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Software developed by SMU stops ransomware attacks

Ransomware attacks have become more common since COVID-19 pandemic

DALLAS (SMU) – Engineers from SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity have developed software that detects ransomware attacks before attackers can inflict catastrophic damage.

Ransomware — a type of malware infection that causes important data files to be locked and prevents users from accessing their important data until the hacker is paid — is crippling cities and businesses all over the world, and the number of ransomware attacks have increased since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Attackers are also threatening to publicly release sensitive data if ransom isn’t paid. The FBI estimates that ransomware victims have paid hackers more than $140 million in the last six-and-a-half years.

Unlike existing methods, such as antivirus software or other intrusion detection systems, SMU’s new software works even if the ransomware is new and has not been used before.

SMU’s detection method is known as sensor-based ransomware detection because the software doesn’t rely on information from past ransomware infections to spot new ones on a computer. In contrast, existing technology needs signatures of past infections to do its job.

“With this software we are capable of detecting what’s called zero-day ransomware because it’s never been seen by the computer before,” said Mitch Thornton, executive director of the Deason Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. “Right now, there’s little protection for zero-day ransomware, but this new software spots zero-day ransomware more than 95 percent of the time.”

The new software also can scan a computer for ransomware much faster than existing software, said Mike Taylor, lead creator of the software and a Ph.D. student at SMU.

“The results of testing this technique indicate that rogue encryption processes can be detected within a very small fraction of the time required to completely lock down all of a user’s sensitive data files,” Taylor noted. “So the technique
detects instances of ransomware very quickly and well before extensive damage occurs to the victim’s computer files.”

Southern Methodist University (SMU) has filed a patent application for this technique with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Lyle Engineering students Taylor, a cybersecurity Ph.D. student, and Kaitlin N. Smith, a recent electrical engineering Ph.D. graduate, created the software, along with Thornton.

New software enables existing sensors to detect ransomware

“Ransomware is malware that enters a victim’s computer system and silently encrypts its stored files. It then alerts the user that they must pay a ransom, typically in a non-traceable currency such as bitcoin, in order to receive the key to decrypt their files,” Thornton explained. “It also tells the victim that if they do not pay the ransom within a certain time period, the key for decryption will be destroyed and thus, they will lose their data.”

SMU’s software functions by searching for small, yet distinguishable changes in certain sensors that are found inside computers to detect when unauthorized encryptions are taking place.

When attackers encrypt files, certain circuits inside the computer have specific types of power surges as files are scrambled. Computer sensors that measure temperature, power consumption, voltage levels, and other characteristics can detect these specific types of surges, SMU researchers found.

The SMU software monitors the sensors to look for the characteristic surges. And when a suspicious surge is detected, the software immediately alerts the computer to suspend or terminate the ransomware infection from completing the encryption process.

Use of the computer’s own devices to spot ransomware “is completely different than anything else that’s out there,” Taylor said.

About the Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity
The mission of The Deason Institute, which is part of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, is to advance the science, policy, application and education of cyber security through basic and problem-driven, interdisciplinary research.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Dallas Innovates: Gamers join scientific research to help end the COVID-19 threat

BALANCED Media|Technology and Complexity Gaming have launched a citizen science effort that will test drug compounds against coronavirus, helping SMU sift through possible treatments faster

Source: HEWMEN

DALLAS (SMU) – While medical professionals everywhere have been hard at work for months searching for a cure to the COVID-19 virus, an unlikely industry has emerged to join the fight: the video game community, Dallas Innovates’ Alex Edwards reports.

A new effort from BALANCED Media|Technology (BALANCED) and Complexity Gaming intends to garner spare computer processing power that could help find treatments for coronavirus. The two Dallas-based organizations are encouraging anyone that works with video games to donate to the citizen science/crowdsourcing initiative called #WeAreHEWMEN, Edwards explains.

The BALANCED’s HEWMAN app will use gamers’ processing power to go through more than 200,000 FDA medications and compounds, with help from SMU computational biologist John Wise. Using these 200,000 compounds, between 1.5 to 3 million virtual experiments will be run, simulating attempts to dock compounds to specific locations on the virus. By identifying the compounds with the highest probability of success at treating coronavirus, Wise, who works in SMU’s Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery, can test new treatments faster and therefore, potentially get a viable treatment to the market more quickly.

Read the story about this innovative collaboration here.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

 

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Health & Medicine Mind & Brain

Psychological study teaching people to experience and recognize joy has been adapted for COVID-19

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU has adapted their study on a psychological condition known as anhedonia to reflect new restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.
 
Researchers at SMU and UCLA have been involved in a five-year study of a treatment for anhedonia – the inability to find pleasure in any aspect of life – since 2019. 
 
Psychology professors Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz at SMU and Michelle G. Craske at UCLA are studying the effectiveness of a type of cognitive behavioral therapy aimed at teaching people to seek out and recognize the positive aspects of life – increasing their sensitivity to reward. They will compare their results with a more traditional approach of treating the negative affect side of their problems.
 
But because millions of Americans have been asked to stay at home to keep from possibly spreading the COVID-19 virus, researchers have made some adjustments to how they are doing the study. 
 
For instance, instead of encouraging study participants to meet with friends in-person to increase feelings of joy and connectedness, the recommendation has been modified to arranging meetings online. Participants are also being given skills they can use to cope more effectively with COVID-19 worries about health and future, as well as how to generate feelings of gratitude and how to take other people’s viewpoint in account when thinking. And all sessions between participants and therapists are being done via telehealth instead of in person, because of the COVID-19 restrictions.
Researchers are still recruiting Dallas and Los Angeles residents to participate in the study. More information about the study is available here.
 
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
 
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New study by SMU professors details how homeless students are doing educationally in Houston ISD

DALLAS (SMU) – A new report by SMU professors Alexandra Pavlakis and Meredith Richards details how homeless students in Houston ISD are faring educationally.

SMU’s Simmons professors Alexandra Pavlakis and Meredith Richards look at research information with Kessa Roberts, post doctoral fellow.

Released by the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University, the report makes clear that homeless students are at an elevated risk of a range of adverse educational outcomes, and the findings also highlight the complexity of the relationship between homelessness and student outcomes. Pavlakis and Richards, who are both assistant professors at SMU’s Simmons School of Education & Human Development, looked at students who were homeless from 2012-13 to 2016-17, the years immediately preceding Hurricane Harvey.

Some of the key findings include:

  • Students experiencing homelessness were more likely to drop out of school than their matched, non-homeless peers.
  • Students who were homeless four and five years tended to have higher attendance than students who were homeless for shorter periods of time.
  • Unaccompanied youth had substantially lower attendance than accompanied homeless students, and less likely to pass the STAAR exams than accompanied homeless students.
  • Where students sleep matters. Attendance gaps were large for unsheltered students and students in motels.
  • Interestingly, homeless students tended to perform better on STAAR exams than their matched peers. This could hint at the potential value of educational supports and resources inherent in McKinney-Vento Act or provided at shelters or drop-in centers for homelessness. However, homeless students were also somewhat less likely to take STAAR tests—particularly in math.

Pavlakis and Richards also make recommendations on what the school district might consider to improve student outcomes. Simmons post doctoral fellow Kessa Roberts, Ph.D. assisted with the research. The Moody Foundation and SMU’s University Research Council supported the research. This is a long-term project for the researchers.

Click here for the report.

 

About Simmons School of Education & Human Development

The Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU (Southern Methodist University) reflects the University’s vision of serving the most important educational needs of our city, region and nation, graduating students for successful careers in a variety of fields and providing educational opportunities beyond traditional degree programs. Recognized as a unique and transformative leader in education research, practice and policy, the School is committed to rigorous, research-driven programs that promote evidence-based, effective practices in education and human development.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

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SMU Center for Family Counseling offers free remote services

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU’s Center for Family Counseling is now offering free telehealth counseling to anyone who needs it during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What started as a work-around to help the community during this period of mandatory social distancing has proved to be so successful that the center will continue offering remote counseling even after the staff returns to seeing patients in-person.

The clinic, associated with SMU’s Master’s in Counseling program, provides a variety of counseling services to adults, adolescents and children who are dealing with anxiety, depression, behavior difficulties, grief and loss, stress and parenting. Like many other businesses and clinics in Dallas, SMU’s Center for Family Counseling has temporarily closed its offices to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Clinic staff recognized, however, that because they were forced to close the clinic’s doors, there might be more people in need of mental health services related to isolation and other stay-at-home issues, said Clinic Director Terra Wagner.

“So we moved to offering services via Zoom,” Wagner said. “However, we plan to continue offering telehealth services, even when we return to seeing clients in person,” she said, explaining that they discovered they can serve more clients using a combination of telehealth and in-person appointments.

The Center for Family Counseling normally operates on a sliding scale fee system to accommodate low-income clients, with charges ranging from $5 to a maximum of $45 per session. All services will be free until further notice, Wagner said.

In addition to the telehealth counseling, five new remote support groups are also open for registration, free of charge: Adult Mindfulness Group, Adolescent Support Group, LGBTQ+ Parenting/Caregiver Support Group, LGBTQ+ Adolescent Support Group and LGBTQ+ Adult Support Group. These support groups started will meet via Zoom. Registration for all groups will remain open until groups end on May 7.

Counselors at the center are graduate students in the Master’s in Counseling program offered by SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development. They have completed most of their coursework as well as clinical skills classes to prepare to work with clients under faculty supervision. The program is accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs.

The clinic helps address the national shortage of mental health professionals by training counselors and providing affordable services. According to a spring 2019 report by Mental Health Dallas, the state of Texas is home to the second highest number of areas in the United States with a mental health professional shortage.

Earlier this year, SMU relocated the Center for Family Counseling from Plano to a new Dallas location in Expressway Tower, 6116 N. Central Expressway, Suite 410. Services are offered Monday through Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. To schedule an appointment, please call 214-768-6789. If the Center for Family Counseling can’t meet your needs, you will be referred to another provider.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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SMU In The News Subfeature Technology

Cybersecurity matters more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic

DALLAS (SMU) – The coronavirus pandemic isn’t just a serious threat to people’s health. It’s also giving cybercriminals the perfect opportunity to access your computer and potentially steal sensitive information, warns an SMU cybersecurity expert. 
 
Mitch Thornton, executive director of the Deason Institute for Cyber Security in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, said there are a number of factors that make cybersecurity especially important during this virus pandemic. 
 
“People are going to be spending more time on the Internet because many of us have been asked to do work from home to keep the virus from spreading,” he said.
 
That means more opportunities for people to download dangerous software that was created by hackers, whether by fake emails that look like they came from work or by bogus ads for online shopping, Thornton said. Employees may also be less familiar with the online software that allow them to communicate with their co-workers from home, increasing the chances they may be tricked by a hacker. 
 
“People are also going to be interested in reading about the virus, learning about new advances and monitoring where the new cases are happening,” Thornton said. “So the adversaries are likely going to be targeting web pages and emails that offer that kind of content.”
 
For instance, he said, sending very sensational and possibly untrue new stories can be used to get people’s attention, distract them and prompt them to click on malicious links more quickly. “Imposter emails from authorities and medical personnel will likely also be more prevalent,” Thornton said.
 
Additionally, several coronavirus-related schemes have emerged to trick the public into downloading software they shouldn’t. But Thornton said there are ways you can keep your computer safe:
  • When you look for information online about the coronavirus, be sure that the sources are trusted. And be on the lookout for websites and emails that are designed to look like legitimate sources but are actually malicious. For example, a website may use a name, look or feel of a legitimate government agency, but have one letter off or a different color from the real website. 
  • Avoid giving personal information online unless you are very familiar with the website. Hackers may try to get your information by creating fake charities asking for donations for COVID-19.    
  • If you’re doing video conferencing for work, take a look at the background that will be appearing behind you. There may be private information that your webcam can pick out, and you can’t be sure who may be watching.  
 
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
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Kids who blame themselves for mom’s sadness are more likely to face depression and anxiety

DALLAS (SMU) – “Even if she doesn’t say it, I know it’s my fault that my mother gets sad.” 

Kids who believe comments like this – assuming blame for their mom’s sadness or depression – are more likely to face depression and anxiety themselves, a new study led by SMU has found.

“Although mothers with higher levels of depressive symptoms face increased risk that their children will also experience symptoms of depression and anxiety, our study showed that this was not the case for all children,” said SMU family psychologist and lead author Chrystyna Kouros. “Rather, it was those children who felt they were to blame for their mother’s sadness or depression…that had higher levels of internalizing symptoms.”

In light of the findings, Kouros said it’s critical that parents and others who regularly interact with children pay close attention to the kinds of comments that kids make about their mom’s symptoms and to intervene if children incorrectly think that it’s their fault that their mom is depressed. Children who take on this blame can benefit from therapies and interventions that target negative thoughts, said Kouros, SMU associate professor of psychology.

Sharyl E. Wee and Chelsea N. Carson, graduate students at SMU, and Naomi Ekas, an associate professor of psychology at Texas Christian University, also contributed to the study, which was published in the Journal of Family Psychology. 

The study is based on surveys taken by 129 mothers and their children, who were recruited from the Dallas-Fort Worth community through schools, flyers and online advertisements. On average, children included in the study were 13 years old. 

Moms were asked to agree or disagree to 20 statements like “I could not shake off the blues” and “I lost interest in my usual activities” to assess if they had depressive symptoms, even if they had not actually been diagnosed with depression. Nearly 12 percent of the women surveyed were found to have potential clinical levels of depressive symptoms.

The moms were also asked to assess whether they felt their children had symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Kids, meanwhile, were asked to complete a total of four surveys to see if they were dealing with any anxiety or depression and whether they blamed themselves for any signs of depression in their mothers.

Kouros said there are two likely explanations for the linkage between mothers’ depressive symptoms and kids’ own mental health issues:

“If children blame themselves for their mothers’ depressive symptoms, then they may be more likely to brood about their mother’s symptoms. And we know from an extensive body of research that rumination over stressors – especially ones that are uncontrollable – is linked with depression and anxiety,” Kouros said. “Also, if children feel personally responsible for their mothers’ symptoms, they may try to ‘make it better’ and use ineffective coping strategies. This could lead to a sense of helplessness, failure, and low self-worth in the child, since ultimately the child was misattributing the cause of their mothers’ depressive symptoms.”

More studies are needed to see if depressed dads have the same effect on their children, Kouros said.

Many media outlets picked up the story, including KERA News, Moms, PsychCentral and The Federalist. 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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A year of surprising science from NASA’s InSight Mars Mission

A new understanding of Mars is beginning to emerge, thanks to the first year of NASA’s InSight lander mission. Findings described in a set of six papers published today reveal a planet alive with quakes, dust devils and strange magnetic pulses.

Five of the papers were published in Nature. An additional paper in Nature Communications details the InSight spacecraft’s landing site, a shallow crater nicknamed “Homestead hollow” in a region called Elysium Planitia.

InSight is the first mission dedicated to looking deep beneath the Martian surface. Among its science tools are a seismometer for detecting quakes, sensors for gauging wind and air pressure, a magnetometer, and a heat flow probe designed to take the planet’s temperature.

While the team continues to work on getting the probe into the Martian surface as intended, SMU planetary scientist and research assistant professor Matt Siegler is one of the scientists who will ultimately help determine what the measurements of the heat flow probe mean for the composition of the interior of Mars.

A cutaway view of Mars showing the Insight lander studying seismic activity. Credit: J.T. Keane/Nature Geoscience

Meanwhile, the ultra-sensitive seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), has enabled scientists to “hear” multiple trembling events from hundreds to thousands of miles away.

