MacDonall, a professor of psychology at Fordham, has recently started a new line of research in animal cognition, so-called “concept formation,” an essential precondition for language.

“For example, seeing the word ‘dog,’ hearing someone say ‘dog’ and seeing a picture of a ‘dog’ are all equivalent,” says MacDonall. “Language-able adults and children can readily substitute for one another. Only if pressed do we say the specific stimuli are different but the ‘concept’ is the same.”

Photographs
Top: (L to R) Peter Sanneman, Jim MacDonall and Anne Neuendorf with some experimental subjects.
Middle: The experimental apparatus.
Bottom: A White Carneaux takes a spin in the apparatus.

MacDonall’s pigeons, like young children, stroke victims and children with autism or learning disabilities, can’t readily connect the stimuli to the label. In experimenting with how pigeons can be trained to make certain associations, MacDonall believes researchers can develop strategies to better teach language skills to children and adults who otherwise have difficulty learning them.

MacDonall uses pigeons (White Carneaux, from the Palmetto Pigeon Plant in Sumter, S.C.), because they’re hardy, long lived, have excellent eyesight and see colors. The pigeons are set up in their own room, with a separate ventilation system, as required by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. The equipment and part of the renovation to animal room funded by a faculty grant through the office of Michael Latham, the interim dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

The experiment is simple: three circles can either be lit red or green. MacDonall trains the pigeons to peck the right- or left-hand circle that matches the color of the center circle (the birds aren’t actually matching the colors, in this case, but the pattern of colors). Each correct peck gets a food reward of mixed grain from a slot beneath the lighted circles.

Normally pigeons will make several hundred errors learning to peck the correct match, and their steady performance will be 85 to 95 percent correct. But preliminary results from MacDonall’s training scheme seem to show that pigeons can learn correct matching with fewer than 20 errors, and with a steady performance rate of about 97 to 100 percent correct.

What’s the difference? When the pigeons begin their training, they are only given the correct choice to peck (and of course rewarded when they do so). Once the pigeons reliably peck the target circle, the researchers introduce the wrong choice, but only for a fraction of a second. The bird has time to see the incorrect choice, but not time enough to peck it. Over time, the duration of time the incorrect circle stays lit is increased until it matches that of the correct choice.

MacDonall’s work has implications for how stroke patients who lost language ability should be retaught, and for teaching language skills to autistic children who have never had the ability to begin with. For adult stroke victims, relearning language can be very frustrating, and instruction is frequently delayed by outbursts of temper at getting the wrong word for an object the patient feels he or she should know.

The inherent frustration aside, MacDonall says the research on stroke recovery shows that the more quickly language skill is reacquired, the more complete it will be. Diminishing the time lost to aggressive outbursts increases the number of language lessons a patient can complete in a day. And that’s where MacDonall’s work comes into play: by giving stroke victims a more painless learning curve, they can potentially reacquire language more quickly and completely.

In teaching language skills to autistic and otherwise learning disabled children, MacDonall says if we can offer them an easier path to acquiring the skills, why shouldn’t we? “Kids don’t like to be frustrated, either,” he says.

The obvious question is, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? MacDonall pauses for a long minute before answering.

“I think a lot of investigators don’t pay close enough attention to the details in the stimulus,” he says. “You need to pay very close attention to exactly what’s happening in the environment, and to the consequences of responding—to the reinforcement you’re offering.”

As for why techniques developed on pigeons should work as well in humans, MacDonall says “Most of the time it does. Conditioning applies across species, though you may find parameter differences: pigeons may require thirty seconds between trials, and humans only two.”

The next step, according to MacDonall, is to try and replicate his early findings with four more pigeons, then publish the results.

“Individuals who do not have language ability (developmentally disabled children and autistic children) and those who have lost language (some stroke victims) are in a very difficult situation,” MacDonall says. “We need to do everything we can to speed their learning or relearning of language.”
__________

The current undergraduate assistants in MacDonall’s lab are:

• Anne Neuendorf, FCRH, psychology, junior
• Peter Sanneman, FCRH, theology, junior
• Caitlin Nosal, FCRH, undeclared, sophomore
• Eileen Moran, FCRH, psychology, senior
• Jessica LaRusso, FCRH, psychology, junior

Over the summer, Sanneman and Neuendorf helped with the research discussed above, and were supported by an Undergraduate Summer Science Fellowship from FCRH. Nosal, Moran and LaRusso joined the lab this semester. Funds for equipment used in this research were provided by the Office of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

As part of the Engineering Physics curriculum, students take courses in Engineering Statics, Mechanics of Materials, Fluid Mechanics, Introduction to Electrical Engineering and now a formal course in Engineering Experimentation. The introduction of this new course to the curriculum is a result of the Engineering Physics Laboratory which was made possible through a generous gift from John and Jeanette Walton.

