Toward Breakthroughs UTSA continues toward Tier One research by being one of only a handful of universities in the nation offering courses in neurofeedback counseling.

It all comes back to Pavlov and his dog. Ring a bell; dog drools.

Classical conditioning at its finest.

However, with the advancement of technology, conditioning (e.g. classical, operant, instrumental) is finally catching up to the digital age.

Experts can now help people condition their own brains to exhibit certain behaviors through a process known as neurofeedback (NFB). Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback that analyzes brainwave patterns to help treat patients.

Through this noninvasive form of counseling, patients attached to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine can actively see their brainwaves as they work through their problems.

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Trained counselors help these patients adjust their thinking and mental state based on the EEG readings, so the patient exhibits more positive neural feedback and less of the negative. Eventually, patients are able to adjust their own neuroresponses toward more positive outlooks.

“Neurofeedback has been found to be particularly valuable in treating disorders such as anxiety-related issues, PTSD, ADHD, mood disorders, and emotional regulation issues,” said Mark Jones, adjunct professor and president of the Biofeedback Society of Texas.

“Often these disorders are difficult to treat with counseling and/ or medication,” he explained. “For

example, a certain percentage of individuals are not able to make effective use of the cognitive techniques for anger management because their brain is so quickly triggered into a ‘fight/flight’ stage at an unconscious level. NFB is a way to get at the source of these problems by enabling a person to improve the function of their brain with the help of this non-invasive technology.”

The NFB course at UTSA is part of the Master’s of Science in Clinical and Mental Health Counseling program, and is taught by Jones, who is board certified in neurofeedback by the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance (BICA) and certified in Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG) by the QEEG Certification Board.

“Having NFB as part of a counseling program is a natural fit because of the importance of integrating counseling techniques into the treatment,” Jones said. “While NFB research is burgeoning in certain graduate programs across the world, it remains to be seen if these schools will develop training tracks for the field. The pace of research into this modality has been increasing rapidly in the past few years and is showing great promise. UTSA is situated to become a nationally recognized program.”

Since it is one of only a few programs in the country that offer neurofeedback, the Masters in Counseling program was exactly what Michael Russo was looking for after he graduated with his degree in psychology.

“I got interested in neurofeedback as an undergrad through an internship with the psychology department,” Russo said. “In that internship experience, I was able to see the wide variety of patients you are able to help using neuroscience.”

“The medical model, for example, looks at various aspects that are going on from a chemical standpoint, whereas neurofeedback looks at it from the electrical standpoint,” he explained. “So, it’s really an awesome way to be able to work with a lot of the same things, and the individual is able to work on those brainwaves themselves.”

Russo always knew he wanted to help people and had a special interest in psychology and counseling. But it wasn’t until he saw his friends return home from tours in the military that he began to focus on specific areas of counseling, namely the treatment of veterans.

“I’ve got a lot of friends who are active military and retired military, and I’ve seen who they were before their deployment, and then who they were when they came back,” Russo said.

“Recognizing what they have done, not only for me but for the country is awesome, and I want to be able to help them achieve whatever goals they set for themselves.”

While his experience with NFB is just in its infancy stage, he is eager to be able to treat issues like PTSD, alcoholism, and depression— problems faced by many of our returning veterans. One of Russo’s manuscripts, “A Research Analysis of Neurofeedback Protocols for PTSD and Alcoholism,” has recently been approved for publication in The Journal of NeuroRegulation. This publication is not only a point of pride for the burgeoning scholar but also for UTSA. Having achieved a milestone as a researcher, Russo also plans to spend his next three years as an advocate for UTSA in its advances in the fields of psychology and counseling, and to “raise awareness of the program and its use of NFB.”

Knowledge.

Leadership.

Service.

T

he UTSA Top Scholar program combines a comprehensive, merit-based scholarship with personalized signature experiences in academics, leadership, and community service. The first of its kind at UTSA, the program is recruiting top-tier students for top-tier faculty. Students in the program bring with them some of the highest entering academic credentials seen at UTSA, including an average two-part SAT of 1434, and an average of 34 semester credit hours in Advanced Placement and dual credit. This impressive group includes valedictorians, Eagle Scouts, accomplished musicians, a black belt, an Intel International Science Fair winner, a member of Connexion SA’s 20 under 20, winner of a $10,000 National Association of Women Business Owners San Antonio chapter Entrepreneurial Spirit Award, and more.

UTSA Top Scholars are advancing the Tier One mission of UTSA, and positively enhancing the university’s prestige. Sarah Santos, Marshall High School valedictorian and UTSA Top Scholar class of 2017, tells a story about high school teachers who tried to talk her out of coming to UTSA. However, Santos said that she found exactly what she needed here at UTSA to enhance her scholarly skills and excel academically. Support from the UTSA Top Scholar program and access to outstanding faculty made Santos’ first year of college better than even she could have imagined, landing her on the Dean’s List both semesters of her freshman year. A psychology major with a biology minor, Santos joined a neuroscience research lab this fall.

Students are chosen as UTSA Top Scholars through a holistic application and interview process. The deadline to apply for the 2015 entering class is Dec. 1. More information, can be found at www.utsa.edu/topscholar, or email Top.Scholar@utsa.edu.

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Cutting-Edge Research, Cutting-Edge Institutions State funding comes to life with the creation of the San Antonio Life Sciences Academy

By Brian Willeford

T

he San Antonio Life Sciences Institute (SALSI) was created in 2003 through funding from the Texas State Legislature to enhance the research, teaching, and service missions of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). It brought researchers together from both institutions for a new multidisciplinary approach to medical and social issues, and has since become an example of how UTSA and UTHSCSA can come together to enhance research and education.

