Fordham College at Lincoln Center Students Show Off Research

Photos by Patrick Verel

The plaza and street level of Lowenstein Center were abuzz on April 11 as 42 juniors and seniors from Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) shared their research with the Fordham community.

The research fair, which was followed by an awards ceremony, featured topics in humanities, sciences. and visual and performing arts.

Molly Clemens, a junior from Rochester majoring in environmental science, was stationed on the plaza to discuss “Drought Creates Stress Memory for European Beech Trees,” which she worked on at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. 

A DAAD Rise scholarship enabled her to travel to Germany last summer, where Laura Nagy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bayreuth, served as her mentor.

Clemens' research concerned whether or not European Beech trees have the ability to adapt to a drought and survive a second drought better.

Molly Clemens chats with a research fair attendee.

“We set up four different control groups using 60 beech trees, and we subjected them to four different regiments of water-we had a control drought, a control for the control, and then the double drought,” she said.

“What we were able to see is that the double drought plants were able to recover better and survived better than the control drought plants did that did not undergo the first draught.”

Clemens hopes to build on this research with a Fulbright scholarship that she is applying for in Australia. She also worked on two other projects in Germany, where she was given a lot of leeway to choose how to approach research.

“The other project was a biodiversity project assessing the biodiversity of grasses, so we would spend long hours smelling grasses and biting them and feeling them, because it's actually very hard to distinguish between them if you just have a pile of grass,” she said. 

“It was very hands-on science.”

Lauren Vogelstein observes Ailey/Fordham BFA students
performing her dance "I think I heard you say that once."

Down on the street level, Lauren Vogelstein was showing off an independent study in choreography. Vogelstein, a senior Ailey/Fordham BFA student from Chicago, presented a demonstration of the dance “I Think I Heard You Say That Once,” which she described as the culmination of four years of trying and failing to create something she was truly happy with.

“I’ve learned what my teachers have been telling me all along, which is that you have to let go of the preciousness of your work in order to create something you really love,” she said. 

Vogelstein is also earning a bachelor's of science in mathematics and will be working at the Museum of Mathematics after graduation. Although she has done formal mathematical research with one of her professors, she chose to present dance at the fair. 

“I thought it was important to show art in a context as research, because I don’t think a lot of people think you can do research in the arts, so I wanted to bring that to the fair today,” she said. 

Cody Brown and Nick Espinoza show off their UAV, which
is capable of analyzing wireless networks from the air.

On the ground floor by the Center Gallery, were Cody Brown and Nick Espinoza, seniors majoring in computer science and political science and information science, respectively. 

“Bridging and Observing Wireless Services for Electronic Reconnaissance,” or BOWSER, involved the construction of a rotor-driven unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of wireless access reconnaissance barnstorming and penetration testing.

“We picked a drone to utilize the city’s uniquely vertical environment to go up and down apartment buildings, where you’ll find a lot more wireless networks than you would in a flat area,” said Brown.

“Let’s say you’re a contractor. You can test for security flaws in company enterprise networks, or just have fun and map out networks around you.”

Espinoza, who hopes to work in cyber security upon graduation, touted their UAV as a unique solution to a very real problem with penetration testing. 

“You can’t exactly see these wireless networks. You might have to go into the building and access the floor," he said. "Why would you take the elevator, and talk your way past security, when you can fly your way right up next to it?”

Jamie Juchniewicz illustrated how words affected the
attitudes of 18th-century American colonists.

Jamie Juchniewicz, a junior anthropology major, addressed the past for her project “Revolution: The Vocabulary of the American Revolution.” What topics, she wondered, would have trended the highest  if Twitter had existed in the American colonies between 1763 and 1776? 

For her project, which she hopes will help her continue onto graduate school, she took five of the most popular American pamphlets from each of the years, from 1763 to 1776, and ran them through Voyant, a processing software that calculates the most used words.

“When we start out in 1765, we’re only seeing the word “American” two times, and when we end in 1776, we see the word “American” 12 times. The colonials are seeing themselves transforming from, 'I’m a member of this colony,' 'I’m a member of the Maryland colony,' 'I’m a Pennsylvanian,' 'I'm a New Yorker,' into seeing themselves as an American, because they’re all sharing the same language,” she said.