The creation of the new laboratory included the renovation of an older laboratory space which required new floors, fresh paint, new and improved lighting, all new laboratory benches and furniture, new computers and air conditioning.

In addition to the renovation, the gift included funding for new laboratory experiments. These experiments were selected to match the courses taught as part of the curriculum. Experiments include strength of material testing, material hardness testing, beam and column buckling, complete fluid dynamics experiments including fluid flow analysis in pipes, pressure and velocity measurements and analysis of fluid flow through various valve configurations.

Additional experiments in Mechatronics and automation technology include computer controlled robotic platforms and conveyor belt assembly units. Students can program each conveyor unit separately in small groups so that the groups can connect all of the units to create a long conveyor system which can assembly parts, test the assembled unit and finally lift and remove the unit from the conveyor system. Experiments also include a broad spectrum of experiments in Electrical Engineering including operational amplifiers, power semiconductors, transistor and amplifier circuits, DC and AC technology, and digital technology.

Sanzari speaking about Engineering Physics to the Fordham College at Rose Hill Board of Visitors.

The curriculum in engineering physics offers unusual opportunities to the student to combine a broad set of options in the engineering disciplines with a strong background in physics and mathematics. Building on a physics and engineering science base, students may choose from among technical elective options in mechanical engineering, civil engineering, computer and information science, and electrical engineering. This combination of experience in engineering design and practice with a broad knowledge of the underlying fundamental physical and mathematical concepts provides the student with an excellent base for careers in engineering as well as for graduate work in engineering.

Fordham students graduating with a degree in Engineering Physics are currently pursuing or have completed graduate degrees in engineering from the following institutions: Columbia University, University of Southern California, Manhattan College, Stevens Institute of Technology, University of California San Diego, University of Central Florida, and Georgia Institute of Technology. Graduates have also entered the professional workforce as engineers with the following companies: Lockheed Martin, Con Edison, Thor Laboratories, City of Yonkers Engineer, Inductotherm, Mottola Rini Engineering, John P. Picone, Inc, and Valador.

A new minor in Engineering Physics has been created. The minor will provide students in the pre-architectural program with courses in civil and mechanical engineering that are vital to their field. The minor will also be attractive to any student that wants to gain a more sophisticated background in engineering and technology. I am currently working to finalize a cooperative agreement with Manhattan College which would lead to guaranteed acceptance for Fordham student’s graduating with a degree in Engineering Physics to the Master’s degree programs in Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Manhattan College.

The Engineering Physics Program is also building a new Alternative Energy Laboratory which is currently under renovation and will be completed this Fall. The renovation and creation of this laboratory is made possible through a generous gift from the estate of William A. Robba. Solar panels and a wind turbine will be mounted on the roof of Freeman Hall. Electrical cables from these devices will run into the Alternative Energy Laboratory. Students will be able to perform experiments in energy conversion, DC and AC electrical circuits, energy storage, photovoltaic cells and wind energy conversion. The power generated by the solar panels and wind turbines will supply energy to help power the lab.

Martin A. Sanzari, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of physics and director of the Engineering Physics Program. Before joining the faculty in 1996 he was a program manager at Kearfott Guidance & Navigation Corp. The holder of four U.S. patents, Sanzari’s research focuses are on Medical Engineering Physics and Applied Optics. He is also a visiting research scientist at The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

It’s hard to tell just by observing the mouse; unlike humans, mice rely less on vision and more on sense of smell and on their whiskers. (For those of you who know your nursery rhymes, this explains why Three Blind Mice ran after a farmer’s wife who was holding a kitchen knife.)

Yet a mouse’s eye photoreceptor rods and cones work very much like a human’s eye rods and cones.

Which is why Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, measures and compares photoreceptor activity in live mice.

