Tag Archives: research

Straying from the stream: investigating the impacts of spring Chinook salmon hatchery fish on wild, origin fish

Dams, climate change, habitat loss, predation, anglers. Wild salmon must contend with all of these challenges during some point in their lifetimes. But an additional challenge may be having a negative impact on wild salmon that we don’t yet quite understand: hatchery salmon. The main purpose behind rearing and releasing hatchery salmon into the wild is to increase the number of fish available for anglers (both recreational and commercial) to catch since wild salmon populations are too low in many areas to yield sustainable catches. However, when hatchery fish are released into the wild, some individuals stray. The term straying describes when hatchery fish go where they are not supposed to go. While some degree of straying can be positive because it helps maintain or increase genetic diversity within wild populations, too many hatchery strays could lead to problems for wild salmon. Investigating the impacts of hatchery salmon on wild salmon is no easy feat, and it’s not made easier when you’re trying to do it in possibly one of the most remote and wild places in Oregon…

But that’s exactly what our guest this week is doing! Emily Treadway is a first year Master’s student advised by Dr. Seth White in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at OSU. On top of being a graduate student, Emily is also an employee at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife working within the East Region Fish Research Office. By wearing these two hats and through support from the Lower Snake River Compensation Plan, Emily’s Master’s research aims to do three things: (1) establish baselines for the Wenaha River, (2) determine how a remote region like the Wenaha can be monitored cost-effectively into the future, and (3) hopefully implement certain mitigation efforts or designs that will help support healthy wild salmon populations.

If you want to hear more about Emily’s research, which involves kayaking on the Wenaha, scouting for river hazards, hiking into remote regions with huge solar panel-powered stationary antennas, then tune in to our live show with Emily this Sunday (October 20^th) at 7 pm PST on KBVR 88.7 FM!

If you miss the show, you can check out the interview wherever you get your podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else!

Changing the narrative of the sophomore slump

Going to college is an overwhelming and all-consuming experience. To help students cope with the new realities of college life, universities typically provide huge amounts of resources and support to freshmen during their first year. Once students hit their sophomore year, the assumption is that students are returning to something they’re already familiar with; they know what resources their school has to offer, how to sign up for classes, where to buy the best lunch on campus, and so on. Sophomores are expected to independently way find and the amount of support and provided resources fizzles out. This phenomena is referred to as the sophomore slump as research has shown that sophomores are in fact quite vulnerable compared to other college classes because of this drop-off in support. Shania Siron, who is in her third (and final!) year and advised by Dr. Tenisha Tevis at OSU, is our guest on the show this week and the focus of her Doctorate of Education dissertation research is the sophomore slump. Shania’s research aims at better understanding how college sophomores develop their abilities to self-author through engaging with career services, which Shania is pretty well-placed to do given that she doesn’t just wear a graduate student hat but she in fact also works full-time as the Assistant Director of Career and Fellowship Advising at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Schematic showing how Self-Authorship Theory intersects with the Center for Life Beyond Reed’s Purpose=Driven Career Advising Model

Tune in to our interview with Shania this Sunday (October 6^th) at 7 pm PST on KBVR 88.7 FM to learn about Reed College’s unique advising model, what it means to self-author, and Shania’s journey from being an undergraduate Duck at University of Oregon to being a graduate Beaver at Oregon State University!

If you miss the live show, you can check out the interview wherever you get your podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else!

From hooves to helicopters: the study of foot-and-mouth disease virus in African buffalo

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus is one of the most infectious viral diseases in the world. FMD virus affects all cloven-hooved animals and there have been outbreaks all over the world except for in North America. While FMD virus doesn’t necessarily cause fatality in animals, it causes severe milk production losses and can leave affected individuals severely weakened and debilitated. This is particularly problematic for people who keep livestock as it can affect their livelihoods and economic welfare. Our guest this week is Cambrey Knapp, a 2^nd year PhD student in Comparative Health Science who is studying wildlife-livestock interactions related to FMD virus around Kruger National Park in South Africa. African buffalo within Kruger National Park harbor FMD virus and it can spillover to livestock that are kept in the surrounding areas outside of the park. Cambrey’s research is investigating which viral lineages of FMD virus are most prone to spillover and the temporal aspects of transmission by looking at historic and contemporary African buffalo and cattle samples.

Curious to know how helicopters factor in to the whole story? Tune in to our interview with Cambrey this Sunday (June 2^nd) at 7 pm PST on KBVR 88.7 FM. If you miss the live show, you can check out the interview wherever you get your podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else!

Working towards sustainability in the doula workforce

Studies have shown that birthing mothers paired with doulas have better birth outcomes than mothers that do not work with doulas. For example, doula-assisted mothers are four times less likely to have a low birth weight baby, two times less likely to experience a birth complication and are significantly more likely to initiate breast-feeding, compared to non-doula-assisted mothers¹. Yet, the doula workforce suffers from high levels of burn-out often due to being underpaid, overextended, and disrespected in their work, which often results in doulas leaving the profession². Given the clear benefits of doula-assisted pregnancy and birth, these issues need to be solved. But, how? Well, one person on the job is Master’s student Katie Minich! Katie is in the Applied Anthropology program working with Drs. Melissa Cheyney and David Lewis. Katie’s research aims to better understand how we can improve the sustainability and best practices for doulas post-training.