Words like "authority" and "fame" highlighted the power of the individual, especially going into the revolution, she said. "So you can identify all the main actors by the words they’re using and the political activities that followed the language.”

—Patrick Verel

Gabelli School of Business Launches Undergraduate Research Journal

When the Gabelli School of Business holds its first undergraduate research conference on April 20 and 21st, the centerpiece of the event will be Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Fordham Business Student Research Journal.

The journal is published jointly by the deans of the Gabelli School of Business and the Graduate School of Business.

It features three articles by Gabelli students: “Countering Counterfeits: An Investigation of Message Frame and Message Focus Effects on Persuasion,” by Caroline Dahlgren; “Fund-Management-Gender Composition: The Impact on Risk & Performance of Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds” by Angela Luongo, and “The Relationship Between Socioeconomic Status and Emotional Gratification for Consumers who Purchase Overtly Branded (Overtly Designer) Goods” by Sarah Siracusa.

It also contains lists and abstracts of previously published Gabelli students’ theses, to give a broader sense of the research being done at the college. The best papers submitted to the April conference will be featured in a future issue.

Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., Dean of the Gabelli School of Business and Dean of the Fordham business faculty, said the impetus for the journal came last year, when several students’ research was selected for publication in academic journals that typically carry the work of full-time professors.

“This inspired us to think about how we could further extend the reach of out students’ work and share it with the wider academic community,” she said.

“I hope you find our students work as enlightening and impressive as I have.”

—Patrick Verel

FORDHAMScience: Sudan Meteorites Offer Look at the Early Solar System

In a small laboratory in John Mulcahy Hall, Jon Friedrich and Julianne Troiano have opened a window that looks 4.5 billion years into the past. That window is Almahata Sitta: fragments of a rare, carbon-rich type of meteorite called an ureilite deposited in northern Sudan in 2008, when asteroid 2008 TC3 slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded 37 kilometers above the ground.

Friedrich is an assistant professor of chemistry at Fordham; Troiano is a senior at Rose Hill, majoring in chemistry. The window they’ve opened doesn’t look like much—a tiny speck of material that resembles a black breadcrumb—but the insights gleaned from it have already changed the way we think about the composition of matter in the early solar system.

Images: Right, Jon Friedrich; Left, Julianne Troiano at the Mass Spectrometer (click to enlarge).

“The great thing about is that it allows us to see what the early solar system was like without having to back-calculate the effect of terrestrial contamination,” Friedrich says. “There’s a chemical signature that occurs in most ureilites known to date… and that chemical signature was not present in Almahata Sitta. We were actually able to say that okay, Almahatta Sitta does not contain that signature, so other meteorites of this class maybe actually somewhat contaminated.”

Friedrich says the chemical composition of Almahata Sitta is intriguing because it’s so atypical (the technical word for “weird”). The most common type of asteroid in the asteroid belt (a vast collection of small objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter) is something called an s-type asteroid. If you held a part of one in your hand, it would be heaver than a ureilite of the same size because the s-type would probably about 10 to 15 percent metal—particularly nickel iron, or nickel metal, and it would be gray in color.

“We have the samples, and they’re pretty small—probably the size of a pinky nail,” Troiano says. We grind the samples so it’s easier to dissolve them, then we mix them with nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid and we put them in a microwave digestion system that heats them up and increases the pressure so the samples can dissolve in the acid. When they dry down and they sort of just look like goo.”

The goo is mixed into a 50 milliliter solution and put into a mass spectrometer, which tells the researchers which elements are present and in what amounts. The results are then fed into Excel spreadsheets for analysis.

“One of the things that came out of all of the work that’s been done by people all around the world is that we know the 2008 TC3 asteroid that produced the Almahata Sitta meteorite was a very un-homogenous chunk of rock,” Friedrich says. “Julianne and I focused on the pieces that were ureilitic in nature, which is the majority of Almahata Sitta and the TC3 asteroid. But what we did find was that if you’re a geologist and you had an asteroid and you grabbed pieces of rock, they’d look a little different.”

He says it seems that different pieces of the asteroid did have different internal chemistry to it to some extent. Whether the different parts were formed under different temperatures might be one reason why this is so.

