Monthly Archives: January 2020

Work Your Body, Work Your Brain

Regular exercise can increase your muscle strength, decrease the risk of health complications like high blood pressure and diabetes, but most importantly it can do wonders for our happiness. This link between physical activity and psychological well-being is supported in the literature, but the people who can benefit the most — children in grade school and adults with mobility limitations — seem to be faced with many unnecessary hurdles. Our guest is Winston Kennedy, a 3rd year PhD student in the Kinesiology program and Adaptive Physical Activity option, was a practicing Physical Therapist when he noticed his patients with mobility limitations were trying to perform their rehabilitation exercises at home but they received inadequate support or guidance. It’s these barriers to successful rehabilitation that Winston is examining in his research project with the aim of making physical therapy more inclusive to any patient who could benefit.

Poster presentation of some of my Winston’s research; Determining Factors associated with Physical and Occupational Therapists’ attitudes Towards Disability

Physical therapy is often learned in the hospital and the patient is expected to perform those exercises at home; in fact, nearly 9 million Americans have some experience with physical therapy during their lifetimes but that number should actually be much bigger. Unfortunately, the benefits that patients can receive from PT is not well understood by primary care physicians so there is a discrepancy in the number of patients who receive a referral to visit the PT and those who can benefit. Adults who may benefit from PT could argue their case to their general practitioner and they may even be successful, but treatment gaps remain for children. Early in life during primary school “the majority of students with disabilities are placed in general education classrooms for 80% or more of their time in school“, which could exclude children from participating in exercise and bonding with their peers. The overlap between physical therapy, independent mobility, and mental health becomes obvious only when a wholistic approach to how a lived experience can extend from a person with physically unstable wrists or fingers into the frustration they may feel when using a small key to unlock a stiff door to your own home is painful or is downright too strenuous.

Winston at the Oregon state Championship Olympic weightlifting competition.

Winston continues to be a practicing physical therapist in Corvallis, but what brought him to Oregon State University from Florida was the seemingly obvious physical barriers that patients had in performing their rehabilitation, at home or in the gym, and the effect it had on his patients success. One practical design idea for gyms that can be more inclusive are structurally sound scaffolding near weight machines, or parallel bars for patients to practice walking without the fear of falling, the addition of a roaming human facilitator that can assist someone for a few minutes at a time can also have major positive benefits to generate spaces inclusive for people of all kinds of physical abilities. However, before he can help people in the physical therapy offices, he first needs to understand what the attitudes and perceptions of physical therapy are from primary care physicians who can refer patients. This is the first part of Winston’s project, but it won’t be his last.

Winston first became exposed to physical therapy after a shoulder injury in high school, although he wouldn’t pursue it professionally until he was in his senior year at Hampton University playing on the football team when his school counselor suggested PT could be a career option. Following knee surgeries that ended his football career, he made a hard swing to focus on schooling and PT school that eventually lead him to see the need from his patients. This gap in care, especially for those with disabilities, is what brought him to Oregon State and Sam Logan’s lab in the Kinesiology program. Listen in on Sunday January 26th at 7pm on 88.7FM, or live-streamed to learn more about Winston’s research. If you missed the live episode, you can listen to Winston’s interview on our Apple Podcast page.

Robots without boarders: from Morocco to France to Germany to Oregon State

Amine Gaizi is a masters student working on a degree in Electronics and Embedded systems. As an exchange student from France, Amine is studying in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering within the College of Engineering here at OSU.

Amine taking care of a tea salon and serving mint tea he had prepared for all CPE students, which is very popular in Morocco. During that day Melting Potes was presenting Africa and Amine did this to display the moroccan culture.

Amine is originally from Morocco, where he studied in French schools, so the next natural step was to move to France for his higher education. At CPE (Ecole d’Ingénieurs en Chimie et Sciences du Numérique) in Lyon France, Amine has been working on his degree. At CPE Amine was part of an association that promotes cultural diversity and helps the foreign students that come to CPE. It is called “Melting Potes”, like melting pot but with a twist, in french “potes” means good friends. One of the major events we organize is called “the cultural week”. Everyday they present the culture of a continent through food, music, decorations, activities and gifts.

During his graduate work, Amine worked in the department of automotive microcontrollers at Infineon Technologies in Germany for a year to develop an autonomous robot in the shape of a mini car. Essentially, there is a chip that you can program to interface sensors and control actuators following a particular algorithm. Amine says the microcontrollers developed by the automotive department of Infineon are very safety and security oriented, which makes them practically fail-proof. It is the type of technology that is used for braking systems in cars.

This mini robot car that Amine worked on is capable of scanning what’s in front of it, and heading to target locations while avoiding obstacles, and Amine presented this work at Embedded World fair.

After moving from Morocco to France to Germany, Amine thought, “why not also do an exchange program!”, so going through the University of Lyon’s exchange program, Amine arrived in Corvallis Oregon Fall 2019 and has had a great time so far! Living in “iHouse” which is a community of mostly international students living together in a large house, Amine has made amazing friends from all over the world and has made even more friends through playing tennis.

He’s done a decent amount of traveling during his exchange here but Amine said graduate school is no joke. Being a graduate student is already a challenging undertaking, but being an international student adds another layer of complexity and difficulty. Thankfully, Amine knew some other French exchange students when he arrived who helped him get started, and the Office of International Services provided plenty of resources and information.

To hear more about Amine’s journey to OSU, how the French school system is organized, and about the highs and lows of the international student experience, tune in on Sunday, January 19th at 7 PM on KBVR Corvallis 88.7 FM or stream live. 

