Biology – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu The official news site for Fordham University. Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:45:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://now.fordham.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/favicon.png Biology – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu 32 32 232360065 The New York Times: Fordham Researcher Proves Land-Dwelling Leeches Can Leap https://now.fordham.edu/in-the-media/the-new-york-times-fordham-researcher-proves-land-dwelling-leeches-can-leap/ Tue, 25 Jun 2024 16:34:37 +0000 https://now.fordham.edu/?p=192197 Mai Fahmy, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Fordham University and a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, took video of leeches in Madagascar in 2017. Her 10 second clip, taken on a whim, turned out to be the first known recorded visual evidence of leeches jumping. Read more and watch in Videos Show That Leeches Can Jump in Pursuit of Blood.

In 2023, Dr. Fahmy was again in Madagascar, and she took out her phone to film a pair of leeches on a leaf. Within seconds, she was seeing the same move again — one of the leeches bunched itself up and took to the air.

[T]he presence of a big, warm bag of blood nearby can get leeches pretty riled up. They will start the leech version of running, a furious inchworming along, to try to get closer to you.

“That can be pretty frantic,” said Dr. Fahmy. “And when there are a lot of leeches, it can be kind of overwhelming in the field to notice that you are being pursued so intensely by so many little guys.”

]]>
192197
Which Trees Make You Sneeze? https://now.fordham.edu/science-and-technology/as-pollen-peaks-for-the-season-fordham-has-the-official-nyc-count/ Tue, 07 May 2024 19:51:12 +0000 https://now.fordham.edu/?p=190008 Spring allergies got you sneezing yet?

Blame it on the mulberry, birch, and oak trees if you’re in Manhattan, said Guy Robinson, Ph.D., where Fordham University maintains the only official pollen monitoring station in the city. Those three species dominated Robinson’s latest sample slides heading into what’s traditionally the peak pollen weeks of the season—the first two weeks of May.

Robinson maintains and collects pollen samples from the station, located at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on 60th Street east of Columbus Avenue, as well as another station at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk, New York. Throughout the spring and summer, he feeds the data to the National Allergy Bureau of the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and posts a spreadsheet on @FordhamPollen on X as a public service.

Robinson has been at it for 25 years, while teaching biology and paleoecology in the Department of Natural Sciences, first as a senior lecturer at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, now as a visiting scholar. Once a week, on Tuesdays, he hops up on a wall outside the McMahon residence hall on 60th Street and unwraps a clear inch-wide strip of tape from a cylinder in the Burkard spore trap. The cylinder makes one complete turn in a week. The top of the machine spins like a weather vane, capturing the microscopic particles that cause the seasonal suffering of so many.

Guy Robinson makes slides of pollen particles for every 24 hours.
Guy Robinson makes slides of pollen particles for every 24 hours. Photo by Rafael Villa.

After coiling the tape into a metal canister, he carries it to a biology lab in Lowenstein. There Robinson snips the tape into segments—one for every 24-hour period. Then he begins the tedious process of counting pollen particles. 

On April 30, peering through a microscope while working a rudimentary clicker counter with his left hand and making notes with his right, Robinson said that by now, he recognizes most of the different tree pollens “just at a glance.” That’s how he gets the number we all know as the “pollen count”—the number of pollen particles per cubic meter of air. 

He added, “Humans are still better at counting pollen than any machine.” 

No More Sycamores

Robinson has a paper in review now for the Urban Design and Planning Journal suggesting that municipalities should take into consideration the effects of allergens when creating their tree-planting plans.

“They do not need to be planting sycamores in the city,” he said, noting that the species is highly allergenic. Fortunately, the sycamore pollen numbers are already subsiding for this season.

Trees like cherry, hawthorne, and pear, with noticeable flowers, he said, are not major contributors to allergies because they are insect pollinated (the pollen is not carried by the wind).

Those wreaking the most allergy havoc are oak, birch, alder, walnut, sycamore, and elm. Pine pollen is not a major allergen, although pines produce a lot of pollen, he said.

Every year is slightly different in terms of timing and quantity of pollen, said Robinson. But tree pollen nearly always peaks in the same order each year, with sycamore pollen appearing first. 

So what can you do if you are allergic to pollen?

“What we learned during COVID is that what does seem to have helped is wearing a mask,” Robinson said.  “Even the cheapest ones filter out most of the pollen.”

]]>
190008
Ahead of 2024 Jubilee, a Fordham Grad Shares Why Rose Hill Will Always Be Home https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/magazine-profiles/ahead-of-2024-jubilee-a-fordham-grad-shares-why-rose-hill-will-always-be-home/ Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:51:05 +0000 https://news.fordham.edu/?p=183988 Christine Schwall-Pecci has attended Jubilee before—her own fifth and her husband’s 10th—but this year she’ll be seeing Fordham’s annual alumni reunion through brand-new eyes.

“It’ll be the first time that my husband and I are bringing our daughter to the Fordham campus,” she said of Jubilee Weekend, to be held May 31 to June 2. The couple were married in the University Church in 2015 and welcomed a baby girl this spring. They’re among hundreds of alumni planning to return to campus for the festivities.

