The Wesleyan Connection

Several Wesleyan faculty, graduate students and alumni participated in the 2009 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting Oct. 18-21 in Portland, Ore.

Suzanne O’Connell, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, director of the Service Learning Center, presented a research poster and delivered a presentation titled “Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention and promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences.” She spoke about the grant-funded organization Geoscience Academics in the Northeast (GAIN), which was established to build a community of academic geoscience women within a small geographic area.

Johan Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences, presented an abstract of his research titled “Twelve Years of Element Flux Measurements at Copahue Volcano.” He spoke about measuring water fluxes and river water compositions on the volcano for the last 12 years including a magmatic eruption period in 2000.

Varekamp and Ellen Thomas, research professor of earth and environmental sciences, presented the paper “Natural and Human Impacts on the Evolution of Block Island, RI.” Sarah Gillig ‘09, Emma Kravet ‘09 and Conor Veeneman ‘09 also contributed to the paper.

Dana Royer, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, gave a talk titled “Leaf Economic Traits from Fossils Support a Weedy Origin for Angiosperms.” Royer explained how many key aspects of early angiosperms are poorly known. By studying leaf economic traits such as photosynthetic rate and leaf lifespan, Royer concludes that early Cretaceous landscapes were populated with weedy angiosperms with short lived leaves.

Royer’s former post-doc Dan Peppe and Gabriela Doria M.A. ‘09 gave a talk. McNair Fellow Sofia Oliver ‘10 attended and co-authored Peppe’s paper.

Earth and Environmental Sciences major James Rea ‘09, who currently works at the Cascade Volcano Observatory, presented his work on “Regional Magmatic Setting of Callaqui Volcano (S-Andes, Chile).” Rea samples several rocks from lava flows, scoria cones and dikes around the volcano for trace elements, mineral chemistry and radiogenic isotope compositions.

Earth and Environmental Sciences graduate student Tristan Kading presented a similar abstract titled “Copahue Volcano, Argentina: Introducing ‘Extreme Environments’ on Earth to High School Students” and “Lake Caviahue, Argentina as a Source-Sink for Volcanic Arsenic and Phosphorus.”  Kadding has spoke to local high school students about field work in the small village of Caviahue. The talks highlight the nature of geological field work while touching on some important basic concepts in earth science.

Other attendees included Peter Patton, professor and chair of earth and environmental sciences and Emma Mendelsohn ‘10.

Edward Moran says he measures the mass of black holes by its gravitational effects on something else that's nearby.

5 Questions is a new feature in The Wesleyan Connection that will ask faculty members – surprise! – five questions about their work and activities.

This issue, the questions go to Edward Moran, chair and associate professor of astronomy and director of the Van Vleck Observatory. His primary area of study is black holes. This summer he received a major National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for an extensive study on “intermediate mass” black holes.

Q: Everyone thinks they know, but once and for all: what is a black hole?

EM: Technically, black holes are places where matter has been crushed down to a single point. In other words, blacks hole can have the mass of a star but absolutely no size. They therefore have infinite density and, in their immediate vicinity, an extremely intense gravitational field.

Q: How are black holes created?

EM: We only know how stellar-mass black holes are created, which is from the explosions of very large stars. As for the types of black holes I study, the “supermassive” black holes that are found at the centers of galaxies, how they are created and what their initial masses are remain open questions at this time. I’m trying (more…)

Biology Ph.D. candidate Kate Miller records echolocation calls of bats at one of four study sites along Middletown's Coginchaug River. Miller hopes to identify which types of stream habitats have the most activity, and uncover critical habitats in Connecticut. (Photos by Olivia Bartlett Drake)

Biology Ph.D candidate Kate Miller treks through a wildflower-lined trail alongside Middletown’s Coginchaug River. She approaches a plastic garbage bin and a PCV pipe protruding from the ground.

“That’s my bat echolocation recorder,” she says. “It’s old but I’m not complaining. It was free and it works.” Miller credits Scott Reynolds, Ph.D, of North East Ecological Services in Concord, N.H. for the loan of the equipment.

Inside the crude setup is a 12-volt battery, an echolocation call recorder and lap-top computer. Every 1.5 seconds, the equipment translates the information into a graph and stores it as a data file on the laptop. Miller opens the lap top and examines the graph, which reveals recorded frequencies vs. time on two axis, in real-time.

The meadow is alive with audible sounds of songbirds, crickets and cicadas.

“Right now we’re picking up something with a 10 to 15 kilohertz frequency. We know that’s not a bat since their calls are usually between 25 and 80 kilohertz,” Miller explains, eyeing the lines on the graph. “Humans can only hear frequencies up to about 20 kilohertz.”

Building on studies that identify stream corridors as prime foraging habitats for bats, Miller hopes to identify which types of stream habitats have the most activity. She also hopes to determine whether or not the composition and abundance of “benthic macroinvertebrates” – mostly aquatic larvae that live on the stream bottom and hatch into flying insects the bats consume – is at all correlated (more…)

Robert Lane, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, is researching an odorant receptor gene regulatory system. (Photo by Olivia Bartlett Drake)

In order for animals to detect food sources, avoid predators and find mates, they rely on their olfactory system, or sense of smell.