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In May 2014, the two institutions took this collaborative approach a step further by creating the SALSI Academy.

Its mission was to serve as the focal point for the policy issues in the life sciences by using collaborative expertise to enhance research that contributes to solving healthcare related problems.

“A cornerstone concept of the SALSI Academy is to build on the successes of the past to promote stellar team science which capitalizes on the talented human investigators we have within each institution,” said Mark Nijland, the assistant vice president for research at UTHSCSA. The SALSI Academy hit the ground running by announcing its first call for proposals—the SALSI Innovation Challenge. Researchers applying for the grant were tasked to discover high risk, high reward collaborative studies that have the potential to create ground-breaking research and innovations in diseases that impact South Texas.

SALSI awarded more than $750,000 in grants to four projects. These projects varied in scope, encompassing diabetes and cancer, treatment strategies for bloodstream infections, and establishing an understanding of the role of carbohydrates in immune responses.

“These projects are meant to foster and challenge UTSA and UTHSCSA investigators to formulate and collaborate on new and innovative research strategies that are intended to solve prevalent diseases found in the south Texas community,” said Joo L. Ong, department chair of biomedical engineering at UTSA. Following the Innovation Challenge, SALSI turned its attention toward “Research Areas of Excellence” within UTSA and UTHSCSA by announcing the Clusters in Research Excellence grant. This grant bolstered strategic research clusters through capacity building and collaborative, interdisciplinary research to address global issues and challenges. SALSI awarded $300,000 in grants to two clusters. One cluster is focusing on the challenge of “big data” analytics for use in discovery, training, and decision-making in the medical field, and the other cluster is focusing on strengthening collaborative efforts to identify and treat fungal infections.

“Before SALSI, we were a bunch of separate researchers with some ideas,” said John Quarles, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at UTSA. “Now we have real research directions that we all work towards together and the money to back it up to get our ideas off the ground. This will definitely help to propel us to get federal money in the future.”

Within six months, the SALSI Academy has reinforced the partnership between UTSA and UTHSCSA while also establishing mechanisms for groundbreaking, worldchanging research. The academy will continue to foster an environment of collaboration and significantly raise the international profile of both institutions.

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Dedicating Decades to Research “One purpose of higher education is to make the mind a better place in which to live—to develop intellect, character, and quality interactions. Another purpose of higher education, evidenced in UTSA’s faculty research, is to contribute more broadly to society, to discover, evaluate, then disseminate new knowledge that will enhance the human capacity for productivity within a range of cultural and social-situational contexts.” –Rosalind Horowitz 31

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Early in her career at The University of Minnesota, Rosalind Horowitz was selected by research administrators to nurture research development activities. From those experiences, she learned there were many stages to a research trajectory.

Some research projects brought immediate new knowledge that could be acted upon by citizenry rather quickly and reliably. Other research represented small increments in the resolving of a problem, within a complex puzzle, in the advancement of new knowledge. The latter studies were part of a slow, sustained, methodical process that would bring advantages to everyday life. They were investments for a university and state, with potential outcomes that were not immediately visible.

Since her arrival to UTSA, more than 30 years ago, her commitment has been unyielding—to nurture and grow exemplary research that will raise UTSA to Tier One status. To that end, she has pursued studies with talented graduate students, applied those studies in teaching, and provided research-based services in the lowerincome school districts of San Antonio.

“It is vital that our students learn about the research that supports the claims we make, or even defies them, in our classes,” Horowitz said. “Every course that I taught over 30 plus years has included the latest research studies, instructional strategies for incorporating reliable research findings in classrooms, other non-school settings, and sheer life.”

Horowitz is well known for her scholarly work internationally, especially for her connection of orality and literacy from a developmental perspective.

“Much research and teaching in schools has used a fixed model of student performance,” she said.

“Rather, a developmental approach to research and teaching suggests that we are in constant flux and able to grow in expertise with proper instruction and modeling or coaching. The oral-written connection has been explored for its influence in developing high literacy

across grades and with first generation students in higher education.”

Her research has examined how dialogue plays a central role in learning and teaching through varied written sources. Differences between comprehension by the ear, in listening practices, versus by the eye, in reading-writing, have been addressed in her book, Comprehending Oral and Written Language.

Another body of her scholarly work is focused on the achievement gap in reading among Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans, which leads to disparities in overall achievement in schooling.

“Despite millions of dollars invested by the federal government in raising achievement in reading proficiency and comprehension, minority populations do not reach expectations of performance on reading measures,” Horowitz said.

Some students even become weaker as they progress through school and ultimately dropout,” she added.

Currently, she is working to examine what the persistent issues are and what can be done to help all students, whatever income level or culture, succeed in high school and pursue careers in the work world.

Horowitz is also researching multiple source processing. Her work in this arena shows how children, adolescents, and adults develop with age in processing more than one source to acquire meaning, and how they give credit to the sources that influence them.

More specifically, an ongoing study with undergraduates examines how students process persuasive texts

and develop the ability to persuade, from several sources, arguments for or against particular ideas. This research is designed to train teachers how to read from different points of view, how to take a position, argue for it, and ultimately train their students to develop the same skills in classrooms.

Finally, Horowitz has also been conducting research on borderlands in order to address how bicultural, binational literacy practices contribute to motivation and high literacies.

As part of a U.S.-Mexico Center Grant, Horowitz and students looked at reading preferences and activities of U.S.-Mexico adolescents who live in the U.S. and attend a U.S. high school but travel regularly across the border to Mexico. Subjects were from families experiencing poverty but who were voracious readers, determined to read and move out of a poverty cycle.