“I’m really looking forward to meeting up with some friends who also have kids—who will be bringing them to Fordham for the first time—because it’s just such a special place for us and we’re really looking forward to introducing them to it,” said Schwall-Pecci, a 2009 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate.

Building a Skillset

Meeting her husband, Robert Pecci, GABELLI ’08, on campus isn’t the only reason Fordham holds a special place in the Long Island native’s heart. Rose Hill is also where she found faculty mentors. She majored in biology and minored in chemistry and sociology, which helped her build both the hard and soft skills needed to launch a successful career in health care communications, she said.

Working closely with professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., during her sophomore year, Schwall-Pecci researched nanotubes and protein hormones with the potential to advance drug delivery and the treatment of diabetes. She later earned a Clare Boothe Luce fellowship, which enabled her to conduct research in Germany the summer before her senior year. And after graduating from Fordham, she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

A Sense of Belonging

She also found that Fordham’s Jesuit identity instilled in her—and other students—“a sense of belonging and wanting to give back, and feeling like you’re a part of a community that is responsible for helping better the world around you.”

That commitment to giving back is why she’s chosen a career path that enables her to promote better public health. As a senior vice president at BGB Group, she works to make complex scientific concepts and information accessible for patients. She’s also a longstanding volunteer with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She first began volunteering with the organization after her father died from cancer when she was a student at Fordham.

When her father was diagnosed, she “was overwhelmed and naive to the fact that anything bad could actually happen to him,” she recently wrote for BGB Group. Her mother felt “numb, in denial, confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, helpless, and hopeless,” Schwall-Pecci shared. It’s an experience that fuels her commitment to helping patients and their families process their diagnoses, ask the right questions, and make informed decisions about their health care.

Staying Connected with Her Fellow Rams

Following graduation, Schwall-Pecci was a member of the Young Alumni Committee, an advisory and programming board for graduates of the past 10 years. She’s past that 10-year cap now, but she’s stayed connected to Fordham however she can—participating in panels, mentoring students, and speaking at events. And her first impression of the Rose Hill campus still rings true.

Schwall-Pecci and her husband welcomed daughter Hunter Alana in January 2024.

“I just felt like the people who were going there, who had chosen to go to Fordham, had a similar kind of mindset and values as I had and were the kind of people that I wanted to surround myself with,” she said.


Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Health education and access to quality medical care and information. Medicine is inherently defined by specialized language that may not be the easiest to digest, especially when you are newly diagnosed. I want everyone to feel empowered to make decisions with their care providers and ask informed questions.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Take what you do seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously! It’s all about enjoying the journey—be committed to what you are passionate about, but don’t worry about making mistakes or changing your mind along the way.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
This is so hard—how do I choose? In NYC, it is honestly probably the Fordham campus in the Bronx, as cheesy as that sounds. That is where I met my husband and we got married, so it will always be one of my happy places. And in the world, it is likely Abisko, in the very north of Sweden, where I saw the northern lights!

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Probably The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is a fascinating look at the evolution of our approach to understanding and treating cancer. It appeals to me both professionally and also personally, as I lost my dad to leukemia when I was a student at Fordham.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
There are too many to name, but Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., in the chemistry department was my research mentor while at Fordham. She is so passionate about the research she conducts and the students she mentors, which inspired me to commit myself to my own work and always put forward 110% in my studies.

Interested in hearing more of Schwall-Pecci’s story? Listen to her episode of the Fordham Footsteps podcast.

]]>
186839
20 in Their 20s: Sonola Burrja https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/20-in-their-20s-sonola-burrja/ Fri, 08 Dec 2023 16:10:32 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=179939

A Visa lottery winner finds her path to medical school

Growing up in Albania, Sonola Burrja never imagined that she would move to Mamaroneck, New York, and study in the United States. But when her family won the U.S. government’s Diversity Immigrant Visa program lottery in 2018, the plan changed.

“The plan was that my younger brother and I get educated outside of Albania, which would probably result in our … not going back, [but]when we won the U.S. lottery, my parents saw it as a great opportunity for the entire family to stay together,” says Burrja, who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in May.

Now, just five years after moving to New York, she’s a first-year student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. And she can’t imagine not having gone to Fordham, where she joined the pre-health program, majored in biological sciences, minored in German, and was part of the University’s inaugural group of ASPIRES scholars. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, the program—which stands for Achievement in STEM through a Program of Immersive Research Experience and Support—provides a select group of undergraduates with scholarships for their four years at Fordham, guidance in and out of the lab, and funding for their undergraduate research. 

Conducting Ethical Research

Through ASPIRES, Burrja began collaborating with professors and conducting research almost right away—albeit not in the way she expected. It was March 2020, when COVID-19 spread to the United States, so her plan to conduct in-person research had to be put on hold in favor of a virtual research project.

“I was supposed to meet up with a researcher at Fordham that week that everything got shut down,” she recalls. Instead, she spent the summer working with Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D., a psychology professor and associate dean for strategic initiatives at Fordham College at Rose Hill, studying statistical data on diabetes and COVID-19 comorbidity.

Burrja went on to earn three undergraduate research grants from Fordham to support her work with biology professor Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D. She joined the Kundakovic Lab to study the epigenetic effects of hormones in female brains. 