Seismic waves are affected by the materials they move through, giving scientists a way to study the composition of the planet’s inner structure. Mars can help the team better understand how all rocky planets, including Earth, first formed.

Underground

Mars trembles more often – but also more mildly – than expected. SEIS has found more than 450 seismic signals to date, the vast majority of which are probably quakes (as opposed to data noise created by environmental factors, like wind). The largest quake was about magnitude 4.0 in size – not quite large enough to travel down below the crust into the planet’s lower mantle and core. Those are “the juiciest parts of the apple” when it comes to studying the planet’s inner structure, said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at JPL.

Scientists are ready for more: It took months after InSight’s landing in November 2018 before they recorded the first seismic event. By the end of 2019, SEIS was detecting about two seismic signals a day, suggesting that InSight just happened to touch down at a particularly quiet time. Scientists still have their fingers crossed for “the Big One.”

Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth, but it does have volcanically active regions that can cause rumbles. A pair of quakes was strongly linked to one such region, Cerberus Fossae, where scientists see boulders that may have been shaken down cliffsides. Ancient floods there carved channels nearly 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) long. Lava flows then seeped into those channels within the past 10 million years – the blink of an eye in geologic time.

Some of these young lava flows show signs of having been fractured by quakes less than 2 million years ago. “It’s just about the youngest tectonic feature on the planet,” said planetary geologist Matt Golombek of JPL. “The fact that we’re seeing evidence of shaking in this region isn’t a surprise, but it’s very cool.”

At the Surface

Billions of years ago, Mars had a magnetic field. It is no longer present, but it left ghosts behind, magnetizing ancient rocks that are now between 200 feet (61 meters) to several miles below ground. InSight is equipped with a magnetometer – the first on the surface of Mars to detect magnetic signals.

The magnetometer has found that the signals at Homestead hollow are 10 times stronger than what was predicted based on data from orbiting spacecraft that study the area. The measurements of these orbiters are averaged over a couple of hundred miles, whereas InSight’s measurements are more local.

Because most surface rocks at InSight’s location are too young to have been magnetized by the planet’s former field, “this magnetism must be coming from ancient rocks underground,” said Catherine Johnson, a planetary scientist at the University of British Columbia and the Planetary Science Institute. “We’re combining these data with what we know from seismology and geology to understand the magnetized layers below InSight. How strong or deep would they have to be for us to detect this field?”

In addition, scientists are intrigued by how these signals change over time. The measurements vary by day and night; they also tend to pulse around midnight. Theories are still being formed as to what causes such changes, but one possibility is that they’re related to the solar wind interacting with the Martian atmosphere.

In the Wind

InSight measures wind speed, direction and air pressure nearly continuously, offering more data than previous landed missions. The spacecraft’s weather sensors have detected thousands of passing whirlwinds, which are called dust devils when they pick up grit and become visible. “This site has more whirlwinds than any other place we’ve landed on Mars while carrying weather sensors,” said Aymeric Spiga, an atmospheric scientist at Sorbonne University in Paris.

Despite all that activity and frequent imaging, InSight’s cameras have yet to see dust devils. But SEIS can feel these whirlwinds pulling on the surface like a giant vacuum cleaner. “Whirlwinds are perfect for subsurface seismic exploration,” said Philippe Lognonné of Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), principal investigator of SEIS.

Still to Come: The Core

InSight has two radios: one for regularly sending and receiving data, and a more powerful radio designed to measure the “wobble” of Mars as it spins. This X-band radio, also known as the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), can eventually reveal whether the planet’s core is solid or liquid. A solid core would cause Mars to wobble less than a liquid one would.

This first year of data is just a start. Watching over a full Martian year (two Earth years) will give scientists a much better idea of the size and speed of the planet’s wobble. – Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature

If women scientists wore fake facial hair, would men take them more seriously?

DALLAS (SMU) – Bonnie Jacobs is a world-renowned paleobotanist at SMU (Southern Methodist University) who specializes in the plant fossil record and what it reveals about past communities, ecosystems and climate. Her work in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia has helped document the origins and evolution of Africa’s modern biomes, as well as shed light on the environmental context of human family origins.

But she felt she needed to don a mustache and a beard to make a point.

Dr. Alisa Winkler, Vertebrate paleontologist, Southern Methodist University. Above: Dr. Bonnie Jacobs, Paleobotanist, Southern Methodist University. Credit for both photographs: 2015 Kelsey Vance

So did Alisa Winkler, an anatomy professor at UT Southwestern who also conducts research on fossil rodents, rabbits and other ancient mammals at SMU.

A new exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History called the “The Bearded Lady Project,” is drawing attention to the sexism that female paleontologists still face in the pursuit of their careers. The exhibit features portraits of women engaged in paleontology research – many in difficult and remote locations – while wearing false beards or mustaches. The tongue-in-cheek question being asked through the exhibit is, “Would they have been granted more respect and credibility had they been men?”

You can read more about this exhibit in The Dallas Morning News here.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Renowned geologist James Quick named inaugural dean of SMU Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies

Distinguished geoscientist James Quick will open the doors to a new era of research and interdisciplinary collaboration.

DALLAS (SMU) – Distinguished geoscientist James Quick will open the doors to a new era of research and interdisciplinary collaboration as the inaugural dean of SMU’s newly created Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.

SMU announced the creation of the Moody School in November 2019, made possible by a landmark $100 million gift from the Moody Foundation. The investment in graduate-level education is fueling SMU’s move to join the finest universities in the country in its development of research with impact, delivered by top-notch faculty and graduate students.

Quick, a volcanologist of international stature, joined SMU in 2007 as the University’s first Associate Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies, with the responsibilities of supporting increases in research activity and the number of students graduating with a Ph.D.  Since his arrival, research funding has increased from $14 million a year to $42 million a year, and annual graduation of Ph.D.s has increased from 45 to more than 70.

These increases contributed to SMU’s leap in 2011 past 55 sister institutions in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to earn recognition for “high research activity.”  The creation of the Moody School positions SMU to compete for coveted “R1” status, which is reserved for those institutions with the highest research activity.

“The new Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies is going to expand research efforts of SMU, the impact of which will benefit the universities, laboratories and businesses that employ our doctoral graduates,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “Dean Quick is a passionate advocate for research and the cultivation of scholars, and is well placed to deliver on the promise of the Moody School to deliver research with even greater impact.”

The Moody School will begin formal operations during the 2020-21 academic year. The broad endowment funding provided by the Moody Foundation will guarantee the strength of the school in perpetuity, while the operational funds included in the gift provide for immediate impact. In addition to becoming the inaugural dean of the Moody School, Quick also retains the title of associate provost for research.

“Jim Quick was the chair of the faculty task force that spelled out the need for and ultimate creation of the new Moody School,” said Peter Moore, SMU provost and vice president for academic affairs ad interim. “He’s a natural for this position.”

About 45 percent of students at SMU are graduate students pursuing a master’s degree, doctorate or Ph.D., but the creation of the Moody School will create opportunities for all SMU students by extending to undergraduates more opportunities to participate in significant research and learn from prestigious faculty.

“The gift establishing the Moody School is an unprecedented investment in SMU, providing essential tools to dramatically elevate the University’s reputation in graduate education and powering its advance among research universities,” Quick said. “The opportunity to help guide SMU on this path as the Inaugural Dean is simultaneously exciting and humbling, and I look forward to working with SMU’s faculty to elevate graduate education, scholarship and research across the University.”

Eventually, all graduate degrees through Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, Lyle School of Engineering, Meadows School of the Arts and Simmons School of Education and Human Development will be administered jointly through the Moody School.  Students will receive diplomas to both their individual schools of study and the Moody School.

The Cox School of Business, Dedman School of Law and Perkins School of Theology do not offer Ph.D. studies and will continue to manage their own terminal degrees.  But the Moody School will link interdisciplinary research and professional development from all SMU schools.

Quick joined SMU after a 25-year scientific career with the United States Geological Survey, including as program coordinator for the Volcano Hazards Program, where he supervised monitoring of the nation’s 169 volcanoes to provide critical early warning of eruptions.  He has remained an active researcher during his tenure at SMU.

In 2009 Quick led scientists from the University of Trieste to discover an enormous, 280-million-year-old  supervolcano fossil in the Sesia Valley in northern Italy, revealing the never-seen-before “plumbing” of a supervolcano all the way through the Earth’s crust. Italian geologists awarded Quick the Capellini Medal in September 2010 for the discovery, and the area encompassing the supervolcano later won UNESCO designation as the Sesia-Val Grande Geopark. Quick was named an honorary citizen of the city of Borgosesia, Italy, in recognition of the significance of the Sesia Valley discovery.

Quick became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in November 2013.  He was honored for his distinguished contributions to geologic science and volcanic risk assessment, particularly for the study of magmatic systems and for service to governments in assessing geologic risk.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas.  SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world. 

 

 

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New leaf fossils found in Ethiopia’s Mush Valley

DALLAS (SMU) – Leaf fossils from Ethiopia’s Mush Valley that date back nearly 22 million years have been found by SMU’s Earth Science professors Bonnie Jacobs and Neil J. Tabor and a dozen other international scientists.

The Mush Valley is the first site in Africa to produce an assemblage of some 2,400 leaves from that time interval, and the first to be studied using multiple lines of evidence, including associated microscopic fossils and chemical constituents, that tell us details about the ancient ecosystem.

Paleobotanical remains that an international team found in Ethiopia’s Mush Valley.

Scientists can use data from the study to answer fundamental questions, like what climate change may look like in the future. Specifically, climate scientists can take information from the study, along with other data, to test models used to estimate future global climate change.

“The past helps us to understand how ecological processes operate under conditions so different from now. It is like the Earth has done experiments for us,” said Jacobs, a world-renowned paleobotanist at SMU (Southern Methodist University).

In addition, using fossils to learn more about what Africa’s prehistoric ecosystems were like can provide context for events in the past, such as when a land bridge developed between Africa and Eurasia 24 million years ago or the environment for primate precursors to the human family.

The fossils found in this study span an interval of 60,000 years during the early Miocene Epoch, which began 23 million years ago. Ellen D. Currano, a paleoecologist at the University of Wyoming, was the lead author of the study.  It was published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

You can read more about the work that Jacobs, Currano and the international colleagues have been doing in the Mush Valley here.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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SMU robotic arm is helping Beaumont boy make a remarkable recovery after polio-like condition

DALLAS (SMU) – A robotic arm built by mechanical engineering professor Edmond Richer at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering is delivering a stronger future for young Braden Scott, helping re-create connections between his brain and muscles.

Braden was 5 years old when he came down with acute flaccid myelitis, a rare condition that affects the nervous system.

Watch KXAS-NBC 5’s story to learn more.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Smithsonian has extended Sea Monsters Unearthed exhibit one more year to 2021

DALLAS (SMU) – “Sea Monsters Unearthed: Life in Angola’s Ancient Seas” was given an additional year at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. It will now be on display until 2021.

The exhibit has been viewed by 6 million visitors since it opened last year, leading to Smithsonian granting a longer stay for the exhibit in the Washington, D.C. museum. It was originally supposed to leave next year. Smithsonian also asked for an additional exhibit window for “Sea Monsters Unearthed,” showcasing the international and interdisciplinary collaboration that went into discovering the fossils.

The exhibit showcases never-before-seen fossils from Angola that was made possible largely due to the work of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs and his colleagues and undergraduates. SMU Emeritus Professor of Paleontology Louis Jacobs and his SMU colleague Michael Polcyn forged a partnership with collaborators in Angola, Portugal and the Netherlands to explore and excavate Angola’s rich fossil history, while laying the groundwork for returning the fossils to the West African nation. Back in Dallas, Jacobs and Polcyn, director of the University’s Digital Earth Sciences Lab, and research associate Diana Vineyard went to work over a period of 13 years with a small army of SMU students to prepare the fossils excavated by Projecto PaleoAngola. These students – including Myria Perez, a former paleontology student who is now a fossil preparator at the Perot Museum – worked in basement laboratories to painstakingly clean and preserve the fossils.

“Sea Monsters Unearthed” allows visitors to visually dive into the cool waters off the coast of West Africa as they existed millions of years ago when the continents of Africa and South America were drifting apart. It’s a unique opportunity to examine fossils of ancient marine reptiles and learn about the forces that continue to mold life both in out of the ocean.

After 2021, the exhibit will return to Angola. Learn more here.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

About the National Museum of Natural History

The National Museum of Natural History is connecting people everywhere with Earth’s unfolding story. The museum is one of the most visited natural history museums in the world with approximately 7 million annual visitors from the U.S. and around the world. Opened in 1910, the museum is dedicated to maintaining and preserving the world’s most extensive collection of natural history specimens and human artifacts. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free. For more information, visit the museum on its website and on Facebook and Twitter.

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SMU develops efficient methods to simulate how electromagnetic waves interact with devices

DALLAS (SMU) – It takes a tremendous amount of computer simulations to create a device like an MRI scanner that can image your brain by detecting electromagnetic waves propagating through tissue. The tricky part is figuring out how electromagnetic waves will react when they come in contact with the materials in the device.

SMU researchers have developed an algorithm that can be used in a wide range of fields – from biology and astronomy to military applications and telecommunications – to create equipment more efficiently and accurately.

Currently, it can take days or months to do simulations. And because of cost, there is a limit to the number of simulations typically done for these devices. SMU math researchers have revealed a way to do a faster algorithm for these simulations with the help of grants from the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

“We can reduce the simulation time from one month to maybe one hour,” said lead researcher Wei Cai, Clements Chair of Applied Mathematics at SMU. “We have made a breakthrough in these algorithms.”

“This work will also help create a virtual laboratory for scientists to simulate and explore quantum dot solar cells, which could produce extremely small, efficient and lightweight solar military equipment,” said Dr. Joseph Myers, Army Research Office mathematical sciences division chief.

Dr. Bo Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at SMU (Southern Methodist University) and Wenzhong Zhang, a graduate student at the university, also contributed to this research. The study was published today by the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and can be viewed here. 

(From Left) Wei Cai, Dr. Bo Wang and Wenzhong Zhang. Credit: Photo courtesy of SMU (Southern Methodist University), Hillsman S. Jackson

The algorithm could have significant implications in a number of scientific fields.

“Electromagnetic waves exist as radiation of energies from charges and other quantum processes,” Cai explained.

They include things like radio waves, microwaves, light and X-rays. Electromagnetic waves are also the reason you can use a mobile phone to talk to someone in another state and why you can watch TV. In short, they’re everywhere.

An engineer or mathematician would be able to use the algorithm for a device whose job is to pick out a certain electromagnetic wave. For instance, she or he could potentially use it to design a solar light battery that lasts longer and is smaller than currently exists.

“To design a battery that is small in size, you need to optimize the material so that you can get the maximum conversion rate from the light energy to electricity,” Cai said. “An engineer could find that maximum conversion rate by going through simulations faster with this algorithm.”

Or the algorithm could help an engineer design a seismic monitor to predict earthquakes by tracking elastic waves in the earth, Cai noted.

“These are all waves, and our method applies for different kinds of waves,” he said. “There are a wide range of applications with what we have developed.”

Computer simulations map out how materials in a device like semiconductor materials will interact with light, in turn giving a sense of what a particular wave will do when it comes in contact with that device.

The manufacturing of many devices involving light interactions uses a fabrication process by layering material on top of each other in a lab, just like Legos. This is called layered media. Computer simulations then analyze the layered media using mathematical models to see how the material in question is interacting with light.

