The students were selected from more than 350 applicants to join the first cohort of Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology), a collaboration between Fordham and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The project aims to grow interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers among historically underrepresented populations.

The program is part of a five-year study led by Fordham and WCS to test the effectiveness of tiered mentoring in helping students get accepted into college and find careers in STEM fields. The study, which is funded by a $2.6 million National Science Foundation grant, connects New York City high school students with Fordham biologists, graduate and undergraduate students, and WCS educators.

If successful, the program could ultimately be scaled up and implemented nationwide, said Amy Tuininga, PhD, Fordham’s principal investigator for Project TRUE.

“Mentoring gives you the power to offer real research experience to a greater number of students,” said Tuininga, an associate professor of biology. “I couldn’t mentor all of these students in my lab, but I could mentor one or two graduate students, who then go on to mentor more students.”

Students conducted research at four New York City zoos—Bronx Zoo, Queens Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, and Central Park Zoo. Each of the four teams included a Fordham graduate student and a WCS instructor as the project leaders; four undergraduate students; and between eight and 12 high school students.

One of the more striking outcomes of having a tiered mentorship structure, said WCS instructor Lily Mleczko, was how effectively the students communicated with one another, despite differences in age and education.

“I graduated from high school 13 years ago, so I’m a lot farther removed from that experience than the undergraduates. They were an essential step to simplifying and explaining scientific concepts and research methods to the high school students,” Mleczko said.

“And it didn’t stop at the science—the undergraduates would talk to them about what it’s like to be in college and about different resources at Fordham, like the CSTEP program.”

That mentoring relationship is, in fact, at the crux of Project TRUE, said Karen Tingley, director of Zoo and Aquarium Programs and Business Development for the WCS Education Department.

“The undergraduate students are an important part of the equation. Rather than having someone at the ripe old age of 30 mentoring the high school students, they have the undergrads to look at and think, ‘This person is 19 years old and is doing all of this. I can do this too,’” Tingley said.

The mentorship doesn’t stop after the research ends, however. The students will reconvene in the fall for a two-day college boot camp that offers instruction and guidance on the college application process. Over the next four years, the team will maintain contact with the students, both to inform them of internships and research opportunities and to measure their progress in college.

If successful, Project TRUE will have helped 200 New York City high school students gain entrance to the STEM fields by the end of the five-year study.

“The goal is for them to see that there’s a world of career opportunities out there and that these opportunities are for them, too—not just others,” Tingley said. “That’s why we wanted to have the program happen in this space—at Fordham—so that they can see that they, too, belong here in college.

“It’s a matter of showing them that there are opportunities out there for them, and their opinions and their voices matter.”

With two prestigious institutions—the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden—sitting across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, it would seem like a no-brainer to get students involved at them.

That’s certainly how Amy Tuininga, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, sees it.
Tuininga, the associate dean of strategic initiatives, partnerships, and assessment at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that she first broached the idea of getting students to do research and teaching with the zoo when she spotted a talented doctoral candidate who had more than a dash of initiative.

“It seemed like he had potential to innovate teaching in nontraditional settings,” Tuininga recalled.

Eventually, the doctoral candidate, Jason Aloisio, worked with Tuininga and Karen Tingley, the city zoos’ director of education, to found Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology). It is a tiered mentoring program that works with faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students to teach city kids about urban ecology. The program, sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society, was adopted by the Central Park Zoo and even found its way into city parks.

“For many of these kids, reality is a dirty sidewalk and natural areas are perceived as places where you can get mugged,” said Aloisio. “We’re trying to dispel that perception.”
With the success of the zoo relationship established, Tuininga introduced doctoral candidate Chelsea Butcher to James Boyer, Ph.D., the Marian S. Heiskell Vice President for Children’s Education at the New York Botanical Garden.

The garden’s youth program differs from the zoo’s in that it primarily engages teens who already have an interest in urban ecology. These teens are brought in as “teen explainers” to teach kids ages 3 to 10 about plants in an informal manner at the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. As the teens gain experience and knowledge, they can move on to become “advanced explainers,” said Boyer.

“They all have a passion for the work and it teaches them self-confidence,” he said. “They don’t join the program because they were urban kids without a connection to nature or science. They’re committed.”