Through focus groups, Horowitz learned about adolescent in-school and outside-of-school reading activities, travel across the border, aspirations for work, and binational affiliations that provide an edge for students.

“Stereotypes and misconceptions of minority adolescents are rampant,” she said. “This research looks at our adolescents on the border who break all odds and how they find the stamina to do so.”

Her Border Literacy Project was extended by work in the southern part of Israel in the city of Beersheba, which is near the border of Gaza. Horowitz has inaugurated a comparativeinternational partnership between a teacher training college in Beersheba and UTSA. “Like our U.S. high school and college border populations, these

Bedouin populations are developing second language skills and are highly mobile while reformulating identity that will help them navigate several contexts,” Horowitz explained. “What is important is that these border town populations raise new models for 21st century, teacher training.”

All of her past and ongoing research are a testament to her dedication to literacy and education, and Horowitz has often been recognized as a pioneer and leader in her field.

Horowitz was recognized as a distinguished alumna of The University of Minnesota—one of only 100 University of Minnesota graduates from 1905-2005 to receive this recognition.

She is also a Spencer Fellow of The National Academy of Education, the first such fellow at UTSA, and she was one of five selected internationally for funding for a three-year period.

Additionally, Horowitz has yearly attended Academy proceedings and initiated the first Spencer Fellows Forum which continues to exist today, showcasing research.

Since her honor as a fellow, she has been invited to serve as a group leader, discussant, and individual mentor to new fellows, with travel awards and recognition by the Academy for her work. She also evaluates proposals for funding other fellows.

To sum up the achievements of such a distinguished professor is difficult, but Horowitz’s research adds fresh imaginative approaches to dialogue and literacy development at its higher-end levels, thereby adding new avenues for learning in the sciences and humanities.

Rosalind Horowitz, Ph.D.

Professor, Departments of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, and Educational Psychology Rosalind Horowitz is a professor in the College of Education and Human Development with a joint appointment in the Departments of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, and Educational Psychology. Her research is focused on discourse and literacy studies. This research addresses the new populations that experience immigration, binationalism, and biculturalism across the Americas.

Active in contributing to UTSA’s research growth, she is a member of UTSA’s Research Advisory Board (RAB), which provides recommendations for advancing the university’s research agenda to President Ricardo Romo.

Discovery 32

LANDSCAPE

FOR LEARNING

By Kathryn Jones

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Cibolo Preserve partnership offers researchers a unique outdoor laboratory.

Springs on the outskirts of Boerne trickle into Cibolo Creek, triggering a journey of water. The creek meanders through rocky flats, shady pools and deep limestone canyons with scenic waterfalls in one of the most pristine places in the Hill Country—the Cibolo Preserve.

Founded in 2008 by San Antonio philanthropist Bill Lende, the nonprofit Cibolo Preserve sprawls for 521 acres in a critical recharge zone for the Trinity and Edwards aquifers. That same year, the preserve formed a relationship with UTSA to allow undergraduate and graduate research in science and environmental studies, including archaeology, geology, plant life, water, and wildlife. The agreement gives UTSA researchers controlled access to this unique outdoor laboratory.

Located east of Boerne, in south Kendall County, Cibolo Preserve protects a land of rugged beauty, rich with plants and animals and evidence of human occupation dating back thousands of years. The most unusual geological feature is a narrow canyon through a rudist reef, exposing fossil beds, which form a rocky outcropping.

A five-member board of trustees oversees the preserve and decides which research projects to approve. The decision is based on “increasing our understanding and expanding the body of knowledge of the preserve so we can become better stewards,” said J.W. Pieper, the trustee who coordinates all research projects at the preserve.

“We really enjoy working with UTSA, and they have been responsive in working with the preserve and making this a very productive relationship,” Pieper added.

The preserve also works with the nearby Cibolo Nature Center whose Master Naturalist volunteers have been observing Great Blue Heron rookeries at the preserve since 2004. A waterfowl study focusing on migratory ducks on Cibolo Creek is another Cibolo Nature Center research project.

Pieper said access is limited because the preserve is an area of Discovery 34

ecological, hydrological, geological, and archaeological significance. “It’s primarily done to monitor the pristine condition, but at the same time to observe nature in its own place, and to see what happens historically with the flow of water through the preserve and through limestone,” he said.

The board requires that for personal safety at least two people be present on a research project at the preserve because it is a remote and rugged area. Researchers must sign in, and report out when they leave the property. In addition to UTSA and the Cibolo Nature Center, the preserve has given wildlife biologists from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department access to the property for research projects.

One of the earliest studies conducted at the preserve was by UTSA’s Center for Archaeological Research. The study was undertaken when the City of Boerne was planning to put a new wastewater pipeline through the property.

The researchers excavated several burned-rock middens, or mounds, and discovered ancient tools, including spear points—proof that people were living there 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. More recently, Dr. Kathryn Brown, associate professor of archaeology, conducted an archaeological study to survey and map the preserve, create a database, and conduct subsurface testing to find and examine artifacts.

Other studies concern geology, plant life, and water.

Most of the UTSA research is based on observations, although some involve taking measurements or samples.

For example, Dr. Alexis Godet, assistant professor of geology, and John Grosch, a graduate student, are 35

Discovery

studying the Albian rudist reef of the Glen Rose formation, a sedimentary succession partially built by bivalve mollusks.

In June and July, Godet and Grosch spent part of a week examining the reef for specific fossils and took rock samples from above and below the reef.

“The Albian reef architecture dates to 110 million years ago, in the Cretaceous geologic period,” Godet said. “We are trying to recreate the history of this reef by studying rocks that are slightly older, contemporaneous and slightly younger than the reef itself.”

