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UVM Impact
Graduate Education and Research News November 2022
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| Welcome
Welcome to the November issue of IMPACT, an e-newsletter highlighting research, scholarship, and graduate education at the University of Vermont (UVM). The Graduate College and the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) have been keeping up the busy pace this semester. Dean Cindy Forehand held the Fall Graduate Faculty Meeting in November where she discussed new hires and searches, the new course numbering system, and her impending retirement. VP Dombrowski and his team have been sharing research news widely and have continued to add funding successes to their Research Timeline, including three in November.
Please read on and discover what else has been happening.
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Featured Graduate Student
Irfan Tahir is a Ph.D. candidate and New Harvest Fellow in UVM's Engineered Biomaterials Research Laboratory (EBRL). A native of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Irfan's academic path—which spans from Turkey to Vermont via Minnesota—may, at first glance, seem circuitous, but upon closer inspection, one sees that things unfolded just as they should have, and Irfan seems to have landed exactly where he was meant to be. Fortunately, he discovered his academic interests at key moments and then courageously pursued them—even when it meant pushing the boundaries of a set academic path. He is glad to have found an area of research that aligns morally with his values of reducing animal suffering and that marries his background in engineering with his love of cell biology. Irfan's research work is in cultivated meat, a subsector of the cellular agriculture field. To cultivate meat, Irfan grows cells from a biopsy and applies them to a scaffold, a nourishing microenvironment that the cells need to grow. To date, many of the materials used to build scaffolding are neither ethically sourced nor sustainable. So, Irfan is focused on finding sustainable, scalable alternatives such as alginate, a polymer found in brown seaweed. Irfan and his advisor, Dr. Rachael Floreani, have made significant headway in this area. See more >>>
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Graduate Student Senate The purpose of the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) is to enhance all aspects of graduate school life at the University of Vermont—both academic and nonacademic activities that affect the graduate student body. As indicated in the GSS constitution, the Graduate Student Senate shall consider any matter that directly influences or affects the graduate student body as a valid item for its interest and deliberation. In short, GSS acts as a liaison between UVM’s administration and graduate students.
GSS collaborates with recognized clubs to ensure that the needs and priorities of the graduate student body are being considered, including those of the Graduate Student Parents Club. In conversations with the Graduate Student Parents Club leadership, GSS learned that there was a perception that UVM had completely eliminated childcare services for UVM families. In the public comment period of the October 2022 Board of Trustees, someone raised the same concern. Seeking to support graduate student parents, GSS brought these concerns to meetings with President Garimella and Provost Prelock. In these meetings it was discovered that childcare services are, indeed, available through the Trinity Children’s Center (TCC), with some spaces reserved for UVM families. Clearly, misperceptions among parents who work and study at UVM existed because the students concerned were not connected with relevant resources. Sometimes, when GSS advocates for graduate students, the changes achieved are not inherently structural; instead, sometimes, the changes involve educating graduate students and the broader UVM community about opportunities which are already available.
(By Justin Salisbury, GSS President)
Photo: GSS President Justin Salisbury (left) and GSS VP Ijaz Ul Haq (middle) meeting with UVM President Garimella (right).
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University Scholar Lecture: Kimberly Vannest, Ph.D.
Professor and Chairperson, Department of Education
Professor Vannest notes that public schools routinely screen for vision, hearing, or academic learning problems, but few schools in the United States engage in screening for social, emotional, or behavioral risk despite evidence that 1 in 5 children may need services and research indicating emotions and behavior impact learning outcomes. This educational omission deprives equal access to learning environments or quality educational experiences—particularly when school settings are the access point to social supports and mental health care for youth. How can we better approach this challenge: What can we do, what should we do, and why aren’t we doing it? It is time to do better.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy Professor Vannest's inaugural University Scholar lecture: Universal Screening for Social, Emotional, Behavioral Health in Schools: Students and Teachers at Risk.