More Efficient, Less Expensive Way to Solve Helmholtz and Maxwell’s Equations

SMU researchers have found a more efficient and less expensive way to solve Helmholtz and Maxwell’s equations – difficult to solve but essential tools to predict the behavior of waves.

The problem of wave source and material interactions in the layer structure has been a very challenging one for the mathematicians and engineers for the last 30 years.

Professor Weng Cho Chew from Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, a world leading expert on computational electromagnetics, said the problem “is notoriously difficult.”

Commenting on the work of Cai and his team, Chew said, “Their results show excellent convergence to small errors. I hope that their results will be widely adopted.”

The new algorithm modifies a mathematical method called the fast multipole method, or FMM, which was considered one of the top 10 algorithms in the 20th century.

To test the algorithm, Cai and the other researchers used SMU’s ManeFrame II – which is one of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation – to run many different simulations.

Several outlets featured the news of the faster algorithm, including Breaking Defense, Primeur Magazine and the Army’s website.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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Drug oleandrin may be an effective new way to treat HTLV-1 virus, SMU study shows

An estimated 10 to 15 million people are infected with HTLV-1, which is a cousin of HIV

DALLAS (SMU) – A study led by SMU suggests that oleandrin – a drug derived from the Nerium oleander plant – could prevent the HTLV-1 virus from spreading by targeting a stage of the reproduction process that is not currently targeted by existing drugs.

That is significant because there is currently no cure or treatment for the virus – a lesser-known “cousin” of HIV that affects an estimated 10 to 15 million people worldwide.

“Our research findings suggest that oleandrin could possibly limit the transmission and spread of HTLV-1 by targeting a unique stage in the retroviral life cycle,” said Robert Harrod, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences. Harrod is a co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals.

The human T-cell leukemia virus type-1, or HTLV-1, is a retrovirus that infects white blood cells known as T-cells and is usually transmitted in a similar manner to HIV-1 through a person’s blood or body fluid. Infected cells present within breast milk can also pass HTLV-1 from mother to infant through breastfeeding.

While HIV-1 kills the infected T-cells, HTLV-1 causes them to divide uncontrollably. This in turn can lead to the development of aggressive leukemia – a cancer of the white blood cells. People infected with HTLV-1 can also develop a progressive neurological disease known as HTLV-1-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP), a progressive inflammatory disease of the nervous system that can affect one’s ability to walk and may cause serious symptoms leading to coma and even death.

Retrovirus particles copy themselves within infected cells by transcribing their RNA into DNA after entering a cell, a process called the retroviral life cycle. The more virus-infected cells that are produced, the worse symptoms can get for people who are infected with HTLV-1.

The two lead authors, Tetiana Bowley and Lacin Yapindi, are Ph.D graduate students who worked with Harrod in his lab. Aditi Malu, who also worked in Harrod’s lab, graduated from SMU with a PhD in May. Together with collaborator Jagan Sastry at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Dr. Robert Newman at Phoenix Biotechnology, Inc., SMU researchers found that the botanical compound called oleandrin successfully interrupted part of the infection cycle for HTLV-1.

“As has been shown for HIV-1, treatment with oleandrin did not affect the ability of infected cells to produce and release new virus particles. However, the particles that were produced were defective, meaning they contained less envelope glycoprotein on their surface,” Harrod said. “This impaired their ability to form virological synapses for effective cell-to-cell virus transmission.”  

A so-called “envelope,” which forms the outer coat of the HTLV-1 particle and binds to the receptors on the surface of target cells, must be present in order for a virus-infected cell to fuse with the membrane of an uninfected T-cell, allowing the virus to enter the cell and spread the disease. Without it, the HTLV-1 retrovirus can’t successfully be passed to other cells.

“Oleandrin is unique in its ability to block the incorporation of the envelope glycoprotein into mature virus particles as they’re exiting an infected cell,” Harrod said.

The hope is that oleandrin, or a similar drug that targets the same part of the retrovirus infection cycle, could potentially prevent HTLV-1 from causing progressively worse clinical symptoms in people with an immune-driven condition like HAM/TSP where the body’s immune system causes tissue damage due to the misrecognition of replicating virus particles.

“If a drug, such as oleandrin, could prevent the spread of HTLV-1 particles within an infected HAM/TSP patient, it may become possible to dampen the neuroinflammatory response to alleviate the symptoms of disease,” Harrod said.

Harrod called the findings “exciting” because oleandrin targets a different mechanism of fighting the virus – one that hasn’t been the focus of other antiviral drugs that attack specific steps in the retroviral infection cycle. Those drugs, called highly-active antiretroviral therapies or HAART for short, have not been shown to be effective with HTLV-1.

In the study, to demonstrate that purified oleandrin or an N. oleander extract could inhibit the formation of HTLV-1 virological synapses, SMU researchers in Harrod’s lab labeled an HTLV-1-infected virus-producing cell-line with green fluorescent protein (GFP), so these cells could be easily identified by their ‘green’ fluorescence under a microscope. These cells were then placed in the same culture well as healthy T-cells. T-cells that became infected with HTLV-1 were easy to spot because researchers could see a junction between the two cells and then a red fluorescent signal showing up in the newly-infected T-cell.

Phoenix Biotechnology provided the purified oleandrin and Nerium oleander plant extract used in the study.

Dallas Voice covered the news here, as well as D CEO Healthcare and Medical XPress.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Wastewater leak in West Texas revealed by satellite radar imagery and sophisticated modeling

Leakage in Ken Regan field could have contaminated groundwater for livestock and irrigation between 2007 and 2011

DALLAS (SMU) – Geophysicists at SMU say that evidence of leak occurring in a West Texas wastewater disposal well between 2007 and 2011 should raise concerns about the current potential for contaminated groundwater and damage to surrounding infrastructure.

SMU geophysicist Zhong Lu and the rest of his team believe the leak happened at a wastewater disposal well in the Ken Regan field in northern Reeves County, which could have leaked toxic chemicals into the Rustler Aquifer. The same team of geophysicists at SMU has revealed that sinkholes are expanding and forming in West Texas at a startling rate.

a) Coverage of the ALOS PALSAR scenes used (white box). Black line shows the boundary of the Ken Regan field. Dark green line and light green line represent the boundaries of the Rustler Aquifer and Pecos Valley Aquifer in Texas, respectively. Red star represents the epicenter of the earthquake that occurred in May 2018. Blue circle represents the groundwater well for livestock drawing from the Rustler Aquifer in this area. Blue triangles are wells, which provide groundwater leveling records. (b) Vertical deformation (cm/yr) (in the red box in Fig. 1a) estimated from InSAR. Green circles with and without arrows indicate active injection/disposal wells in the Ken Regan field and oil production wells within 1.5 km from the deformation center during the research period, respectively. Purple circle represents the groundwater which provides groundwater quality records. Source: Zhong Lu

Wastewater is a byproduct of oil and gas production. Using a process called horizontal drilling, or “fracking,” companies pump vast quantities of water, sand and chemicals far down into the ground to help extract more natural gas and oil. With that gas and oil, however, come large amounts of wastewater that is injected deep into the earth through disposal wells.

Federal and state oil and gas regulations require wastewater to be disposed of at a deep depth, typically ranging from about 1,000 to 2,000 meters deep in this region, so it does not contaminate groundwater or drinking water. A small number of studies suggest that arsenic, benzene and other toxins potentially found in fracking fluids may pose serious risks to reproductive and development health.

Even though the leak is thought to have happened between 2007 and 2011, the finding is still potentially dangerous, said Weiyu Zheng, a Ph.D. student at SMU (Southern Methodist University) who led the research.

“The Rustler Aquifer, within the zone of the effective injection depth, is only used for irrigation and livestock but not drinking water due to high concentrations of dissolved solids. Wastewater leaked into this aquifer may possibly contaminate the freshwater sources,” Zheng explained.

“If I lived in this area, I would be a bit worried,” said Lu, professor of Shuler-Foscue Chair at SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and the corresponding researcher of the findings.

He also noted that leaking wastewater can do massive damage to surrounding infrastructure. For example, oil and gas pipelines can be fractured or damaged beneath the surface, and the resulting heaving ground can damage roads and put drivers at risk.     

SMU geophysicists say satellite radar imagery indicates a leak in the nearby disposal well happened because of changes shown to be happening in the nearby Ken Regan field: a large section of ground, five football fields in diameter and about 230 feet from the well, was raised nearly 17 centimeters between 2007 and 2011. In the geology world, this is called an uplift, and it usually happens where parts of the earth have been forced upward by underground pressure.

Lu said the most likely explanation for that uplift is that leakage was happening at the nearby well.

“We suspect that the wastewater was accumulated at a very shallow depth, which is quite dramatically different from what the report data says about that well,” he said.

Only one wastewater disposal well is located in close proximity to the uplifted area of the Ken Regan field. The company that owns it reported the injection of 1,040 meters of wastewater deep into the disposal well in Ken Regan. That well is no longer active.

But a combination of satellite images and models done by SMU show that water was likely escaping at a shallower level than the well was drilled for.

And the study, which was published in the Nature publication Scientific Reports, estimates that about 57 percent of the injected wastewater went to this shallower depth. At that shallower depth, the wastewater–which typically contains salt water and chemicals–could have mixed in with groundwater from the nearby Rustler Aquifer. Drinking water doesn’t come from the Rustler Aquifer, which spans seven counties. But the aquifer does eventually flow into the Pecos River, which is a drinking source.

The scientists made the discovery of the leak after analyzing radar satellite images from January 2007 to March 2011. These images were captured by a read-out radar instrument called Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) mounted on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, which was run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

With this technology called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR for short, the satellite radar images allow scientists to detect changes that aren’t visible to the naked eye and that might otherwise go undetected. The satellite technology can capture ground deformation with a precision of sub-inches or better, at a spatial resolution of a few yards or better over thousands of miles, say the researchers.

Lu and his team also used data that oil and petroleum companies are required to report to the Railroad Commission of Texas (Texas RRC), as well as sophisticated hydrogeological models that mapped out the distribution and movement of water underground as well as rocks of the Earth’s crust.

“We utilized InSAR to detect the surface uplift and applied poroelastic finite element models to simulate displacement fields. The results indicate that the effective injection depth is much shallower than reported,” Zheng said. “The most reasonable explanation is that the well was experiencing leakage due to casing failures and/or sealing problem(s).”

“One issue is that the steel pipes can degrade as they age and/or wells may be inadequately managed. As a result, wastewater from failed parts can leak out,” said Jin-Woo Kim, research scientist with Lu’s SMU Radar Laboratory and a co-author of this study.

The combination of InSAR imagery and modeling done by SMU gave the scientists a clear picture of how the uplift area in Regan field developed.

Lu, who is world-renowned for leading scientists in using InSAR applications to detect surface changes, said these types of analysis are critical for the future of oil-producing West Texas.

“Our research that exploits remote sensing data and numerical models provides a clue as to understanding the subsurface hydrogeological process responding to the oil and gas activities. This kind of research can further be regarded as an indirect leakage monitoring method to supplement current infrequent leakage detection,” Zheng said.

“It’s very important to sustain the economy of the whole nation. But these operations require some checking to guarantee the operations are environmentally-compliant as well,” Lu said.

Co-author Dr. Syed Tabrez Ali from AIR-Worldwide in Boston also contributed to this study.

This research was sponsored by the NASA Earth Surface and Interior Program and the Schuler-Foscue endowment at SMU.

Previously, Kim and Lu used satellite radar imaging to find that two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas—two counties over from the Ken Regan uplift—were likely just the tip of the iceberg of ground movement in West Texas. Indeed, they found evidence that large swaths of West Texas oil patch were heaving and sinking at alarming rates. Decades of oil production activities in West Texas appears to have destabilized localities in an area of about 4,000 square miles populated by small towns like Wink, roadways and a vast network of oil and gas pipelines and storage tanks.

Watch the WFAA Verify news segment. You can also hear a report on the study that was broadcast on Austin’s NPR KUT 90.5 below:

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

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NYT: Bickering more after kids?

DALLAS (SMU) – Feel like your fighting more with your spouse after having kids? 

That’s not surprising, given that you have new responsibilities to tackle and you’re probably not getting the sleep you need.

Stephanie Wilson, an SMU assistant psychology professor, told The New York Times that “that lack of sleep is one of the reasons couples spar.” Wilson has researched the relationship between sleep and marital conflict, and found that the worst case scenario for squabbling was when both partners were sleep deprived. If only one partner is exhausted, the bickering isn’t as bad, The NY Times’ Jessica Grose reported.

Read the article to find some great tips for avoiding a relationship apocalypse while you’re raising your children.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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What’s the effect of climate change on plants?

DALLAS (SMU) – Plants need CO2 to live. But we are emitting way too much for plants to absorb.

Bonnie Jacobs

Bonnie Jacobs, a professor of earth sciences at SMU (Southern Methodist University), made this point and others in a recent interview with “Healthy Living Healthy Planet Radio.” Jacobs, who is a noted expert in paleobotany, was asked to weigh in on what climate change might mean for plants in the near future.

By studying fossil plants, paleobotanists can not only better understand past climates, but they can also get a sense of what future climate change could look like.

Jacobs said the climate change we are seeing – precipitated by higher levels of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, emitted into our atmosphere from cars, power plants that burn fuels – will “definitely have a detrimental effect for some plants.”

In some parts of the world, that will be because drought will become more common as the temperature increases, making it harder for native plants to survive. In other parts of the world, it could be because rains become too heavy for plants to grow.

“Life finds ways to adapt.  And if a species cannot adapt, it will go extinct. This is kind of the natural way of the living world,” Jacobs notes. “The really big problem is that we have over 7.5 billion people on this planet right now, and we are living through a very drastic change because the change is happening so quickly with regard to climate.”

You can hear the interview here.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Is it possible to change your personality? Yes, if you’re willing to do the work involved

DALLAS (SMU) – Want to be more outgoing?  Or less uptight?

In an interview with Fox4ward’s Dan Godwin, SMU psychology professor Nathan Hudson said that it is possible for people to change aspects of their personality.  But it will require some work on your part.

You can view the video here or on Hudson’s website. Forbes and Psychology Today also did a piece on the research.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, community and the world.

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Historical data confirms recent increase in West Texas earthquakes

A new analysis of historical seismic data conducted by The University of Texas at Austin, SMU and other academies has found that earthquake activity in West Texas around Pecos has increased dramatically since 2009.

The study, published Nov. 4, 2019, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, is important because it leverages old, unmined data to track seismic activity over nearly the past two decades – much further back than other studies— to show that activity has increased during the past decade in an area of the Permian Basin that is being heavily developed for oil and gas. Although researchers have generally thought that to be true, the statewide TexNet earthquake monitoring system has been gathering data since only 2017, making it impossible to definitely determine when the cluster of seismic activity around Pecos really began.

The researchers were able to extend the seismic record of the area by turning to the older TXAR system near Lajitas about 150 miles to the south. TXAR is an array of 10 seismographs installed in the 1990s by scientists at SMU (Southern Methodist University) to help track nuclear testing across the world, said lead author Cliff Frohlich, a senior research scientist emeritus at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

“Especially for these West Texas earthquakes, we would like to get some information about when they started,” Frohlich said. “I really saw this as a way to bridge the gap before TexNet.”

The TXAR system is some distance from Pecos, but Frohlich said the equipment is highly sensitive and that the area is remote and seismically very quiet, making the system perfect for picking up vibrations from explosions across the world or from earthquakes 150 miles away. Frohlich worked with Chris Hayward, director of SMU’s Geophysics Research Program, to create a method to derive the earthquake data from the international data TXAR collects and build an earthquake catalog for the Delaware Basin near Pecos from 2000 to 2017.