The researchers will use mapping, sampling, and geochemistry to unravel potential links between the rudist reef and environmental changes. Analyzing the phosphorus content of the rocks helps the researchers determine how much nutrient was in the water. They are also comparing the reef analysis from the Cibolo Preserve with other locations in Texas in which time-equivalent rocks are outcropping to learn more about its formation and environmental changes.

The preserve’s accessibility makes a big difference because other Texas rudist reefs are on private property and not easily available for research. “The trustees of the property are very interested in science and in what we’re doing, and that really encourages us,” Godet said. “And the quality of the outcropping is very good.”

In another project, Dr. Janis Bush, associate professor and director of Environmental Science Academic Programs, and Dr. Oscar Van Auken, professor emeritus in the Department of Biology, completed a study of Post Oaks and their community structure. Van Auken said they wanted

to see how many of the trees are on the preserve, their size distribution and whether the trees are repopulating themselves. Some of the trees are more than 100 years old, he said.

“We’ve certainly been aware of Post Oaks, but had never seen a population in Central Texas,” Van Auken said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Yongli Gao, associate professor of environmental geology and hydrology, is focusing on waterrelated studies. Two of his graduate students have finished thesis projects studying different aspects of water on the preserve. One investigated groundwater and surface water interaction in Cibolo Creek to determine whether there has been any mixing of the two.

“One of the big questions is where did the water go, because it just disappeared,” Gao said. “We would like to track that. How much does it contribute to the aquifer?”

The other thesis project examined water quality after the City of Boerne opened its new wastewater treatment plant that discharges treated water into the upper portion of the creek. “It will be very interesting for us to track this kind of water,” Gao said.

Gao will also look at changes in vegetation since Ashe juniper—commonly known in Texas as mountain cedar—has been removed annually on the preserve. “We want to follow that and see how it affects the ecosystem,” he said.

With environmental foresight, the City of Boerne in 2010 guaranteed a minimum flow of 410,000 gallons of water per day in Cibolo creek where it enters the Cibolo Preserve. The water sustains riparian habitat and flows naturally through cracks and fractures in the limestone creek bed to return underground to the aquifer in its mile-and-a-half journey through the preserve. Preserve trustees contracted with the United States Geological Survey to install a stream flow gage to measure precipitation, creek water level, and flow rate as Cibolo Creek enters the preserve. This data is available to UTSA research personnel on the Internet and is updated hourly.

Initially, the preserve spanned 500 acres, but during the past five years the trustees have acquired an additional 21 acres of critical aquifer recharge watershed adjacent to the preserve. Particularly important was the acquisition of water catchment property which provides spring flow for a 70-foothigh fern bank, a quarter-mile-long limestone bluff, that is a habitat for a variety of rare plants and amphibians. “We bought it to protect it,” Pieper said.

With so much acreage to explore, document, and study, UTSA researchers are literally having a field day—or days— at Cibolo Preserve.

“We’re hoping that long-term we will have more constant results to show the hydrology of this unique place and how that compares with the surrounding area,” Gao said. “Ecologically, this place is very different.”

Discovery 36

From Students to

Scholars

By Brian Willeford

The Office of Undergraduate Research is changing the way students become involved with academics.

Haley Hazlett came to UTSA after studying at Northwest Vista College to pursue a degree in biology.

Within two years, she began to struggle with her new, more demanding course load, and she lost her initial drive. Around then, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which eliminated her remaining desire to study.

As she debated dropping out, she was introduced to Dr. Matthew Gdovin, a researcher working on a new project— breast cancer treatment.

“You can understand why, despite all my thoughts of dropping out, I was interested,” Hazlett said.

“From the moment I began working in a laboratory as an undergraduate researcher, I was able to make connections between what I was learning and why it was useful. In a time when I felt as if there was nothing I could do to impact the world around me, I was given an opportunity to do just that.”

The opportunity Hazlett received was due to the Office of Undergraduate Research (O.U.R.) at UTSA. The O.U.R. gives students the opportunity to work with faculty, gain knowledge, and get firsthand experience conducting research. Since its formation in April 2013, the O.U.R.’s mission has been to initiate a collaborative network of programs to engage and support undergraduate students to participate in research and scholarly activities.

It was established on the principles that by engaging students in university life and research early, students become increasingly involved over time. By promoting participation in research, the O.U.R. works to develop students into scholars.

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To highlight these student-scholars and their research, the O.U.R. hosted the inaugural Research & Creative Inquiry Showcase in April 2014. The event, held at the UTSA Main Campus, invited students from all areas of study to display their work to the university and community.

Scientific research posters, sculptures, and mechanical engineering projects were all put on display—more than 200 students came to show off their scholarly work.

“The inaugural showcase was hugely successful,” Donovan Fogt, director of the O.U.R. said. “This event represented what a top-tier university offers, by way of opportunities, to supplement academic classwork, and we expect the 2015 showcase to have more than 400 student presenters.”

Realizing the need to promote research across more than just varied disciplines, the O.U.R. reached out to the Mexico-based Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) system to begin a 10-year agreement to participate in exchanges of education, research, and culture.

“UTSA and the Tecnológico de Monterrey have very similar research interests and have been wonderful collaborators for some time now,” President Ricardo Romo said. “Expanding this relationship will strengthen our ability to offer top-tier opportunities to students and scholars for pursuing education, research, and collaboration ahead.”

As part of this agreement, the first 11 students arrived in the summer 2014 for a six-week program where they were partnered with UTSA research faculty and worked in their labs. The program also included training

seminars, cultural engagement activities, and professional development to round out the students’ experience.

Additionally, the students received a certificate from UTSA and 20 hours of course credit from their home institution.