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Postdoctoral AssociationThe Dean's Celebration of Excellence in Research is an annual three-day event that highlights the research being conducted by junior faculty, senior faculty, postdoctoral trainees, and graduate students at UVM's Larner College of Medicine (LCOM). Many of UVM's postdocs were involved in the Excellence in Research Week this year, which ran from October 31st through November 2nd, 2022. This event had many highlights, such as the Graduate Student Research Showcase, the Dean’s Excellence in Research Awards, and the Research Laureate Lecture from Professor Yvonne Janssen-Heininger. For postdoctoral researchers, the event also included a poster session, which allowed postdocs to highlight their work to the broader LCOM community. Part of the awards ceremony was an award for Outstanding Research Publication, and the postdoctoral category was won by Dr. Nicholas Klug for his publication “Adenosine signaling activates ATP-sensitive K+ channels in endothelial cells and pericytes in CNS capillaries”. Nicholas is mentored by Professor Mark Nelson in the Department of Pharmacology. The Larner College of Medicine is also once again hosting the Research Tapas Seminar Series. These seminars, which are open to anyone wishing to attend, offer a fantastic avenue for postdocs to get training beyond the lab bench--training that will round out their experience at UVM and help prepare them for wherever their career takes them next. The UVM Postdoctoral Association (PDA) encourages all postdocs to consider attending these events and extends a sincere congratulates the individuals whose research accomplishments were celebrated during the Dean’s Excellence in Research Week.
(By Brandon Bensel, UVM PDA Co-Chair)
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Postdoc Spotlight: Ajit Singh
Ajit Singh, Ph.D., is a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Karen C. Glass where he seeks to uncover how chemical modifications of histone proteins, generally known as epigenetic modifications, manage DNA packing and make it accessible for translation of information contained in its unique DNA sequence. To do this he gets to use some very high-tech equipment, including his favorite: the cryo-electron microscope. In the Glass Lab, Singh's research is specifically focused on bromodomain-containing proteins in Plasmodium falciparum. P. falciparum is a unicellular eukaryote and is the main cause of malaria cases worldwide. This is important work because malaria affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. According to a WHO estimate, there were 409,000 recorded global malaria fatalities in 2019, with children under 5 years old being the age group most impacted. There is a pressing need to define the molecular pathways behind pathogenesis in P . falciparum because of this parasite's recent alarming increase in drug-resistance. Read more about Ajit Singh and his important work. See more >>>
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| Graduate Program Spotlight
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Program Spotlight
“We know that, increasingly, the need for mental health support among our children and families far exceeds what they can get outside of school,” says Justin Garwood, one of five core faculty leading the project in the College of Education and Social Services (CESS). “So, how do we meet these needs in school? We will train the future leaders who will help us answer that question.”
The Ph.D. in SHIE will prepare future leaders in higher education through a rigorous pedagogical, theoretical, and methodological program anchored in community-engaged, equity-oriented, trauma-informed, and evidence-based practices. A comprehensive, cohort-based approach is designed to cultivate future faculty members who teach effectively and conduct high-quality research that is relevant, cutting-edge, and useful in supporting positive child outcomes. Read more in Doug Gillman's article. See more >>>
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Research Spotlight
In collaboration with 28 universities and institutions, the University of Vermont (UVM) is advancing its status as a preeminent institution in the field of hydrological research.
As outlined in a recent UVM article, this new initiative was made possible through the tireless efforts of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., with transformative support from the federal government of up to $25 million over the next five years. It establishes the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH). CIROH is a national consortium of science and services to provide actionable water resources intelligence to improve a national water model and flood forecasting. Headquartered at the University of Alabama Water Institute (AWI), CIROH consists of academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and government and industry partners across the United States and Canada.
CIROH at UVM will work closely with two federal organizations—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Water Center and the recently announced U.S. Geological Survey Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility—allowing for highly productive collaboration between CIROH’s cooperative members and other federal agency scientists in pursuit of supporting four broad themes:
-Water resources prediction capabilities.
-Community water resources modeling.
-Hydroinformatics.
-Application of social, economic, and behavioral science to water resources prediction.
Click through to view a CIROH at UVM project spotlight slideshow. See more >>>
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Alumni NewsZhaojin Li, Ph.D., is a 2021 graduate of the UVM Neuroscience Graduate Program. She is currently working as a scientist on the Research and Development team at Calico (Calico Life Sciences, LLC) in San Francisco. Calico’s mission is to understand the biology of aging and longevity in order to develop interventions that allow people to live longer, healthier lives. To contribute to a growing body of cutting-edge research in the science of human longevity, Calico has created a culture similar to many Silicon Valley start-ups where scientists and engineers have the freedom to explore, take chances, and follow their own scientific pursuits and passions within the aging categories. At Calico, Dr. Li supports early discovery projects and helps with new target validation. She is currently working on a project that has identified a new target, and she and her team are exploring the functions of this target in the aging processes of multiple organs/diseases. Scientists at Calico don’t limit themselves to a specific set of age-related diseases but instead ask open-ended questions about how we humans age and about the diseases associated with the aging process. Click through to learn more about Zhaojin Li, her work at Calico, and what she misses most about Vermont. See more >>>
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