Author Archives: Matthew Vaughan

Tracking Sharks in the Pacific Northwest

Announcement: TONIGHT WE HAVE A SHARK SCIENTIST ON THE SHOW!

Meet Jessica Schulte, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences. Jess is part of ‘The Big Fish’ lab, and guess what—she still has all her limbs! As you’ll hear on the show tonight, this isn’t a Jaws sequel. Sharks are often portrayed negatively in the media, but Jess is here to flip the script. She’ll highlight why sharks are fascinating, misunderstood, and worthy of far more research attention.

Broadly speaking, Jess is studying the movement and foraging ecology of an apex predator: the broadnose sevengill shark. Her work takes place primarily in Willapa Bay, Washington, where—mysteriously—these sharks gather in large numbers. Why they congregate there is unknown, but Jess is sinking her teeth into finding the answer. In fact, little is known about the movement and foraging ecology of broadnose sevengills. Last year Jess co-authored a paper on the first scientifically confirmed sighting of sevengills in the Puget Sound. To uncover more about what they are doing, Jess heads out on a boat 3–4 times each month from March to October and catches (yes, catches) these sharks. Utilizing strong ethical methods, she collects stomach contents and secures tracking tags before safely releasing them back to the ocean.

If you think Jess’s research sounds exhilarating, wait until you hear about her journey to grad school. She served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, became a dive master in Honduras, assists with OSU’s scientific diving program, and has traveled to countless countries. She’s also just an awesome person—so tune in to our chat tonight on KBVR 88.7 FM, May 4th. You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

No Rest for the Massless

Sometimes the smallest things in the universe can answer some of the largest questions. That seems to be the case with neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles – which just means they are the smallest of the small and that they are indivisible. The name neutrino literally means electrically neutral (neutr-) and small (-ino). For a long time, scientists believed neutrinos had no mass. Now, it is known to have a mass, but nobody has been able to enumerate it. Despite their size (or maybe because of it) they are the most abundant particle in the universe. Every second, 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body without interacting with any particles in your body. 

Noah at the Wilson Hall atrium at Fermilab, the national particle physics lab outside of Chicago where their experiments are based

Noah Vaughan (they / them) is a PhD Student in the Physics Department at Oregon State University whose research focuses on experimental high energy particle physics, specifically neutrinos! They are co-author on over 50 publications, which is an incredible feat at this career stage and demonstrates the collaborative nature of the field. Noah works on the Main Injector Neutrino ExpeRiment to study v-A interactions (MINERvA) Project which is the first neutrino experiment in the world to use a high-intensity beam to study neutrino reactions with five different nuclei. Basically, MINERvA provides understanding on how neutrinos interact with other particles which inform scientists about the bigger role they play, including in star supernovas, the creation of the universe, and the structure of protons.

Noah in the underground hall at Fermilab

Noah’s experiments for their dissertation were performed at Fermalab, which is 100 meters underground. That’s something I bet a lot of PhD students couldn’t claim! These experiments have given Noah a dataset with over 1,000,000 points, which is the largest of its type. The nature of neutrinos makes them difficult to study. They interact through gravity and something called the weak force. The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. It’s much weaker than electromagnetism, but it’s incredibly important. The weak force changes one type of particle into another. It’s one of the driving forces in radioactive decay and helps fuel the sun through nuclear reactions. The weak force changes the identity or “flavor” of particles, at a very small range (smaller than the size of a proton). This allows neutrinos to navigate through atoms of massive objects without interacting.

The top parts of the MINERvA detector that Noah helped rebuild for use in a new prototype detector to be used for DUNE, a future neutrino experiment. Each of the blue and red cylinders is a photomultiplier tube that reads out the light collected from the scintillation strips in the detector (Photo provided by Noah)

This all means that Noah’s work is very important, and answering questions about some of the smallest things in the universe leads to answers to the biggest questions in the universe.

The front face of the MINERVA detector in its original commissioning (photo provided by Noah, from Reider Hahn at Fermilab)

Written by Taylor Azizeh.

