research Archives - Page 2 of 9

Undergraduates Present Research

Posted on November 9, 2016March 23, 2022

Fifteen Kalamazoo College students joined three of their teachers (professors Dwight Williams, Santiago Salinas and Ellen Robertson) to present research at the 2016 West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference (WMRUGS) in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The annual conference provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to present their own research to a large and supportive group of professional scientists. K was well represented with sophomores, juniors, and seniors in attendance from both the Departments of Biology and Chemistry: Suma Alzouhayli ’17 (Chemistry and Biology), John Bailey ’17 (Chemistry), Christi Cho ’17 (Chemistry), Quinton Colwell ’17 (Chemistry), Rachel Fadler ’17 (Chemistry), Sarah Glass ’17 (Chemistry), Sharat S. Kamath ’19, Christina Keramidas ’18 (Chemistry and Biology), Cydney Martell ’19 (Chemistry), Garret Miller ’16 (Chemistry), Susmitha Narisetty ’19 (Biology), Darren Peel ’17 (Biology), Collin Steen ’17 (Chemistry), Myles Truss ’17 (Chemistry), Raoul Wadhwa ’17 (Chemistry and Computer Science). In addition to presenting their research, students heard a keynote address and research talks by undergraduate and graduate students from regional colleges and universities. This free event also provided undergraduate researchers the opportunity to interact face-to-face with graduate school recruiters and to learn more about future career opportunities.

There were 169 undergraduate posters presented at WMRUGS from students representing 17 different college and universities. Ten students from the Kalamazoo College Department of Chemistry, presented results of their research conducted under the mentorship of Kalamazoo College faculty that included Laura Furge, Regina Stevens-Truss, and Dwight Williams. Other students presented the results of their summer research projects conducted in laboratories at Indiana University and the University of Oregon. Students from the Department of Biology presented their findings from research conducted this past summer in laboratories at South Dakota State University and Michigan State University.

K Alumna Elected to ACS Director Post

Posted on November 8, 2016March 23, 2022

Christina C. Bodurow ’79, senior director of external sourcing in the medicines development unit at Eli Lilly & Co. (Indianapolis), has been elected the District II Director for the American Chemical Society for 2017-2019. District II includes counties in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. At K Christina majored in chemistry. She served in student government, participated on the Hornet tennis and swimming teams, and played in the Jazz Band. She studied abroad in Erlangen, Germany. Christina earned her Ph.D. in organic/organometallic chemistry at Princeton University (1984). After graduate school she began her career at Eli Lilly in the chemical process research division. She led the early phase development of a number of neuroscience medicines, including the global submissions of nine new chemical entities. Kalamazoo College congratulates Christina on her ACS election.

Summer Science Shared

Posted on August 26, 2016March 23, 2022

Scientific inquiry takes no summer break at Kalamazoo College, and a culmination of the summer’s work occurred at the Dow Science Center Mini Poster Session (August 26). In the chemistry department alone some 17 students worked in the laboratories of five chemistry faculty–Professors Bartz, Furge, Smith, Stevens-Truss and Williams. Those students include first-years, sophomores, juniors and seniors, many of the latter working on their Senior Individualized Projects. The mini poster session included 12 presenters explaining the science they had conducted during the summer. Quinton Colwell ’17 (in the red tie) is pictured discussing his poster, titled “Molecular Dynamics and Real-Life Drug Metabolism.” Molecular dynamics is the study of real life systems using computer models and simulations. Colwell’s work involved a relatively novel technique,biased molecular dynamics, which, he wrote, “brings an additional layer to computer simulations relevant to bench-top experiments. It has the potential to be a game-changer.” In addition to Colwell, other presenters included Sarah Glass ’17, Myles Truss ’17, Shreya Bahl ’17, Suma Alzouhayli ’17, and Blake Beauchamp ’17.

Diamonds in the Rough

Posted on April 12, 2016March 23, 2022

Tom Higgins ’92 returned to his alma mater in early April as part of a visit coordinated by the Kalamazoo Section of the American Chemical Society. Higgins talked about “How Undergraduate Research Experiences Can Change Students’ Lives.” He should know. Higgins and a number of collaborators have made great strides in cultivating future scientists by introducing undergraduate research experiences for students at two-year institutions. Known as STEM-ENGINES (Engaging the Next Generation in Exploring STEM), their research collaborative has enabled over 286 Chicago-area students, including many first-generation American citizens, to gain academic-year and summer research experience mentored by chemistry and biology faculty. Often these “diamonds in the rough” may not have envisioned research as a potential career path.

