In 2021 Jordan Peele remade the 1992 cult horror classic, Candyman. The 2021 remake received critical success and despite being delayed several times due to the covid-19 pandemic, was a box office success as well. In both the 1992 and 2021 versions, the eponymous main character is a black man. But in the remake, the character deviates from the usual narrative trope of being a menacing black man to a man with complex emotions and feelings. For most viewers, these changes make for a good story, but likely are not things that they dwell on, and certainly are forgettable by the time they have left the theater. But for our guest this week, literature MA student Marisa Williams in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, these differences are what gives them inspiration and are what inform their research. While Marisa has just begun their thesis work, they know that they will examine issues of racism on black bodies within contemporary literature. Specifically, Marisa plans to explore how the legacy of colonialism has remained in the literature of French-Caribbean authors writing in the 21st century despite more than two centuries of emancipation from colonialism.
In order to do this kind of research, Marisa first has to learn about the history and philosophy of colonialism and post-colonial identity in the Caribbean. They plan to do this by exploring how notions of “Creole-ness,” the monstrosity of whiteness, and identity have all shaped the French-Caribbean experience in today’s literature. This has led Marisa to some interesting literary “rabbit holes,” that has taken them through history, philosophy, and fantasy literature.
To learn more about what is “Creole-ness,” the monstrosity of whiteness, and identity and how they relate to fantasy literature, tune in live on Sunday May 1st, 2022 on KBVR to listen. You can also catch more of Marisa’s story and research when they present as part of OSU’s 2022 Grad Inspire which will be taking place on May 12th.
Content warning: this article includes mentions of transphobia and suicide.
Rue Dickey found himself feeling helpless and frustrated upon reading the news about the onslaught of anti-transgender legislation sweeping the country this year. In the four months of 2022 alone, nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed in states across the United States. This skyrocketing number is up from around 41 such bills in 2018, and around half of these bills targeting transgender folks specifically. In February 2022, Texas governor Greg Abbott called for teachers and members of the public to report parents of transgender children to authorities, equating providing support and medical care for trans youth to child abuse – a move that made national headlines. It’s imperative that we understand the consequences of this wave of horrific and discriminatory legislation: a survey by the Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide within the past year alone, and over half of transgender and nonbinary youth have considered suicide.
Rue (they/he) graduated from Oregon State University in 2019, and they are currently the Marketing Coordinator for the Corvallis Community Center. They also develop and create content for TTRPGs, or Tabletop Role Playing Games. TTRPGs are role playing games in which players describe their characters’ actions and adhere to a set of rules and characterizations based on the world setting, and characters work together to achieve a goal or go on an adventure. They often involve improvisation and their choices shape the world around them. Think Dungeons & Dragons – many TTRPGs involve the use of dice rolling to determine the outcomes of certain actions and events.
Rue Dickey, 2019 OSU graduate and Marketing Director for the Corvallis Community Center.
Gaming as a way to crowdfund for a cause
Wanting to do something to help children and transgender people living in Texas, Rue decided to turn his passion for TTRPGs into a fundraiser. The online indie game hosting platform itch.io has been used in the past to create fundraisers for charities by bundling together and selling games. A few of Rue’s friends who run a BIPOC tabletop server have had experience with creating profit-sharing bundles using the platform in the past, so after he consulted them and walked through the steps, he set up a bund?ndraiser, Rue wanted to ensure that the money was going directly to transgender people. “At the time, a lot of the larger media outlets were encouraging people to donate to Equality Texas, which works to get pro-queer legislature through in Texas, but they don’t necessarily help trans folks on an individual level.”
After tweeting about the fundraiser and soliciting ideas for charities, he landed on two organizations in Texas that are trans-led and focused on transgender individuals: TENT (Transgender Education Network of Texas, a trans-led group that works to combat misinformation on the community level through the corporate level, offering workshops as well as emergency relief funds for trans folks in need) and OLTT (Organización Latina Trans in Texas, a Latina trans woman-led organization focusing on transgender immigrants in Texas, assisting with the legal processes of immigration, name changes, and paperwork.) Both charities serve transgender folks directly in Texas, and you can donate to the organizations by following the links we have included in the article. Both charities were thrilled to learn about the donation – for OLTT, it’s the largest single donation they have ever received, and they will be able to use it to perform needed renovations and expansions at their shelter facilities.