By analyzing data from 2000 to 2017, scientists were able to document more than 7,000 seismic events near Pecos that were determined by the team to be earthquakes. Data on these seismic events had to be manually reviewed to ensure they were in fact earthquakes and not a false detection. This was done by Frohlich and Julia Rosenblit, who was an SMU intern at the time.

Multiple events first started occurring in 2009, when 19 earthquakes of at least magnitude 1 were documented. The rate increased over time, with more than 1,600 earthquakes of magnitude 1 or greater in 2017. Most were so small that no one felt them.

The study shows a correlation between earthquake activity in the area and an increase in oil and gas activity but doesn’t make an effort to directly tie the two together as other studies have done.

“West Texas now has the highest seismicity rates in the state,” said Heather DeShon, study co-author and associate professor at SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “What remained uncertain is when the earthquakes actually started. This study addresses that.”

This study is the latest in a comprehensive effort to determine what is causing an increase in seismic activity in Texas and how oil and gas operations can be managed to minimize that human-induced element. The state approved the TexNet system in 2015, which is operated in tandem with research efforts by the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research (CISR).

Co-author Peter Hennings, who leads CISR and is a Senior Research Scientist at the UT Bureau of Economic Geology said that fundamental research like this latest study is vital when trying to unravel such a complicated problem.

“The obvious next step is exactly what the University of Texas is doing – conducting these careful studies on the relationship between earthquakes and their human and natural causes to build an integrated understanding,” Hennings said.

SMU seismologists have also been the lead or co-authors of a series of studies on Texas earthquakes. For instance, UT Austin and SMU found that earthquakes triggered by human activity have been happening in Texas since 1925, and they have been widespread throughout the state ever since. In addition, SMU research showed that many of the Dallas-Fort Worth earthquakes were triggered by increases in pore pressure–the pressure of groundwater trapped within tiny spaces inside rocks in the subsurface.

The Bureau of Economic Geology and UTIG are units of the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. Scientists from SMU, Portland State University, the University of Oklahoma and the French institute IFREMER also worked on the study.

Several outlets covered the new research, including The Weather Channel, The Dallas Morning News, Texas Tribune, Midland Reporter-Telegram, and Dallas Observer. – The University of Texas at Austin

 

 

 

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SMU engineering and education professors receive NSF grant to research teaching computer science and computational thinking through community gaming

DALLAS (SMU) – The Lyle School of Engineering, Guildhall and the Simmons School of Education & Human Development at SMU will use a $1,521,615 grant from the National Science Foundation to research teaching computer science and computational thinking through the popular video game, Minecraft. Research will span the fields of game design, human computer interaction, machine learning, curriculum design and education assessment by integrating STEM+C (computing) based curriculum directly into Minecraft. The project will help advance knowledge in game-based learning by building on techniques and experiences from commercial game design. The game and infrastructure produced through the research will serve as a vital computing resource for middle and high school educators.

The grant, which was featured in Dallas Innovates, was awarded to Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall and an assistant professor of Computer Science at Lyle, Eric Larson, associate professor in Computer Science at Lyle and Leanne Ketterlin Geller, professor and Texas Instrument Endowed Chair in Education at Simmons. Research begins this month with funding extending through 2022. Their aim is to create a more stable, ethical, and inclusive data science workforce by broadening the interest in data science to a more diverse population of K-12 students.

“We’re presented with the challenge of finding creative ways to positively impact student outcomes in STEM and the value it can provide in the learning experience,” said Ketterlin Geller. “We struggle with K-12 student engagement in math and science so this project is an optimal way to help us generate new interest while meeting our education goals and seeing students succeed and excel in these fields.”

“A key initiative of STEM+C is to cultivate the skills for the next generation of data scientists, information scientists, and engineers. Video games provide a technique to engage the next generation of students in a fun and intuitive manner,” said Clark. “Games are developed around fundamental activities, or gameplay atoms, which reflect the experiential learning process through a trial and error in-game conveyance/feedback loop.”

Research will integrate curriculum that aligns with education standards such as Common Core Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS-2013), Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA-2017), and California Computer Science Content Standards (CACS-CS 2019) into the successful loops found in Minecraft. These loops contain game mechanics that have shown to engage a large demographic of players across age, gender, race, and socio-economic factors. The project will integrate feedback from educational stakeholders, including teachers and students. Key outcomes from engaging in gameplay that are assessed include changes in students’ interest, attitudes, beliefs, and self-efficacy in STEM+C, engagement in collaborative open-ended solution making, and achievement in related computing and mathematics concepts. – Molly Phillips, Lyle School of Engineering

 

About the Lyle School of Engineering

SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 29 graduate programs, including master’s and doctoral degrees, through the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Engineering Management, Information and Systems; and Mechanical Engineering. Lyle students participate in programs in the unique Deason Innovation Gym, providing the tools and space to work on immersion design projects and competitions to accelerate leadership development and the framework for innovation; the Hart Center for Engineering Leadership, helping students develop nontechnical skills to prepare them for leadership in diverse technical fields; the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, developing new methodologies for incorporating engineering education into K-12 schools; the Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, combining the innovative forces of Lyle and the Cox School of Business to integrate their expertise, resources and guidance to develop technology prototypes and create viable business plans; and the Hunter and Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity, combining technological innovation with business expertise to address global poverty.

About Guildhall

Since its genesis, SMU Guildhall has set the bar in game development education. Recognized as one of the best game design graduate programs in the world, SMU Guildhall works collaboratively across disciplines and industries to train the next generation of game developers. It’s long held a seat in the Top 10 rankings for game development programs across the world by the Princeton Review, sitting at Number 1 for the past two years. In addition to its Team Game Production curriculum, the Guildhall has been commended for the high quality of its faculty of industry veterans and professionals as well as its career services achievements. The program has graduated over 800 alumni, who now work at more than 270 video game studios and tech companies around the world. The program’s achievements can also be seen in its high-caliber game successes including record breaking downloads, awards, and contest wins. SMU Guildhall offers both a Master of Interactive Technology in Digital Game Development degree and a Professional Certificate of Interactive Technology in Digital Game Development, and it is the only program to offer specializations in all four cornerstones of game development — Art, Design, Production, and Programming. For more information, visit guildhall.smu.edu.

About Simmons School of Education & Human Development

The Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU reflects the University’s vision of serving the most important educational needs of our city, region and nation, graduating students for successful careers in a variety of fields and providing educational opportunities beyond traditional degree programs. Recognized as a unique and transformative leader in education research, practice and policy, the School is committed to rigorous, research-driven programs that promote evidence-based, effective practices in education and human development.

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SMU In The News

Dallas Innovates: MacFarlane to lead SMU’s Hart Institute for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

DALLAS (SMU) – Duncan L. MacFarlane MBA ’98, an expert in engineering entrepreneurship and a pioneer in the field of photonics, has been appointed the first executive director of the Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at SMU. The Institute combines the innovative forces of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering and Cox School of Business. The two schools integrate their expertise, resources and guidance to develop technology prototypes and create viable business plans.

“Naming Duncan to this position is a natural extension of his vast expertise in product innovation and engineering entrepreneurship. He is actively engaged in Dallas, the region and the SMU community in efforts to nurture ground-breaking ideas and turn them into reality,” said Lyle Dean Marc P. Christensen.

“The resources provided through this institute greatly enhance SMU’s ability to cultivate and support engineering entrepreneurs in North Texas and beyond,” said MacFarlane, who also holds the Bobby B. Lyle Centennial Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship, serves as associate dean for Engineering Entrepreneurship and is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lyle. “I am delighted with this opportunity.”

“An alumnus of the SMU Cox Executive MBA program, Duncan’s inherent innovative spirit helped launch the joint M.S. in Engineering Entrepreneurship degree in concert with the Lyle and Cox Schools in 2017,” said Matthew B. Myers, Dean of the Cox School of Business. “We look forward to a deeper collaboration between the two schools in taking the engineering entrepreneurship program and campus-based technology start-ups to new heights.”

MacFarlane’s specific research areas include breakthrough advances in quantum informatics, photonics, communications systems and instrumentation. His work in photonic filters is used widely by optical component and system engineers in industry. MacFarlane pioneered the manufacture of micro-optics using ink jet techniques and invented a novel 3-dimensional volumetric display applied in aerospace. He has written more than 100 technical papers, holds 18 U.S. patents and has secured more than $8.5 million in research funding.

Prior to joining SMU, MacFarlane spent almost three decades at The University of Texas at Dallas in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, where he served as program director of Telecommunications Engineering and associate dean for Interdisciplinary Programs. MacFarlane started three new departments, including Materials Science and Engineering, Bioengineering, and Systems Engineering and Management, as well as six new degree programs. MacFarlane received the UT Dallas Diversity Ambassador Award in 2012 and the Jonsson School Award for Teaching Excellence in 2014.

MacFarlane’s industry experience includes roles at Schafer Associates, Texas Instruments and JDS Uniphase. He was an original member of Celion Networks, a telecommunications system startup backed by Sequoia, a venture capital firm. He was also a co-founder of MRRA, a company dedicated to improving medical imaging through supporting instrumentation.

At Lyle, MacFarlane teaches undergraduate and graduate-level Electrical and Computer Engineering courses, as well as Engineering Entrepreneurship. He is the director of the Photonics Devices and Systems Laboratory and co-director of the Quantum Informatics Research Group. As the Bobby B. Lyle Centennial Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship, MacFarlane serves as program director for the Master of Science in Engineering Entrepreneurship (MSEN).

MacFarlane is a registered professional engineer in the state of Texas and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has been elected to the honor societies Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi and Beta Gamma Sigma. MacFarlane earned his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University in 1984 and 1985, respectively; a Ph.D. from Portland State University in 1989; and an MBA from SMU in 1998.

Read Dallas Innovates’ article on MacFarlane here. – Molly Phillips and Anna Martinez

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, community and the world.

 

About the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering

SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 29 graduate programs, including master’s and doctoral degrees, through the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Computer Science and Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Engineering Management, Information, and Systems; and Mechanical Engineering. Lyle students participate in programs in the unique Deason Innovation Gym, providing the tools and space to work on immersion design projects and competitions to accelerate leadership development and the framework for innovation; the Hart Center for Engineering Leadership, helping students develop nontechnical skills to prepare them for leadership in diverse technical fields; the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, developing new methodologies for incorporating engineering education into K-12 schools; and the Hunter and Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity, combining technological innovation with business expertise to address global poverty.

 

About the Cox School of Business

The SMU Cox School of Business, established in 1920, is committed to influencing the way the world conducts business via prolific research that provokes innovation, change and global thought leadership. Cox faculty members strive to connect ground-breaking research to the classroom as well as the marketplace. Cox faculty are widely published in the world’s most prestigious management journals. The Cox School of Business offers a full range of business education degree programs including BBA, multiple MBA programs, and other Master of Science degree programs, as well as non-degree Executive Education programs. Consistently ranked among the world’s leading business schools, SMU Cox maintains an active alumni network and is accredited by AACSB.

 

 

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Dallas Morning News: SMU researcher, Garland students are using smartphones to monitor bridge safety

Brett Story

DALLAS (SMU) – Seems like smartphones can do everything these days. Add to that list gathering information on bridge’s structural health.

Brett Story, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, and students at Garland High School are using smartphones in passing cars to check if there are any cracks or uneven settling in the foundation of the Briarwood bridge, which crosses over Duck Creek in Garland.

The Dallas Morning News has more on this innovative research.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

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Researchers unveil new volcanic eruption forecasting technique

Volcanic eruptions and their ash clouds pose a significant hazard to population centers and air travel, especially those that show few to no signs of unrest beforehand. Geologists are now using a technique traditionally used in weather and climate forecasting to develop new eruption forecasting models. By testing if the models are able to capture the likelihood of past eruptions, the researchers are making strides in the science of volcanic forecasting.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the eruption history of the Okmok volcano in Alaska. In 2008, a large eruption produced an ash plume that extended approximately 1 mile into the sky over the Aleutian Islands – posing a significant hazard to aircraft engines along a route that transports roughly 50,000 people between Asia and North America each day, the researchers said.

“The 2008 eruption of Okmok came as a bit of surprise,” said University of Illinois graduate student and lead author Jack Albright. “After an eruption that occurred in 1997, there were periods of slight unrest, but very little seismicity or other eruption precursors. In order to develop better forecasting, it is crucial to understand volcanic eruptions that deviate from the norm.”

Geologists typically forecast eruptions by looking for established patterns of preeruption unrest such as earthquake activity, groundswell and gas release, the researchers said. Volcanoes like Okmok, however, don’t seem to follow these established patterns.

To build and test new models, the team utilized a statistical data analysis technique developed after World War II called Kalman filtering.

“The version of Kalman filtering that we used for our study was updated in 1996 and has continued to be used in weather and climate forecasting, as well as physical oceanography,” said U. of I. geology professor Patricia Gregg, a co-author of the study that included collaborators from SMU (Southern Methodist University) and Michigan State University. “We are the first group to use the updated method in volcanology, however, and it turns out that this technique works well for the unique unrest that led up to Okmok’s 2008 eruption.”

One of those unique attributes is the lack of increased seismicity before the eruption, the researchers said. In a typical preeruption sequence, it is hypothesized that the reservoir under the volcano stays the same size as it fills with magma and hot gases. That filling causes pressure in the chamber to increase and the surrounding rocks fracture and move, causing earthquakes.

“In the 2008 eruption, it appears that the magma chamber grew larger to accommodate the increasing pressure, so we did not see the precursor seismic activity we would expect,” Albright said. “By looking back in time with our models, or hindcasting, we can now observe that stress had been building up in the rocks around the chamber for weeks, and the growth of the magma system ultimately led to its failure and eruption.”

This type of backward and forward modeling allows researchers to watch a volcanic system evolve over time. “While we stopped our analysis after the 2008 eruption, we are now able to propagate this new model forward in time, bring it to present day, and forecast where Okmok volcano is heading next,” Gregg said.

The researchers posit that these models will continue to find other less-recognized eruption precursors, but acknowledge that every volcano is different and that the models must be tailored to fit each unique system.

The volcano forecasting technique used in this study was based on volcano deformation data from GPS and satellite radars. Geophysicist Zhong Lu, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU and a global expert in satellite radar imagery analysis, processed the satellite radar images and provided the volcano deformation maps for this research.

The U. of I. team is working in collaboration with researchers from Alaska Volcano Observatory and SMU to help build a stronger forecasting system for the Aleutian Islands area. The researchers received $541,921 in grant money from NASA for the work in early 2019.

Popular Mechanics, Sci Tech Daily and other outlets highlighted the study. — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

 

 

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Why do birds migrate at night?

UT Southwestern Medical Center and SMU found migratory birds maximize how much light they get from their environment, so they can migrate even at night 

DALLAS (SMU) – It was a puzzle about birds.

Migratory birds are known to rely on Earth’s magnetic field to help them navigate the globe. And it was suspected that a protein called cryptochrome, which is sensitive to blue light, was making it possible for birds to do this.

Yet many of these animals are also known to migrate at night when there isn’t much light available. So it wasn’t clear how cryptochrome would function under these conditions in birds.

A new study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center in collaboration with SMU (Southern Methodist University), though, may have figured out the answer to that puzzle.

Researchers found that cryptochromes from migratory birds have evolved a mechanism that enhances their ability to respond to light, which can enable them to sense and respond to magnetic fields.