“This is my first time doing research abroad, and I’m looking forward to comparing and learning how life and work is like at another university,” said Juan Carlos Rivas Rodriguez, a fourth-year student at Tecnológico de Monterrey. “I want to learn as much as I can and contribute to the research being done at UTSA, and then bring that knowledge back home to help there.”

Fogt’s passion to drive student success is clear in the O.U.R.’s efforts. He has made significant contributions to UTSA and its partners by giving students the resources, drive, and confidence they need to advance their studies.

“We’re trying to instill in students the idea that they’re not biology majors; they’re not ‘studying biology,’ they are young biologists,” Fogt said. “They are young artists, they’re not ‘studying art’.”

Overcoming all of her obstacles, Hazlett has since graduated from UTSA and moved on to her next academic achievement.

“I am now pursuing a Ph.D. at Dartmouth College in Experimental Molecular Medicine,” Hazlett said. “I would not be here if I had not become involved in research as an undergraduate, and I highly encourage students to become involved in the life-changing opportunities the O.U.R. has to offer.”

Discovery 38

Resurgence of

Consumption On one hand, Ebola killed approximately 5,000 people this year in one of the worst outbreaks in history. The world is in panic. On the other hand, 1.5 million people died last year from tuberculosis, the second-greatest killer worldwide due to a single infectious agent. The world barely seemed to notice.

S

tudies of ancient remains indicate that tuberculosiscausing organisms have existed in Egypt, India, and China for at least 17,000 years. During the Middle Ages, tuberculosis (TB) was termed the “King’s Evil” since it was believed that monarchs from France and England could cure the disease by touching those affected. As TB progressed to the Americas, it continued to claim lives, and became known as “consumption” due to drastic diseaseinduced weight loss. By the nineteenth century, it became known as “the captain of all these men of death.” Today, in many countries, the Captain still holds sway.

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The death toll from TB is in the millions. No country is immune; worldwide an estimated 13.7 million people are infected with active, infectious TB. About one third of the world’s population, or approximately two billion people, are infected with TB. Although there are various treatment regimes for tuberculosis, the disease is adapting more rapidly than the development of new treatments. More and more strains of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are occurring worldwide, and soon those strains may leave us completely defenseless against a new pandemic.

South African medical microbiology Ph.D. student Nontuthuko Maningi has seen the swath of destruction caused by TB in her own country. There has been a dramatic resurgence of the disease as South Africa struggles with

the world’s largest HIV epidemic. One in four deaths among HIV patients is caused by tuberculosis.

“South Africa has nine provinces, and all these provinces have diverse strains of tuberculosis which are difficult to treat due to drug resistance,” Maningi said. “South Africa’s high prevalence of HIV increases the problem of tuberculosis and makes it difficult to diagnose, because patients co-infected with TB and HIV do not produce enough sputum for laboratory diagnosis.”

Finding adequate samples to test and diagnose the disease is crucial in halting new MDR-TB strains. However, diagnosis difficulties in the more remote parts of South Africa have led researchers in Africa to look for help elsewhere.

“My Ph.D. involves the application of a new molecular technology for sequencing the many strains of tuberculosis,” Maningi said. “Currently, we do not have this new sequencing technology in our country.”

Although the new and needed sequencing technology is currently not available in South Africa, researchers at UTSA were already advancing the field of TB genome sequencing.

It was from the research of UTSA Biology Professor James Chambers and former Ph.D. student Luke Daum ‘07 of Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics, that Maningi found an answer to her problem.

Chambers and Daum published a paper in 2012 describing their work in tuberculosis gene sequencing and Maningi wanted to learn more about the gene sequencing process. Maningi’s thesis supervisor procured the needed funds from the South African government for her to come to the US to learn the new sequencing technology under the supervision of Daum and Chambers.

“Part of her experience in the US was to experience an American academic university setting,” Daum said. “We put her in University Campus Housing, got her acclimated to Texas cuisine, gave her a library card and access to the laboratory, required her to attend specific seminars, and exposed her to some of the cutting-edge technologies that can only be carried out here at UTSA and Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics.”

Although TB is most commonly seen in low- and middle-income countries and is rarely seen in the U.S., it may not be long until TB evolves to be more drug resistant—becoming a problem in the U.S. as well. Teams of universities and groups from private industry are all coming together to tackle the problems surrounding MDR-TB. Discovery 40

“I mean, 100-200 years ago you come down from the attic with a cure for polio, and you win a Nobel Prize in Science. It doesn’t work that way anymore,” Daum said. “You’re dead in the water if you don’t build bridges with other groups, and don’t share and reciprocate technologies, methodologies, protocols, and experiences.

You’ll die otherwise. That’s just the way it is.

You have to be open to collaboration.”

“Certainly we would have never been able to do anything we’ve done here with tuberculosis if I hadn’t had access to samples that The University of Pretoria procured,” Daum added. “We were able to examine those samples such that we could develop protocols looking specifically at drug resistance here in the U.S.” UTSA understands the need for furthering collaborations with industry and other academic institutions. Faculty realize it involves more than just paying lip-service to the idea of teamwork. It involves a hands-on approach.

“Now, there is considerable work that Luke [Daum] and I want to conduct with the group in South Africa providing us fertile ground for many future collaborations,” Chambers said. “So, from that point of view it was extremely valuable to us to develop this relationship with Nontu [Maningi].”

Now back home, Maningi is excited about putting her new skills to use. “When I was at UTSA, I was exposed to two next generation sequencing technologies, i.e., Ion Torrent and the MiSeq Illumina,” she said. “I learned how to really get the mutations from the data that has been produced from those two technologies. And as far as I know, I’m the only one in Africa who has worked in both technologies.”