Since the fundraiser ended, Rue has been interviewed by several national news outlets, including NBC, Gizmodo, and The Mary Sue, as well as gaming-centric websites like Polygon, Dicebreaker, and GamesHub. Although they have received some harassment and nasty DMs, Rue says that the support from the community has vastly overshadowed the naysayers. Similarly, he spoke of the overwhelming rush of support from trans folks, queer folks, and allies to the movement in the face of structural legislation that seeks to harm trans people.
“It restores a bit of my faith in humanity to see that on a structural level, they are trying to get rid of us, but on a community level, there is support – there will always be a place to go and people looking out for you.”
Tune in at 5 PM on Sunday, April 24 for this special episode of Inspiration Dissemination. Stream the show live or listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts! You can keep up with Rue and their games on twitter and itch.io.
Did you know humans have the ability to “taste” through smelling? Well we do, and it is through a process called retronasal olfaction. This fancy sounding term is just some of the ways that food scientists, such as our guest speaker this week, recent M.S. graduate and soon to be Ph.D. student, Jenna Fryer studies how flavors, or tastes through smell, are understood and what impact external factors have on them. Specifically, Fryer looks at the ways fires affect the flavors of wine, a particularly timely area of research due to the recent wave of devastating wildfires in Oregon.
Fryer at OSU’s vineyard
Having always been interested in food science, Fryer examines the ways smoke penetrates wine grapes. She does this by studying the ways people taste the smoke and how they can best rid the smokiness in their mouths, because spoiler, it has a pretty negative impact on the flavor. This research has forced her to develop novel ways to explain and standardize certain flavors, such as ashiness and mixed berry, as well as learn what compounds are the best palate cleansers. She will continue this research with her Ph.D. where she plans to figure out what compounds make that smoky flavor, and how best to predict which wines will taste like smoke in the future.
Through this work, Fryer has made some fascinating discoveries, such as how many people can actually detect the smoke flavor (because not everyone can), how best to create an ashy flavor (hint, it has to do with a restaurant in the UK and leeks), why red wine is more affected by smoke than white wines, and what the difference is between flavor and taste.
Fryer processing wine samples
Tune in live at 7pm on Sunday April 24th or listen to this episode anywhere you get your podcasts to learn about Fryer’s research!
And, if you are interested in being a part of a future wine study (and who wouldn’t want to get paid to taste wine), click on this link to sign up!
This week we have Colin Shea-Blymyer, a PhD student from OSU’s new AI program in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, joining us to talk about coding computer ethics. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are exploding, and while many of us are excited for a world where our Roomba’s evolve into Rosie’s (á la The Jetsons) – some of these technological advancements require grappling with ethical dilemmas. Determining how these AI technologies should make their decisions is a question that simply can’t be answered, and is best left to be debated by the spirits of John Stewart Mill and Immanual Kant. However, as a society, we are in dire need of a way to communicate ethics in a language that machines can understand – and this is exactly what Colin is developing.
Making An Impact: why coding computer ethics matters
A lot of AI is developed through machine learning – a process where software becomes more accurate without being explicitly told to do so. One example of this is through image recognition softwares. By feeding these algorithms with more and more photos of a cat – it will get better at recognizing what is and isn’t a cat. However, these algorithms are not perfect. How will the program treat a stuffed animal of a cat? How will it categorize the image of a cat on a t-shirt? When the stakes are low, like in image recognition, these errors may not matter as much. But for some technology being correct most of the time isn’t sufficient. We would simply not accept a pace-maker that operates correctly most of the time, or a plane that doesn’t crash into the mountains with just 95% certainty. Technologies that require a higher precision for safety also require a different approach to developing that software, and many applications of AI will require high safety standards – such as with self-driving cars or nursing robots. This means society is in need of a language to communicate with the AI in a way that it can understand ethics precisely, and with 100% accuracy. The Trolley Problemis a famous ethical dilemma that asks: if you are driving a trolley and see that it is going to hit and kill five pedestrians, but you could pull a lever to reroute the trolley to instead hit and kill one pedestrian – would you do it? While it seems obvious that we want our self-driving cars to not hit pedestrians, what is less obvious is what the car should do when it doesn’t have a choice but to hit and kill a pedestrian or to drive off a cliff killing the driver. Although Colin isn’t tackling the impossible feat of solving these ethical dilemmas, he is developing the language we need to communicate ethics to AI with the accuracy that we can’t achieve from machine learning. So who does decide how these robots will respond to ethical quandaries? While not part of Colin’s research, he believes this is best left answered by the communities the technologies will serve.