“We were able to show that the protein cryptochrome is extremely efficient at collecting and responding to low levels of light,” said SMU chemist Brian D. Zoltowski, who was one of the lead authors of a new study on the findings. “The result of this research is that we now understand how vertebrate cryptochromes can respond to very low light intensities and function under night time conditions.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS in September.

(From left) UT Southwestern Medical Center research specialist Yogarany Chelliah, Dr. Joseph Takahashi, and SMU’s Dr. Brian Zoltowski. Photo courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Kim Leeson.

Cryptochromes are found in both plants and animals and are responsible for circadian rhythms in various species. In birds, scientists were specifically focused on learning more about an unusual eye protein called CRY4, which is part of a class of cryptochromes.

The lab of Joseph Takahashi, a circadian rhythms expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center, worked with other UT Southwestern scientists to purify and solve the crystal structure of the protein – the first atomic structure of a photoactive cryptochrome molecule from a vertebrate. The lab of Brian Zoltowski, an expert in blue-light photoreceptors, studied the efficiency of the light-driven reactions –  identifying a pathway unique to CRY4 proteins that facilitates function under low light conditions.

“Although in plants and insects, cryptochromes are known to be photoactive, which means they react to sunlight. Among vertebrates much less is known, and the majority of vertebrate cryptochromes do not appear to be photoactive,” said Takahashi, chairman of neuroscience at UT Southwestern and an investigator with Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “This photosensitivity and the possibility that CRY4 is affected by the magnetic field make this specific cryptochrome a very interesting molecule.”

Researchers took a sample of the CRY4 from a pigeon and grew crystals of the protein. They then exposed the crystals to x-rays, making it possible for them to map out the location of all the atoms in the protein.

And while pigeons are not night-migratory songbirds, the sequences of their CRY4 proteins are very similar, the study noted.

“These structures allow us to visualize at the atomic scale how these proteins function and understand how they may use blue-light to sense magnetic fields,” said Zoltowski, associate professor of chemistry at SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences. “The new structures also provide the first atomic level detail of how these proteins work, opening the door for more detailed studies on cryptochromes in migratory organisms.”

In the study, researchers discovered unusual changes to key regions of the protein structure that can enhance their ability to collect light from their environment.

“Cryptochromes work by absorbing a photon of light, which causes an electron to move through a sequence of amino acids. These amino acids typically consist of a chain of 3 or 4 sites that act as a wire that electrons can flow through,” explained Zoltowski. “But in pigeons, it was identified that this chain may be extended to contain 5 sites.”

This mutation of the electron chain in pigeons makes cryptochrome less dependent on a bird’s environment having a lot of light for the protein to be activated.

“Birds have evolved a mechanism to enhance the efficiency. So even when there is very little light around, they have enough signal generated to migrate,” Zoltowski said.

Other co-authors of the study include UT Southwestern’s Yogarany Chelliah, Anushka Wickramaratne, Wei Xu, Ryan E. Hibbs and Carla B. Green; SMU’s Nischal Karki; Henrik Mouritsen from the University of Oldenburg; and Peter J. Hore and Lauren Jarocha from the University of Oxford.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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SMU paleontology grad named one of the AAAS IF/THEN ambassadors

The ambassadors are encouraged to share their stories of being women innovators, in hopes it inspires the next generation of women to get into science, technology, engineering and math [STEM]

Myria Perez ’18 and Louis Jacobs

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU (Southern Methodist University) graduate Myria Perez ’18 was one of 125 women innovators across the country who was selected to be an AAAS IF/THEN ambassador.

Their mission? To share their stories and serve as high-profile role models for girls, in hopes it leads to a new generation of women getting into science, technology, engineering and math [STEM].

“We firmly believe that if we support a woman in STEM, then she can change the world,” Lyda Hill, the founder of Lyda Hill Philanthropies, said in a statement. “The goal of IF/THEN is to shift the way our country — and the world — think about women in STEM and this requires changing the narratives about women STEM professionals and improving their visibility.”

Perez, who is now a fossil preparator at the Perot Museum, worked with paleontologist Louis Jacobs and others to unearth never-before-seen fossils from Angola. Those fossils are currently on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Learn more about Perez in this video, Myria Perez: Portrait of a Paleontologist. You can also read about the award she won in The Dallas Morning News article.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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How do we get so many different types of neurons in our brain?

New SMU study may provide insight on how our brains are able to produce so many different types of neurons, which control everything we do

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU (Southern Methodist University) researchers have discovered another layer of complexity in gene expression, which could help explain how we’re able to have so many billions of neurons in our brain.

Neurons are cells inside the brain and nervous system that are responsible for everything we do, think or feel. They use electrical impulses and chemical signals to send information between different areas of the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the nervous system, to tell our body what to do. Humans have approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain that direct us to do things like lift an arm or remember a name.

Yet only a few thousand genes are responsible for creating those neurons.

All cells in the human nervous system have the same genetic information. But ultimately, genes are turned “on” or “off” like a light switch to give neurons specific features and roles. Understanding the mechanism of how a gene is or is not turned on – the process known as gene expression – could help explain how so many neurons are developed in humans and other mammals.

 “Studies like this are showing how by unique combinations of specific genes, you can make different specific neurons,” said Adam D. Norris, co-author of the new study and Floyd B. James Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at SMU. “So down the road, this could help us explain: No. 1, how did our brain get this complex? And No. 2, how can we imitate nature and make whatever type of neurons we might be interested in following these rules?”

Scientists already have part of the gene expression puzzle figured out, as previous studies have shown that proteins called transcription factors play a key role in helping to turn specific genes on or off by binding to nearby DNA.

It is also known that a process called RNA splicing, which is controlled by RNA binding proteins, can add an additional layer of regulation to that neuron. Once a gene is turned on, different versions of the RNA molecule can be created by RNA splicing.

But before the SMU study was done, which was published in the journal eLife, it was not exactly clear what the logistics of creating that diversity was.

“Before this, scientists had mostly been focused on transcription factors, which is layer No. 1 of gene expression. That’s the layer that usually gets focused on as generating specific neuron types,” Norris said. “We’re adding that second layer and showing that [transcription factors and RNA binding proteins] have to be coordinated properly.

And Norris noted, “this was the first time where coordination of gene expression has been identified in a single neuron.”

The sad-1 gene, present in all of the worm’s 300 neurons (visualized by fluorescence), is spliced into different versions in different neurons. Neurons with one version fluoresce red, neurons with the other version fluoresce green, and yellow neurons in the bottom panel contain both versions.

Using a combination of old school and cutting-edge genetics techniques, researchers looked at how the RNA of a gene called sad-1, also found in humans, was spliced in individual neurons of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. They found that sad-1 was turned on in all neurons, but sad-1 underwent different splicing patterns in different neuron types.

And while transcription factors were not shown to be directly participating in the RNA splicing for the sad-1 gene, they were activating genes that code for RNA binding proteins differently between different types of neurons. It is these RNA binding proteins that control RNA splicing.   

“Once that gene was turned on, these factors came in and subtly changed the content of that gene,” Norris said.

As a result, sad-1 was spliced according to neuron-specific patterns.

They also found that the coordinated regulation had different details in different neurons.

“Picture two different neurons wanting to reach the same goal. You can imagine they either go through the exact same path to get there or they take divergent paths. In this study, we’re showing that the answer so far is divergent paths,” said Norris. “Even in a single neuron, there are multiple different layers of gene expression that together make that neuron the unique neuron that it is.”

Norris used worm neurons because “unlike in humans, we know where every worm neuron is and what it should be up to. Therefore, we can very confidently know which genes are responsible for which neural process.

“The very specific details from this study will not apply to humans. But hopefully the principles involved will,” Norris explained. “From the last few decades of work in the worm nervous system, specific genes found to have a specific effect on the worm’s behavior were later shown to be responsible for the same types of things in human nerves.”

The lead author of the study was Morgan Thompson, a graduate student at SMU. Ryan Bixby, Robert Dalton, Alexa Vandenburg — all former or current students in SMU’s Biological Sciences department — also contributed to the study. In addition, John A. Calarco from the University of Toronto, Canada was a co-author.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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People transformed the world through land use by 3,000 years ago

Study sheds light on how the way our ancestors fed themselves changed our ecosystem

DALLAS (SMU) – Humans started making an impact on the global ecosystem through intensive farming much earlier than previously estimated, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

Evidence of the earliest domesticated plants and animals dates back to around 10,000 years ago. But findings from a team of more than 250 scientists, including two from SMU (Southern Methodist University), show that by 3,000 years ago our ancestors had dramatically changed the world to grow food.

“Our study shows in detail the progression from the origins of agriculture to its spread around the world,” said SMU anthropologist Mark D. McCoy. “It turns out that earth science models are probably too conservative, and intensive reshaping of the environment for food production was common by thousands of years before the onset of the kind of industrial scale farming we see today.

“That is important because over the time periods discussed, humans became the major force shaping ecosystems around the world,” McCoy said.

The new global assessment by the ArchaeoGLOBE Project also shows that scientists have previously underestimated the impact of early human land use.

Crowdsourcing the Map

Led by archeologist Lucas Stephens, a researcher affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, ArchaeoGLOBE used a crowdsourcing approach, inviting experts in ancient land use to contribute to a questionnaire on 146 regions (covering all continents except Antarctica) at ten historical time intervals to assess and integrate archaeological knowledge at a global scale. The result was a complete, though uneven, meta-analysis of global land use over time.

Significantly, the study also reveals that hunting and gathering was more varied and complex than originally thought, helping archeologists to recognize that foragers “may have initiated dramatic and sometimes irreversible environmental change.” Intensive forms of agriculture reported around the world included activities like clearing land, creating fields that were fixed on the landscape, raising large herds of animals, and putting increasing amounts of effort into growing food.

SMU anthropologist and ArchaeoGLOBE team member K. Ann Horsburgh notes the rise in agriculture and livestock is primarily due to growing populations needing to be fed.

“Food production such as agriculture and pastoralism, when compared with foraging in the same environment, is linked to a faster population growth and can sustain higher population densities,” said Horsburgh.

Horsburgh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and McCoy, Associate Professor of Anthropology, provided information on land use in Africa and the remote islands of the Pacific, respectively. McCoy also brought his expertise in geospatial technology to study how people in the past inhabited and shaped the world around them, while Horsburgh brought her knowledge of ancient DNA to retrace the spread of domesticated animals.

Mapping Ancient Migrations

The map could provide new light on how the spread of farming and herding were linked to major migrations in human prehistory.

“This is first time that regional expertise on ancient land use has been synthesized on this scale,” Horsburgh said. “That matters because we know that although the shift from foraging to farming tends to be a ‘one-way’ transition, it did not progress the same way around the world. The details of how it did progress has shaped everything from our diets to the languages we speak today.”

Horsburgh went on to say, “What remains the topic of intense study is how much of the transition is food producers spreading and displacing foragers, and how much is it foragers adopting or marrying into food producing groups, or some other scenario. Most of this was done in the absence of written records, so it is up to anthropology to sort things out.”

“The natural next step for this revised model of the spread of different types, and intensities, of land use is to compare them with human genetics and linguistics and integrate these findings into the big story of humanity,” said Horsburgh.

Several media outlet covered this research including The New York Times, Science and CNN.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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Corey Clark wins Tech Titans Award

DALLAS (SMU) – Corey Clark, SMU professor and chief technology officer of BALANCED Media | Technology, has won Tech Titans’ 2019 Technology Inventor Award.

The award recognizes the pioneering accomplishments a person, team or group has made to create breakthrough ideas or products that have advanced the disciplines of arts, education, energy, engineering, environment, medicine and/or science.

Corey Clark, PhD

Corey Clark, PhD, was selected as the recipient of the Technology Inventor Award because of the work he’s done to infuse human intelligence into machine learning. BALANCED Media | Technology’s HEWMEN platform combines the processing power of gaming computers with the intuition of gamers themselves to analyze medical imagery and processed data to help make cancer treatments more effective.

That technology was recently on display when former Dallas Cowboys’ champion Michael Irvin, Madden champion Drini (Complexity Gaming) and several others played a game for charity that Clark helped create using the HEWMEN platform. The game, called Omega Cluster, had each player act as a spaceship pilot who must warp from location to location gathering energy crystals before enemies’ lock onto their position and destroy their ship. But the process of collecting and sorting crystals was actually organizing by proxy a set of chemotherapeutic co-medications compounds that have been tested in the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery’s laboratory. The game let players explore these compounds and identify what has allowed some to be successful in the lab testing while others have not.

In another project, Clark worked with SMU educators and designers and Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT) to create an Indiana Jones-like game to help adults who weren’t able to read. That project won $1.5 million as a grand prize winner in the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE competition, as well as an additional $1 million achievement award for most effective app to help adult English language learners learn to read in the competition.

Clark is the deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall and an assistant professor of computer science at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.

He was given the award on Aug. 23 at the 2019 Tech Titans Gala in Plano, Texas. Tech Titans is the largest technology trade organization in Texas and each year, it recognizes outstanding technology companies and individuals in the North Texas area who have made significant contributions to their industries.

To learn more about the work Clark has been involved in, visit his Human and Machine Intelligence (HuMIn) Game Lab website.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

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SMU professor featured in APM Reports’ documentary, Students on the Move

“Every time a student moves schools they lose 4 to 6 months of academic learning.”

Alexandra Pavlakis

For many kids, staying focused on the school work they need to do is enough of a challenge. Add in the uncertainty and stress that can come when you don’t know if you’ll have a roof to sleep under.

As APM Reports, millions of children in the United States have unstable housing, and a growing body of research finds that repeatedly uprooted children are more likely to struggle in school and more likely to drop out. But there are ways to help them succeed.

APM Reports did a documentary focused on two groups of kids who often change addresses — homeless kids and children of migrant farmworkers — and explored efforts to help these students do well in school.

Alexandra Pavlakis, who has done several studies on student homelessness and poverty, was interviewed for the piece. Pavlakis is an Assistant Professor in Education Policy and Leadership at SMU’s Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

Go here to listen to APM Reports’ piece on “Students on the Move: Keeping uprooted kids in school.”

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world. 

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Attackers could be listening to what you type

SMU researchers were able to detect what is typed with remarkable accuracy using just a smartphone

DALLAS (SMU) – You likely know to avoid suspicious emails to keep hackers from gleaning personal information from your computer. But a new study from SMU (Southern Methodist University) suggests that it’s possible to access your information in a much subtler way: by using a nearby smart phone to intercept the sound of your typing.

Researchers from SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity found that acoustic signals, or sound waves, produced when we type on a computer keyboard can successfully be picked up by a smartphone. The sounds intercepted by the phone can then be processed, allowing a skilled hacker to decipher which keys were struck and what they were typing.

The researchers were able to decode much of what was being typed using common keyboards and smartphones – even in a noisy conference room filled with the sounds of other people typing and having conversations.

“We were able to pick up what people are typing at a 41 percent word accuracy rate. And we can extend that out – above 41 percent – if we look at, say, the top 10 words of what we think it might be,” said Eric C. Larson, one of the two lead authors and an assistant professor in SMU Lyle School’s Department of Computer Science.

Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering faculty Eric Larson and Mitch Thornton discuss their research on the security of smartphones at SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity.

The study was published in the June edition of the journal Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. Co-authors of the study are Tyler Giallanza, Travis Siems, Elena Sharp, Erik Gabrielsen and Ian Johnson – all current or former students at the Deason Institute.

It might take only a couple of seconds to obtain information on what you’re typing, noted lead author Mitch Thornton, director of SMU’s Deason Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“Based on what we found, I think smartphone makers are going to have to go back to the drawing board and make sure they are enhancing the privacy with which people have access to these sensors in a smartphone,” Larson said.