The K chemistry major cites his foreign study experience (Erlangen, Germany) as a source of insight and empathy into his own students’ discomfort in learning beyond their comfort zone. He sees community colleges as important part of the higher education landscape and his research demonstrates that small investments in a student can have a big payoff benefiting individuals, families, institutions, and communities.

Higgins is a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education, and he also serves as a professor at Harold Washington College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago.
He began teaching at Harold Washington in 1998 after completing his Ph.D. at Northwestern. He never thought he’d be there as long as he has been, but–as he told an audience of students and faculty from K, Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo Valley Community College– the atmosphere created by small class sizes made it hard to leave.

Text and photo by Ann Jenks

Four Awarded Fellowships for Research

Posted on March 30, 2016March 23, 2022

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced that four Kalamazoo College alumni have been awarded 2016 Graduate Research Fellowships. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. GRFP fellows are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

The four K alums are Amanda Mancini ’14, Jared Grimmer ’15, Patricia Garay ’11 and Monika Egerer ’13. Mancini, Grimmer and Egerer majored in biology at K, Garay majored in chemistry. For the 2016 competition, NSF received close to 17,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers. Mancini will focus her research in biological anthropology, Grimmer and Egerer work in the area of ecology, and Garay conducts her explorations in the neurosciences. All four studied abroad at K and in different countries–Mancini in Ecuador, Grimmer in Spain, Garay in Costa Rica, and Egerer in Thailand. Congratulations, Hornet science graduate students!

National Science Foundation 2016 fellowship grants will support the graduate school research of four K alumni in ecology, neurosciences and biological anthropology.

Religious “Nones” On The Rise In U.S, Reports Pew Center Researcher and Thompson Lecturer at Kalamazoo College

Posted on February 16, 2016March 23, 2022

FROM WMUK RADIO (102.1 FM) http://wmuk.org/topic/westsouthwest Feb 15, 2016:

Jessica Hamar Martinez, Pew Center senior researcher and 2016 Thompson Lecturer at Kalamazoo College.

The Pew Research Center finds that more people in the United States don’t have any religious affiliation. Pew Center Senior Researcher Jessica Hamar Martinez will discuss those findings at Kalamazoo College.

Her address is called Nones on the Rise, One in Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation. It begins at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday [Feb. 16] in the Olmsted Room at K’s Mandell Hall.

Martinez says the “nones” are people who say they are atheist, agnostic or don’t identify with any particular religion. She says that group has grown significantly since Pew’s last Religious Landscape study seven years earlier. Martinez says that is driven largely by the millennial generation.

Some highlights.

The increase in atheists and agnostics is small, but there is also a decline in the certainty of people who say they believe in God.
People who do identify with a religious group have grown more observant. Martinez says that includes more scripture reading, participation in things like prayer groups and sharing their faith with others.
The older “millennials” have not moved in the direction of becoming more religious. Martinez says it’s still a short period of time. But so far, the lack of religious affiliation appears to be an ongoing trend.

Martinez says views on religion tend to align with social and political issues. She says there has been an increase in the religiously unaffiliated among Democratic voters, and a smaller increase of the “nones” among Republicans.

Listen to an extended interview with Jessica Hamar Martinez on WMUK’s WestSouthwest program with Gordon Evans: http://wmuk.org/topic/westsouthwest.

Research Reveals Enzyme’s Role in Shifting-Eyed Fish

Posted on November 16, 2015March 23, 2022

Rina Fujiwara '14 and Leslie Nagy '09 — Rina Fujiwara ’14 and Leslie Nagy ’09 in the Vanderbilt University laboratory of Dr. Fred Guengerich. As Leslie was completing her rotation in the laboratory Rina was just beginning hers, so Leslie helped train Rina. Both scientists did important research on a key enzyme in fish and humans.

Sometimes science uncovers a pretty interesting “what” long before researchers learn that particular “what’s” equally interesting “how.”

Two Kalamazoo College alumnae are among the authors of a recently published paper describing HOW certain fish change their eyes to see more effectively in different water environments. Such a shift in visual acuity is a pretty cool “what” that’s been known for a while. Even some of the “how” had been elucidated–like knowing the components of a room’s light switch for example. What had been unknown–until now–was the enzyme responsible for the change, or, in other words, the finger that flips the switch.

The two co-authors who share K science ancestry, so to speak, are Rina Fujiwara ’15 and Leslie Nagy ’09. Both did the research described in the paper while working in the laboratory of Fred Guengerich at Vanderbilt University. Guengerich happens to have been the thesis advisor of Laura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry at Kalamazoo College, when Laura was earning her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt. Both Nagy and Fujiwara worked in the Furge Lab during their undergraduate years; talk about scientific ancestry! The paper–titled “Cyp27c1 Red-Shifts the Spectral Sensitivity of Photoreceptors by Converting Vitamin A1 into A2”–appeared this week in the high impact scientific journal Current Biology. The Atlantic also published an article on the research.