Currently, commonly used TB diagnostic methods can take months to obtain needed results thus delaying proper treatment. However, the techniques Maningi learned here in San Antonio will allow her to identify specific strains in as little as three days. This, she said, is a big step in preventing tuberculosis from becoming extensively drug resistant, and from her stay here in San Antonio and at UTSA, it might not be long before South Africa has its current MDR-TB epidemic under control.

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Making Sense of the Census

By Tony Cantú

Poring over data for a living may not sound particularly exciting, but for UTSA Professor of Demography Lloyd Potter, the statistics he compiles are alive with thrilling significance.

As director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research, Potter interprets and compiles census data illustrating the ever-changing structure of populations. As state demographer, he paints portraits from the human condition—births, deaths, income, the incidence of disease, and other variables—to chart projections widely utilized by policy makers.

Most recently, Potter has trained his demographer’s eye on a trend illustrating recent declines in Hispanic birth rates. Those census numbers illustrate the effectiveness of educational outreach targeting specific populations. From a demographer’s perspective, three or four years have shown a significant decrease in Hispanic births.

“Texas has made great strides in reducing teen births, but we’re also seeing more Hispanic women delaying child bearing to attend school,” Potter said.

Conversely, Potter has seen an up-tick in Asian migration. While still a minority among minorities in Texas— particularly given lower birth rates—the youthful Asian population has grown significantly in recent years.

“Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 50 percent. The population base is small, but there’s growth,” Potter said.

Potter is comfortable in his world of numbers, interpreting and compiling population data for widespread dissemination.

But, in being named state demographer in 2010—becoming the third official demographer to emerge from UTSA—he faced an additional task for which he was less prepared: public speaking.

He suddenly found himself a sought-after speaker, gradually learning to present data in an easy-to-understand format. Rather than dry recitations of statistics, his PowerPoint presentations are now enhanced with colorful charts and graphs in his effort to engage audiences—legislators, county judges, Rotary Clubs, trade groups, House and Senate committees, and others.

“When I first started out, I would speak from an academic standpoint and could see peoples’ eyes glaze over,” he joked. “Over time, I’ve refined that and made the data easier to consume and the numbers more approachable. When you show people graphs, they understand the data,” Potter said.

At a recent hearing for a Texas House Health Care Education and Training Committee, committee members and the audience benefited from his expertise in plotting out some of the potential health care workforce challenges the state may experience as a function of increasing ethnic diversity.

“They were trying to figure out what the state needs to do to ensure we are training health care providers for our future workforce, and what that workforce looks like in terms of race and ethnicity,” he said. “Diagnosing health care occupations, requiring higher levels of education, are dominated by non-Hispanic whites. But if you look at health care aides, occupations requiring little education, the field is dominated by those of Hispanic descent and non-Hispanic blacks.”

As the demographics of the state become more and more Hispanic, we potentially face shortages of higher educated health care professionals if we don’t facilitate educational pathways for young Hispanics into these occupations,” Potter added.

Diversification of the diagnosing health care occupations is also important as Texas becomes more diverse. Research indicates that many Hispanics are more likely to visit doctors to whom they can relate culturally.

Those cultural tendencies point to the importance of a demographer’s work in isolating census data that may alert to specific community needs.

“The thing for me that’s rewarding is giving a presentation or providing a constituent some data, and then seeing people make better, more informed policy and business decisions based on that information,” Potter said.

Lloyd B. Potter, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Professor, Department of Demography Lloyd Potter has been focused on the nexus of population dynamics and policy since the late 1970s. He has worked as an applied demographer in multiple settings for more than 30 years, and in June of 2010, Potter was appointed as the Texas State Demographer. At UTSA, Potter serves as the director of the Texas State Data Center and the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research where he is engaged in a range of applied demography research projects.

Currently, Potter’s work focuses upon understanding and communicating demographic processes in Texas, training doctoral level applied demographers in the areas of public policy, and conducting demographic research on public policy related topics.

Discovery 42

Karl Klose, world-renowned researcher and noted TEDx speaker, introduces a novel way to approach microbiology.

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acteria and mankind are locked in a battle that has been raging for millions of years, with each side trying to gain the upper hand over their adversary.

Humans gained an advantage with the discovery of antibiotics, but now bacteria are fighting back with increased resistance to these drugs. This ancient war was highlighted at the Ellen Noël Art Museum of Permian Basin in a new exhibition—Healing Blade: Fantasy Art in Medicine. UTSA microbiology professor Karl Klose was invited to the opening on June 6, 2014, as the guest of honor.

Klose gave a talk on The Rise of the Superbug: Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria. During his presentation, he pointed out that antibiotics were once the “wonder drugs of the 20th century” but through misuse have led to the creation of superbugs, or drug-resistant bacteria. This topic fit well with the art exhibition, which highlighted the art from the roleplaying game Healing Blade.

Healing Blade is a game where bacteria, depicted as dreaded foes, are pitched in battle against antibiotic heroes in the mythical world of Soma. This fantasy world correlates to the real life struggle of medicine’s ongoing battle against infectious disease and antibiotic resistance.

The idea of drug resistance is often a difficult concept to explain, and creators of Healing Blade sought to make it more easily understood by those not in medical professions.

“For example: Staph Aureus (Staphylococcus aureus), which is well-known in its antibiotic-resistant form MRSA, exudes a golden pigment when cultured on plates (Aureus from Aureum/Latin = Gold). This pigment protects the bacteria from natural human defenses. This is depicted as an image of a dragon with thick, golden scales. Similarly relevant attributes characterize the antibiotic heroes,” Arun Mathews, co-creator of Healing Blade, said of the images displayed throughout the exhibit.