“I never knew that there were so many differences between female and male brains—and that somebody at Fordham was actually tackling this issue,” Burrja says, explaining why she asked Kundakovic to be her mentor. “I really thought it was very interesting because some conditions, for example, depression and anxiety, have a sex bias of females during their reproductive stage. There are some huge differences, and we still don’t know enough about this topic—and the brain generally is a very unexplored area.”

To help her navigate the ethical questions that need to be taken into consideration when conducting research, Burrja took Ethics and Research, a course that allowed her to “discuss some very difficult dilemmas” and think deeper “about some issues that don’t really come into our lives, but if you go into medicine or if you go into actually doing research, those issues might come up—and there are actual consequences to being on one side or the other.”

And they will come up: Burrja plans to become a doctor. She’s not yet sure what her specialty will be, but one thing in particular is a must.

“The patient interaction part is something that I would not want to sacrifice,” she says. “I would like to be able to speak with them and just be an advocate for them, especially working with underserved populations.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

]]>
179939
A Beacon of Hope for the Birds (and Humans) of New York https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/a-beacon-of-hope-for-the-birds-and-humans-of-new-york/ Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:47:12 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=179097

NYC Audubon’s Dustin Partridge wants New York City to become more livable for both people and wildlife—and green roofs, he says, are key to that effort.

As you walk through the apple orchard, with Honeycrisps and GoldRushes at your feet, a swallow flies by, then a kinglet and an Eastern phoebe, whose presence signals the start of the fall migration. Not far off, grape vines grow along a trellis, native wildflowers buzz with insect activity, and ripe tomatoes and ears of corn wait to be picked.

Taking it all in, you could easily imagine being on a bucolic farm in upstate New York, far from the hustle of the city. But if you listen closely, you can hear the cars whizzing by on the West Side Highway 60 feet below. And if you turn around, you can see the Empire State Building to the east.

This is the scene atop the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan, home to nearly eight acres of greenery, from short, low-maintenance sedum to tall grasses—making it one of the largest green roofs in the U.S. and a habitat for more than 60 bird species. On a cool, sunny August morning, Dustin Partridge, Ph.D., GSAS ’20, director of conservation and science at NYC Audubon, is walking from section to section, stopping often to look through binoculars at birds he spots out of the corner of his eye.

Partridge began studying the benefits of urban green roofs for wildlife not long after he began his biology graduate studies at Fordham in 2009. As his research expanded and he decided to go beyond his master’s program to pursue a doctorate, he became one of the first researchers on the Javits Center green roof following its installation in 2014, and he and his staff have continued to monitor its animal and insect activity closely ever since.

For Partridge, it’s a critical part of making New York City more hospitable to humans and wildlife—and more resilient amid heat waves and other effects of climate change.

A Look at the Main Building’s Roof
Dustin Partridge stands on the main roof’s sedum.
« of 10 »

Protecting Birds and Boosting Biodiversity

NYC Audubon is one of more than 450 independent chapters of the National Audubon Society, a network designed to “protect birds and the places they need” throughout the U.S. (NYC Audubon has announced its plan to change its name in 2024, due to John James Audubon’s legacy as a slave owner; the national organization has not announced a similar plan.)

To understand why birds need protection broadly, consider this: North America has lost nearly 25% of its bird population in the past 50 years, according to research published in Science magazine. The causes range from climate change and habitat loss to toxic pesticide use—and the research points to wider disruptions of ecosystems vital to both humans and wildlife.

To understand why birds need protection in New York City, consider two factors: The city lies squarely on the Atlantic flyway migration route—an air path for transient birds that stretches from Greenland to South America and includes ground areas where birds stop to find food to fuel their journey. The city is also home to more than 8 million people—and an infrastructure that has not only replaced natural habitats but is often hostile to the wildlife still around. It is a city of glass skyscrapers, one in which up to 230,000 birds die each year in window collisions, according to NYC Audubon research.

It’s within this setting that Partridge and his colleagues at NYC Audubon—along with a dedicated cast of volunteers—are working toward protecting wild birds and their habitats in the five boroughs. They do this through initiatives ranging from bird-friendly building campaigns like Project Safe Flight that aim to help birds migrate through the city safely, to community science bird surveys in which amateur birders and experts alike can submit data based on their local observations. The organization’s work, though, is not only about benefiting wildlife, according to Partridge.

“Biodiversity is important for humans,” he says. “It helps reduce the impacts of climate change. It can lead to ecotourism. Everything we do for wildlife and for birds is also very much for people, especially when it comes to quality of life in the city.”

And while biodiversity is both apparent and expected at other sites where NYC Audubon conducts research—from coastal wetlands like South Brother Island in the Bronx to large green spaces like Central Park—it can also thrive in places fewer people see or know about, like at the Kingsland Wildflowers green roof atop the Broadway Stages film and TV studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or within the Justice Avenue bioswale in Elmhurst, Queens, a vegetated ditch that catches dangerous combined sewer overflow and holds it until it can be absorbed by the underlying soil.

Of all the projects NYC Audubon has worked on, though, the Javits Center, with its midtown Manhattan location, stands as one of the organization’s most distinctive research hubs, one that is fertile for both biodiversity and human collaboration.