The ability to detect and distinguish among thousands of environmental odorants is based on a combinatorial recognition system. A specific smell is coded in the brain by a specific combination of receptor proteins that get stimulated by the unique combination of odorant chemicals elicited by that scent.

“The smell of ‘lemons,’ for example, would result from a specific combination of odorant receptor proteins that become stimulated upon binding the specific set of inhaled chemicals emitted from a lemon,” explains Robert Lane, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Lane will further investigate a complex odorant receptor gene regulatory system. His study, titled “Cross-Disciplinary Science & Investigation of Olfactory Receptor Gene Regulation” was funded with a two-year, $299,995 NSF grant (more…)

Hughes Fellow Juan Carlo Francisco '11 speaks to Michael Weir, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, professor of biology, about his project "Comparative Analysis of Ecotype Demarcation Algorithms" during the 2009 Summer Undergraduate Research Poster Presentations July 31 in Exley Science Center. Francisco's advisors were Danny Krizanc, professor of computer science, and Fred Cohan, professor of biology.

Hughes Fellow Danielle Mor ’10 speaks about her research titled “Identifying Migration Guidance Factors for Transplanted Neural Stem Cells in the Epileptic Hippocampus." Mor’s advisor is Laura Grabel, the Lauren B. Dachs Professor of Science and Society, professor of biology.

(more…)

Anna Shusterman, assistant professor of psychology, received a five-year National Science Foundation grant.

Anna Shusterman, assistant professor of psychology, recently received a five-year, $716,227 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study “The role of language in children’s acquisition of number concepts.” Shusterman will be evaluating 3-to-5-year-old hearing children in her Cognitive Development Laboratory at Wesleyan. She also will be studying deaf and hard-of-hearing children of the same ages who are learning English to try to determine how language delays affect children’s learning of number concepts.

The grant, which begins this year, comes from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. The program is only available to non-tenured faculty. Researchers may apply a total of three times to the program; Shusterman was awarded the grant on her first application.

“The CAREER Program truly provides NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty and demonstrates (more…)

Henk Meij, senior consultant and manager of Unix Systems Group, stands by two racks of blades, which were donated by Blue Sky Studios.

Next fall, Wesleyan students and faculty will perform research activities on the same state-of-the-art animation computers that produced Ice Age the Meltdown, a $652 million worldwide box office hit.

The computer hardware was donated July 2 by Greenwich, Conn.-based Blue Sky Studios, the creator of a number of award-winning digital animation features, including the Ice Age series and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, which took in nearly $300 million worldwide.

In 2008, Blue Sky Studios refreshed their technology for their latest movie, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and bought racks of new computers.

“The old computer racks still had a lot of life left in them, so we went looking for large colleges and universities in Connecticut that might be able to make use of this kind of computing infrastructure, and to which we might donate these computers,” explains Andrew Siegel, head of systems at Blue Sky Studios. “Wesleyan seemed like a good candidate.”

Blue Sky arranged for the racks to be delivered to the Exley Science Center loading dock. They are now housed on the fifth floor of Information Technology Services.

“We requested two, but they graciously gave us four,” Ganesan “Ravi” Ravishanker, associate vice president for Information Technology Services.

Each rack holds 52 Angstrom Microsystem-brand “blades,” with a memory footprint of 12 or 24 gigabytes each. Combined, Blue Sky donated about 3.7 terabytes of total memory.

“This is just phenomenal,” says Henk Meij, senior consultant and manager of Unix Systems Group. “Once it’s in full operation, it’s going to be much appreciated by the researchers. (more…)

Ellen Thomas

A paper co-authored by Ellen Thomas, research professor of earth and environmental sciences, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2009.

In the article, “Surviving mass extinction by bridging the benthic/planktic divide,” Thomas and her colleagues show a very unexpected observations, i.e. that a species of foraminifera, which lives floating in the surface waters of the Indian Ocean, is genetically the same as a species living on the bottom of the ocean in shallow waters (between tide levels, coast of Kenya) – using DNA analysis.

“We then show, using a sophisticated way of chemical analysis, that it was not just blown there by storms, but formed its shell there in the surface waters,” Thomas explains. “We then interpret these data, and argument that such species that live both on the bottom and floating in surface waters (until now unknown for foraminifera) are much better able to survive the adverse environmental effects at such times as the meteorite impact that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

The story is written up by the UK counterpart of the National Science Foundation (NERC), which funded the first author of the paper, Kate Darling.

Evan Perkoski ’10 is a recipient of a 2009-10 Undergraduate Research Program grant sponsored by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Perkoski, who is majoring in government, will study “Counterterrorism and ETA in Spain.” His faculty advisor is Erica Chenoweth, assistant professor of government.

Undergraduate Research Program recipients are actively engaged in critical research related to the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism, consistent with the mission of START. Each recipient is paid $3,000 to enhance his/her START research and professional development and receives funds to attend the 2010 START Annual Meeting in College Park, MD.