An expert in bacteria, Klose has published numerous papers on the subject. Recently, he and researchers at the Ruhr University in Germany identified a regulatory thermometer that controls the ability of cholera to cause disease by sensing the body temperature of humans. Klose is also a member of the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Disease at UTSA.

Discovery 44

Reaching Beyond How does an average student from New Hampshire end up with a Ph.D. in physics from UTSA and the Southwest Research Institute? By finding his passion and following it across the solar system.

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By his own account, George Clark was an average student in high school with no particular aptitude for math or science. He saw himself as a regular guy and wasn’t quite sure what he would do with his life after high school. He moved out of his parents’ home, lived with friends, and worked at various jobs hoping to find what he was meant to do in life.

“I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” Clark said. “I was exploring a little of everything for a couple of years. One day I started reading some astronomy books, and I got hooked on that. I bought myself a telescope, some introductory books on astronomy and taught myself the objects in the night sky. I liked it so much that I went to an introductory astronomy course at the local college.”

At the local college, Clark began working with professor John Gianforte, who brought him to the observatory at The University of New Hampshire (UNH) for observing sessions. Unable to get enough of astronomy, Clark began volunteering at the observatory just so he could take part in additional sessions. It wasn’t long before he knew he wanted to enroll at UNH and study astronomy full time.

To pay for school, Clark worked at a local telescope shop, and as chance would have it, UNH professor Eberhard Möbius came into the store one day to purchase some telescopes.

“He was looking to do a little field study, and needed telescopes and accessories,” Clark said. “I helped him purchase that stuff, and then mentioned that I was interested in science, and I was going to pursue a degree at UNH full time in the fall semester.”

Möbius recognized Clark’s passion, and after speaking with him for a bit longer, he offered Clark a job.

“He basically hired me on the spot,” Clark said. “He said, ‘Just work with me.

If you like science, then maybe you can pursue a physics degree.’ So I put in my two weeks notice at the job, and I started summer research before I was even a full-time student at UNH.” Although his passion was astronomy, UNH didn’t have an Discovery 46

astronomy program at the time. So, the kid with no aptitude for math or science went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics instead.

Wanting to achieve more, to do real research on celestial objects, Clark began pursuing options for a Ph.D. Möbius, his mentor, was working on the IBEX mission with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and Clark’s advisor suggested he look into the programs offered by SwRI. “My advisor basically said I should really consider this program down here because they have a great facility that also does hands-on hardware instrumentation work, and there’s really only a few in the country that do this type of work,” Clark explained.

“He thought it would be a great career move for me to come down here and get a Ph.D. through the SwRI-UTSA program.”

“So, I applied to here and to some other schools and when the decision came, I asked my wife if she was ready to move to Texas. And she was totally

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on board. She put her career on hold, which was amazing, and supported me 100 percent. We moved down here almost five years ago.”

When he arrived, he took core graduate courses at UTSA and specific science courses at SwRI. At the same time, SwRI began work on the Juno space mission—a mission designed to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Clark could hardly wait to take part in the new project.

“The Juno project really got me excited, because it’s going to be a mission of lots of firsts,” Clark said.

“For example, it’s going to be the first mission to orbit the poles of Jupiter.”

Clark’s work centered on calibrating flight instrumentation for Juno’s Jovian Auroral Distribution Experiment (JADE) instrument. The instruments had already been designed and developed but required testing for accurate analysis.

“What that meant was we put the JADE instrument in a specially designed lab with a vacuum chamber

and large coils that emulate Jupiter’s strong magnetic field,” he explained.

“We shoot electrons at the instrument and adjust voltages, energies, and magnetic fields to try to and match expected scenarios in space.

We measure the response of the instrument to these different scenarios.

It’s very crucial that we take those measurements before the instrument gets integrated on the spacecraft because otherwise we don’t know how it will perform.”

Currently, Juno is halfway to Jupiter traveling at 33,400 miles per hour. To protect the instrumentation Clark spent so many hours calibrating, a vault was created to encase it in a 500-pound titanium box, that, according to NASA, is the size of an SUV’s trunk and is the first of its kind for a NASA planetary mission.

Juno is expected to arrive at Jupiter in July 2016, where it will determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, measure atmospheric conditions, map Jupiter’s

magnetic and gravity fields, and as far as Clark’s research is concerned, explore Jupiter’s magnetosphere—the magnetic field protecting Jupiter from solar winds.

Clark graduated from his joint program between UTSA and SwRI in July and is currently working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and The Catholic University of America where he is working on the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission and the Rosetta mission. He plans to continue his research into outer space and see what other mysteries he can unravel.

“I feel like the cartographer term, terra incognita is totally applicable to some of the things that happen in space science,” he said. “We send these probes to distant space areas that we’ve never seen before. We have a good reason to go there, but you can’t help but think you’ll also discover really new and exciting things that are going to change our idea of how things work.”

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Sos Agaian:

UTSA’s 2014 Innovator of the Year

By Brian Willeford

I

n certain disciplines within academia there is a shifting paradigm. No longer are educators only expected to conduct research and to teach.

Instead, more and more of them are expected to show that their work has commercial value. As the world evolves and research goes hand-in-hand with inventions and commercialization, a new breed of educator should be recognized— educators like Sos Agaian.

Agaian, a Peter T. Flawn Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at UTSA and UTSA’s Innovator of the Year 2014, is known for his brilliant mind and tireless work ethic. He is also one of the San Antonio Business Journal’s Tech Titan award winners for 2014.

Since arriving in 1997, Agaian has worked hard to earn a reputation as one of the most prolific inventors the university has ever seen. He has 31 patents and invention disclosures, and three of his innovations have been licensed to startup companies.