The advanced-level explainers get to meet up with Butcher. Boyer said that even though his staff brings plenty of child-studies and educational experience to the table, in Butcher they found someone who can teach plant science as a practice.

“She is constantly correcting misconceptions and gives them a realistic sense of science through experiments,” he said.

Butcher’s background is in urban ecology. She loves field research, but the harsh winter of 2013-14 kept her and the cohort housebound in the garden’s Haupt Conservatory and the laboratory. Beginning in March, she and the teens ran experiments that focused on the adaptation of plants in both rainforest and desert environments. Sample plants from both environments were given water in varying amounts and at varying frequency. Each week the students counted and measured the leaves, and observed whether a plant was getting sick or benefiting from its particular water regimen.

The students presented their observations at the YouthCaN World Conference held at the Museum of Natural History on April 28. The conference brings together students from around the world (in person or via video) to do research presentations about the environment.

Instead of a dry show-and-tell, the garden team presented a sci-fi-infused video intended to capture the attention of their fellow teens. They also presented information they learned from Butcher on ethnobotany—the study of human use of plants for things like food or clothing.
Following their presentation, the teens also implemented a plan to do qualitative research to measure if their lab training paid off.

For this, Tuininga drafted yet another doctoral candidate—this time from Fordham’s Department of Psychology. Sheena Jeswani helped the students develop a survey that will evaluate visitors’ experiences at the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. When the students complete their 120 hours of internship, they’ll have data that shows whether their research helped improve their skills as explainers. The survey will also teach the teens the difference between quantitative and qualitative research.

While the teens walk away learning a lot, so, too, do the doctoral candidates. Butcher, who just won a Claire Booth Luce Fellowship, said the experience has made her a better scientist.

“As scientists, we get focused on our area and it gets difficult to communicate with people outside of our field,” said Butcher. “But with these teens I have to think about how do I get them excited, and that makes me excited.”

The contract, which will run through 2011, designates the Calder Center as one of the state’s focal points for vector-borne disease research and related public health issues. It will cover Sullivan, Ulster, Duchess, Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties and parts of Long Island. Previously, the region’s entomology laboratories had been located at Cornell University in Ithaca and Sullivan County Community College, part of the State University of New York system in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y.

Under the contract, the Calder Center will monitor local populations of ticks and mosquitoes; research ways to detect and control the risks of diseases these insects carry; collaborate with local departments of health in all nine counties with regard to such diseases; and be response-ready to public outbreaks of vector-borne diseases such as the West Nile virus. The contract will pay the salaries for researchers and technicians to work side-by-side with staff at the Calder Center’s well-established Vector Ecology Laboratory (VEL).

Richard Falco, Ph.D., associate research scientist and co-director of the VEL, will act as the state’s metropolitan regional medical entomologist. “Given our experienced personnel, the strong commitment by Fordham in supporting this kind of work and our location in a suburban, populated habitat where mosquitoes and ticks proliferate, it was a natural place for the state to choose,” Falco said.

The contract comes on the heels of the Calder Center’s receipt of a $388,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study fungi that can kill the black-legged tick, one of the major transmitters of Lyme disease. That grant was awarded to Falco, VEL co-director and associate research scientist Thomas Daniels, Ph.D. and Amy Tuininga, Ph.D., associate professor of biology.

Nancy Busch, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), said the state has recognized the “quality work done by the staff of the VEL for many years.

“The contract demonstrates the positive benefits of Fordham’s commitment to basic scientific research and applications—both prevention and intervention,” she added.

The two-year grant will allow Calder Center researchers to identify fungi that share habitats with the tick and investigate how weather conditions, such as humidity and temperature, affect those fungal populations. The researchers hope to determine which fungi are most virulent to ticks and the optimum conditions under which they act as a natural deterrent to the spread of the tick population.

“These fungi are one of the reasons why a tick’s life isn’t easy,” said Tom Daniels, Ph.D., associate research scientist at the Calder Center’s Vector Ecology Laboratory and principal investigator on the project. “By understanding the ecology of these organisms, we anticipate development of natural ways to impose further controls on tick populations and the spread of disease.”