Diving into Underwater Robots

Have you ever wondered what goes into designing and building a robot? In an age of seemingly exponential technological growth, robots are becoming more and more commonplace. On land, robots have excelled at tasks such as assembly line manufacturing, warehouse logistics, and even household chores. Engineers and researchers are now designing robots capable of exploring other environments such as the ocean. The use of robots underwater can aid humans in many tasks, including engineering projects like offshore construction. This approach significantly improves safety by removing humans from often dangerous situations, while also increasing efficiency. However, the underwater environment differs dramatically from land, posing many challenges for researchers.

Akshaya Agrawal, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Robotics Department at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, is tackling the challenges of implementing robots underwater. Ocean currents create drag—up to 800 times greater than what we experience on land—and communication signals like Wi-Fi do not travel well underwater, making it difficult to localize (determine the robot’s exact position). Akshaya’s research involves developing and testing motion-planning algorithms designed to help teams of robots coordinate movement and perform tasks underwater. She utilizes realistic simulations to assess the performance of robots underwater, coupled with laboratory tests on ground-based robots, and plans to transition to an underwater testing phase in the future.

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Akshaya’s passion for engineering and robotics began at an early age. Her journey from India to Oregon is inspirational, as is how she’s redefining the academic landscape for women in robotics. To hear more about her story, all the cool robots she’s working with, and the steps involved in getting them underwater, tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM this Sunday, Feb. 2. You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

Is Climate Change Making Gray Whales Picky Eaters?

The Oregon Coast is known for its ruggedness and harsh weather, but also offers a prime opportunity to spot gray whales on their migratory paths. These majestic marine mammals undertake one of the largest migrations of any animal, traveling from the Arctic to Baja California to breed before heading back north along this “whale super-highway.” Despite having the mechanisms to feed in the water column, these benthic specialists prefer bottom feeding, scooping up sand from the seafloor and filtering out invertebrate prey through their baleen, likely targeting locations of high caloric content. However, along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a behavior known as ‘prey switching’ has been observed, where gray whales feed in the water column instead of their preferred benthic prey, amphipods. Our upcoming guest, Taylor Azizeh, a first-year Ph.D. student at the Marine Mammal Institute, explores what may be driving this prey switching behavior.

Polar regions are among the top locations to be impacted by climate change, which Taylor suspects may be responsible for grey whales switching from benthic to pelagic prey. Changes in bottom water temperature and sediment grain size may result in habitats less favorable for amphipods, leading whales to seek food elsewhere. In response to warming, the distribution of other predators may shift to where they compete for the same food source, or the reduced sea ice cover could result in more productive pelagic waters. How do gray whales, these benthic specialists, adapt to changing food availability?

Gray whale populations often experience boom and bust cycles or unknown mortality events, with the most recent one currently underway. Taylor’s research on the foraging plasticity of gray whales is not only timely, but also employs a holistic approach using a combination of methods to assess the big picture. She plans to use stable isotopes to provide information on what whales are feeding on, but only when combined with GPS tags tracking movement and drone photogrammetry measuring body conditions can one understand where and why. Taylor plans to utilize this combination to ask big picture questions such as whether they’re feeding in areas of high biomass, if they return to those same areas, and how much adaptability can individual gray whales display?

At its core, Taylor’s research delves into the adaptability of gray whales. Gray whales have survived the ice ages, proving their ability to deal with harsh conditions, and Taylor hypothesizes they may be more flexible than we currently understand.

To learn more about Taylor’s passion for these charismatic animals of ecological, social, and cultural importance, the adventure which led here to grad school—from Costa Rica to Ecuador, Denmark, and London—tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM this Sunday, Nov. 3. You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

Fear.exe: How horror video games hijack more than just your computer

Our upcoming guest is Erika Stewart, a second-year MA student in the School of Writing, Literature and Film. As an avid gamer growing up, Erika found a way to explore this passion more deeply in graduate school, where her thesis focuses on horror in video games. 

Scholars have studied our relationship with horror for decades, identifying that the fear induced arises from a threat to our bodies. But what about video games, where no immediate physical threat exists? An emerging genre of games—coined by Erika as ‘malwaric’ games—hijack your computer (much like malware) and can induce deep fear in players. How do these games create fear if there’s no representation of the body?