Climate change, carbon, roots vs shoots, and why soil is more than just dirt

For starters, soil and dirt are not the same thing (contrary to my own belief). First of all, dirt is in fact soil that has been removed from its intended location. For example, the stuff on your shoes after you go hiking in the forest or the grit under your fingernails after you go dig around in your garden, that’s all dirt. The stuff that is left untouched in the forest and in the garden, that’s all soil. Secondly, soil is super important for a number of reasons. One of the key reasons being that it has the potential to help us reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere on human timescales, and therefore, mitigate the effects of climate change. And Adrian Gallo is right in the nitty-gritty of it all. 

Adrian is a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Crops and Soil Sciences working with Dr. Jeff Hatten, who was also his Master’s advisor. While Adrian’s Master’s work was focused on understanding how carbon and water move in Oregon soils under intensive forest management, his PhD is looking at soils from a much wider and more diverse range of habitats and ecosystems. Specifically, the soil cores are from 43 different locations across North America spanning 20 different ecoclimatic zones, ranging from the Alaskan Arctic Tundra to the southern tip of Florida. By analyzing these samples, Adrian is making a continental-scale assessment of soil organic matter and how similar or different it is across these ecoclimatic zones. In particular, Adrian is looking at carbon. Carbon is unique to look at in soils because it is cycling in human timescales, unlike carbon in rocks and oceans, which cycles on geologic timescales. What this means is that essentially we can directly manage and influence the carbon on our landscapes. However, before we can do that, we need to understand why some carbon stays in soil much longer than other carbon (50,000 years vs 1 week) and how different microbes have different abilities to use these different kinds of carbon. 

  • Organizing cores from his 43 NEON sites. Source: Twitter.
  • These soils from Klemme field site (OAES) were likely the most red soils Adrian has documented in 2.5 years. Source: Twitter.

While it may not sound like it to many of us, the work that Adrian is doing is soil-scientifically speaking quite ‘basic’. It is ‘basic’ because soil scientists today are only now realizing how little we actually know and understand about how carbon works and cycles within soil. The reason being that “we were using essentially the same analytical methods for more than 100 years, and our predictions and climate models were built using that data. It’s only in the last 25 years that we have had instruments sensitive enough to test some of these predictions, and in some cases we’ve found that our models are completely wrong.” (NEON Science). 

Many of us probably learned about how cycling of elements, such as nitrogen, calcium, and carbon, works in middle school. The terrestrial carbon cycle was likely explained in the following way; a tree grows, its leaves fall, the leaves decompose, the nutrients go back into the soil, the tree uses the nutrients, which includes carbon. However, what Adrian and many other soil scientists are finding is that the carbon cycle isn’t as cyclical as we thought it was, and as we perhaps wish it would. Additionally, our belief that most of the carbon that finds its way into soils is shoot-derived (aka from the leaves or from above the ground) is also being proven flawed, in some part by Adrian’s research. After analyzing the soil cores from his 43 sites, Adrian found that most of the carbon in soil is looking like it is in fact root-derived. 

  • Photos from 24-Jun-2018 when Adrian had to haul his samples across campus to get them from freezers to incubators. Source: Twitter.

You may be thinking to yourself, why should I care about how much carbon is in the soil and where it comes from and how long it stays there. Well, soil is actually the most important terrestrial carbon sink, storing an estimated 4,100 gigatons of carbon globally, which is more than the atmosphere (~590 Gt) and organisms (650 Gt) store. And the truth of the matter is that we want carbon in our soil. In fact, we want a whole lot more in there. Not only would having more carbon in our soil be beneficial to our climate (as we would be capturing and storing more of the atmospheric carbon in our soils rather than have it out in the atmosphere), but it is also beneficial from an agricultural perspective. If you put carbon in soil, it increases its water holding capacity, meaning farmers don’t have to irrigate as much, it increases the amount of nutrients in the soil, and as a consequence of both, it means that a more diverse range of crops can be planted. There are so many downstream benefits of putting carbon back into soil that is has the potential to make farmers much safer in bad drought or flood years.

Another really exciting component of Adrian’s research is how collaborative and interdisciplinary it is. One of the best examples of this is where he got his 43 soil cores from. You see, Adrian didn’t actually have to go to each of his 43 cross-continental sites (which would have been a nightmare temporally, logistically, financially, and many more words ending in -ally). Instead, he and his advisor were able to convince a team of researchers who were already going to these sites as part of an NSF-funded project called NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network), to send him the 1-m average length cores, which the NEON group were actually planning on not using and dumping. Furthermore, Adrian has joined forces with researchers from diverse backgrounds to look at these cores from totally different angles. While Adrian represents the role of chemist in the group, there is also an ecologist, mineralogist, and a statistician, who are all fitting different pieces of the puzzle together.

In Adrian’s own words, “it’s a really exciting time to be in the field of biogeochemistry because that’s basically what soil is – some mixture of biology, the chemistry that is involved, and the parent material– the rock itself–dictates a lot of the reactions that can occur. We have taken that for granted for a really long time but I really enjoy the complexity of it and having specialists come in to look at this problem from lots of different angles has been really great.”.

https://twitter.com/adriancgallo/status/964185681500110848?s=21
When Adrian is not in the lab breaking apart soil cores or in his office thinking about soil, you’ll probably find him speeding around in the woods on his bike…covered in soil. Source: Twitter.

To hear more about Adrian’s research and also about his journey to OSU and more on his personal background, tune in on Sunday, January 12 at 7 PM on KBVR Corvallis 88.7 FM or stream live. Also, make sure to follow Adrian on Twitter for updates on all things soil and check out a recording of a talk he recently gave at the American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America joined conference!

[Unfortunately due to a conflict with OSU Athletics schedule promoting a game, this on-air interview did not take place. The podcast/on-air interview will occur later in 2020]