Finnemann’s work focuses on the causes of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), or loss of sight that accompanies the aging process. Of the 161 million people in the world who are visually impaired, 58 percent of them are over the age of 60.

Finnemann joined with research associate Ying Dun, Ph.D., and student-mentee Ramy Elattal (FCRH’ 10) on an experiment in her Larkin Hall laboratory to document the quality of vision in mutant lab mice that have reduced cellular anti-oxidant defenses, against normal “wild-type” mice. Anti-oxidants are molecules (found in green, leafy vegetables, pomegranates, etc.) that help prevent or reverse damage to living tissues caused by another type of molecule called a free radical. Free radicals (often formed when certain molecules interact with oxygen), have unpaired electrons, causing them to be very reactive with other molecules. When free radicals come in contact with DNA and cell membranes, the reactions damage them, a process called oxidative stress.

To test the eyes of live mice, the team uses an electroretingram (ERG) machine, which measures animal’s vision as well as human vision by means of simple electrical impulses detected on the surface of the eye by a contact lens—it’s a very similar procedure to an Electrocardiogram machine, which measures the heart.

An ERG can measure the light sensitivity of eye rods and cones and can also detect abnormal function in the retina. A healthy eye will respond to a flash of light much more vigorously than an unhealthy eye, so the team measured the different responses to light flashes in the two mouse groups, administering three separate recording sessions each with five consecutive responses at five different light intensities.

Those mutant mice that lacked proper anti-oxidant defense had a reduced reaction to the flashes of light, compared to the “wild-type” mice, whose response time was stronger and with larger amplitudes.

But the team wanted to see what the differences in the retinal photoreceptors of both teams of mice looked like as well. They used laser scanning confocal fluorescence microscopy, a process that takes pictures of a section of the retinal tissue.

You can see the mice’s retinas in the laser photographs (left): an image of a cross-section of a mouse retina. The green color shows cone photoreceptor cells, and the red color is a DNA counter stain that shows where the different cell types in the retina are positioned.

Now look at the following two photos. They offer a close-up comparison between a the healthy, normal mouse retina and a damaged retina in a mouse lacking antioxidant defense; the green squiggly lines in the wild-type photograph represent the presence of healthy cones.

Since there was no matrix of cones in the mutant mice, the scientists suggest that cones may be missing or defective and therefore impeding the vision.

So how does this relate to human blindness?

“Our cells and tissues have the same anti-oxidant defense systems as mouse cells,” said Finnemann, who studies cellular functions in the retina and their role in causing AMD. “But as this defense diminishes with age, our rods and cones malfunction.”

Finnemann said that identifying which components of the retinal cells are particularly vulnerable to oxidative damage is an important first step toward devising effective strategies how to prevent age-related blindness. Her other research includes a study (funded by the California Table Grape Commission) feeding mutant and wild-type mice a “healthy diet” enriched in grapes (good sources of anti-oxidants) and observing how this improves vision.

Gordon Plague, an evolutionary biologist at the Louis Calder Center, studies the evolution of bacteria in insects, among other things. Ideas are his stock in trade and he, like Ellison, can rarely point to their genesis. Except for the weevils.

An assistant professor of biological sciences, Plague raises maize weevils (Sitophilus zeamais) and rice weevils (Sitophilus oryzae) in the lab at Calder to study their symbiotic bacteria. “They’re easy to raise,” Plague says. “You can just grow them in jars with some corn or rice in an incubator in the lab.” (The incubator is used to control humidity and optimize growth, according to Plague.)

Weevils, in case you’re wondering, are insects that primarily feed on plant material. Maize weevils and rice weevils spend their larval and pupal stages within a kernel of stored grain, living off the endosperm—the starchy portion from which the seed draws nutrition (analogous to the “white” of a chicken’s egg). The weevils need the bacteria to break down the starches into nutrients the weevils can use, and the bacteria can only live inside the weevils’ specialized host cells, called bacteriomes.

Periodically, Plague and his students need to remove some weevil larvae (the sub-adult stage of the insect) from a jar to harvest bacteria from them. When they did so, Plague says, they noticed that the adult rice weevils seem to climb the walls of the jar much more vigorously than adult maize weevils after the larvae had been removed.

“A lot of times you can’t pinpoint exactly what sparked a particular question or line of research,” Plague says. “I do a lot of my best thinking when I’m walking my dog, and I can let my mind wander. But in this case, we saw that the rice weevils were climbing like crazy after the jar had been disturbed, much more so than the maize weevils. We wondered why that was.”