Wildlife on the Javits Center Roofs
Herring gulls flying above the Javits Center
« of 10 »

A Green Roof ‘Role Model’ in Midtown Manhattan

As the Javits Center green roof neared completion in 2014—just two years after New York state announced plans to raze the building—Partridge began working as an ecologist and green roof program manager at NYC Audubon. By that time, he had decided to turn his research on urban green roofs into a doctoral dissertation, working closely with Fordham biology professor J. Alan Clark, Ph.D.

Along with Clark and master’s student Kaitlyn Parkins, GSAS ’15, who was studying bat foraging activity on green roofs, Partridge spent hours atop the building’s springy sedum carpet setting up bird monitors and collecting insect samples to track food availability.

“Dustin was that original researcher on the Javits Center green roof,” notes Clark, who also called his former advisee “a visionary, hard-working man.”

In the years since beginning his research, not only did Partridge attain his doctorate, in 2020, but he became a founding member of the Green Roof Researchers Alliance, a consortium of more than 60 researchers, teachers, and policymakers for which he is currently the managing director. The group advocates for green roofs not only as sites for increasing biodiversity but also as tools that offer energy savings for buildings, increased stormwater capture, and improvements in air quality.

And as Partridge’s role at NYC Audubon has grown, so has the organization’s work with the Javits Center, which opened a large expansion to its north side in 2021. Atop that expansion is where you can find the orchard, pollinator garden, and working farm, all of which are managed by Brooklyn Grange and serve as additional sites for NYC Audubon research.

For Partridge and his colleagues, their field station on the original building roof—a trailer with monitoring equipment and a computer—allows them to dig deeper into the diversity and amount of wildlife populating all those acres, a group that included more than 60 bird species as of October 2023.

All this activity makes the Javits roof a point of interest for others looking to replicate its success—from the mayor of Seoul, South Korea, where a new convention center is being planned, to the New York State Office of General Services, which has shown interest in setting up similar green roofs across its administrative buildings. That success has also led to plenty of positive press for the project, with recent media attention from The New York Times, WNYC, and Gothamist, among other outlets.

“Javits has become quite a role model for the city, both in terms of bird-friendly design and for the green roof,” Partridge says. “We’ve learned so much here and it’s been great for moving the city’s policy forward. It’s a really well-known building to point to: This could be the rest of the city.’”

So, will it be the rest of the city?

Scenes from the North Building’s Roof
Partridge next to the north roof’s pollinator garden
« of 10 »

Legislative Progress—But Work to Be Done

While green roofs are far from ubiquitous in New York City—and while access to them and other green spaces is still unevenly distributed toward wealthy areas—Partridge points to some examples of progress. In 2019, the New York City Council passed Local Laws 92 and 94, both part of the city’s Climate Mobilization Act, which require all new buildings or roof replacements to have a “sustainable roofing zone”—solar panels, a green roof, or a combination—covering 100% of the roof.

Meanwhile, the city’s green roof tax abatement offers property owners $5.23 per square foot of green roof space and $15 per square foot in districts deemed priority areas based on a lack of green space, combined sewage overflow issues, and heat vulnerability. And as for the protection of birds, in 2020, New York City enacted Local Law 15, which requires all new construction and significant renovations in the city to use bird-friendly materials like visible window glazing or UV-reflective patterns.

“It’s so important that as people create these habitats that they use bird-friendly glass surrounding them,” says Parkins, who went on to work and consult for NYC Audubon from 2013 to 2022 and is now the glass collisions program coordinator for the American Bird Conservancy. “The worst thing we can do is lure birds and other wildlife into places that are dangerous for them.”

NYC Audubon and its counterparts at the state organization, Audubon New York, are also advocating for two pieces of legislation—the Lights Out Act at the local level and the Dark Skies Act at the state level. Both laws would curb the use of interior and exterior lights in buildings that are dormant through the night. Those bright lights are a major cause of bird death because they lure migrating birds away from their intended path and cause them to crash.

Partridge says that New Yorkers who would like to see that legislation passed, or who want to see green roofs added to their buildings without a mandate, can call their City Council members and state legislators, and talk to their building owners about the benefits of sustainable roof coverage.

He also encourages both avid birders and more casual, curious parties to volunteer with NYC Audubon or even just to sign up for a free birding tour, which can underscore the importance of protecting New York City’s wildlife and their habitats.

“It’s incredible, the bird life that’s in the city,” he says, “and we have really amazing guides that can take you out. It’s just great to see not only the birds that will spend their summers or winters here but also the birds that are migrating through. It’s a whole new world that so many New Yorkers don’t see, and it’s an amazing aspect of the city.”
A gull flying over the Javits Center with a high-rise building in the background

]]>
179097
‘Next-Generation Scientists’: Inside a Fordham Biochemistry Lab https://now.fordham.edu/colleges-and-schools/fordham-college-at-rose-hill/next-generation-scientists-inside-a-fordham-chemistry-lab/ Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:43:05 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=176306 For Emma Phan, a sophomore chemistry major, the summer was a chance to dive into her research project related to ALS, a neurodegenerative disease.