SMU Simulated a Noisy Conference Room, But Typing Could Still Be Intercepted

The researchers wanted to create a scenario that would mimic what might happen in real life. So they arranged several people in a conference room, talking to each other and taking notes on a laptop. Placed on the same table as their laptop or computer, were as many as eight mobile phones, kept anywhere from three inches to several feet feet away from the computer, Thornton said.

Study participants were not given a script of what to say when they were talking, and were allowed to use shorthand or full sentences when typing. They were also allowed to either correct typewritten errors or leave them, as they saw fit.

“We were looking at security holes that might exist when you have these ‘always-on’ sensing devices – that being your smartphone,” Larson said. “We wanted to understand if what you’re typing on your laptop, or any keyboard for that matter, could be sensed by just those mobile phones that are sitting on the same table.”

The answer was a definite, “Yes.”

But just how does it work?

“There are many kinds of sensors in smartphones that cause the phone to know its orientation and to detect when it is sitting still on a table or being carried in someone’s pocket. Some sensors require the user to give permission to turn them on, but many of them are always turned on,” Thornton explained. “We used sensors that are always turned on, so all we had to do was develop a new app that processed the sensor output to predict the key that was pressed by a typist.”

There are some caveats, though.

“An attacker would need to know the material type of the table,” Larson said, because different tables create different sound waves when you type.  For instance, a wooden table like the kind used in this study sounds different than someone typing on a metal tabletop.

Larson said, “An attacker would also need a way of knowing there are multiple phones on the table and how to sample from them.”

A successful interception of this sort could potentially be very scary, Thornton noted, because “there’s no way to know if you’re being hacked this way.”

The Deason Institute is part of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, and its mission is to to advance the science, policy, application and education of cyber security through basic and problem-driven, interdisciplinary research.

Many media outlets covered the story, including The Dallas Morning News, Forbes and BBC.

 

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SMU professor David J. Meltzer talks about the first people in the New World with MeatEater

DALLAS (SMU) – Imagine being one of the first Ice Age people in the New World and seeing a rattlesnake for the first time. Or encountering a plant you’d never seen before and wondering if it is a food source or something that could poison you.

Professor David J. Meltzer from SMU (Southern Methodist University) talks about that and much more on a podcast with MeatEater’s host Steven Rinella.

The podcast can be listened to here.

Meltzer is an anthropologist at SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences, and he has done extensive research on the first peoples who settled in the New World. For instance, he was just part of a groundbreaking study, which found a previously unknown group of people who lived there during the last Ice Age.

 

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New map outlines seismic faults across DFW region

Study by SMU, UT Austin and Stanford scientists rates faults for potential earthquakes; Faults under DFW urban area viewed as lower quake hazard

 

DALLAS (SMU) – Scientists from SMU, The University of Texas at Austin and Stanford University found that the majority of faults underlying the Fort Worth Basin are as sensitive to forces that could cause them to slip as those that have hosted earthquakes in the past.

 

The new study, published July 23rd by the journal Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), provides the most comprehensive fault information for the region to date. 

 

Fault slip potential modeling explores two scenarios: a model based on subsurface stress on the faults prior to high-volume wastewater injection and a model of those forces reflecting increase in fluid pressure due to injection.

 

A simplified version of the fault map created by the team of researchers. The map includes faults that are visible at the surface (green) and faults that are underground (black). The solid line indicates underground faults that researchers were able to map at a high resolution. The dotted line indicates faults that were mapped at a medium resolution. According to the research, in the presence of wastewater injection activity, the majority of the faults in the area are as susceptible to slipping as those faults that have already produced earthquakes. The map also marks earthquake locations and waste-water injection well locations and amounts. Credit: UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology

None of the faults shown to have the highest potential for an earthquake are located in the most populous Dallas-Fort Worth urban area or in the areas where there are currently many wastewater disposal wells.

 

Yet, the study also found that the majority of faults underlying the Fort Worth Basin are as sensitive to forces that could cause them to slip and cause an earthquake as those that have hosted earthquakes in recent years.

 

Though the majority of the faults identified on this map have not produced an earthquake, understanding why some faults have slipped and others with similar fault slip potential have not continues to be researched, said SMU seismologist and study co-author Heather DeShon, who has been the lead investigator of a series of other studies exploring the cause of the North Texas earthquakes.

Earthquakes were virtually unheard of in North Texas until slightly more than a decade ago. But more than 200 earthquakes have occurred in the region since late 2008, ranging in magnitude from 1.6 to 4.0. A series of studies have linked these events to the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas operations by injecting it deep into the earth at high volumes, triggering “dead” faults nearby.

A total of 251 faults have been identified in the Fort Worth Basin, but the researchers suspect that more exist that haven’t been identified. 

The study found that the faults remained relatively stable if they were left undisturbed. However, wastewater injection sharply increased the chances of these faults slipping, if they weren’t managed properly.

 

“That means the whole system of faults is sensitive,” said the lead author of the study Peter L. Hennings, a research scientist from UT Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology and the principal investigator at the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research (CISR). 

DeShon said the new study provides fundamental information regarding earthquake hazard to the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

 

“The SMU earthquake catalog and the Texas Seismic Network catalog provide necessary earthquake data for understanding faults active in Texas right now,” she said. “This study provides key information to allow the public, cities, state and federal governments and industry to understand potential hazard and design effective public policies, regulations and mitigation strategies.”

“Industrial activities can increase the probability of triggering earthquakes before they would happen naturally, but there are steps we can take to reduce that probability,” added co-author Jens-Erik Lund Snee, a doctoral student at Stanford University.

 

Earthquake rates, like wastewater injection volumes, have decreased significantly since a peak in 2012.  But as long as earthquakes occur, earthquake hazard remains. Dallas-Fort Worth remains the highest risk region for earthquakes in Texas because of population density.

Even after the earthquakes died away, North Texas residents have wondered about the region’s vulnerability to future earthquakes – especially since no map was available to pinpoint the existence of all known faults in the region.  The new data, while still incomplete, benefited from information gleaned from newly released reflection seismic data held by oil and gas companies, reanalysis of publicly available well logs, and geologic outcrop information.

U of T at Austin and Stanford University provided the fault data and calculated fault slip potential. SMU, meanwhile, has been tracking seismic activity — which measures when the earth shakes —since people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area felt the first tremors near DFW International Airport in 2008. A catalog of all those tremors was recently published in June in the journal BSSA.

SMU seismologists have also been the lead or co-authors of a series of studies on the North Texas earthquakes. SMU research showed that many of the Dallas-Fort Worth earthquakes were triggered by increases in pore pressure — the pressure of groundwater trapped within tiny spaces inside rocks in the subsurface. An independent study done by SMU’s seismologist Beatrice Magnani found that wastewater injection reactivated dormant faults near Dallas that had been dormant for the last 300 million years.  

DeShon said any future plan to mine for oil or natural gas in Fort Worth basin should be done with an understanding that the basin contains several faults that are highly-sensitive to pore-pressure changes. The study noted that rates of injection dropped sharply in the Fort Worth basin, but the practice still continues. Most of the injection that has taken place has been concentrated in the Johnson, Tarrant, and Parker counties, near areas of continued seismic activity.  

“The largest earthquake the Dallas-Fort Worth region experienced was a magnitude 4 in 2015” DeShon said. “The U.S. Geological Survey and Red Cross provide practical preparedness advice for your home and work places. Just as we prepare for tornado season in north Texas, it remains important for us to have a plan for experiencing earthquake shaking.”

Many outlets covered the news:

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Texas’ strategic goal for students’ debt burden shows potential promise and pitfalls

SMU professor found black and Latinx college graduates had some of the highest debt-to-income ratios 

DALLAS (SMU) –College students in Texas who graduated from public universities with a bachelor’s degree had, on average, student loan debts that equaled 74 percent of what they earned in their first-year wages, according to a new study from SMU (Southern Methodist University). 

The study, which looked at students who started college between 2004 and 2008, also shows that black and Latinx students are predicted to borrow larger amounts of college debt than white students compared to what they’ll make in their first job. 

The findings suggest that if public universities try to meet the goals of a Texas initiative designed to increase attainment and reduce student debt burdens, the institutions may inadvertently be discouraged from educating historically underserved students.

Dominique Baker

“Even when controlling for prior income, parental education, choice of major and the time it took to get their degree, historically underserved students are predicted to have higher debt-to-income ratios,” said Dominique J. Baker, author of the study and assistant professor of education policy at SMU’s Simmons School of Education & Human Development. “This means that any sanctions associated with a policy like the ‘strategic goal’ in Texas would likely punish state institutions simply for educating students who are predicted to have higher debt-to-income ratios.”    

Baker’s study is the first to investigate the debt-to-income ratio in Texas since the state created the 60x30TX strategic plan. The plan calls for increased completion of undergraduate programs in shorter periods of time, as well as efforts to keep undergraduate student debt at or below 60 percent of first-year wages by 2030. 

Baker’s study only focuses on students who earned a bachelor’s degree. The 60x30TX plan also includes students who earn a credential or associate’s degree who have smaller debt-to-income ratios than bachelor’s degree recipients.  

The findings, which were recently published in AERA Open, suggest that the state of Texas may find it difficult to maintain the 60 percent goal given the demographic and borrowing trends in the state.

On average, students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree after attending a public university had an average $25,794 of undergraduate loan debt. That number jumped to $33,255 when loans held by parents were also included. 

Yet, students earned approximately $34,132 during their first year after earning a degree, meaning that the average student’s debt-to-income was 74 percent, according to the study. If you factor in the amount that parents took out in loans for their child’s college education, the average debt-to-income ratio was closer to 92 percent. 

In addition, the study found that black students, on average, borrowed $7,214 more than their white peers, while Latinx students borrowed $453 more. 

The state of Texas has emphasized that debt-to-income ratios at certain institutions will not be held to the 60 percent threshold. However, conversations have begun that explore attaching sanctions to individual institution’s debt-to-income ratio. 

The study highlights that this could be concerning as the public universities that were shown to have the highest median debt burdens in Texas were Prairie View A&M University, Texas Southern University, Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas A&M University – Commerce and the University of North Texas at Dallas. Many of these colleges also have higher-than-average rates of Latinx and black student enrollment, Baker noted. 

“So it would be inequitable to sanction institutions solely for serving certain student populations,” Baker said.

The study was based on data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Workforce Commission. Baker merged information from both sources to determine students’ debt-to-income ratios.  

Only four-year college students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree and worked full-time in the year immediately following graduation in Texas were included. The 40,000 students who were part of the study started undergraduate college between 2004 and 2008.

Baker said that the Texas goal of keeping the debt-to-income ratio at 60 percent or less for undergraduates is admirable. But she warned that any state looking to adopt such a model should be cautious about penalizing public universities that routinely fail to meet that target for its students because those colleges have more racial minorities, like a historically-black college.    

“Future research needs to be conducted on incorporating measures of affordability in state accountability structures in ways that do not penalize underserved student populations,” she said.

Student debt has become a key issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, as college tuition continues to rise and borrowers nationwide owe a total of $1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. Concern over students’ ability to repay undergraduate debt led to the creation of goal 4 of the 60x30TX strategic plan, which was developed by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

The Dallas Morning News wrote about the study here.

 

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White House recognizes Walkington with Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

DALLAS (SMU) – Candace Walkington, an associate professor in Teaching and Learning at SMU (Southern Methodist University), is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Announced by the White House, the award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.

Walkington, who works in SMU’s Simmons School of Education & Human Development, is among 11 selected from Texas to receive the award. She was nominated by the U.S. Department of Education.

Her research focuses on how abstract mathematical ideas can become connected to students’ concrete, everyday experiences so concepts are more understandable. By examining students’ out-of-school areas of interest and their intended careers, her research looks at “personalizing” mathematics instruction.

For more on her research, see the following:

Walkington, C., Clinton, V., & Shivraj, P. (2018). How Readability Factors Are Differentially Associated with Performance for Students of Different Backgrounds When Solving Math Word Problems. American Educational Research Journal, 55(2), 362-414. DOI: 10.3102/0002831217737028

Walkington, C. & Bernacki, M. (2018). Personalization of Instruction: Design Dimensions and Implications for Cognition. Journal of Experimental Education, 86(1), 50-68.

Walkington, C. (2013). Using learning technologies to personalize instruction to student interests: The impact of relevant contexts on performance and learning outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(4), 932-945.

 

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SMU’s ‘Titans in a Jar’ could answer key questions ahead of NASA’s space exploration

NASA headed to Saturn’s ‘Titan’ moon in 2026 to look for signs of past or present life 

DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) could help determine if Saturn’s icy moon – Titan – has ever been home to life long before NASA completes an exploratory visit to its surface by a drone helicopter.

This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL

NASA announced in late June that its “Dragonfly” mission would launch toward Saturn’s largest moon in 2026, expecting to arrive in 2034. The goal of the mission is to use a rotorcraft to visit dozens of promising locations on Titan to investigate the chemistry, atmospheric and surface properties that could lead to life.

SMU was awarded a $195,000 grant, also in June, to reproduce what is happening on Titan in a laboratory setting. The project, funded by the Houston-based Welch Foundation, will be led by Tom Runčevski, an assistant professor of chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. SMU graduate student Christina McConville was also awarded a fellowship by the Texas Space Grant Consortium to help with the project.

Before the rotorcraft lands on Titan, chemists from SMU will be recreating the conditions on Titan in multiple glass cylinders — each the size of a needle top — so they can learn about what kind of chemical structures could form on Titan’s surface. The knowledge on these structures can ultimately help assess the possibility of life on Titan — whether in the past, present or future.

Scientists have long considered Titan to be very similar to pre-biotic Earth, even though it is a frigid world much farther from the sun than our planet. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere like Earth, and is also the only world other than Earth to have standing bodies of liquids, including lakes, rivers and seas, on its surface. In addition, NASA scientists believe Titan may have a subsurface ocean of water.

“Titan is a hostile place, with lakes and seas of liquid methane, and rains and storms of methane. The storms carry organic molecules produced in the atmosphere to the surface, and at the surface conditions, only methane, ethane and propane are liquids. All other organic molecules are in their solid form – or, as we would call them on Earth, minerals,” Runčevski explained.

“We are interested in the chemical composition and crystal structure of these organic minerals, because it is believed that minerals played a key role in the origins of life on Earth,” he said. “Hence, our research may help assess these possibilities for strange “methanogenic” Titanean life.”

Runčevski added that any information that they get about the structure of Titan’s upper layer crust, which is made of organic minerals, could prove very useful to NASA’s Dragonfly mission.

In order to create these “Titans in a jar” at SMU, Runčevski said they will use information about the conditions on Titan that were obtained during the mission Cassini-Huygens, which ended two years ago.

“We can recreate this world step by step in a cylinder made of glass,” he said. “First, we will introduce water, which freezes into ice. Second, we will top that layer of ice with ethane that liquidizes as a ‘lake.’ Then we will fill the remaining cylinder with nitrogen.”

After that, they can introduce different molecules into the system, mimicking the rainfall. Lastly, they will “dry” the lakes by slightly raising the temperature and produce the surface of the moon. The cylinder that this moon will be created inside is specifically designed, so that multiple state-of-the-art experiments can be done and they can learn from the structure of the real Titan. Large parts of these experiments will be performed at research facilities that provide modern synchrotron and neutron radiation, such as Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the National Institute and Technology in Maryland.

Several media outlets have covered the news, including:

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Inside Higher Ed: The truth about bias response teams is more complex than often thought

DALLAS (SMU) – Are bias response teams political correctness police on college campuses? Or are they a quick fix for dealing with prejudice and bias?