Enter Gaelle Voltaire, an undergraduate student in biological sciences who needed a research project. (Before we get on with the science portion of our program, let us give thanks for an article that includes the surnames “Plague” and “Voltaire.”) Plague turned Voltaire loose on the climbing weevils. Job one was to confirm that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing: that the rice weevils were indeed more vigorous climbers. Or in the language of their paper, “Our objective was to quantify this climbing behavior in both species under a variety of environmental conditions to assess whether our anecdotal observations were correct.”

Read the paper by Plague, Voltaire and lab members Bridget E. Walsh and Kevin M. Dougherty: “Rice Weevils and Maize Weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) Respond Differently to Disturbance of Stored Grain,” published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Vol. 103, No. 4, 2010.

It turns out that careful observation confirmed what Plague and his students had noticed in the Calder lab: the two species exhibited markedly different climbing behaviors after the jars were disturbed, with the rice weevils climbing significantly more than maize weevils under a variety of environmental conditions..

We know what you’re thinking: “Some bugs in a jar on a countertop in Westchester climbed more than some other bugs in other jars? Really? This is why I majored in English!”

But measuring the climbing rates of two species of insects isn’t an end unto itself. As a biologist, Plague sees this behavior shedding light on the deep evolutionary history not just of weevils, but of human beings. (There are also the practical considerations that his findings may have for pest control.)

It turns out a lot of insects that live and feed on stored grain exhibit this climbing behavior (“negative geotaxis” in the jargon) when the store is disturbed, and probably evolved many times in different species. Because both the rice and maize weevils exhibit the behavior, it is likely that it existed in their last common ancestor, 20 million years ago (at least 15 million years before the split between the chimpanzee and human lines). So weevils very likely infested the stored seeds and nuts of rodents and birds before humans started growing and storing surplus grain.

What would be adaptive (in other words, what would confer an advantage in leaving behind offspring) about this climbing behavior?

“These weevils have a 30-day lifecycle from egg to adult,” Plague says. “When the caches of rodents and birds were disturbed, it was probably a signal that the owner was coming home. That poses a risk that the weevil might be eaten, or at least that the cache was going away. The weevils would have to get away so they could lay eggs in another cache.”

In the simplest terms, weevils that climbed away from disturbed grain, whether in an animal cache or a silo, were more likely to leave behind offspring. Over time the offspring of the climbing weevils outnumbered less vigorous climbers until the climbing behavior was the norm. And the fact that weevils which don’t escape disturbed stores leave behind fewer offspring continues to exert selection pressure for the climbing behavior.

“The difference in climbing behavior between the rice weevils and the corn weevils may be because corn weevils are better flyers than rice weevils,” Plague says. “The rice weevils may climb more vigorously because they need more time to get away.”

“Complex behaviors are primarily maintained because they provide a survival or reproductive benefit to the animal,” Plague says. “Therefore, taking an evolutionary approach to studying animal behavior can shed insight into an animal’s biology, both past and present. This project not only did that, but the results also potentially have implications for controlling these worldwide stored grain pests. And also significantly, it was a pretty simple experiment that gave students experience with the complete scientific process, from the generation of a question to the publication of the paper.”

The blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, has a complicated two-year life cycle that revolves around feeding on the blood of animals. It’s the whole bloodsucking thing that makes the tick a vector, or carrier, of diseases like Lyme (and babesiosis and anaplasmosis, among others). Ticks are born without the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, Borrelia burgdorferi. When they feed on animals and birds that are “reservoir competent,” meaning they can carry and transmit the Lyme bacterium, the ticks acquire it. If you provide the tick’s next meal, it can return the favor by infecting you with the disease. (White footed mice, chipmunks and robins are reservoir competent; gray squirrels, deer and opossums are not.)

So what does the Tick Index number mean? Several times a week, Thomas J. Daniels, Ph.D., Fordham associate research scientist and co-director of the Calder Center’s Vector Ecology Laboratory, takes drag samples at Calder. He and colleague Rich Falco, Ph.D., a medical entomologist with the New York State Department of Health, use a one-meter square piece of while corduroy attached to a wooden bar to go hunting ticks.