These companies work closely with the university and the researcher to 49

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develop mutually beneficial products and services. And Agaian believes startup companies will be the benchmarks for future educators.

“Currently, professors are evaluated on the number of publications or citations they receive.

I believe, in the future, they will be evaluated on the number of startups they create,” Agaian said. “Cornell just opened a new campus, and startups are the requirement for their new professors.”

“My work has been recognized by earning fellowships and awards, and it was all earned at UTSA.” In addition to his startups, patents, and disclosures, Agaian has been published more than 450 times, with each article bearing the UTSA name and logo. This is remarkable because when he arrived, few citations

made mention of the university—now, there are more than 500 citations from UTSA annually.

“Before, it was hard to get citations. I could see my citations go up as the university’s name went up.

There was a direct correlation. Now, as the university name goes up people say, ‘Oh, this is a good university,’” Agaian said. “My work has been recognized by earning fellowships and awards, and it was all earned at UTSA. I didn’t come here with them.”

Agaian, as well as other university researchers and innovators, have a valuable ally when it comes to protecting their work. The Office of Commercialization and Innovation (OCI) works with UTSA professors and researchers who disclose the results of their research that may result in new inventions. The office determines how to protect the intellectual property and works with the inventors to develop and commercialize these new technologies by marketing them.

The new inventions may be licensed to an established company or a startup company which may include the inventors as participants. The intellectual property continues to be managed by OCI including both the patent preparation and prosecution, as well as the licensee tracking and the distribution of resulting royalties.

“The OCI works closely with UTSA innovators to make their inventions successful,” said Jacquelyn Michel, director of technology transfer for the OCI. “Since many of the inventions are in a very early stage they may require further development to be of interest to a company.

“Proof of Concept”—evidence the technology works is essential to either a successful license or a startup.

We protect our inventors intellectual

property and even provide funding to further development the technology to meet unmet needs and increase the interest from companies and the value returned to UTSA and the inventors.”

Agaian’s efforts have given the OCI plenty of work. In 2014, he filed two nonprovisional patents, three provisional patents, and six invention disclosures.

“He is a genuinely good person, and a good partner,” said Subashini Asokan, technology licensing associate for the OCI. “He brings this passion and charisma into every meeting he has with a student, peer, potential client, or investor—he always puts his best foot forward.”

When his life took a turn for the worse, he remained positive by focusing on solutions rather than the problem.

Eight years ago, Agaian was diagnosed with prostate cancer. As the doctors went through all the steps to help him, he began seeing the limitations (weaknesses) in their diagnostic processes. He watched as the doctors researched and analyzed, and saw opportunities to improve their process.

As a result, he invented a program that analyzes cancer cells within seconds, instead of days, allowing doctors to more easily, accurately, and effectively treat patients.

Currently, doctors perform a biopsy by sampling tissues from affected and non-affected areas to predict the path of cancer. Doctors then identify cancerous cells using the Gleason Grading System, which uses recognized patterns to identify infected cells. Agaian looked at the processes, and recognized how time-consuming and subjective they were.

“After surgery, they took a biopsy.

We waited three days for the results.

After that, they said the cancer jumped to another part of my body, and I had to take radiation therapy for a month and a half,” Agaian said. “I began to see the limitation of the prognosis and treatment procedures’ analysis and research process.”

His innovation uses the same biopsy technique currently used, and prepares samples in the same method.

After the samples are prepared and placed in a glass slide, they are digitized using a whole-slide scanner or a camera-equipped microscope. Once high resolution histopathology images are produced, his invention takes over.

The samples are then analyzed by a computer program that recognizes the morphology of tissue structures, color, and texture patterns of the images and their correlation with clinically relevant Gleason grades. Using his methodology, samples can be processed in minutes instead of days, limiting the chance of cancer spreading before treatment.

“This is why I like pathology—I have a personal connection to it,” Agaian said. “I’m trying everything to get this product to market. I don’t want people to have the same problems that I did.”

Agaian’s inventive mind never stops looking for opportunities to improve the world. His mind keeps working, keeps solving problems, and keeps improving the situation.

“He doesn’t give up,” Asokan said. “If someone has already invented something he is working on, he will simply say ‘Then I guess I’ll have to do it better.’”

Agaian’s passion doesn’t stop in the lab; it extends to his students as well. Their success is as important to him as his own, and he ensures they are recognized for the work they do.

“I believe students are more important than I am. I can give ideas, but somebody has to implement them. My philosophy is if my students are strong,

then I can be strong,” Agaian said. “I like to work with students because I think they are talented. They are often not prepared, but they are talented and eager. You have to see their strongest part and bring them up.”

The contributions Agaian has made to his students have helped raise UTSA’s research profile to new heights.

His research even caught the eye of a Stanford student who wanted Agaian to be his first advisor—something that had never happened before.

“The student found me on the Internet and was interested in doing the same research that I am doing. He sent me an e-mail asking if I could be his first advisor. I told him, ‘I’m at UTSA, and you’re at Stanford. They will not agree to make me your advisor.’ After I told him that, he asked me to send him my resume,” Agaian said. “About a month later, I received a letter from Stanford saying that I would be his first advisor, and the second advisor would be from Stanford.”

The first advisor is the primary advisor who leads the research, and the second advisor ensures the standards of the first advisor and the university are upheld. In this unique case, most of the research would be led by Agaian, and a Stanford advisor would ensure all standards are upheld. To an outsider, this example demonstrates the caliber of work done at UTSA. “I’m not saying I’m doing anything extraordinary,” Agaian explained, “but it is very unique.”

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