Colin doing a logical proof on a whiteboard with a 1/10 scale autonomous vehicle in the foreground.
The ArchIve: a (brief) history of AI
AI had its first wave in the 70’s, when it was thought that logic systems (a way of communicating directly with computers) would run AI. They also created perceptrons which try to mimic a neuron in a brain to put data into binary classes, but more importantly, has a very cool name. Perceptron! It sounds like a Spider-Man villain. However, logic and perceptrons turned out to not be particularly effective. There are a seemingly infinite number of possibilities and variables in the world, making it challenging to create a comprehensive code. Further, when AI has an incomprehensive code, it has the potential to enter a world it doesn’t know could even exist – and then it EXPLODES! Kind of. It enters a state known as the Principle of Explosion, where everything becomes true and chaos ensues. These challenges with using logic to develop AI led to the first “AI winter”. A highly relatable moment in history given the number of times I stop working and take a nap because a problem is too challenging.
The second wave of AI blew up in the 80’s/90’s with the development of machine learning methods and in the mid-2000’s it really took off due to software that can handle matrix conversions rapidly. (And if that doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s okay. Just know that it basically means speedy complicated math could be achieved via computers). Additionally, high computational power means revisiting the first methods of the 70’s, and could string perceptrons together to form a neural network – moving from binary categorization to complex recognition.
A bIography: Colin’s road to coding computer ethics
During his undergrad at Virginia Tech studying computer science, Colin ran into an ArachnId that left him bitten by a philosophy bug. This led to one of many philosophical dilemmas he’d enjoy grappling with: whether to focus his studies on computer science or philosophy? And after reading I, Robot answered that question with a “yes”, finding a kindred spirit in the robopsychologist in the novel. This led to a future of combining computer science with philosophy and ethics: from his Master’s program where he weaved computer science into his philosophy lab’s research to his current project developing a language to communicate ethics to machines with his advisor Hassam Abbas. However, throughout his journey, Colin has become less of a robopsychologist and more of a roboethicist.
Want more information on coding computer ethics? Us too. Be sure to listen live on Sunday, April 17th at 7PM on 88.7FM, or download the podcast if you missed it. Want to stay up to date with the world of roboethics? Find more from Colin at https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~sheablyc/.
Colin Shea-Blymyer: PhD student of computer science and artificial intelligence at Oregon State University
Basic biology and computer science is probably not an intuitive pairing to think of, when we think of pairs of scientific disciplines. Not as intuitive as say biology and chemistry (often referred to as biochem). However, for Joseph Valencia, a third year PhD student at OSU, the bridge between these two disciplines is a view of life at the molecular scale as a computational process in which cells store, transmit, and interpret the information necessary for survival.
Think back to your 9th or 10th grade biology class content and you will (probably? maybe?) vaguely remember learning about DNA, RNA, proteins, and ribosomes, and much more. In case your memory is a little foggy, here is a short (and very simplified) recap of the basic biology. DNA is the information storage component of cells. RNA, which is the focus of Joseph’s research, is the messenger that carries information from DNA to control the synthesis of proteins. This process is called translation and ribosomes are required to carry out this process. Ribosomes are complex molecular machines and many of them can also be found in each of our cells. Their job is to interpret the RNA. The way this works is that they attach themselves to the RNA, they take the transcript of information that the RNA contains, interpret it and produce a protein. The proteins fold into a specific 3D shape and the shape determines the protein’s function. What do proteins do? Basically control everything in our bodies! Proteins make enzymes which control everything from muscle repair to eye twitching. The amazing thing about this process is that it is not specific to humans, but is a fundamental part of basic biology that occurs in basically every living thing!
An open reading frame (ORF) is a stretch of nucleotides beginning with a start codon and ending with a stop codon. Ribosomes bind to RNA transcripts and translate certain ORFs into proteins. The Kozak sequence (bottom right, from Wikipedia) depicts the nucleotides that commonly occur around the start codons of translated ORFs.