Erika explores this question by presenting the argument that the computer functions as an extension of the body. Malwaric games are designed to be intrusive and reflect a cultural fear: they are terrifying because the computer has become a part of us, and these games seem to attack us directly. In an age rife with artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality, Erika’s research is both timely and insightful, addressing what this means for the ‘digital divide.’

To learn more about Erika’s research—and how childhood video game memories and positive community college experiences influenced her path to graduate school—tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM this Sunday, Oct. 13. You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

Full cream: The power of milk on infant development

Our upcoming guest is Jillien Zukaitis, a first year PhD student in Nutrition, College of Health. Her lab, fondly referred to as the ‘Milk Lab’, studies at all things milk. With a clinical background as a dietitian, Jillien now couples her practical experience with translatable research.

Partnering with OHSU, Jillien assesses the composition, nutritional value, and potential health benefits of human milk on the development of preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). This involves analyzing various proteins and peptides in the different types of milk fed to these infants and seeing how they are digested to isolate their roles in infant health and development. One way she does this is by isolating milk peptides from infant stomach and intestine and testing these on macrophage cells, examining the immune function of some of the peptides identified. By assessing the processing methods, milk types, and milk contents, she aims to discern what milk is best to feed infants. She plans to compare these results against other sources of nutrition such as infant formula in the future.

One innovative element of her research is through use of an in-vitro “digestion machine” known as SHIME (The Simulator of the Human Intestinal Microbial Ecosystem), which essentially mimics the entire digestive process from start to finish, allowing valuable insights at each stage involved. This revolutionary machine is one of the few in the USA and is right here at OSU!

To learn more about her research, passion to improve the lives of infants, and the unorthodox pathway that led her to pursuing her PhD, tune in to our prerecorded conversation on KBVR 88.7 FM this Sunday, May 12. You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

Plankton: The smallest of organisms require the largest of boats

Did you know that jellyfish are plankton? That’s right, they’re not just abstruse microscopic organisms (although many of them are). For example, did you know that the size difference between plankton members is on an order of magnitude similar to the size of a human compared to the size of Earth? These are just a few of the fun plankton facts our upcoming guest has in store for us.

Elena Conser is a third year PhD student in the Plankton Ecology Lab. She really, really, loves plankton – marine organisms that are unable to swim against the current and are thus, at the whim and mercy of their environment (of which Elena attributes a sort of philosophical solace in). More specifically, she looks at zooplankton, animals that live in the plankton. These organisms form the basis of marine food webs, and Elena’s research aims to better understand planktonic communities and their food webs. She does this off the coast of Oregon, in an oceanographic region called the ‘Northern Californian Current’. This area is extremely productive for plankton growth and supports several economically important fisheries. It is also characterized by upwelling and periods of low oxygen, prompting Elena to investigate the structure of zooplankton communities here and how they may shift in response to environmental change.

To study plankton, Elena employs cutting-edge technology off large research vessels. She uses an imaging system known as ‘ISIIS’ (In-Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System) to view plankton in their natural environment, something that has not previously been possible in her field. The data collected with this system is processed using deep learning and computer vision to capture and identify plankton. Through this, Elena is also able to attain information on what plankton are where, how big they are, and how many there are. Elena couples her imagery data from ISIIS with biological samples of ichthyoplankton (larval fish), collected at different depths using nets. Using the ear bones (known as ‘otoliths’) from these physical samples, she can age larval fish much like how trees can be dated through their rings. She does this on English sole, a common flatfish occurring in the Northern California Current, to better understand the development from larval to juvenile stage.

Elena always knew of the importance of the ocean, which led her to studying marine science, biology, and applied math at the University of Miami in Florida. Here she worked with a larval fish scientist and became curious about the importance of plankton communities. This curiosity led her back to her roots in Oregon to pursue plankton research with developing technology. Her research is indeed at the intersection of oceanography, ecology, and computer science. She is excited to continue tackling questions that have never been able to be answered until now. To hear more on the importance of plankton and the interesting questions Elena is asking, tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM this Sunday, February 25th, or shortly thereafter where you get your podcasts!