Analysis of Almahata Sitta tells us that not everything in the asteroid belt is of the same composition, which has implications for how these objects should be dealt with should they be nudged into an Earth-crossing orbit. Should an object of sufficient size be on a collision course with Earth, the results could be catastrophic. One of the leading suspects, if not the leading suspect, in the extinction of the dinosaurs is the Chicxulub asteroid, a chunk of rock at least 10 kilometers across that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The impact, at a speed at least 20 times greater than that of a rifle bullet, left a crater 180 kilometers across. It would have caused an enormous shock wave, global tidal waves, a tremendous earthquake, hurricane winds, and trillions of tons of debris ejected into the atmosphere. The forests of the Americas would have been set ablaze. The resulting smoke and particulate debris would have created months of darkness and cooler temperatures globally, and concentrated nitric acid rains worldwide.

Though so-called “slate wiper” impacts are rare (perhaps once every hundred million years), they are a real threat. NASA thinks so, and has created the Near Earth Object Program to track possible impactors and devise defenses, most likely nudging those objects out of their Earth-crossing orbits long before they reach us. How the objects get nudged away depends on their composition.

“One of the things that we’re learning is that asteroids aren’t necessarily big, giant rocks in the sky that are one big piece,” Friedrich says. They can be made up of lots of little pieces sort of weakly held together…and the structure you know is something that’s typically strong, a big piece versus something that is weakly put together in sort of a boulder pile. The official term is rubble pile—that’s what people call it in the asteroidal community. Trying to destroy or alter the course of asteroids with these two different properties is going to take different tactics.”

Friedrich has published on the composition of Almahata Sitta before, including in the March 2009 issue of Nature. We wrote about his work at the time (see “Fordham Scientist Helps Tie Chemical Makeup of Meteorite to Parent Asteroid”). He and Troiano have also published several papers on the meteorite, in the peer-reviewed journals Meteoritics & Planetary Science and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta—a somewhat unusual honor for an undergraduate researcher.

Troiano, a Clare Booth Luce Scholar, has made the Dean’s List for the last two years. She is a cheerleader, a member of the Expressions Dance Alliance, and a member of both the American Chemical Society and American Geophysical Union. Troiano says she was already interested in chemistry in high school, and that two great teachers brought her further along that path.

“I came into Fordham as a chemistry major already,” she says. “From there, I guess, once you make it past sophomore year—kind of breaking point—if you make it past that, you can make it through the rest of the major.”

She’s applied to nine graduate schools, but hopes to attend either the University of North Carolina or the University of California, Berkeley, for their analytical and physical chemistry programs. “UNC is the top school for analytical chemistry—they have a lot of really awesome chemistry going on there.”

Friedrich’s research is supported in part by a Fordham Faculty Research Grant. Troiano’s summer research was supported by her Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship.

FordhamScience: Pigeons Lead the Way in Teaching Language Skills

At Rose Hill a couple of pigeons are looking into ways to help learning disabled children and stroke victims learn (or relearn) vocabulary. Of course the pigeons don’t know that’s what they’re doing: they’re just pecking at keys to get food rewards, but Jim MacDonall, Ph.D., and his undergraduate researchers are watching them, and they’re taking notes.

MacDonall, a professor of psychology at Fordham, has recently started a new line of research in animal cognition, so-called “concept formation,” an essential precondition for language.

“For example, seeing the word 'dog,' hearing someone say 'dog' and seeing a picture of a 'dog' are all equivalent,” says MacDonall. “Language-able adults and children can readily substitute for one another. Only if pressed do we say the specific stimuli are different but the 'concept' is the same.”

Photographs
Top: (L to R) Peter Sanneman, Jim MacDonall and Anne Neuendorf with some experimental subjects.
Middle: The experimental apparatus.
Bottom: A White Carneaux takes a spin in the apparatus.

MacDonall’s pigeons, like young children, stroke victims and children with autism or learning disabilities, can’t readily connect the stimuli to the label. In experimenting with how pigeons can be trained to make certain associations, MacDonall believes researchers can develop strategies to better teach language skills to children and adults who otherwise have difficulty learning them.