So now that you are refreshed on your high school biology, let us tie all of these ‘basics’ to what Joseph does for his research. Joseph’s research focuses on RNA, which can be broken down into two main groups: messenger RNA (mRNA) and non-coding RNA. mRNA is what ends up turning into a protein following the translation by a ribosome, whereas with long non-coding RNA, the ribosome decides not to turn it into a protein. While we are able to distinguish between the two types of RNA, we do not fully understand how a ribosome decides to turn one RNA (aka mRNA) into a protein, and not another (aka long non-coding RNA). That’s where Joseph and computer science come in – Joseph is building a machine learning model to try and better understand this ribosomal decision-making process.
Machine learning, a field within artificial intelligence, can be defined as any approach that creates an algorithm or model by using data rather than programmer specified rules. Lots of data. Modern machine learning models tend to keep learning and improving when more data is fed to them. While there are many different types of machine-learning approaches, Joseph is interested in one called natural language processing . You are probably pretty familiar with an example of natural language processing at work – Google Translate! The model that Joseph is building is in fact not too dissimilar from Google Translate, or at least the idea behind it; except that instead of taking English and translating it into Spanish, Joseph’s model is taking RNA and translating (or not translating) it into a protein. In Joseph’s own words, “We’re going through this whole rigamarole [aka his PhD] to understand how the ins [RNA & ribosomes] create the outs [proteins].”.
A high-level diagram of Joseph’s deep learning model architecture.
But it is not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of complexities to the work because the thing that makes machine learning so powerful is that the exact complexities that gives these models the power that they have, also makes it hard to interpret why the model is doing what it is doing. Even a highly performing machine learning model may not capture the exact biological rules that govern translation, but successfully interpreting its learned patterns can help in formulating testable hypotheses about this fundamental life process.
To hear more about how Joseph is building this model, how it is going, and what brought him to OSU, listen to the podcast episode! Also, you can check out Joseph’s personal website to learn more about him & his work!
Much like Oregon’s forests experience wildfire seasons, the waters off the Oregon coast experience what are called “hypoxia seasons”. During these periods, which occur in the summer, northern winds bring nutrient-rich water to the Eastern Current Boundary off the Oregon Coast. While that might sound like a good thing, the upwells bring a bloom of microscopic organisms such as phytoplankton that consume these nutrients and then die off. As they die off, they sink and are then decomposed by marine microorganisms. This process of decomposition removes oxygen from the water, creating what’s called an oxygen minimum zone, or OMZs. These OMZs can span thousands of square miles. While mobile organisms such as fish can escape these areas and relocate, place-bound creatures such as crabs and bottom-dwelling fish can perish in these low oxygen zones. While these hypoxia seasons can occur due to natural phenomena, stratification of the water column due to other factors such as climate change can increase the frequency or severity of these seasons.
2021 was one of the worst years on record for hypoxic waters off the Western coast of the United States. A major contributing factor was the extremely early start to the upwelling triggered by strong winds. Measurements of dissolved oxygen and ocean acidity were high enough to be consistent with conditions that can lead to dead zones, and this is exactly what happened. Massive die-offs of crabs are concerning as the harvesting of Dungeness crab is one of the most lucrative fishing industries in the state. Other species and organisms move into shallower waters, disturbing the delicate balance of the coastal ecosystems. From the smallest microbe to the largest whale, almost every part of the coast can be affected by hypoxia season.
Our guest this week is Sarah Wolf, a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of Microbiology here at Oregon State. Sarah, who is co-advised by Dr. Steve Giovannoni and Dr. Francis Chan, studies how microbes operate in these OMZs. Her work centers around microbial physiology and enzyme kinetics, and how these things change over time and in varying oxygen concentrations. To do this, she spent her second year developing a mesocosm, which is a closed environment that allows for the study of a natural environment, which replicates conditions found in low oxygen environments.
Sarah Wolf, a fourth year PhD Candidate in the department of Microbiology, in her lab
Her experiments involve hauling hundreds of liters of ocean water from the Oregon coast back to her lab in Nash Hall, where she filters and portions it into different jugs hooked up to a controlled gas delivery system which allows her to precisely control the concentration of oxygen in the mesocosm. Over a period of four months Sarah samples the water in these jugs to look at the microbial composition, carbon levels, oxygen respiration rates, cell counts, and other measures of the biological and chemical dynamics occurring in low oxygen. Organic matter can get transformed by different microorganisms that “eat” different pieces through the use of enzymes, but many enzymes which can break down large, complex molecules require oxygen, and in low oxygen conditions, this can be a problem for the breakdown and accumulation of organic matter. This is the kind of phenomenon that Sarah is studying in these mesocosms, which her lab affectionately refers to as the “Data Machine”.