It was in the Furge Lab that Nagy and Fujiwara were introduced to the cytochrome P-450 family of enzymes. They are critical mediators of many human physiological processes. “Today we know there are 57 P-450s in humans,” said Furge. “Many were known and their functions elucidated, but with the sequencing of the human genome, scientists discovered 13 unknown P-450s, which were dubbed ’orphans,’” she added. “Because the family is so important to human health, we’d like to know what these orphans do.” Fish and human share kindred P-450s, including the orphan, Cyp27c1, that’s the subject of the Current Biology paper.

For a full appreciation of the paper’s findings, a very simplified “Vision 101” may help. That we see–and how we see–depends in part on chemicals called chromophores. These share a common chemical backbone: vitamin A. Chromophores differ depending on modifications of their vitamin A, modifications that change an eye’s sensitivity to certain colors. For example, the vitamin A of sea fish–known as vitamin A1–help them better perceive a different spectrum of color than do freshwater fish, whose vitamin A2 allow for clearer vision in the red-wavelength light characteristic of rivers and lakes. Some fish–like salmon, that live in both marine and freshwater environments–can change their eyes by converting their vitamin A’s, from 1 to 2, sort of like gaining night vision goggles according the article in the Atlantic.

Just how they accomplish this conversion is the discovery that resulted from the research described in the paper. A single enzyme member of the cytochrome P450 family (one of the so called orphans, it turns out) converts A1 to A2, thus changing the color tuning of the fish eyes when the fish enters different water environments. And the human analog of that eye-changing P450 orphan in fish, the Cyp27c1 of the paper’s title–has also been studied by Guengerich Lab at Vanderbilt. A second paper on that analog is expected to be published in 2016, and Nagy and Fujiwara will co-authors of that paper as well.

Furge noted the impact and importance of scientific mentoring across generations, citing the example of Guengerich, herself, and Fujiwara and Nagy, representing three generations of cytochrome P-450 research. “Another K [and Furge Lab] alumna, Thanh Phanh ’15, is currently a technician in the Guengerich lab,” said Furge. “She hasn’t contributed to eye project but I’m sure she’ll have her own project in the future.”

Finding Strengths

Posted on October 21, 2015March 23, 2022

Kalamazoo College Assistant Professor of Psychology Kyla Fletcher has been awarded a grant by the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (part of the NIH) to study African-American partner relationships and share “what goes right” in terms of daily HIV risk reduction behavior.

The three-year grant ($438,000, making it the largest single-investigator award ever received at Kalamazoo College) is titled “Substance Use and Partner Characteristics in Daily HIV Risk in African Americans.” Fletcher hopes to enroll 200 participants in the community-based study. Participants will complete daily surveys for a month (a study approach called “daily diary” that provides more reliable data than do retrospective approaches). Participants also will do confidential in-person interviews in the lab Fletcher has set up in Olds-Upton.

The study will empirically consider the role of partners, specifically relative to managing (one’s own and one’s partner’s) substance use and condom use, and negotiating the knowledge of a partner’s HIV status through testing–all behaviors that can be associated with HIV prevention.

“There are relationships where partners talk about these behaviors and negotiate them successfully,” says Fletcher. “The study will help us learn how they accomplish that, which may suggest strategies to encourage such engagement and behaviors more widely among intimate partnerships in specific populations.”

In addition to setting up the interview lab and a website for the study, Fletcher is working with her newly hired Research Associate (hailing from the greater Kalamazoo area) and her team of six Kalamazoo College students to begin the recruitment phase of the study. “I had an enthusiastic pool of K students,” smiles Fletcher. “There is great interest in human sexuality and the influences of community on relationships and the influence of partners in relationships.

“The K students, which include members of every class, bring a diverse set of experiences and new ideas to the study team,” adds Fletcher. In return, the students will learn how to think analytically and how to initiate (and collect and analyze data from) a ’daily diary’ research protocol, knowledge that would be relevant for graduate study or employment in the field of psychology, according to Fletcher.

She is particularly excited that the work will be community-based. “The grant allows us to build a cohort that is diverse in multiple ways and more reflective of the reality of the community,” she explains. “It also obligates us to disseminate the results back to the community and to seek their input on how to communicate those results most effectively.”

Fletcher has already enlisted community representatives as advisers. And, she notes, the community-based character of the research is an opportunity for the K students to get off campus and interact with people from whom they differ in a variety of ways and with whom they also share fundamental similarities. The discovery and exploration of distinctions and commonalities can be a valuable learning experience.