“We drag the fabric over a known distance—usually ten or twenty meters—then turn it over and start counting ticks,” Daniels says. “The ticks are host seeking: they don’t care if it’s me or a square of fabric. We know the size of the drag and the distance, so it’s easy to come up with a mean number of ticks per square meter.”

What the scientists are especially looking for are ticks in the nymphal stage, between 25 and 30 percent of which carry the Lyme bacterium. Nymphs are active and abundant from late spring through summer and into the fall. Because of their great numbers, and because they are so small and often escape detection, nymphs cause 90 percent of Lyme Disease infections. Altogether, Daniels and Falco perform drag counts from late March through early December, weather permitting. Adult ticks, active in the late fall, carry the Lyme bacterium at an even higher rate than nymphs, but because there are so many fewer adults, and because they are easier to spot and pick off before they transmit the disease to humans, they cause many fewer cases.

The scale of the tick index measures the relative risk of being bitten in a particular season. “This season isn’t as bad as last one was,” Daniels says, “so you might not have as much risk with an index of eight this year as you would have with an index of five least season. It’s not an absolute measure of risk.”

Daniels said the infection rate of Lyme Disease in the northeast is fairly steady from year to year, but vastly underreported, which is why he doesn’t rely on epidemiological data on Lyme Disease cases to assess risk.

“I would risk my life on my tick data, because I know how to count ticks,” he says. “The epidemiological data are terrible. Lyme disease is often hard to recognize, and as it’s become more common, physicians are less interested in it, and don’t report it reliably to health agencies.”

Daniels estimates that the 25,000 reported cases of Lyme Disease in the United States each year represents only 10 percent of the real number, “and I’m being generous,” he says.

Daniels and Falco have been collecting tick data since 1987. The first incarnation of the Tick Index debuted about 10 years ago, when Falco was working with the American Lyme Disease Foundation. The project languished when funding for the foundation was short. In 2008, the Index was revived and began publishing each season on the Fordham website: www.fordham.edu/tick.

Daniels received his doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1987, for research on the behavioral ecology of feral dogs on the Navajo reservation. He studied how well dogs that were raised initially as pets adapted to living in a semi-wild state on the reservation’s garbage dumps. Not well, it turned out. By 1985 he had already completed that research and was studying ticks and Lyme Disease, which was just coming to prominence as a medical issue in the United States. He has been at the Calder Center since 1994, and has seen the emergence not only of Lyme disease, but also of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease, in the region.

West Nile is a case study of how a disease agent, introduced into the right animal community under the right conditions, can quickly become part of the everyday landscape.

“In 1999, when West Nile first arrived, we had 60 cases in just one state: New York,” Daniels says. “In 2000 it had spread to two neighboring states, New Jersey and Connecticut, and by 2005, the virus was reported in 43 states. Vector-borne diseases are dynamic and they will continue to pose a significant health challenge in the future.”

The key to discovering why the giant herbivores died out may be when their numbers began to dwindle: about 14,800 years ago, according to a team of researchers that includes Fordham’s Guy Robinson. Their 2009 paper, “Pleistocene megafaunal collapse preceded novel plant communities and enhanced fire regimes,” is based upon the concentrations of fossil spores found in lake sediments in the Midwest and northeast.

Robinson, a lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Center, tracks Sporormiella, a fungus that produces spores which must pass through the gut of a large herbivore to germinate. The spores are between 9 and 12 microns in diameter (about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair), and are found in the dung of large herbivorous vertebrates like mastodons and giant beavers (did we mention the giant beavers?). Over time the dung would be washed by rain into lakes, where the spores, along with pollen and charcoal, collected in layers of sediment.

Lots of spores means lots of dung; lots of dung means lots of animals. Tracking the amount of spores, pollen and charcoal at different sediment depths allows the changes in numbers of large herbivores to be matched exactly to sediment records of vegetation and fire, which can in turn be compared with other archaeological and environmental records.

Beginning 14,800 years ago, the plant communities of North America started to change dramatically, going by pollen counts from the lake sediments. Robinson, who also oversees the Pollen Index at Fordham, saw a rise in novel or “no-analog” plant communities which had high percentages of temperate broadleaved trees such as ash, hornbeam, ironwood and elm coexisting with northern species such as spruce and larch—trees not found growing together previously, or today.