MacDonall uses pigeons (White Carneaux, from the Palmetto Pigeon Plant in Sumter, S.C.), because they’re hardy, long lived, have excellent eyesight and see colors. The pigeons are set up in their own room, with a separate ventilation system, as required by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. The equipment and part of the renovation to animal room funded by a faculty grant through the office of Michael Latham, the interim dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

The experiment is simple: three circles can either be lit red or green. MacDonall trains the pigeons to peck the right- or left-hand circle that matches the color of the center circle (the birds aren’t actually matching the colors, in this case, but the pattern of colors). Each correct peck gets a food reward of mixed grain from a slot beneath the lighted circles.

Normally pigeons will make several hundred errors learning to peck the correct match, and their steady performance will be 85 to 95 percent correct. But preliminary results from MacDonall’s training scheme seem to show that pigeons can learn correct matching with fewer than 20 errors, and with a steady performance rate of about 97 to 100 percent correct.

What’s the difference? When the pigeons begin their training, they are only given the correct choice to peck (and of course rewarded when they do so). Once the pigeons reliably peck the target circle, the researchers introduce the wrong choice, but only for a fraction of a second. The bird has time to see the incorrect choice, but not time enough to peck it. Over time, the duration of time the incorrect circle stays lit is increased until it matches that of the correct choice.

MacDonall’s work has implications for how stroke patients who lost language ability should be retaught, and for teaching language skills to autistic children who have never had the ability to begin with. For adult stroke victims, relearning language can be very frustrating, and instruction is frequently delayed by outbursts of temper at getting the wrong word for an object the patient feels he or she should know.

The inherent frustration aside, MacDonall says the research on stroke recovery shows that the more quickly language skill is reacquired, the more complete it will be. Diminishing the time lost to aggressive outbursts increases the number of language lessons a patient can complete in a day. And that’s where MacDonall’s work comes into play: by giving stroke victims a more painless learning curve, they can potentially reacquire language more quickly and completely.

In teaching language skills to autistic and otherwise learning disabled children, MacDonall says if we can offer them an easier path to acquiring the skills, why shouldn’t we? “Kids don’t like to be frustrated, either,” he says.

The obvious question is, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? MacDonall pauses for a long minute before answering.

“I think a lot of investigators don’t pay close enough attention to the details in the stimulus,” he says. “You need to pay very close attention to exactly what’s happening in the environment, and to the consequences of responding—to the reinforcement you’re offering.”

As for why techniques developed on pigeons should work as well in humans, MacDonall says “Most of the time it does. Conditioning applies across species, though you may find parameter differences: pigeons may require thirty seconds between trials, and humans only two.”

The next step, according to MacDonall, is to try and replicate his early findings with four more pigeons, then publish the results.

“Individuals who do not have language ability (developmentally disabled children and autistic children) and those who have lost language (some stroke victims) are in a very difficult situation,” MacDonall says. “We need to do everything we can to speed their learning or relearning of language.”
__________

The current undergraduate assistants in MacDonall’s lab are:

• Anne Neuendorf, FCRH, psychology, junior
• Peter Sanneman, FCRH, theology, junior
• Caitlin Nosal, FCRH, undeclared, sophomore
• Eileen Moran, FCRH, psychology, senior
• Jessica LaRusso, FCRH, psychology, junior
  

Over the summer, Sanneman and Neuendorf helped with the research discussed above, and were supported by an Undergraduate Summer Science Fellowship from FCRH. Nosal, Moran and LaRusso joined the lab this semester. Funds for equipment used in this research were provided by the Office of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

UPDATED: FCRH Student Lobbies Congress for Research Funding

Video update: Saturday, October 16, 2010.

Stacey Barnaby, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior majoring in chemistry, participated in “Hill Day,” in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 20, 2010, in which young scientists engage policymakers on current research challenges and communicate the importance of supporting scientific discovery.

“It is scientists who spend many hours in the laboratory and come up with leading breakthroughs toward the cure for a disease, or vaccines, or build new materials for solar cells, or biofuels, to perhaps one day make us independent of foreign oil,” said Barnaby, who met with the staff of U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-New York, among others. “The nation is at a turning point in its history and that it is natural for scientists to play leading roles in helping to determine what’s to come.”