With help from recent graduate Beatriz Goncalves, FCRH ’23, and her mentor Professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., Phan looked into how specific peptides—strings of amino acids—could potentially mitigate an enzyme that contributes to ALS from “misfolding,” or failing to function properly.

The goal of the project was to design new peptide-based drug molecules on a nanoscale level that would limit that misfolding so that it wouldn’t disrupt the other proteins from working properly within and outside the cells, according to Goncalves and Banerjee. Goncalves and Phan showed that the molecules that they developed were able to reduce oxidative stress in cells, and that some of the molecules could mitigate misfolding over time.

“The results have been exciting,” Goncalves said.

Phan and Goncalves were just two of the students who spent the summer conducting research in Banerjee’s lab in John Mulcahy Hall at Rose Hill.

Banerjee, the chair of the chemistry department and program director of Biochemistry, said her students have been working on drug delivery systems, particularly those that target tumors and cancerous cells, and developing new biomaterials for tissue engineering as well as targeting protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases.

In the lab, the students have access to a variety of scientific equipment, such as a 3D bioprinter, which allows them to replicate tissue growth and investigate these tissue models for their research.

“My biggest passion at Fordham is working with students in the research lab, and preparing them to become next-generation scientists,” Banerjee said, adding that she mentors students throughout the year, both in the lab and in her classes.

Sophomore Emma Phan spent the summer working in Professor Ipsita Banerjee’s lab.

From the Lab to a Ph.D.

For Goncalves, who was a biology major and biochemistry minor, the experience in Banerjee’s lab helped her get accepted into numerous Ph.D. programs. She chose to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, going for cell and molecular biology where she will work on immunotherapeutic research for targeting cancer.

“I’m an undergraduate student who had the experience and who has the resume to be able to go straight into a Ph.D. That’s an opportunity that was offered to me at Fordham that I probably would not have had at other schools,” she said. “I would probably have to take a gap year or do something else like a master’s in order to have the resumé I have now.”

Goncalves published at least five research papers with Banerjee at Fordham, including a few where she was the first author on the project. She and Molly Murray, FCRH ’23, who majored in chemistry and psychology, said that they spent 10-12 hour days in the lab in summer 2022 and during the school year working on a variety of projects, such as developing ways to deliver drugs into glioblastoma tumor cells as well as developing new peptide based drug molecules for targeting breast tumor cells. The pair also spent this past summer in the lab wrapping up their research projects.

“Beatriz and I last summer, we probably spent about 80 hours a week here,” Murray said. “There were a lot of times where we were here past midnight, but I feel like we’re both very well prepared for going into Ph.D. [programs] and that kind of time commitment.”

Murray, who was also accepted to several programs and will start a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina next fall, said that before working in Banerjee’s lab she had minimal lab experience.

“I think she definitely challenges us a lot—especially when you’re first coming into the lab, there’s a ton of stuff to learn right off the bat,” she said. “We’re a lab that helps each other out a lot, but there’s also that part of it that you have to investigate by yourself, so having that push is definitely helpful.”

Molly Murray, FCRH ’23, uses a 3D bioprinter in Professor Ipsita Banerjee’s lab.

Research on Cancer, Aging, and More

Many students working in the lab over the summer were focusing on drug or treatment delivery systems that could target cancer cells. Murray focused on ovarian cancer, while Amrita Das, a sophomore biology major, started a research project investigating lung cancer.

“I plan on going to med school,” Das said, “so I wanted to get exposed to a research lab setting to get experience.”

Sophomore Aigerim Mukhit’s summer research focused on skin regeneration and aging, particularly around cells called fibroblasts.

The goal of her research was to investigate the impact of peptide conjugates on aged fibroblasts to examine if they enhance can express characteristic proteins, which are indicative of regeneration.

“I just want to contribute to biomedical research—I want to study aging, not only skin aging, but overall aging,” she said.

]]>
176306
STEPping into Biology with Hip-Hop https://now.fordham.edu/campus-locations/rose-hill/stepping-into-biology-with-hip-hop/ Thu, 02 Sep 2021 21:16:36 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=151849 This summer, junior high and high school students from Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP) are challenging themselves creatively in Jamie Parker’s virtual Hip-Hop Biology Course. The class introduces students to careers in STEM and explores the intersection of art, science, and culture. 

“Hip-Hop Biology is a class created to keep students engaged in STEM while embracing their love for hip-hop,” said Parker, an instructor at Fordham, who started using hip-hop as a teaching tool in his Fordham college-level biology classes in 2018.

One technique that Parker uses to engage his students is battle rap. Students come up with raps about course material and then compete against each other. To win a battle, Parker said, “One must have a semi-complex rhythmic flow, interesting content, and understand the culture of the audience they will be performing. Most importantly, the battle must be something the audience can react to and truly feel, even if it’s a personal story or a social issue.”

Students learn more than biology from battle rap, said Parker. Competing directly against another individual encourages students to perform better than they would if they were performing independently. The student becomes better at communicating, performing, and interacting with an audience. They also learn self-control by not reacting if someone insults them in front of others. Another critical piece is the mental health aspect, he said. Artists can discuss trauma in their lives and bring personal experience to their rap.

