Tag: Dedman College

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine

Tribe, urban poor supply insight into diabetes

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 24, 2008

Shawna, who is pregnant, calls diabetes a scourge. She is a member of the Akimel O’odham tribe in Arizona. “Diabetes is a sign that this life we’re living isn’t our life,” she says. “The one our ancestors had was way better.”

Before World War II, diabetes was rare among the members of the Akimel O’odhams, also known as the Pima. Today, however, Shawna is among the 12,000 tribal members on the Gila River Reservation in south central Arizona who have the highest recorded rate of diabetes of any population in the world.

The decline of agriculture set the stage for the health crisis, says Carolyn Smith-Morris, assistant professor of anthropology in SMU’s Dedman College and author of the new book “Diabetes Among the Pima: Stories of Survival” (University of Arizona Press, 2006), the first ethno-graphic account of diabetes in a community. The dramatic change of diet and reduction in activity levels, as well as a genetic predisposition to the disease, led to the epidemic, which affects 50 percent of the adults on the reservation, says Smith-Morris.

“This epidemic is about a culture defining its path in an industrial world,” she says.

For more than 30 years, the National Institutes of Health and other government and private agencies have studied the disease in the isolated Akimel O’odham population. Much of what doctors know about diabetes, a chronic disease that develops when the pancreas stops producing insulin, is based on research with the Akimel O’odhams.

Beginning in 1996, Smith-Morris lived and worked part time on the Gila River Reservation, attending health care classes, visiting medical clinics and joining holiday parades, birthday parties and bingo nights.

“After two and half years, I was finally invited to my first family memorial, spent my first nights in Pima homes, and began in earnest to study life at Gila River,” she says.

As a medical anthropologist, she has helped health care workers at Gila River better understand the Akimel O’odham culture and its attitudes about diabetes. She has spent 10 years studying the causes and conditions of the epidemic. Smith-Morris found that diabetes care practices that work in other cultures have not been as successful with the Akimel O’odhams.

From information gathered through personal interviews, surveys and observation, Smith-Morris’ research suggests that the Akimel O’odham’s diabetes epidemic can be curbed through a community-based approach tailored to their culture.

More than 95 percent of the population is obese, a risk factor of diabetes, but promoting jogging hasn’t worked well in a desert with few paved roads, Smith-Morris says. And a health care system based at one hospital is not always effective on a 372,000-acre reservation, where most residents live in poverty and where many residents don’t have cars. Buses run regularly to carry people to medical appointments, but the Akimel O’odham culture does not live by the clock, she says. In fact, while living among the Akimel O’odham, Smith-Morris deliberately slowed her big-city gait to match their more leisurely pace. In addition, diet change is expensive for a population where most live in poverty.

Based in part on her research, the tribe has spent millions of dollars to develop community-based clinics staffed by field nurses and case managers who provide more home-based care.

Smith-Morris’ research also suggests that improving prenatal care for Akimel O’odham women like Shawna can help curb the diabetes epidemic. Nearly 12 percent of pregnant women on the Gila River Reservation are diagnosed with gestational diabetes, compared with the U.S. average of 4 percent. Women with gestational diabetes and their babies are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes and its complications of kidney failure, blindness and amputations later in life.

“The Pima want to avoid diabetes,” Smith-Morris says. “They want to learn, but not always through the traditional Western methods of written materials and lectures. This epidemic is about a culture defining its path in an industrial world.”

Smith-Morris’ current research focuses on diabetes prevention in the urban setting of South Dallas, where 33 percent of families live in poverty and 61 percent are unemployed. She developed the diabetes prevention component of a proposed $15 million project to create a wellness center in a South Dallas neighborhood. The Baylor Office of Health Equity and the Foundation for Community Empowerment are developing plans for the community-based program.

“My advocacy in these projects has impressed upon investors and planners that healthier lives need less clinic-based, biomedical intervention and more infrastructure support such as family-friendly neighborhoods and jobs that pay a living wage,” she says.

She sees positive signs of change as tribal officials are taking more control of their health care system and health education. The hospital has hired more field nurses who travel to patients’ homes. Pima women are encouraged to fry their traditional bread in oil instead of lard.

Non-Native American health care workers also have a new opportunity to better understand their patients’ culture. Bill Knowler, head of the NIH diabetes, digestive and kidney disorders research office in Phoenix now requires all Gila River Reservation NIH workers to read Smith-Morris’ new book. &#8212 Nancy Lowell George

Tags Carolyn Smith-Morris, Dedman College, SMU Department of Anthropology

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

Taos: Modern archaeology goes beyond digging

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 20, 2008

For hundreds of years the beauty and mystery of Taos, New Mexico, have lured thousands of settlers and visitors, from the ancestors of the Taos and Picuris Indians and Spanish settlers to skiing enthusiasts and artists.

Now students participating in SMU’s Archaeology Field School have answered the call of Taos in their own way. In summer 2007 they began work on the first phase of a research project that will bring together University faculty and students, Taos community leaders, private landowners, and local, state and federal government agencies.

Sunday Eiselt

The multifaceted undertaking will involve surveying on foot and through satellite and Google Earth images, as well as archival research and excavation. The collaboration marks the first time archaeological exploration has been conducted on the Ranchos de Taos Plaza.

The project was made possible because the Field School, part of SMU’s Department of Anthropology in Dedman College, has established trust in this traditional community that in the past has regarded such efforts with suspicion.

“Modern archaeology involves a lot of soft skills, including cultural sensitivity and the ability to interact respectfully with communities,” says Sunday Eiselt, visiting assistant professor of anthropology and acting director of SMU’s Archaeology Field School. “You can’t just go in, put holes in the ground and leave.”