Tune in to our interview with Katie this Sunday (May 26^th) at 7 pm PST on KBVR 88.7 FM. We will be covering a whole range of topics, including Katie’s eight years of experience as a doula herself, why Oregon is one of the best places to be a doula in the US, and more!

If you miss the live show, you can check out the interview wherever you get your podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else!

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics discussed, check out the following resources:

Minich, K. I. (2023). “Listening to Doulas in Southern Oregon: Exploring Motivations and Experiences of Birthworkers.” McNair National Research Journal, 2. https://maop14.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/2023-McNair%20National%20Research%20Journal%20-%20FINAL.pdf

Minich, K. I. (2023) “Listening to Doulas in Southern Oregon: Understanding Value and Care.” Southern Oregon University Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program McNair Scholars Journal, 19. https://digital.sou.edu/digital/collection/p16085coll19/id/23004/rec/18

The Uplift Lab: Home – Uplift Lab

Profile on research award: Announcing the Deanna Kingston Scholarship for Graduate Student Excellence | Anthropology, Anthropology Academic Programs, Graduate Anthropology, Prospective OSU Anthropology Graduate Students | College of Liberal Arts | Oregon State University

Graduate Student profile: Anthropology Graduate Students | Anthropology, About Anthropology, Faculty & Staff Directory | College of Liberal Arts | Oregon State University

References

¹ Gruber, K.J., Cupito, S.H., and Dobson, C.F. (2013) Impact of Doulas on Healthy Birth Outcomes. The Journal of Perinatal Education, 22(1): 49-58.

² MamaGlow Foundation. (2023) Birth worker burnout: Exploring integrative approaches to nurturing a healthy doula workforce. https://mamaglowfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Birth_Worker_Burnout_Brief.pdf

Welfare, TANF, and Higher Ed: Students thrive when we remove the barriers

In 2023, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) distributed aid to nearly 20,000 families, and approximately 40,000 individual recipients in the state of Oregon (FY2023 TANF Caseload). The families and individuals who receive TANF often face unseen difficulties and obstacles, especially related to higher education. This week on ID, we speak with Terese Jones, a recent PhD graduate in Human Development and Family Sciences. Terese’s dissertation work centered around TANF recipients, the challenges they face with higher education, developing a pilot program to address these challenges, and assessing the outcomes.

Terese’s research identifies many common obstacles that TANF students face, a few of which are a lack of information about resources, stigma surrounding the use of these resources, and practices and procedures that discourage students from using these resources. In the program she developed, she sought to eliminate some of these barriers. For example, she removed a requirement that certain students receiving assistance needed to provide a state issued form that tracked their class attendance, which had to be signed by their professors. This change was the most positively received component of the program among the participants because it eliminated a significantly embarrassing and uncomfortable experience for the students.

Terese found that eliminating some of the barriers the students identified allowed them to expand what is called “possible selves” which refers to the futures that students can imagine and identify as possible for themselves. Students who initially sought to become phlebotomists changed their career trajectory towards nursing when they realized they would have the support to do so. Additionally, the participants also expanded their “public selves” which refers to how they see themselves within their community/public life. Many of these students saw themselves going back to their communities as health professionals, addiction and counseling professionals, and social service and welfare professionals.

Terese says that she found herself relating to these students because she also has a background of poverty that drove her through her higher education journey. She is now continuing her work in a position at LBCC, where she is developing more programs centered around deep poverty in Linn-Benton county with the hopes of making a difference in the lives of people in our community. To learn more about Terese and her work, check out this week’s episode of ID. Also take a look at some of the resources Terese provided below!

Emergency Financial Assistance — Vina Moses Center

Family Support Program – Corvallis Public Schools Foundation (cpsfoundation.org)

South Corvallis Food Bank

Training the trainers who train trainers of little humans

Do you feel dizzy after reading that title? Me too, after writing it, but this week on the show we did indeed speak to a trainer of the trainers who train trainers of little humans! Meet Maya Johnson, a 3rd year PhD student in the School of Human Development and Family Sciences. For her research, Maya studies early childhood education policy and the childcare system within Oregon, with a pretty applied policy focus. Alongside doing her research, in her capacity as a graduate research assistant at OSU, some of what Maya does is to write trainings and coaching systems for individuals who train early childhood educators (hence the trainer of trainers who train trainers).

Check out our interview with Maya wherever you get your podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We cover a whole range of topics related to early childhood education, such as the HeadStart program, the childcare crises, why we don’t know a whole lot about the education stats of children under the age of 6 in Oregon, and what Maya is doing to hopefully change that problem!