As the incidence of Sporormiella (and hence large herbivores) declined over a 1,000-year period, the incidence of pollen grains from novel plant communities increased, as did the incidence of charcoal, indicating fires.

What do all of these clues point to? Butchered mammoth bones found in southeastern Wisconsin can be dated to between 14,800 and 14,100 years ago, indicating the presence of humans in the region at the beginning of the decline of large herbivores. One pretty good hypothesis is that over the period between 14,800 and 13,300 years ago, human hunters reduced the population of mammoths, mastodons and other large herbivores. As the herbivores declined, the trees on which they fed, broadleafs like elm and oak, increased, as did the amount of standing and dead wood and leaf litter available to fuel wildfires (and possibly fires set by humans for hunting and land-clearing purposes).

The archeological and fossil records seem to indicate that the population of large herbivores goes extinct altogether between 13,300 and 12,900, which corresponds exactly with the arrival of the Clovis people, big-game specialists named for their stone points first excavated in Clovis, N.M.

Robinson stresses that this interpretation of the record is somewhat controversial: other contenders for the decline and eventual extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna include climate change, an extraterrestrial impact, and disease or some combination of the three, as well as human predation.

But the decline of the large herbivores (as measured by Sporormiella concentrations) precedes the increase of no-analog plant communities. If climate change reduced the number of herbivores, it didn’t do so by changing the habitat. Likewise, the hypothesis that a meteor or comet slammed into North America approximately 13,000 years ago and killed the megafauna isn’t consistent with a gradual decline of the large herbivores, nor the timing of its beginning.

This summer, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) will present the William Skinner Cooper Award to Robinson, along with colleagues Jacquelyn Gill, John Williams, Stephen T. Jackson and Katherine Lininger for their paper, which ESA says “contributes to the fundamental understanding of ecological history in eastern North America.” The award will be given at ESA’s annual meeting in August, in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Meanwhile, Robinson and his colleagues are extending their research by sampling lake sediments in more locations. “The samples our paper was based upon were all from lowland sites,” Robinson says. “We’re now moving into higher elevations in the Shawangunk Mountains, and we’re starting to see indications that the decline in Sporormiella is what you’d expect if it was being caused by human predation: there is a lag in the decline in higher elevations because humans move into the richer lowlands first.”

More evidence to support the hunting hypothesis is also coming to light in sediments from the late Holocene, 200 to 300 years ago, Robinson says. The samples seem to indicate a rebound of large herbivores on a significant scale following Europeans’ first contact with Native Americans. Researchers hypothesize that first-contact epidemics essentially depopulated the continent, drastically reducing hunting pressure on wildlife.

Robinson believes that the data strongly supports human hunting as a prime cause of large herbivore declines and extinctions, but that it may take a while for scientific opinion to come around.

“Like the fact that Africa and the Americas were once joined, many things that seem self evident now were highly controversial when they were first proposed,” he says. “That pre-historical, pre-agricultural people could have such a profound effect on their environment may be hard for people to accept for reasons that have nothing to do with the data.”

Among the seven award winners at the conference, two were Fordham students: Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Stacey Barnaby, a chemistry major from Monroe, Conn.; and Esi Kajno, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native and natural sciences major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Stacey Barnaby has been conducting research in the Chemistry Department in the laboratory of Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., for the past year. Barnaby’s project mainly focuses on the development of nanostructures for potential applications in anti-aging and cancer.

Specifically, Barnaby has been studying the growth of kinetin-based nanostructures and the growth of selenium nanoparticles as biocompatible materials for drug delivery for prevention of oxidative cellular damage. She has been examining the potential of these materials as radical scavengers and investigating their efficiency as supports for enzymes such as glutathione peroxidase, which plays a vital role in prevention of oxidative damage. These materials have been found to survive in live cell cultures of normal rat kidney cells, which is promising and she hopes that she will be soon be moving on to conduct in vivo studies. She has already presented at conferences such as the New York American Chemical Society undergraduate research symposium, the Columbia University undergraduate research symposium, the Fordham undergraduate research symposium, and ECSC, which involved undergraduate participants from colleges and universities all over the East Coast.