The event, sponsored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), featured undergraduate and graduate researchers from universities across the nation, including Fordham, Brown and Yale Universities, and New York Medical College. The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with more than 12,000 members worldwide.

“This is one of our most important activities,” said Thomas Baldwin, dean of the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and a member of ASBMB’s public affairs panel. “Not only does it afford us an opportunity to talk with our elected representatives in Congress, which itself is a critically important activity, but it is an opportunity for young scientists to engage in the process of public debate. These are our scientific leaders of the future. Getting them involved now will pay dividends to the science community for years to come.”

Most ASBMB members teach and conduct research at colleges and universities. Others conduct research in various government laboratories, at nonprofit research institutions and in industry. The Society’s student members attend undergraduate or graduate institutions.

FordhamScience: Undergraduate Research and Bird Mojo

Several Fordham students presented their research at the 64th Annual Eastern Colleges Science Conference (ECSC), at Pace University this spring, in which more than 400 students participated.

Among the seven award winners at the conference, two were Fordham students: Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Stacey Barnaby, a chemistry major from Monroe, Conn.; and Esi Kajno, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native and natural sciences major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Stacey Barnaby has been conducting research in the Chemistry Department in the laboratory of Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., for the past year. Barnaby’s project mainly focuses on the development of nanostructures for potential applications in anti-aging and cancer.

Specifically, Barnaby has been studying the growth of kinetin-based nanostructures and the growth of selenium nanoparticles as biocompatible materials for drug delivery for prevention of oxidative cellular damage. She has been examining the potential of these materials as radical scavengers and investigating their efficiency as supports for enzymes such as glutathione peroxidase, which plays a vital role in prevention of oxidative damage. These materials have been found to survive in live cell cultures of normal rat kidney cells, which is promising and she hopes that she will be soon be moving on to conduct in vivo studies. She has already presented at conferences such as the New York American Chemical Society undergraduate research symposium, the Columbia University undergraduate research symposium, the Fordham undergraduate research symposium, and ECSC, which involved undergraduate participants from colleges and universities all over the East Coast.

At ECSC, Barnaby was recently honored with an excellence for poster presentation award, in the division for molecular biology and biochemistry. She loves doing research and presenting and sharing her work with fellow researchers at conferences. She gives campus tours as a member of the Rose Hill Society, welcomes freshman as a part of the New Student Orientation team, and tutors students in the HEOP program. She hopes to apply to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in biochemistry/bionanotechnology. “I love research because the possibilities are endless,” she said. “I truly feel that through research, I can help make a difference in the world.”

Esi Kajno worked with Dr. James Wishart at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of the Summer Undergraduate Internship program.

Due to global energy challenges, the conversion of cellulosic biomass (plant material) into ethanol has recently attracted considerable interest as an alternative means for the production of affordable and renewable biofuels. The complication is that plant-derived cellulosic material requires pre-treatment in order to remove the lignin that is naturally bound to cellulose and makes it resistant to hydrolysis into fermentable sugars.

Current pre-treatment processes are costly and challenging since they require harsh conditions (high pressures and temperatures, use of strong acids and/or toxic and flammable substances). Recently, alternative methods to improve on cellulose conversion to biofuels have focused on the use of a new category of solvents known as Ionic Liquids (ILs). These are salts that remain liquids at low temperatures. Unlike organic solvents, ILs are non volatile and therefore very attractive as a green chemistry alternative. In addition their unique set of physical and chemical characteristics offers a new medium for reaction kinetics.

Kajno’s work focused on the synthesis, purification and characterization of ILs and their use in studying the dissolution of cellulose from corn cob and wood, which is key to its conversion into ethanol.

Science Friday Bonus: J. Alan Clark, the Avian Barry White
Today the Daily News reports on Alan Clark’s work with a flock of highly endangered Waldrapp ibis at the Bronx Zoo. The flockhad produced no chicks for seven years. Clark, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Fordham, created a soundtrack of mating calls, recorded in Austria, that restored the birds’ mojo, and the flock has since hatched six offspring from three sets of parents.

Read the complete story, which includes photos and recordings of the mating calls: “Soundtrack of mating calls helps put flock of endangered Waldrapp ibis at Bronx Zoo in the mood.”