Research Highlights

KY INBRE has started a brand new weekly series in their newsletter introducing the 2022 KY INBRE funding recipients. This week, meet Dr. Michael Guy, Northern Kentucky University, recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellow award.

Said Guy, “Our lab studies transfer RNA (tRNA), which is a molecule required to read the information in your genes and convert it into the proteins that give cells their shape and perform chemical reactions. To function properly tRNAs must be modified by the cell, and we study the proteins that form these modifications. People with defects in these modifications often suffer from intellectual disability or other diseases.”

“KY INBRE funding has allowed us to hire a fantastic lab technician who keeps the lab running smoothly and helps me train students and direct their research.”

Alaska EPSCoR PhD student Anushree Badola is lead author on an article just published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, describing a method of simulating hyperspectral imagery from satellite images.

Fire & Ice researchers Julie Schram (pictured) and Jessica Glass are doing things the easy way. At least, that’s the idea. Schram, a Co-PI (and a faculty hire) of the Alaska NSF EPSCoR Fire & Ice project and an Assistant Professor of Animal Physiology at the University of Alaska Southeast, and Glass, a fellow Fire & Ice faculty hire and an Assistant Professor in the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, are using biochemical lab techniques that enable them to collect data about marine life and their interactions without having to directly observe them in real time.

Last week, Wyoming Space Grant hosted a small group of educators for their first high-altitude balloon workshop in many years. The group received a crash course in the art of high-altitude ballooning. To cap it off, they successfully flew payloads they built up to 90,000 feet. The Summer 2022 High-Altitude Balloon Workshop was held July 26-28, at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Workshop was open to teachers and educators based in Wyoming. No prior ballooning experience was required.

Workshop attendees learned about:

• Educational opportunities available through the Wyoming NASA Space Grant
• The history and future of Wyoming Space Grant’s high-altitude balloon program
• The entire high-altitude balloon process from start to finish (i.e., payload development, logistics, launch, tracking, and recovery)
• Ways to implement balloon payload development, experiment design, and data analysis in the classroom

SC INBRE researcher Vida Mingo, from Columbia College, was a co-author on a Policy Forum paper published in Science entitled “Achieving STEM diversity: Fix the classrooms.” From the Abstract: Achieving equity in STEM requires attracting and retaining college students from diverse backgrounds. Despite decades of calls for action, change has been slow. Recommendations have largely focused on members of underrepresented groups themselves rather than on fixing the classrooms that drive many students out of STEM.

Earlier in July, New Mexico EPSCoR Director Gunny Balakrishnan presented to the New Mexico State Legislature Science, Technology & Telecommunications Committee at an interim committee meeting held July 7-8. Committee members were visibly impressed as Director Balakrishnan rattled off the laundry list of positive impacts NM EPSCoR has had on building New Mexico’s research capacity since 2000 when the program was established. After the presentation, Committee Vice Chair Debra M. Sariñana, told Director Balakrishnan, "Senator Soules told us about how wonderful this organization is...so to hear exactly what you are doing is great!"

There is a common misconception that Ancestral Pueblo people rarely ate fish. The remains of fish that were eaten by these people are indeed rare at early archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico. Now, however, findings by researchers at the University of New Mexico show that not only did fish become a common part of Ancestral Pueblo people's diet, but the bigger the fish, the better. The NSF-supported research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, used 3D scans of modern fish to estimate the body size of ancient fish.

Nebraska NSF EPSCoR Center for Root and Rhizobiome Innovation team members collaborated for a newly accepted paper, “Association analyses of host genetics, root-colonizing microbes, and plant phenotypes under different nitrogen conditions in maize,” published in eLife. Writes one of the co-authors, Jinliang Yang of University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “In this study, we used population genetics methods to 1) identify beneficial microbes under selection by the plant host; 2) detect plant loci associated with the abundance of microbes; 3) find the correlation of these microbes with plant phenotypes.”

Iowa Space Grant Consortium and the Iowa NASA EPSCoR announce that Hailey Waller has joined their team as the EPSCoR Program Assistant. Hailey will be working primarily with the NASA EPSCoR program and will also assist on with the space grant side.

Hailey is a 2019 Iowa State University graduate, with a B.S. in Environmental Science and Anthropology. She worked in assisting graduate students in Entomology research within the NREM department and served as a WiSE Peer Mentor as well in the LAS Saving the Planet Learning Community.

Idaho EPSCoR GEM3 seed funding recipient, Devaleena Pradhan, Idaho State University, has received an NSF CAREER Award. Pradhan will receive $867,632 over five years to further her research on the Bluebanded goby, a fish that lives in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The small fish can rapidly switch sexes in response to changes in their environment.