Lyme disease is transmitted by the bite of an infected deer tick, and New York accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s cases of the bacterial disease, according to the Federal Centers for Disease Control. In addition, the ticks spread human granulocytic anaplasmosis and babesiosis, two rare diseases that can be deadly if not treated with antibiotics.
The grant represents the first major funding on the fungal study project, which scientists at the Calder Center have been working on since 2001. It is part of the NIH’s R21 program, which funds early-stage studies in areas classified as high risk but which “may lead to a breakthrough.”

Amy Tuininga, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, and Rich Falco, Ph.D., associate research scientist of biology and regional medical entomologist for the New York State Health Department, will serve as co-principal investigators. In addition, undergraduate and graduate research assistants will take part in gathering soil samples and ticks for the presence of fungi.

“Our hypothesis is that there is not a single species of fungus, but rather several species of fungi that work together to regulate the tick populations,” said Tuininga. “Through our work, we hope to discover a new biocontrol strategy consisting of, say, three or more fungi that can be used together more effectively than just one.”

As a graduate student, Amy Tuininga, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, developed her strongest interest in studying fungi that are decomposers—consumers of dead plants and animals. However, when a job opened up studying ectomycorrhizal fungi (known as “good fungi,” or mutualists, which provide nutrients in exchange for carbon), she took the job even though she wasn’t that enthusiastic.

“The woman who was giving me the culture collection to care for told me, ‘These are beautiful fungi, you’ll love them,’” Tuininga said. “And I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, right! Beautiful. Whatever. I’ll just do the job.’”

But when Tuininga started working with them, she found herself dazzled by the vibrant yellows, pinks and blues, and the organic netlike patterns that she could see under the microscope.

“They really are beautiful,” she said with a laugh. “Now I’m the one promoting them.”

For Tuininga, their real beauty, however, lies in their function. As a fungal ecologist at Fordham University’s Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station, Tuininga researches the effects of fungi on plants and insects, and their overall value within ecosystems. Among some of the things she has investigated are:

• how these “good” fungi respond to a natural wildfire and how they shift their functions, helping to heal the damaged environment in the process;

• how emissions of fossil fuels affect “good” fungi, and how those fungi that can withstand high levels of pollution can predict a forest in decline;

• how the Hemlock woolly insect, which defoliates the Eastern Hemlock trees, affects the “good” fungi, and how the fungi might feedback to help control forest recovery;

• and which types of mitosporic (asexual, spore-producing) fungi in the soil can kill black-legged ticks, and how pesticide companies might use such fungi to create more biologically friendly controlling agents.

The power of fungi, Tuininga said, is untapped and they are important components in most ecological systems. Fungi, for example, can connect different plant species to each other through a vast underground network.

Such underground webs, she said, offer huge benefits for above ground plants by supporting seedlings with nutrients until they can grow big enough to reach a spot of sunlight.

“We have only identified about 80,000 species of fungi,” she said. “But it is estimated that there are 1.5 million species on the planet. We know of about 5 percent—what are those other 95 percent doing? Most likely, they’re doing really important things.”

Tuininga’s work frequently takes her into the field. Recently, she accompanied two students into the Calder Center’s 113-acre forest to supervise their collection of soil samples. While her students bagged and labeled the samples, Tuininga pointed out various invasive plants and animals, including a pebbly patch of earthworm residue and heaps of poison ivy. Such invasive species, she said, tend to show up on the edge of forests near large metropolitan areas, due to increased human activity.

Another problem for ecosystems in close proximity to metropolitan areas is an abundance of fossil fuels. One study that Tuininga participated in measured the effect of nitrogen pollution on fungi in both highly populated areas in and around New York City and in more rural areas. The study’s findings, she said, were used by lawyers for the State of New Jersey who filed suit against a power plant for increasing its coal emissions in violation of the federal Clean Air Act.

“As scientists, we don’t generate policy per se, but we make information available, putting it out there in a way that can be used by policymakers,” she said. “Our results are not collected to support a particular agenda. We just report what we find.”

In addition to her research and teaching, Tuininga supervises students in the Calder Center’s undergraduate research program, graduate students in the biology department, and writes research proposals to various funding sources. And when she has a chance, Tuininga gives talks to professional and lay audiences on her research and on the importance of environmental preservation.

“A lot of the [fungal]species are very sensitive to human activities,” she said. “We may be losing a lot of our biodiversity and not even know what functions are performed by some of those species. And 100 years down the road, it will be too late.”

– Janet Sassi