At ECSC, Barnaby was recently honored with an excellence for poster presentation award, in the division for molecular biology and biochemistry. She loves doing research and presenting and sharing her work with fellow researchers at conferences. She gives campus tours as a member of the Rose Hill Society, welcomes freshman as a part of the New Student Orientation team, and tutors students in the HEOP program. She hopes to apply to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in biochemistry/bionanotechnology. “I love research because the possibilities are endless,” she said. “I truly feel that through research, I can help make a difference in the world.”

Esi Kajno worked with Dr. James Wishart at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of the Summer Undergraduate Internship program.

Due to global energy challenges, the conversion of cellulosic biomass (plant material) into ethanol has recently attracted considerable interest as an alternative means for the production of affordable and renewable biofuels. The complication is that plant-derived cellulosic material requires pre-treatment in order to remove the lignin that is naturally bound to cellulose and makes it resistant to hydrolysis into fermentable sugars.

Current pre-treatment processes are costly and challenging since they require harsh conditions (high pressures and temperatures, use of strong acids and/or toxic and flammable substances). Recently, alternative methods to improve on cellulose conversion to biofuels have focused on the use of a new category of solvents known as Ionic Liquids (ILs). These are salts that remain liquids at low temperatures. Unlike organic solvents, ILs are non volatile and therefore very attractive as a green chemistry alternative. In addition their unique set of physical and chemical characteristics offers a new medium for reaction kinetics.

Kajno’s work focused on the synthesis, purification and characterization of ILs and their use in studying the dissolution of cellulose from corn cob and wood, which is key to its conversion into ethanol.

Science Friday Bonus: J. Alan Clark, the Avian Barry White

Today the Daily News reports on Alan Clark’s work with a flock of highly endangered Waldrapp ibis at the Bronx Zoo. The flockhad produced no chicks for seven years. Clark, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Fordham, created a soundtrack of mating calls, recorded in Austria, that restored the birds’ mojo, and the flock has since hatched six offspring from three sets of parents.

Read the complete story, which includes photos and recordings of the mating calls: “Soundtrack of mating calls helps put flock of endangered Waldrapp ibis at Bronx Zoo in the mood.”

It turns out some people did notice. They called their local news outlets, who in turn called the News and Media Relations Bureau at Fordham. They were all looking for Benjamin C. Crooker, Ph.D., associate professor of physics and director of the Fordham University Seismic Station.

We couldn’t reach Crooker that day, but happily for the readers of Science Friday, he did give a great interview to The Observer, the Lincoln Center student newspaper, in February: “Fordham Monitors World’s Seismic Activity.”

What about New York? Can a big one happen here? The odds are against it. The biggest quake in recent years here was in 2002, when a magnitude two earthquake hit New York City. It was caused by an “ancient” (meaning relatively inactive) fault, Cameron’s Fault, which runs through 125th street, said Crooker.

Inside Fordham also wrote about the Seismic Station a couple of years ago: “New York’s Shaky Legacy Traced to Rose Hill Underground.”

Fordham is one of a handful of broadband seismographic stations in the New York-New Jersey region that feeds its data to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, which in turn compiles and sends all the regional data to Boulder. The Guralp DM24 CMG3T machine, which combines the functions of a seismometer and digitizer, helps researchers make, effectively, a “CAT scan of the Earth,” according to Crooker. “Fordham’s station is like one cell in a giant camera,” he said, “used to build a seismic map of the earth.”

Just in case you’re wondering, the earth did not move for the News and Media Relations staff on Wednesday.

The center’s research faculty and scientists from other research institutions direct a diversity of research programs, including work on ecosystem responses to loss of eastern hemlock due to exotic insects and climate change, ecology and epidemiology of vector-borne diseases, avian population dynamics, urban wildlife ecology, behavioral and biochemical adaptations of mammals to extreme environments, the role of ectomycorrhizal fungi in forest soils and their responses to control burning and wildfire, and the role of benthic algae in stream food webs.

Fordham University’s partnerships with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the New York Botanical Garden foster collaboration between Calder Center researchers and scientists at these institutions.

Calder Center Background and Research Profiles

Fordham’s Calder Center Named State Entomology Lab

Calder Director Measures Aquatic Health in Upper Mississippi

Scientist Charts Effects of Climate Change on Hibernating Chipmunks

Fordham Plays Key Role in Gathering Pollen Counts That Reach a Wide Audience

Calder Center Awarded NIH Grant to Study Tick Pathogens

Fordham Biologists Create Index to Measure Tick Risk

Calder Center Photo Gallery

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