Sarah’s journey into science has been a little nontraditional. A first generation college student, she started out her education as a political science major at Montana State before moving to the University of the Virgin Islands for a semester abroad. At the time she wasn’t really sure how to get into research or science as a career. During this semester her interest in microbiology was sparked during an environmental science course which led to her first research experience, studying water quality in St. Thomas. This experience resulted in an award-winning poster at a conference, and prompted Sarah to change her major to Microbiology and transfer to California State University Los Angeles. Her second research experience was very different – an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory studying cleanroom microbiology, which resulted in a publication identifying two novel species of Bacillus isolated from the Kennedy Space Center. Ultimately Sarah’s journey brought her here to Oregon State, which she was drawn to because of its strong marine microbiology research program.
Sarah works on the “Data Machine”
But Sarah’s passion for science doesn’t stop at the lab: during the Covid-19 pandemic, she began creating and teaching lessons for children stuck at home. During this time she taught over 60 kids remotely, with lessons about microbes ranging from marine microbiology to astrobiology and even how to create your own sourdough starter at home. Eventually she compiled these lessons onto her website where parents and teachers alike can download them for use in classrooms and at home. She also began reviewing children’s science books on her Instagram page (@scientist.sarahwolf), and inviting experts in different fields to participate in livestreams about books relating to their topics. A practicing Catholic, she also shares thoughts and resources about religion and science, especially topics surrounding climate science. With around 12k followers, Sarah’s outreach on Instagram has certainly found its audience, and will only continue to grow.
If you’re curious about microbes in low oxygen conditions, what it’s like to be a science educator and social media influencer, or want to hear more about Sarah’s journey in her own words, tune in at 7 PM on March 13th to catch the live episode at 7 PM PST on 88.7 FM Corvallis, online at https://kbvrfm.orangemedianetwork.com – or you can catch this episode after the show airs wherever you get your podcasts!
Our guest this week, Dr. Ari Foley, is a recent (July 2021) OSU graduate from the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering. For her PhD research, she developed a rapid imaging method for post-detonation nuclear forensics. While methods to do this work already exist, a lot of them are time- and material-intensive. Therefore, the goal of Ari’s work was to develop a method that could inform optimized destructive analysis of samples after a detonation event of a nuclear weapon, with a particular focus on reducing the amount of imaging time required. Not only was Ari able to accomplish this task but the system she developed is able to take an image of the spatial distribution of radiation omitted from an object in the same exposure as taking a traditional photograph of the object being analyzed (see Image below). How in the world did Ari do this? Read below for a short synopsis or even better listen to the episode here!
A core component of Ari’s system was an electron-magnifying charged couple device, also known as an EMCCD. The CCD part of that is essentially a normal camera but the EM part magnifies the signal collected from whatever the camera is pointed at. Ari rigged an inorganic scintillation crystal to the EMCCD, which sits in a 3D-printed holder just in front of the camera. The purpose of the crystal is that once it is held in close proximity to radioactive fallout material from a detonation, the radiation interacts with the crystal, which leads to the emission of light. This light is proportional to the amount of energy that is imparted within the crystal. The EM part of the EMCCD kicks in as the image is taken as it allows for a high intensity image to be made that magnifies the light emitted from the crystal interacting with the radiation. This process needs to occur in light tight box, however it is mobile, meaning that it can easily be taken into the field and directly be used at a nuclear detonation site to measure the intensity of radiation of fallout material.
Ari spent the last three years of her PhD time in Idaho at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), which is one of the leading nuclear research labs in the USA and has close ties with OSU. In fact, Ari was one of two students in the inaugural class of INL Graduate Fellows, which enabled her to conduct this work while working full-time at the lab. However, Ari’s career may have gone down a very different path because she had always wanted to be an Arts student or pursue a career in human rights. However, during a summer school experience during her high school years, Ari attended a class on Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations. During this class, the students took a trip to the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York, which hosts a statue from Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The statue is of a woman holding a lamb, which from the front, looks completely normal. However, when you walk around to the back of the statue, the statue is completed charred and scarred – a consequence of the atomic bomb. The same class presented case studies of radiation contamination on tribal reservations in the USA. Seeing and learning these things really riled Ari up at the time because while she had been interested by radiation in chemistry class, she was suddenly confronted by the fact that radiation contamination were actual ongoing world issues.