The class is a perfect fit for STEP, Parker said, because it gets young people excited about college. STEP is a New York state academic enrichment program designed to prepare underrepresented minority and economically disadvantaged junior high and high school students for college and careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, health careers, and licensed professions, like accounting, law, psychology, social work among other licensed fields. Fordham’s STEP program normally takes place at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, with some activities also taking place at local school and partner sites. The program continued throughout the pandemic when students attended virtually. 

Camila Diaz Rodriguez, a student from Cathedral High School in Manhattan, called the Hip-Hop Biology course “a different experience.” 

“Writing about STEM, It does help us bring together ideas and speak about topics that usually people don’t pay mind to, for example, our [rap]was on global warming,” she said.

Parker invited guest speakers to the course, like Papoose, a prolific rapper known for spreading knowledge through his rhymes.  In a Q&A, the middle school and high school  STEP students were able to ask Papoose advice on how to memorize rhymes and discuss STEM.

“You’ve got to know how to count your bars. You got 16 bars. Sometimes you want to say so much. And that’s the challenge for artists. How can you break it down and summarize it into 16 bars or sometimes eight bars?” He said, ” That can make you a better rapper because now, when you’re creating your rap, you’re calculating what you’re saying,” he told the students.

Parker said using hip-hop makes students feel like they are a part of something familiar. “We want this to be a space where people feel welcome, for them to be a part of it and want to be a part of it.  Sometimes in these spaces, you don’t always see individuals who look or sound like you, and so if we can at least have our own sound from our own voice and sometimes bring our own people into this space, maybe we’ll feel a little more comfortable.”

]]>
151849
$1.9 Million Grant Will Fund Research on Women’s Mental Health https://now.fordham.edu/colleges-and-schools/graduate-school-of-arts-and-sciences/1-9-million-grant-will-fund-research-on-womens-mental-health/ Mon, 15 Feb 2021 05:15:25 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=145517 Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological sciences, was awarded nearly $1.9 million in grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health for her neuroscience research on women’s mental health. 

“The field of neuroscience has been very male-centric. Most studies were historically done on males, and there wasn’t enough information on the female brain in general. This grant is not only a testament to the excellence of the project proposal, but also to the importance of this topic,” said Kundakovic, who learned she received the grant on Jan. 29. 

Kundakovic studies cellular changes in the brain on a molecular level using a mouse model. Her lab specializes in researching the molecular mechanisms behind hormonal changes during the ovarian cycle and how they can change female brain and behavior. Her research results could lead to the development of sex-specific treatments for mental disorders like anxiety and depression—disorders that are more prevalent in women than in men. 

In recent years, Kundakovic and her team discovered that chromatin, a microscopic cell component, changes its shape during the ovarian cycle, which also changes the way genes are expressed. Over the next five years of grant funding from the NIMH, they will build on their research and try to better understand how chromatin changes in brain cells can impact anxiety-related behavior, especially for female mice, in her project “Epigenetic regulation of brain and behavior by the estrous cycle.” 

“We are trying to understand how chromatin changes within brain cells affect cellular function and contribute to changes in behavior and which specific cells are really critical for changing behavior,” said Kundakovic. “With this new grant, we will be able to identify the specific brain cells that are really responsive to hormonal changes and reveal epigenetic regulators that are possible targets for drug treatment.”

Kundakovic said her research has taken on new meaning during the pandemic, an unprecedented period where more people than usual are struggling with their mental health, especially anxiety and depression. 

“The pandemic may widen the gender gap that we are already seeing in anxiety and depression,” Kundakovic said. “We will have even more women who are affected by these disorders.”

]]>
145517
Professor Finds Molecular Mechanism Linked to Increased Risk for Disorders in Women https://now.fordham.edu/science/professor-finds-molecular-mechanism-linked-to-increased-risk-for-disorders-in-women/ Mon, 19 Aug 2019 13:22:56 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=122991 Women are twice as likely to have anxiety and depression than men. But not much has been known about how and why that happens at a molecular level—until now. 

Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, spearheaded a study that was published in Nature Communications, the third highest-ranked multidisciplinary science journal in the world, earlier this summer. Kundakovic and her colleagues found that chromatin, a microscopic cell component, changes its shape during the ovarian cycle—especially when females experience a drop in estrogen. This changes how our genes behave. Because this occurs inside the brain area implicated in anxiety and depression, it may mediate women’s vulnerability to increased risk for these disorders. 

Now, thanks in part to the research conducted by Kundakovic’s team, scientists are closer to figuring out which molecules should be targeted with drug treatments, particularly for women with anxiety or depression. 

“This is really important for us to show at the molecular levelthe molecular basis of this is what we now, with our study, are starting to understand,” Kundakovic said.

Part of the reason why this study is important is that it focuses on the female brain. Tell me more about that. 

The majority of neuroscience experimental studies were done on males. It’s been like that for decades. We know very little about the female brain, and this is particularly a problem for the disorders that are more frequent in women than men, like depression and anxiety. So this is why we basically don’t understand anything about the mechanism that tells us why this sex difference exists. 

Our study was designed to try to understand howat a molecular levelthese fluctuating sex hormone levels might increase the risk of anxiety and depression in women.

Why is there such a stark difference between men and women regarding their risk for anxiety and depression?