In an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed, a team of professors, including Southern Methodist University’s S. Kiersten Ferguson, argues that the truth is more complex.

They note that bias response teams — which handle reports of incidents that may involve prejudice from students, faculty or staff — are well-intentioned but often lack sufficient resources and time to carry out their charges. And they often get caught in the middle of demands from two different groups, neither of which they are typically able to fully satisfy.

Read the story here.

EXCERPT:

By Ryan A. Miller, Tonia Guida, Stella Smith, S. Kiersten Ferguson and Elizabeth Medina   

Inside Higher Ed

“University of Michigan brings back the Soviet Union with its bias response team,” the conservative-libertarian website The College Fix announced last spring. Similar headlines have warned that such teams punish free speech and are the latest example of political correctness run amok in higher education.

Claims that bias response teams function as the thought police on campuses are false. The truth about these teams is more complex, and less nefarious, than headlines acknowledge. Through our research, including an article we published in The Review of Higher Education, we’ve sought to understand the purpose and functions of bias response teams from the perspectives of administrators who run them at 19 colleges throughout the nation.

Misconceptions about bias response teams abound. What do these teams generally do? They:

  • Receive reports of incidents that may involve prejudice from students, faculty and staff;
  • Reach out and seek to support those who file reports;
  • Engage those who were the subjects of reports in voluntary, educational conversations; and
  • Monitor trends in the campus climate to inform educational efforts.

They also refer incidents that go beyond the scope of the team’s purview — crucially, those that involve institutional policy violations or criminal acts — to the professionals on the campus who are already designated to handle them, such as student conduct offices or campus police.

What do bias response teams not do? In the vast majority of cases, they do not have the power to discipline or sanction any campus community member. Bias response teams generally adopt a nonregulatory approach. They do not shut down free speech or charge into classrooms to stop offensive statements from faculty members or students. A federal judge in the University of Michigan case brought by Speech First affirmed as much, remarking “The university considers this voluntary and the student has no obligation to come in.”

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New power generation technology using waste heat from geothermal plants tested by SMU

The Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has just completed a research project that aims to use ultra-low-grade heat (150 °F to 250 °F) normally discarded by geothermal facilities to generate additional electricity. A central component of this project was the proprietary bottoming cycle technology of PwrCor, Inc., an advanced technology company that focuses on renewable energy solutions for Waste-to-Heat Power, Geothermal, and Solar markets.

Maria Richards

SMU’s Geothermal Laboratory, which is a research facility devoted to broadening the understanding and use of geothermal energy, compiled information such as ambient air temperature, injection temperature, and injection flow rate to quantify the total thermal energy within the spent geothermal fluids already being produced, but not utilized, by 31 of 73 U.S.-based geothermal sites for which data was available. What they found was that roughly 427 MWe can be generated from the spent geothermal fluids of currently existing facilities. This represents about 15% of the capacity of the sites looked at in the study.

“Geothermal energy is the work-horse of green power production.  Unlike various others, it operates 24/7, is suitable for baseload power supply, occupies a small footprint, and is designed to last,” noted Maria Richards, Geothermal Lab Coordinator for the Geothermal Laboratory. “PwrCor is working to improve the efficiency of our geothermal power infrastructure, and we commend their efforts.”

PwrCor is currently working with companies in the fuel cell and reciprocating engines industries, but they are also involved in initiatives in geothermal, oil and gas, and solar thermal. Their technology that allows for the cost-effective conversion of low-grade and ultra-low-grade heat to mechanical power and electricity could be revolutionary for businesses that could convert wasted heat to additional electrical power.

Joe Batir, a research geologist for the Geothermal Laboratory at SMU, said, “There is a great deal of heat being underutilized in geothermal power generating facilities around the United States.  Technology that can convert even a small portion of this underutilized heat into additional power has the potential of bringing major benefits to both geothermal power producers and to the environment.”– Globe News Wire and SMU

SMU’s research was featured in Think Geoenergy.

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SMU’s catalog of North Texas earthquakes confirms continuing effects of wastewater disposal

A comprehensive catalog of earthquake sequences in Texas’s Fort Worth Basin, from 2008 to 2018, provides a closer look at how wastewater disposal from oil and gas exploration has changed the seismic landscape in the basin.

In their report published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Louis Quinones and Heather DeShon of Southern Methodist University (SMU) and colleagues confirmed that seismicity rates in the basin have decreased since 2014, a trend that appears to correspond with a decrease in wastewater injection.

However, their analysis also noted that new faults have become active during this period, and that seismicity continues at a greater distance from injection wells over time, suggesting that “far-field” changes in seismic stress will be important for understanding the basin’s future earthquake hazard potential.

“One thing we have come to appreciate is how broadly injection in the basin has modified stress within entire basin,” said DeShon.

The first thing researchers noted with wastewater injection into the basin “was the reactivation of individual faults,” she added, “and what we’re now starting to see is essentially the leftover energy on all sorts of little faults being released by the cumulative volume that’s been put into the basin.”

The earthquake catalog published in BSSA reported all seismicity recorded by networks operated by SMU between 2008 and 2018. Some seismic sequences in the catalog–such as the 2008 Dallas Fort Worth Airport earthquakes–are well-known and well-studied, while others such as the 2018 west Cleburne sequence are reported in the paper for the first time.

DeShon said publishing the complete catalog was important in part to help people recognize that “there are earthquakes throughout the basin, not just on these three or four sequences that have garnered a lot of press attention.”

The researchers found that overall seismicity in the Fort Worth Basin has been strongly correlated in time and space with wastewater injection activities, with most seismicity occurring within 15 kilometers of disposal wells.

Wastewater disposal volume began to decrease from its peak in 2014, mostly as a result of lower oil and gas prices, and the study showed “tapering off of seismicity along the faults that were near high-injection wells,” said Quinones.

There are exceptions to this pattern, including the 2015 Irving-Dallas and 2017 Lake Lewisville sequences that have no wells within 15 kilometers.

Induced earthquakes occur when wastewater injected back into the ground increases the pore pressure within the rocks and affects stress along faults in surrounding rock layers. In the Fort Worth Basin, these stress changes may propagate far–more than 10 kilometers–from the injection wells, the researchers suggested.

“Injection rates peaked in 2014, but we still don’t understand how spatially extensive the modification of pore pressure is at depth, so we still don’t understand how the hazard is going to reduce with time,” said DeShon.

There are still far fewer induced earthquakes in the Fort Worth Basin compared to regions such as Oklahoma, which also has experienced a dramatic increase in seismicity in the past decade as the result of wastewater disposal from oil and gas production. The volumes of injected wastewater are much higher in Oklahoma, and the faults there tend to be much closer together, DeShon said.

By contrast, Quinones said, faults in the Fort Worth Basin are more widely spaced, and there are few instances of earthquakes jumping between faults.

However, the dense population of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area makes it critical to continue monitoring the region’s induced earthquake risk, comparing seismic data with more information on wastewater injection.

For the moment, DeShon said, researchers only have access to monthly cumulative volume and average pressure at injection wellheads, in a report that is updated once a year.

“It would be best if injection data were provided in a more timely fashion in Texas, and if more detailed daily information on injection rates and  volumes and some measurements of downhole pressure were provided,” she said.–Seismological Society of America

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Long exposure to protein inhibitor may be the key to more effective chemotherapy for treatment-resistant cancers, SMU finds

SMU researchers find success in treating drug-resistant prostate cancer cells in the lab

DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers at SMU’s Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) have succeeded in lab testing the use of chemotherapy with a specific protein inhibitor so that the chemotherapeutic medication is better absorbed by drug-resistant cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The approach could pave the way for a more effective way to treat cancers that are resistant to treatment.

A mix of drugs is frequently used to shrink cancer tumors or keep tumor cells from spreading to other parts of the body. But chemotherapy is so toxic that the mix often kills healthy cells, too, causing dreadful side effects for cancer patients. And eventually, many cancers learn how to resist chemotherapy, making it less effective over time.

“When multidrug resistance evolves, this leaves the patient with a very poor prognosis for survival and the oncologist with few, if any, effective tools, such as chemotherapy medicines, to treat what is very likely an aggressive and/or metastatic cancer at this point,” said John Wise, associate professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences and co-author of a study on the findings published Friday in PLOS One.

Much of the research led by CD4 director Pia Vogel and Wise is centered on a class of proteins called ABC transporters, a key factor in why many cancers resist chemotherapy.

Long exposure to P-gp inhibitor and chemotherapy decreased cancer cell survival, as assessed by colony formation. Credit: SMU

“These transporters are defensive proteins and are normally very, very good for us. They protect us from toxic chemicals by literally pumping them out of the cell, almost like a sump pump removes water from one’s cellar,” Vogel said.

But when someone has cancer, these proteins do more harm than good.

“One protein, P-glycoprotein, can pump nearly all chemotherapeutics out of the cancer cell, thereby making the cancer resistant to many drugs and untreatable,” Wise noted.

For this reason, SMU researchers tested the combination of using an inhibitor that temporarily shuts down P-glycoprotein’s ability to remove drugs from the cancer cells along with chemotherapeutics on prostate cancer cells grown in the lab, which have been shown to be resistant to multiple chemotherapeutic drugs.

The SMU team was able to show that if inhibitors of P-glycoprotein are used during and after the multidrug resistant cancer cells have been exposed to the chemotherapy drugs, then the cancer cells become much more sensitive to the chemotherapeutics.

The recipe for success was giving cancer cells a dose of both chemotherapy drugs and the P-gp inhibitor for two hours. Researchers then washed the prostate cancer cells to get rid of any residual chemotherapy drugs before giving the cells another dose of just P-gp inhibitor for 22 hours, lead author and SMU Ph.D. doctoral candidate Amila K. Nanayakkara explained.

Pia Vogel and John Wise

Prostate cancer cells that were given this treatment were shown to retain chemotherapy drugs at a much higher level compared to cancer cells not treated with the P-glycoprotein inhibitor. And after about 24 hours, much fewer of these cancer cells survived in this treatment compared to the cells which had not seen the inhibitor.

When the same tests were performed on normal noncancerous cells, “there was no sign of extra toxicity to the healthy cells using this method,” Wise added.

One issue, though, is how to duplicate this method in a patient’s body. “Once you’ve taken a chemotherapy drug, it’s not easy to remove it after just two hours,” said co-author Vogel, a professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences.

Still, the researchers argued that it is worth further research, because there are currently few options for cancer patients once their disease becomes resistant to multiple chemotherapies.

“Our paper shows these remarkable effects when the inhibitor is present during, and importantly, after exposure to chemotherapeutic,” Wise said. “And while ‘washing’ is not feasible in humans, the kidneys and other organs are in a sense doing the washing step for a patient. These organs are washing the chemotherapy from the bloodstream and therefore, out of cancer cells. So in that way, we think our preliminary cell culture studies may be translatable at least in principle to animals and people.”

News Medical, Dallas Innovates and others wrote about the new research.

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DNA from 31,000-year-old human teeth reveals new ethnic group living in Siberia during last Ice Age

The two 31,000-year-old milk teeth found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Russia which led to the discovery of a new group of ancient Siberians. Photo credit: Russian Academy of Sciences.

An international team of researchers, including SMU anthropologist David Meltzer, discovered a new group of ancient Siberians. The research was published June 5, 2019 as a story in Nature

Two children’s milk teeth buried deep in a remote archaeological site in north eastern Siberia have revealed a previously unknown group of people lived there during the last Ice Age.

The finding was part of a wider study, which also discovered 10,000 year-old human remains in another site in Siberia are genetically related to Native Americans – the first time such close genetic links have been discovered outside of the US.

The two 31,000-year-old milk teeth found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Russia which led to the discovery of a new group of ancient Siberians. Photo credit: Russian Academy of Sciences.

The international team of scientists, led by Professor Eske Willerslev who holds positions at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and is director of The Lundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, have named the new people group the ‘Ancient North Siberians’ and described their existence as ‘a significant part of human history’.

The DNA was recovered from the only human remains discovered from the era – two tiny milk teeth – that were found in a large archaeological site found in Russia near the Yana River. The site, known as Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (RHS), was found in 2001 and features more than 2,500 artifacts of animal bones and ivory along with stone tools and evidence of human habitation.

The discovery was published on June 5 as part of a wider study in Nature and shows the Ancient North Siberians endured extreme conditions in the region 31,000 years ago and survived by hunting woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and bison. Several publications, such as The New York Times and Science Magazine, also covered the discovery.

Professor Willerslev said: “These people were a significant part of human history, they diversified almost at the same time as the ancestors of modern day Asians and Europeans and it’s likely that at one point they occupied large regions of the northern hemisphere.”

Dr Martin Sikora, of The Lundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics and first author of the study, added: “They adapted to extreme environments very quickly, and were highly mobile. These findings have changed a lot of what we thought we knew about the population history of north eastern Siberia but also what we know about the history of human migration as a whole.”

Researchers estimate that the population numbers at the site would have been around 40 people with a wider population of around 500. Genetic analysis of the milk teeth revealed the two individuals sequenced showed no evidence of inbreeding which was occurring in the declining Neanderthal populations at the time.

The complex population dynamics during this period and genetic comparisons to other people groups, both ancient and recent, are documented as part of the wider study which analyzed 34 samples of human genomes found in ancient archaeological sites across northern Siberia and central Russia.

Professor Laurent Excoffier from the University of Bern, Switzerland, said: “Remarkably, the Ancient North Siberians people are more closely related to Europeans than Asians and seem to have migrated all the way from Western Eurasia soon after the divergence between Europeans and Asians.”

Scientists found the Ancient North Siberians generated the mosaic genetic make-up of contemporary people who inhabit a vast area across northern Eurasia and the Americas – providing the ‘missing link’ of understanding the genetics of Native American ancestry.

It is widely accepted that humans first made their way to the Americas from Siberia into Alaska via a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait which was submerged at the end of the last Ice Age. The researchers were able to pinpoint some of these ancestors as Asian people groups who mixed with the Ancient North Siberians.

One of the paper’s senior authors, Professor David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University (SMU), explained: “We gained important insight into population isolation and admixture that took place during the depths of the Last Glacial Maximum – the coldest and harshest time of the Ice Age – and ultimately the ancestry of the peoples who would emerge from that time as the ancestors of the indigenous people of the Americas.” Meltzer is an anthropologist at SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences.

This discovery was based on the DNA analysis of a 10,000 year-old male remains found at a site near the Kolyma River in Siberia. The individual derives his ancestry from a mixture of Ancient North Siberian DNA and East Asian DNA, which is very similar to that found in Native Americans. It is the first time human remains this closely related to the Native American populations have been discovered outside of the US.

Professor Willerslev added: “The remains are genetically very close to the ancestors of Paleo-Siberian speakers and close to the ancestors of Native Americans. It is an important piece in the puzzle of understanding the ancestry of Native Americans as you can see the Kolyma signature in the Native Americans and Paleo-Siberians. This individual is the missing link of Native American ancestry.” — St. John’s College, University of Cambridge

Read The New York Times article here. More publications on the discovery can be found here:

A 31,000-year-old milk tooth was discovered in this small area among ancient remnants of tools and animal bones. Photo credit: Elena Pavlova

 

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CBS 7: Research shows Permian Basin sinkholes are growing

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU geophysicist Zhong Lu was interviewed by CBS-7’s Shane Battis to discuss the ongoing issue of West Texas sinking.

