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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