Listen to the podcast episode here to learn more about the nitty-gritty of how Ari developed her nuclear forensic system, how she prevented from getting radiation in the lab, and her road to OSU!
Plants can get rusty. No joke! There is a fungal pathogen called rust which can cover the leaves of plants. This is problematic given that leaves are the site where photosynthesis occurs, the process whereby plants use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water in order to grow. While a plant may still be able to photosynthesize if the leaves contain just a little bit of rust, the more and more rust spreads across the leaves, the less and less surface area there is for photosynthesis to occur. When you get rust on a metallic item, there are several home remedies you can try to remove the rust, such as baking soda or a vinegar bath. But do plants have rust-removal options too? Possibly…and it’s what our guest this week, PhD student Maria-Jose Romero-Jimenez (or Majo), is trying to figure out.
Rusty leavesRusty leaves
Majo, who is in her second year of graduate school in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology here at OSU, is using black cottonwood as her plant study species. Black cottonwood is a Pacific Northwest native which has many uses, including the paper industry in Oregon. Recently, the Department of Energy has also listed the black cottonwood as a plant of interest for its potential use as a biofuel. As you can imagine, with this much large-scale interest in black cottonwood, there is also huge interest in understanding how it is affected by disease and pathogens, and what can potentially be done to prevent pathogens, such as rust, from spreading.
Yeast diversity panel
Fortunately, it seems like black cottonwood has a natural ally that helps it fend off rust – yeast! Majo’s main research goal is to figure out what yeast colonies are able to prevent rust infestation of black cottonwood plants. While this task may sound relatively straightforward, it sure isn’t. Majo’s work involves both field and lab work and is started in the fall of 2020 when Majo had to isolate yeast colonies from a bunch of leaves that were collected in the PNW (primarily Washington and Oregon). This work resulted in isolating almost 400 yeast colonies, from which Majo had to select a subset to grow in the lab. Meanwhile, baby black cottonwood plants needed to be propagated, potted, and cared for to ensure that Majo would have enough grown plants for her first round of greenhouse experiments. These experiments involved a series of treatments with different combinations of yeast colonies that were applied to the black cottonwood plants before being sprayed with rust to see how plants in different yeast treatments would do.
Curious to know what the results of Majo’s first round of experiments was and what the next steps are? You can download the episode anywhere you get your podcasts! Also, check out Majo’s Instagram (@fungibrush) for some educational videos on how she conducts her research (as well as a lesson in Spanish!).
It might sound like science fiction, but you’ve probably heard the phrase ‘gut-brain axis’ used in recent years to describe this phenomenon. What we call the “gut” actually refers to the small and large intestines, where a collection of microorganisms known as the gut microbiome reside. In addition to the microbes that inhabit it, your gut contains around 500 million neurons, which connect to your brain through bidirectional nerves – the biggest of which is the vagus nerve. Bacteria might be able to interact with specialized sensory cells within the gut lining and trigger neuronal firing from the gut to the brain.
Our guest this week is Caroline Hernández, a PhD student in the Maude David Lab in the Department of Microbiology, and she is studying exactly this phenomenon. While the idea that the gut and the brain are connected is not exactly new (ever heard the phrase “a gut feeling” or felt “butterflies” in your gut when you’re nervous?), there still isn’t much known about how exactly this works on a molecular level. This is what Caroline’s work aims to untangle, using an in vitro(which means outside of a living organism – in this case, cells in a petri dish) approach: if you could grow both the sensory gut cells and neurons in the same petri dish, and then expose them to gut bacteria, what could you observe about their interactions?
Caroline Hernández in her lab at Oregon State, using a stereo microscope to identify anatomical structures in a mouse before dissecting out a nerve bundle
The answer to this question could tell us a lot about how the gut-brain axis works on a molecular level, and could help researchers understand the mechanisms by which the gut microbiome can possibly modulate behavior, mood, learning, and cognition. This could have important implications down the line for how we conceptualize and potentially treat mood and behavioral disorders. Some mouse studies have already shown that mice treated with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus display reduced anxiety-like and depressive behaviors, for example – but exactly how this works isn’t really clear.