When you look at boys and girls before puberty, there’s really no difference in risk for depression. This risk really becomes two times higher in females when they get their first period when the hormones start fluctuating. And then around perimenopause, this difference becomes even more profound because there are more extreme fluctuations. You can have very high or very low sex hormones. And then after menopause, when women achieve these very stable, low sex hormone levels, the sex difference becomes almost nonexistent. So this really tells us that this is not about low or high hormones, but the fluctuations in hormones that might be increasing women’s vulnerability to anxiety and depression.

What’s an extreme example of hormone fluctuations? 

Postpartum depression, a period when you have very high progesterone and estrogen (sex hormones), and then a drop after pregnancy. It often triggers a serious depression. There are a lot of lines of evidence showing that this drop in sex hormones, particularly estrogen, may increase the risk for anxiety and depression.

There’s another interesting phenomenon. Women who are depressed and on antidepressant treatments often report that just before their period, they experience worsening of their symptoms. The symptoms seem to be in control with the treatment, but all of a sudden, in this particular period, their symptoms worsen.

All these human findings are consistent with our findings in mice (women experience the menstrual cycle; female mice experience a similar process called the estrous cycle), showing that a drop in estrogen during the estrous cycle leads to increased anxiety levels in females.

You studied brain cells from both female and male mice, and also included female mice in different stages of the estrous cycle. What did you find? 

DNA is six-and-a-half feet long in a single cell. You have to package it very nicely so you can put this huge piece of DNA into every cell. The way this is accomplished is through a special structure called chromatin. 

This is important to package our DNA, but not only for that. By opening and closing chromatin, you can turn genes on or off. You have to have this open structure for some factors to bind and to turn the genes on. If this is closed, you can’t do that. People use libraries as an analogy. You can have a huge library. There are certain books you can’t even access. But if something’s accessible, you can potentially read it. That’s how our genome works as well. 

What we showand this is really the biggest discovery of this studyis that as hormones fluctuate, they’re actually changing the organization of chromatin. This changes gene expression. 

Can you provide an example that explains these chromatin changes? 

Serotonin is a neurotransmittera chemical in the brain that has been implicated in anxiety and depression. What we show in our study is that the genes that are important for serotonin function, their expression, and their chromatin organization changes with the estrous cycle. Basically, now we are providing a possible molecular mechanism for why we could have those changes in anxiety levels across the ovarian cycle. 

What’s the difference between chromatin in male and female mice? 

In terms of how many open chromatin regions we have, the numbers are pretty similar. What is different is which regions are open or closed. They change with the estrous cycle, and they differ between males and females, meaning some genes that were closed will open up. And some genes that were open will close. What we didn’t expect is that we would find as many differences across the estrous cycle as we see when we compare chromatin in males and females. 

Women and men currently have the same treatment for anxiety and depression. But might your study results lead to the development of sex-specific treatments for these disorders? 

Yes. We are starting to understand what are the players involved, what are the mechanistic factorslike receptors, regulators of chromatinthat are leading to this opening and closing. It may help us identify a candidate that we could possibly target with drugs. 

Many women take birth control. How can that affect sex hormones and treatment? 

We don’t know enough about that. There are different contraceptives. I think we need more studies in humans to understand how exactly contraceptives would affect this. 

What implications does this research have for transgender people? Or is there not enough data yet? 

That’s another important question that I’m getting more nowadays. What we’re talking about here are biological changes that are induced by hormones. When we talk about transgender people, you might think about certain hormonal treatments that they are receiving. Our brain, even in adulthood, is responsive to these hormones. But sexual differentiation of the brain is very complicated, and it starts very early during life. So as you said, I think we would need more information and funding to try to understand how exactly this would affect transgender people. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

]]>
122991
Former Lab Partners Reconnect, Reflect on Fordham’s Influence https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/former-lab-partners-reconnect-reflect-on-fordhams-influence/ Thu, 27 Apr 2017 02:34:01 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=67264 They’ve been teasing each other about the 1976 Maroon yearbook photo for years.

“Just look at my hair and beard!” said Christopher Proto, D.D.S. “I was wearing the uniform of the day—flannel shirt. You can tell who lived on campus and more or less rolled out of bed, and who commuted. Maybe that’s why Gloria looked more put together.”

Like Proto, Gloria Coruzzi, Ph.D., majored in biology at Fordham, but after graduation, the lab partners went their separate ways to start careers and families. She earned a doctorate in molecular and cell biology at NYU, where she’s the Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor and a former chair of the biology department. He earned a doctorate in dental surgery at Georgetown and has been in private practice since 1981.

They reconnected about six years ago, Proto said, after a chance encounter in a restaurant on Arthur Avenue, near Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Proto was having lunch with his wife, Monica, and their son, Andrew, FCRH ’12, when he spotted Coruzzi walking back to a table to join her husband and son. “I stopped her and said, ‘Gloria?’ She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Chris?’” The friends embraced, and introduced their spouses and sons. “We couldn’t believe that we reconnected in the Bronx after all these years,” he said. “It was like a movie.”

They later met for lunch near NYU, where Proto is now a clinical instructor at the College of Dentistry, and eventually brought two other former classmates into the fold: David Perricone, M.D., a pediatrician; and Diane Esposito, Ph.D., who earned a doctorate in biology at Fordham in 1982 and is now director of research compliance at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

“We were an unusually balanced, fun foursome,” Coruzzi said.