If you’re interested in learning more about some of the topics discussed, check out the following resources:

A “policy brief” that Maya put together for a final project in a social policy class she took: Toward Just and Livable Wages: Early Educator Compensation Reform in Oregon
The Oregon Child Care Research Partnership is where a lot of the early childcare education policy research in Oregon comes from if you want to know more about the kind of research that goes into child care policy.
Maya works on the Early Learning System Initiative (ELSI) in helping build a system of support for Oregon’s early educators.
If you want to learn more about Maya or get in touch with her, here is her OSU profile page: https://health.oregonstate.edu/directory/maya-johnson

Sniffing for science

On our last episode for winter term, we interviewed Kayla Fratt, who is currently a PhD student in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences. However, aside from being a graduate student, Kayla is also one of the founders and trainers for K9 Conservationists, an organization that unites highly trained conservation detection dog teams with researchers to collect scientific data. For her graduate research, Kayla is working with her canine colleagues, Barley & Niffler, to understand island biogeography effects on diet and movement for sea wolves in southeast Alaska and basic natural history of pumas in El Salvador.

If you’re curious to hear all about how Kayla became a certified dog behavior consultant, how and why in the world you train a dog to sniff out poop, and the plans for Kayla’s PhD dissertation, check out the podcast episode anywhere you listen to podcasts, including on our KBVR page, Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

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!

Exploding Cheeses and Microbes at Work

For those of us who consume dairy products, we often don’t give much thought to the trials and tribulations that had to be faced to get that product on the grocery shelves. It’s probably a fair assumption to say that most of us have never considered that cheese could explode, but that is the center of Madeleine Enriquez’s graduate research.

Madeleine (Maddie) is a master’s student in the laboratory of Joy Waite-Cusic, and she investigates dairy microbiology and spoilage, particularly mitigating “gas defects” in cheese. In semi-hard to hard cheeses certain microorganisms can cause build-up of gasses called “gas defects” which can eventually lead to blow-outs of the cheese in its packaging, or significant structural defects within the cheese (think Swiss cheese holes where they’re not supposed to be). Maddie works on practical and easy ways to mitigate these gas defects for small dairy farmers. Some of the variables include aging temperature, bioprotective cultures, or combinations of both.

Maddie’s interest in this particular area of food science originally stemmed from her grandfather, who was a dairy farmer. She went to the University of Connecticut for her bachelor’s degree in animal science. While there she participated in undergraduate research on dairy farms, particularly focusing on dairy microbiology later in her degree. This eventually led to her coming to Oregon State to further her education in dairy food science.

If you want to hear more about exploding cheese, making gouda on a weekly basis, and strapping wheels of cheese in for a CT scan, tune in for this episode of ID airing live on Jan 21, 2024.

Poopy predators: Assessing carnivore diet and population dynamics via non-invasive genetics

Getting to the bottom of what top predators in an ecosystem are eating is critical to understand how they may be influencing dynamics in the entire system and food web. But how do you figure out what a predator is eating if it’s hard to catch and collar or watch continuously? Easy, you use their poop! Ellen Dymit, a 4^th year graduate student in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences advised by Dr. Taal Levi, is our guest on the show this week and she is a poop-tracker extraordinaire!

For her PhD research, Ellen uses primarily non-invasive genetic methods to study large carnivores in two projects in Alaska and Central America. While the systems and carnivores she studies for these two projects are pretty different, the techniques she uses to analyze the collected scats are the same. The Alaska project is focused on determining what different wolf populations and packs across coastal Alaska are consuming, whether individuals are specialized in their feeding habits, and how large the populations are. The Central America project, which is based out of Guatemala, looks at a whole host of predators, including jaguars, pumas, and ocelots, to gain a better understand of the food web dynamics in the ecosystem.

One of Ellen’s extremely remote field camps in Alaska

Both of these projects involve some unique challenges in the field that Ellen has had to learn to tackle. DNA can deteriorate pretty quickly, especially in warm Guatemalan temperatures, which is problematic when you’re trying to analyze it. Yet, Ellen’s lab has perfected methods over the last few years to work with neotropical samples. Ellen’s Alaska field work is incredibly remote as it’s just Ellen and one field technician roaming the Alaskan tundra in search of wolf scat. Accessing her field sites involves being flown in on a small fixed wing plane, where they are extremely space and weight-limited. Therefore, every single piece of gear needs to be weighed to ensure that the pilot has enough fuel to get to the site and back. As a result, Ellen isn’t able to collect the entire scat samples that she finds but can only take a small, representative sample.

Ellen’s incredibly adventurous field work is followed by months spent in the lab processing her precious scat samples. So far, her results have revealed some pretty interesting differences in diet of wolf packs and populations across three field sites in Alaska. The Guatemalan project, which occurs in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society Guatemala, is one of the first to analyze a large sample size of ocelot scats and the first to attempt DNA metabarcoding of samples collected in the neotropics.

To hear more details about both of these projects, as well as Ellen’s background and some bad-a$$ stories from her Alaskan field work, tune in this Sunday, October 15^th live on 88.7 FM or on the live stream. Missed the show? You can listen to the recorded episode on your preferred podcast platform!

Inspiration Dissemination

Inspiring Stories From Oregon State Graduate Students on 88.7 KBVR FM