The challenges of in vitro research
Before these mechanisms can really be untangled, there are several challenges that Caroline is working on solving. The biggest one is just getting the cells to grow at all: Caroline and her team must first carefully extract specific gut sensory tissue and a specific ganglion (which is a blob of neurons) from mice, a delicate process that requires the use of specialized tools and equipment. Once they’ve verified that they have the correct anatomy, the tissues are moved into media, a liquid that contains specialized nutrients to help provide the cells with the growth factors they need to stay alive. Because this is very cutting-edge research, Caroline’s team is among the first in the world to attempt this technique – meaning there is a lot of trial and error and not a great amount of resources out there to help. There have been a number of hurdles along the way, but Caroline is no stranger to meeting challenges head-on and overcoming them with incredible resilience.
From art interactions to microbial interactions
Her journey into science started in a somewhat unexpected way: Caroline began her undergraduate career as a studio art major in community college. Her art was focused on interactivity and she was especially interested in how the person perceiving the art could interact with and explore it. Eventually she decided that while she was quite skilled at it, art was not the career path she wanted to pursue, so she switched into science, where she began her Bachelors of Science in molecular and cellular biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign.
During her undergraduate degree, a mental health crisis prompted Caroline to file for a medical withdrawal from her program. The break was much needed and allowed her to focus on taking care of herself and her health before returning to the rigorous and intense program three years later. Caroline is now a strong supporter of mental health resource awareness – in this episode of Inspiration Dissemination she will describe some of the challenges and barriers she faced when returning to finish her degree, and some of the pushback she faced when deciding to pursue a PhD.
“Not everyone was supportive,” she says. “I didn’t receive great encouragement from some of my advisors.”
Where she did find support and community was in her undergraduate research lab. Her work in this lab on the effects of diet and the microbiome on human health gave her the confidence to pursue graduate school, demonstrating that she was more than capable of engaging in independent research. In particular Caroline recalls her mentor Leila Shinn, a PhD student at the time in that lab, who had a profound impact on her decision to apply to graduate programs.
Tune in on Feb 27th to hear the rest of Caroline’s story and what brought her to Oregon State in particular. You can listen live at 7 PM PST on 88.7 FM Corvallis, online at https://kbvrfm.orangemedianetwork.com, or you can catch the episode after the show airs wherever you get your podcasts.
If you are an undergraduate student or graduate student at Oregon State University and are experiencing mental health struggles, you’re not alone and there are resources to help. CAPS offers crisis counseling services as well as individual therapy and support and skill-building groups.
At OSU there is a building called Milam Hall. It sits across the quad from the Memorial Union and houses many departments, including the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, where our guest this week, History and Philosophy of Science M.A. student Kathleen McHugh is housed. The building is certainly showing its age, with a perpetually leaky roof and well worn stairwells. But despite this, embedded in some of its classrooms, are hints of its former glory. It was once the location of the School of Home Economics, and was posthumously named after its longstanding dean, Ava B. Milam. While no books have been written about Milam, aside from her own autobiography, her story is one worth telling, and McHugh is doing just that with her M.A. thesis where she explores Milam’s deliberate actions to make home economics a legitimate scientific field.
Home Economics students cooking. Courtesy of Industrial-Arts Magazine.
During Milam’s tenure, home economics was a place where women could get an education and, most importantly, where they would not interfere with men’s scientific pursuits. It necessarily othered women and excluded them from science. But McHugh argues that Milam actively tried to shape home economics so that it was perceived as a legitimate science rather than a field of educational placation. And, as McHugh demonstrates through her research, in part due to Milam’s work, women are able to study science today without prejudice (well, for the most part. Obviously there is still a long way to go before there is full equality).
But exactly how Milam legitimized a field that–let’s be honest, probably immediately gives readers flashbacks of baking a cake in middle school or learning how to darn a sock –is exactly what McHugh explores in her thesis. Through meticulous archival research, and despite COVID hurdles, McHugh has created a compelling and persuasive narrative of Milam’s efforts to transform home economics into a science.
Guests waiting outside a tearoom at the 1919 San Francisco World’s Fair run by Home Economics students. Courtesy of Industrial-Arts Magazine.
Listen this week and learn how a cafe at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair and a house near campus that ran a nearly 50 year adoption service relate to Milam and her pioneering work. If you missed the live show, listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts.