“But,” Proto added, “Gloria was always the one who told us to stop fooling around! She kept us on task.”

Last June, the foursome returned to Rose Hill for Jubilee.

“We were all connected at some level, but our 40th reunion brought us together on campus for the first time,” Coruzzi said. “We walked down memory lane, even went into some of the labs.”

Both Proto and Coruzzi recalled the challenges of being pre-health majors—the long hours in the lab, the competition and anxiety associated with getting into grad school. But they said the support they received from professors and peers at Fordham continues to serve them well.

“As in any walk of life, we found that common adversity helps you develop strong bonds. You see it in the armed forces, on sports teams—we supported each other,” Proto said. “That sense of teamwork was very important to me.”

Biology professor E. Ruth Witkus in a Fordham classroom, circa 1974
Biology professor E. Ruth Witkus, Ph.D., pictured here circa 1974, taught at Fordham for more than 40 years.

Coruzzi said she found a mentor in biology professor E. Ruth Witkus, Ph.D., who joined the Fordham faculty in 1944 and chaired the biology department from 1966 to 1978.

“She was chair of the department when women weren’t in many faculty positions,” Coruzzi said of Witkus, who died in 2008 at the age of 89. “She was way ahead of her time—razor-sharp smart, very decisive—and that really influenced me, especially when I was chair of the biology department at NYU. I’ve always thought of myself as a scientist, not a ‘woman scientist.’”

Coruzzi added that the Jesuit model of cura personalis, or care for the whole person, is something she tries to convey to her own students.

“You’re embraced by it,” she said, “and it stays with you as a person. Those ties that you make in college really can follow you for the rest of your life.”

 

Register here for Jubilee ’17, scheduled for June 2 to 4. And go to fordham.edu/reunions for information about all of this spring’s events, including the Lincoln Center reunions.

]]>
67264
Combating Influenza Using Mathematics https://now.fordham.edu/campus-locations/rose-hill/combating-influenza-using-mathematics/ Tue, 07 Feb 2017 14:34:34 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=64081 For years, Rolf Ryham, Ph.D., an associate professor of mathematics at Fordham College at Rose Hill, has been developing mathematical models to solve problems that involve cell activity.

In the beginning, he focused on the mathematical theory behind experiments that Fredric Cohen, Ph.D. and Robert Eisenberg, Ph.D., physiologists at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, had been working on— until they advised that he move from theory to “reality.”

“They said, ‘this is what the experiments say. This is what actually happens in the experiments when we change conditions,’” said Ryham of his collaborators. “’Your mathematical description must account for these effects.’”

Ryham kept their recommendation in mind when he began to calculate non-spontaneous events in membrane fusion, a process for intercellular communication that can be critical in the delivery of drugs to combat diseases. He was particularly interested in how a virus and a cell join together, and how much energy is required to stimulate that process (activation energy).

According to Ryham, if researchers know precisely where and how a particular virus and its machinery expend energy, it may be possible to develop treatments that interrupt the delivery of genetic material by that virus and prevent infection.

Last year, he partnered with Cohen and other researchers from the National Institutes of Health to publish results of a funded study about the properties of influenza virus haemagglutinin. The study, which was published in Nature Microbiology, explores how a deeper understanding of the structural details of membrane fusion machinery can help to effectively combat influenza.

While there have been several mathematical models that estimate activation energies, Ryham helped to identify a transition pathway that previous physicists had missed in their explorations of viral fusion: a new structure called ‘lipidic junction.’ The researchers made further headway in the study by quantifying the activation energy for this new pathway of membrane fusion, which had never been done in this capacity, he said.

Ryham calculated the minimum-energy paths necessary for membrane fusion. He said an approach to calculation called the “string method” allowed him to provide a mathematical explanation for what the biologists were observing under the microscope.

“The thing that they were seeing, which was totally unexpected, was that when the virus attaches itself to the cell or fuses with the cell, it doesn’t follow the conjectured pattern,” he said. “It seems to break open and re-attach in an abrupt process. You wouldn’t suspect that nature would permit something so abrupt.”

The experiments also revealed that the activation energy for membrane fusion was significantly lower than what researchers previously predicted, which has biological significance. Another unexpected outcome was that the amount of cholesterol in the cell governed whether the event was an abrupt or smoothly transitioning process.

“It just reinforces the idea that cholesterol is a control parameter for things occurring inside the body,” he said. “In this case, it was for influenza.”

Related work on the subject deals with gaining entry into a cell—but without the use of viruses.

“The application of this study is more toward pharmacology,” he said. “The idea is that you want to load up minute spherical vesicles with a drug, launch them in the bloodstream, and then release the drug in a controlled fashion. Having an equation describing how and when the vesicle is going to burst is part of what makes these treatments possible.”

Ryham said mathematical models like the ones he develops, whether big or small, could contribute to breakthroughs in medicine in the future.

“Mathematicians are often motivated by questions in basic science and research something because it’s interesting,” he said. “But it may end up having an application down the road, and you never know what that application is going to be.”

]]>
64081