This academic year is Fletcher’s fourth at Kalamazoo College. She teaches courses in general psychology, adolescent development, research methods, the psychology of the African-American experience, and the psychology of sexuality.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In grad school she focused on developmental psychology with an emphasis on sexual socialization, and she did post-doctoral work at U of M’s Substance Abuse Research Center.

“It’s in the nature of human relationship development that partners tend to meld into one another, adopt each other’s interests and give greater consideration of a partner’s desires,” says Fletcher. “How partners influence behaviors related to substance use, sexual risk and HIV prevention is a key question of this study. What strengths in relationships work toward healthy outcomes, and can these strengths be applied more widely?”

“It’s exciting work,” concludes Fletcher, “and could be part of a cultural shift—a needed shift, in my opinion—from a deficit-based view to a strength-based view of sexuality and health.”

The Algorithm Knows

Posted on October 12, 2015March 23, 2022

Justin Horowitz ’05 is a graduate research assistant in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He’s also the first author of a study that describes the development a of mathematical algorithm that can ascertain intention even when the act of carrying out that intention is interrupted.

The study article is titled “I Meant to Do That: Determining the Intentions of Action in the Face of Disturbances,” and it appears in the online journal PLOS ONE. The article’s co-author is James Patton, professor of bioengineering and principal investigator of the study, which occurred at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Horowitz and Patton call the discovery a “psychic robot” and its potential applications may turn out to be profound. Imagine a car diverted from its course that could restore the driver’s intended direction faster than the driver could do so. ““The computer has extra sensors and processes information so much faster than I can react,” Horowitz said in a UIC press release (October 6, 2015, by Jeanne Galatzer-Levy). “If the car can tell where I mean to go, it can drive itself there. But it has to know which movements of the wheel represent my intention, and which are responses to an environment that’s already changed.” The algorithm can make that distinction.

The algorithm also may have potential application in treatment of stroke patients. Imagine a prosthetic device that can restore a patient’s intended course of action before that intent was changed by after-effects of the stroke, such as interruptions in motor coordination. “If you know how someone is moving and what the disturbance is, you can tell the underlying intent,” said Horowitz, “which means we could use this algorithm to design machines that could correct the course of a swerving car or help a stroke patient with spasticity.”

Horowitz earned his bachelor’s degree at K in biology.

K’s 3 of 300

Posted on April 21, 2015March 23, 2022

Three Kalamazoo College chemistry majors presented at the 2015 Experimental Biology meeting, a joint meeting of six different societies including the American Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) as well as societies for physiology, nutrition, pharmacology, pathology, and anatomy. More than 15,000 scientists attended the meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

Rina Fujiwara ’15, Sarah Glass ’17, and Victoria Osorio ’16 shared results of the research they did in collaboration with Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge. Their presentations were part of both the Undergraduate Poster Competition and as part of the regular scientific session for ASBMB. Some 300 undergraduate posters composed the ASBMB competition from students across the country and from a variety of college and universities.

Fujiwara’s work, part of her Senior Individualized Project (SIP), showed how the work of two human liver enzymes vital to the body’s processing of medicines is halted by two small molecule inhibitors. The research took place in the Furge lab at Kalamazoo College and was published in Drug Metabolism and Disposition (Fall 2014). Other co-authors included Furge, Amanda Bolles ’14, and Erran Briggs ’14.

Glass and Osorio presented a poster that centered on recent work in the Furge lab with variants of an enzyme responsible for metabolism (or processing in the body) of about 15 percent of all medicines. The presence of these enzyme variants in different individuals can lead to vastly different responses to some pharmaceutical drugs, including cough syrup, the breast cancer drug tamoxifen, and many more. Though not present at the meeting, Mike Glista ’06) and Parker de Waal ’13) were co-authors on the posters.

This summer Fujiwara will enter the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Osorio and Glass will continue research with Furge this summer. Both plan to attend graduate school after graduating from Kalamazoo College.

At the Boston meeting Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss once again directed her highly acclaimed HOPES project, connecting science teachers with practicing scientists to enhance the quality and hands-on authenticity of primary and secondary classroom science instruction.

Professors Furge and Stevens-Truss are members of the ASBMB and attend the meeting every year. Travel to ASBMB for students Fujiwara, Glass, and Osorio was supported by grants from the Richard J. Cook Research Fellowship Fund (Fujiwara), an award from the ASBMB Student Affiliate (Fujiwara), the Provost Office (Glass, Osorio), and a grant to Furge through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Travel for Furge and Truss was supported by the Hutchcroft Endowment as well as NIH and grants from ASBMB.