So far, two large sinkholes have formed near Wink, Texas. But Lu notes that the problem is only expected to get worse over time, due to the Permian Basin in Wink and other neighboring towns having a layer of salt below the ground. In many cases, oil and gas drilling has allowed leaking water to soften that salt layer and cause the surface to cave in, Lu explained.

Lu and fellow SMU geophysicist Jin-Woo Kim have done a series of studies on the phenomenon of the ground sinking at alarming rates in West Texas.  Earlier studies have revealed significant ground movement that suggests the two existing holes are expanding and new ones are forming.

The researchers used satellite radar images that were made public by the European Space Agency, and supplemented that with oil activity data from the Railroad Commission of Texas.

Lu and Kim are both in the SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, which is part of the Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences.

As Lu told Battis, the deterioration can cause serious problems for people in Wink.

“I think if you live in that area, I would be very concerned,” he said.

For instance, he noted that sinking ground can bend roads into unsafe shapes that put drivers and risk, and it can also damage pipelines underground.

Watch the CBS-7 news segment. 

 

EXCERPT

WINK, Tx. (KOSA) – Research by geophysics has shown the Permian Basin may be booming economically, but it’s also sinking physically.

Wink is known for its massive sinkhole, but new research suggests that in the coming years that sight might not be so uncommon.

It turns out Wink isn’t the only spot prone to sinkholes.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University have found points all over the Permian Basin where the ground is sinking at 5 to 53 centimeters every year.

But why?

CBS7 spoke to a Dr. Zhong Lu, a geophysics professor at SMU who has been studying sinkholes patterns in the Permian Basin.

He explained the Permian Basin has a layer of salt below the ground surface and in many instances oil and gas drilling has allowed leaking water to soften that layer and cause the surface to cave in.

“The casings on the oil wells, it has problems and it cracks and leaks through the casing,” Lu said. “And the corrosion of the metal pipe may also be happening as well that allows the water to diffuse into that area.”

 

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Dallas Cowboys’ legend and video gamers help fight cancer

Gamer’s play contributes to SMU research

The worlds of eSports, professional sports, philanthropy and cancer researching collided on Saturday for an online streaming event to raise funds for children with cancer, their families and Children’s Health in Dallas.

Three-time Super Bowl winner and NFL Hall of Famer, Michael Irvin, and two-time Madden NFL champion, Drini Gjoka, joined to compete in a gaming tournament alongside patients and patient families at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. The tournament consisted of a live Madden NFL 19 streaming game via Twitch and ExtraLife. Stream viewers were asked to make contributions to Children’s Health in support of its Dallas emergency room renovation.

At the same time, technology created by BALANCED Media | Technology helped Southern Methodist University (SMU) researchers search for a cure for cancer.

The event was also made possible by esports organization Complexity Gaming, which streamed the tournament via its channels and provided social media, press and corporate connections.  Other collaborators included The Playmakers Academy of young athletes and Still Thankful LLC, a bridge for medical families and their support group that wants to help.

NBC-5’s Paul Jones covered the event, which was followed by more than 13,000 people.

Video Game Was Fun, Also Helped Cancer Researchers

Not only did the Dallas Cowboys’ Irvin and Gjoka help earn thousands of dollars for families affected by cancer, but a Twitch interactive gamed called Omega Cluster also allowed people watching the gaming tournament to help SMU researchers.

In the Omega Cluster game, each player acted as a spaceship pilot who must warp from location to location gathering energy crystals before enemies’ lock onto their position and destroy their ship. The process of collecting and sorting crystals was actually sorting by proxy a set of chemotherapeutic co-medications compounds that have been tested in the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery’s laboratory. The game let players explore these compounds and identify what has allowed some to be successful in lab testing while others have not.

BALANCED’s HEWMEN, meanwhile, continually supplied all of the game players with the best-known solutions each time a player launched Omega Cluster. This synchronization ensured that the video gaming community was always working to help push the science to the next level by searching and sorting the best-known solutions for any further improvements.

“If they just play that game…that’s actually helping us try to find those compounds that can actually make incurable cancer treatable and that’s what the goal is, what we’re working towards,” Corey Clark told NBC. Clark, the deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall and director of the Human and Machine Intelligence (HuMIn) Game Lab, designed the game with the help of research from biochemistry professors John Wise and Pia Vogel.

Not the First Time SMU Has Worked With Gamers To Help Cure Cancer

It’s not the first time Wise and Vogel have worked with Clark to narrow the search for cancer-fighting chemotherapy drugs.

They also partnered with the makers of “Minecraft” to create a version of the popular best-selling video game that could help SMU researchers identify which chemical compounds show promise in alleviating the problem of chemotherapy failure after repeated use.

The Vogel and Wise research labs are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) in SMU’s Dedman College.  Source: SMU, Play It Forward eSports

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The Dallas Morning News: HMS, Australia team up to solve a global health challenge

DALLAS (SMU) – Southern Methodist University (SMU) has teamed up with Texas-based HMS, the Digital Health CRC (Cooperative Research Centre) and Stanford University to tackle some of the world’s most significant health challenges using ‘big data.’ Dallas Morning News’ business reporter Melissa Repko covered the news on the collaboration, which was announced on Tuesday.

There are two key health care challenges that the coalition is looking to address: the global opioid epidemic and the high rates of avoidable hospital readmissions. The first research project conducted by Stanford University students will tackle the opioid crisis. The second project—led by Daniel Heitjan, Chair of Statistical Science at SMU—will focus on preventable hospital readmissions, which is when patients unexpectedly return to a hospital within 30 days of an earlier hospital stay.

As Repko reported, HMS is providing a key piece of the puzzle: A massive database of more than 2 million patients that researchers can use to find patterns and flag people who are at risk. Researchers will use the Medicaid claims data that HMS clients agree to share. It will be stripped of personal details such as names and addresses that could identify a patient.

Created last year by the Australian government with a seven-year grant, the Digital Health CRC is comprised of more than 80 businesses, universities and health technology providers. Its goal, working with HMS, SMU and Stanford University, is to develop and test digital health solutions that will solve “a vexing problem for both the U.S. and Australia: Health care costs that are skyrocketing, even as outcomes lag behind,” Repko wrote.

Victor Pantano, chief executive of Digital Health CRC, said the immensity and significance of the project reminds him of the Apollo space program. He lives in Canberra, the Australian capital. It’s near a former NASA tracking station called Honeysuckle Creek. The tracking station — a collaboration between scientists in the U.S. and Australia — received and relayed to the world the first images of astronaut Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

 

Researchers from the two countries are partnering again to explore “one of the most exciting frontiers in the modern age: the use of big data and digital technologies to deliver better health systems and better health outcomes into the future,” he said.

Read the Dallas Morning News article here.  

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KERA News: ‘Teaching joy’ is a new approach in the battle against anhedonia

DALLAS (SMU) – Anhedonia is a symptom of depression that strips people of their ability to feel joy.

Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz, professors at Southern Methodist University (SMU), talked to KERA News’ host of All Things Considered Justin Martin about why this psychological condition can be so devastating for people who have it.

Meuret, professor of psychology and director of SMU’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center, and Ritz, an SMU professor of psychology, have been part of a five-year study that aims to develop a more effective treatment for anhedonia.  UCLA is also part of that study.

Listen to KERA interview.

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SB Nation: Can speed save Ben Simmons?

DALLAS (SMU) – As SB Nation’s Michael Pina points out, Philadelphia 76ers’ Ben Simmons might be the fastest player in the NBA, not to mention the other physical advantages he has.  But Pina asks the question: is any of that enough?

For the article, Pina interviewed coaches, players and Southern Methodist University professor Peter Weyand, who leads the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory.

Weyand explained what it is about Simmons, listed as 6’10 and 240 pounds, that makes him such a wonder on the basketball court, biologically speaking.

“Being really large, it’s hard to be fast … Anything where you’re trying to move body mass in space, it’s an advantage to be small,” says Dr. Peter Weyand, a biomechanist and physiologist who’s spent decades conducting performance related research. “It’s just basic biology, how muscular strength relates to body size. Bigger people are weaker.”

He makes a comparison to sprinters: “The quick and dirty is that if you’re smaller, shorter, and less massive, it’s easier to accelerate,” Weyand says. “So if you look at the difference between 400- vs. 200- vs. 100-meter specialists, the shorter the race is the shorter they get, because more of that race is accelerating. And then if you go to the indoor competitions, where typically the standard race distance is 60 meters, the guys that excel at that rate tend to be even shorter, because more of that race is accelerating.”

Read the full article.

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Is blinded review enough? How gendered outcomes arise even under anonymous evaluation, SMU study shows

DALLAS (SMU) – Even when a scientist’s gender wasn’t revealed, female scientists got a lower score than males for grant proposals they submitted for review, according to a working paper led by Southern Methodist University professor Julian Kolev.

The study found that female scientists were more likely to use narrower, more topic-specific language than male applicants for grant research proposals they sent to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Men, on the other hand, tended to use less precise terms, which reviewers gave higher scores for.

The findings suggest that different communication styles are a key driver of the gender score gap, Kolev told Science Magazine in a recent interview.

“Broad words are something that reviewers and evaluators may be swayed by, but they’re not really reflecting a truly valuable underlying idea,” said Kolev, an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business and the lead author of the study. It’s “more about style and presentation than the underlying substance.”

Read more about the study in two recent articles done by Science and Nature.

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NPR asks Peter Weyand “how do pro sprinters run so fast?”

DALLAS (SMU) – If you’ve ever watched any races with the Olympic champion sprinter Usain Bolt, you may have wondered just how he was able to run so fast.

Southern Methodist University professor Peter Weyand, who leads the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory, explained the science behind high-speed running for professional sprinters in an interview with NPR’s WNPR/Connecticut Public Radio. You can listen to the podcast here.

Weyand is well-versed on the topic, having recently co-authored a study that analyzed the way Bolt and other elite athletes ran by using a new motion-based method to assess the patterns of ground-force application.

Weyand is Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology & Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

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Project Support program makes its way to Sweden

Renee McDonald, who helped create Project Support [second to the left standing] and SMU psychology students trained Swedish socials workers on the program.

DALLAS (SMU) – Project Support, an intervention program designed to help improve the parent-child relationship and mental health outcomes for children in families in which intimate partner violence has occurred, is being implemented through social services agencies across Sweden. After a multi-year study, the National Swedish Health Technology Assessment in 2018 designated Project Support, originally developed by SMU Department of Psychology professors Renee McDonald and Ernest Jouriles, as one of two programs with a sufficient evidence base for helping children in domestically violent families.

“Project Support has been demonstrated to ameliorate child adjustment problems and improve family functioning,” says Dr. McDonald. “The program has been evaluated in the U.S. with support from the National Institute of Mental Health and we are delighted that it is now being adopted and utilized in Sweden.”

Project Support is an intensive, one-on-one program in which mental health service providers meet with families weekly in their homes for up to 6 months. During that time, parents are taught specific skills, including how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions, and how to respond to misbehavior. Service providers also provide mothers with emotional support and help them access needed materials and resources through community agencies, such as food banks.

McDonald and Jouriles launched Project Support in the United States in 1996 to address the mental health problems of maltreated children and children exposed to domestic violence and child abuse. Those factors in childhood often lead to considerable problems for children later in life, such as substance abuse, interpersonal violence and criminal activity, say the SMU psychologists.

Both federal and state databases list Project Support as an intervention for children in violent families that is supported by research evidence.

Researchers funded by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, worked with Drs. McDonald and Jouriles to adapt and evaluate the feasibility of providing Project Support to families receiving assistance from the Swedish child welfare agencies.

In early April, SMU hosted six of the original cohort of service providers in Uppsala, Sweden, who were trained to provide Project Support, so that they can share their experiences with Project Support and learn more about programs and services in the U.S. for families in which violence occurs. They visited SMU’s Family Research Center, the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, The Family Place, and Momentous Institute.

U.S. child welfare agencies received more than 4 million reports of child abuse and neglect involving more than 7 million children in 2017, the most recent year data is available, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported. Approximately 13 percent of children in the U.S. are exposed to severe acts of inter-parent violence.

In Sweden, approximately 5 percent of that nation’s children are exposed to severe acts of inter-parent violence, according to Swedish statistics. 

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Preston Hollow People: What did scientists learn from first black hole photo?

DALLAS (SMU) – Park Cities People and Preston Hollow People journalist Bianca R. Montes interviewed Joel Meyers, an assistant professor of physics at SMU, to make sense of what scientists learned from the first-ever image of a black hole, which was revealed by the Event Horizon Telescope last Wednesday.

Meyers is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies a variety of pressing topics, including phenomena in the early universe and observations of the cosmic microwave background.  He said the image of the black hole was “the most direct visualization” we’ve ever had of what these fascinating objects in space actually look like.

“It’s a really dramatic step forward in our ability to say here is a black hole and it cast a shadow,” Meyers said.

Meyers said the image also backs up Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, which was made more than 100 years ago.

“The fact that the image is so close to what we predicted was really a striking confirmation that scientists know what they are doing,” he said.

Read more of what Meyers told the Preston Hollow People on April 10.

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SMU physicist Jodi Cooley receives the 2019 Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU physicist Jodi Cooley has been named the 2019 Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award recipient.

The award, given by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), recognizes educators who have made notable and creative contributions to the teaching of physics. Cooley was honored in July during the AAPT Summer Meeting in Provo, Utah.

Past recipients of the award include well-known physicists such as Michio Kaku, Lisa Randall and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Cooley, who joined Southern Methodist University in 2009, is an associate professor of experimental particle physics in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences who opens her research lab to undergraduates. She has organized a campus rock hunt on Dark Matter Day, analyzed an action film or brought out a Slinky to make physics real for her students. When she delivered the featured address at SMU’s 2012 Honors Convocation, Cooley spoke about the value of failure.

Cooley’s current research interest is to improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter.

She and her colleagues operated sophisticated detectors in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota from 2003 to 2015. The Department of Energy and National Science Foundation is now funding construction of an even deeper location, SNOLAB in Canada, to improve the search of dark matter. Cooley will be one of the researchers at SNOLAB, using detectors that can distinguish between elusive dark matter particles and background particles that mimic dark matter interactions.

Cooley is a principal investigator on the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment and was a principal investigator for the AARM collaboration, which aimed to develop integrative tools for underground science. She has won numerous awards for her research including being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2018. She also received an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

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SMU student wins prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Ophelie Herve

DALLAS (SMU)—A Southern Methodist University (SMU) graduate is one of the recipients of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. 

Ophelie Herve, who is a first-year master’s student in Mechanical Engineering, will receive a three-year stipend of $34,000 to do research of her choosing and $12,000 to pay for her tuition and fees.

She was one of 2,050 students nationwide who was chosen to be a fellow this year. Past fellows include many Nobel Prize winners, Google founder Sergey Brin and the former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

Born in France and raised in Austin, Herve said she plans to use the money to research how to create a prosthetic leg for amputees that it is controlled by their voluntary muscle contractions, so that the leg moves with the same precision as a natural human leg.

“This research has the potential to have a broader impact by improving rehabilitative efforts in the medical field, enhancing injury prevention, and optimizing performance in the athletic industry,” she said.

Herve and her research are featured in an SMU video at https://youtu.be/qEPqvmV9ysE.

Herve said receiving an NSF fellow position has been a tremendous honor. “It is amazing to see that the door has been opened wide to pursue my passion,” she added.

Herve will graduate from SMU in 2019 with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in dynamics and controls.  After that, she said she plans to continue her education under Dario Villarreal, the director of the NeuroMechatronics Lab at SMU, topursue a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering with a biomechatronics specialization.

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SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.