The Field School’s first project in the Plaza began last year as a volunteer effort. Taos native Lupita Tafoya’s adobe house has been in her family for 11 generations, and the original structure dates to about 1800. Field School students offered their labor to lower Tafoya’s packed-earth floor to create a step-down living room area. In the process they found a midden, or kitchen garbage area, dating from the early 1800s.

Digging the midden
The SMU students’ 2007 project focused on investigating the midden, as well as deposits in Tafoya’s dining room and front yard.

A total of 14 SMU students, 12 undergraduates and two graduate assistants, joined forces this year with two new high school graduates from Taos Pueblo.

Pipad Krajaejun, Silpakorn U., Bangkok, and Allison McCabe, Taos Pueblo, excavate in Tafoya’s house.

They participated with the help of scholarships from a fund established by former Texas Governor Bill Clements and his wife, former Texas First Lady Rita Clements.

“It’s a big house with several later additions, so the students will recreate the construction history of the house as well,” Eiselt says.

At one time, archaeological exploration of historic cities was confined largely to abandoned areas that provided space for open-area excavation. That changed after World War II, when bomb craters left areas of large, old cities such as London and Warsaw open for investigation.

Researchers developed new techniques to cope with the logistical difficulties of doing archaeological digs in places where people lived and worked. As historical archaeology evolved, new skills were needed to address the often-divergent needs of individual communities.

Taos is an especially complex challenge, says Eiselt, who received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and has been conducting archaeological research in Northern New Mexico since 1998.

A remote and historically close-knit community, the area has experienced a rapid influx of outside investment in recent years, from tourists drawn to its natural beauty and culture to investors seeking to capitalize on them. About 180,000 visitors a year converge on the town, which has a permanent population of just over 5,000. Tourism accounts for nearly 85 percent of an economy that also consistently maintains a double-digit unemployment rate and a cost of living nearly 14 percent higher than the U.S. average, according to the Taos Economic Report and other indicators.

Mike Sandoval, Taos Pueblo

Impact of modernization
The tension between tradition and modernization in the community of Taos, between preservation and gentrification, is palpable, Eiselt says.

“Many former households just off the Ranchos de Taos Plaza are in ruins,” she says. “And with Plaza lots going for $400,000 each, the property taxes have created a situation in which residents whose families have lived there for generations cannot afford to do so now.”

The collaboration between the SMU Field School and the Taos community is creating an oasis of cooperation in the midst of this upheaval, Eiselt adds.

“It’s also a model of how to accomplish goals that serve the people and their interests, as well as our scientific and educational objectives,” she says.

As part of that model, each Archaeology Field School project begins with a volunteer component and follows the example set at Tafoya’s home. This year, the Field School students also helped with the annual cleaning and re-mudding (enjara) of the much-photographed San Francisco de Asis church, an adobe landmark whose earliest construction dates to 1772.

The Taos Plaza community is setting guidelines and providing context for the archaeologists’ work, Eiselt says.

“Many of the people who live here are accomplished scholars of the area’s history in their own right,” she says. “Interacting with them is another great learning opportunity.”

Leslie Reeder, SMU Ph.D. candidate,
making pottery in La Madera, 2007.

Students measure the layers of flooring in Tafoya’s dining room to reconstruct the history of the house.

For example, it was Lupita Tafoya who told Eiselt that the social universe of Taos Plaza was too small for the proposed study, Eiselt says.

“She let us know that we needed to explore not only the Plaza, but all of San Francisco de Asis parish. So much of the community’s activity centers on that church; if we want to understand what we find, we need to understand that larger context,” she says.

As a result of that conversation, Eiselt has created a multiyear research plan. The plan’s three components, the oral history, archival work and general archaeology, will be carried out in consultation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, the Taos Archaeological Society and residents and archaeologists from the area.

One of the study’s major features is its emphasis on mapping rather than digging.

“Excavation, which is intrusive and destructive, will be avoided as much as possible, with most activities focusing on non-intrusive pedestrian or surface survey, including remote sensing, aerial photography and historic maps,” Eiselt wrote in her introduction to the research plan.

The study’s other highlight, a focus on community interaction, also helps the Archaeology Field School achieve one of its primary educational goals: to teach how to work as partners in places like Taos.

“We’re teaching students not to go in with an attitude of ‘Here’s your past. We know because we’re scientists,'” Eiselt says. “This work is about the people, not the objects.” — Kathleen Tibbetts

Tags Dedman College, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos, Sunday Eiselt

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain

Deep breathing worsens panic-attack symptoms

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 15, 2008

Southern Methodist University psychology professor Alicia Meuret proves conventional wisdom is dead wrong: A person suffering a panic attack who tries deep breathing to calm themselves only increases his or her level of hyperventilation and overall panic-related symptoms.

Meuret’s solution? Self-training to expel lesser amounts of carbon dioxide using a hand-held, biofeedback device results in the ability to normalize breathing and avoid hyperventilation.

Tags Alicia E. Meuret, Dedman College, SMU Department of Psychology

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

Neanderthals: “Don’t call me stupid!”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 25, 2008

New research by a U.S.-U.K. team that included SMU archaeology student Metin Eren assaults the long-held notion that Neanderthals went extinct because their stone tools were inferior to those made by Homo sapiens.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University and the University of Exeter report in the “Journal of Human Evolution” that the early stone tool technologies of Neanderthals were as good as, and sometimes even more efficient, than those of Homo sapiens.

The story, “Complexity of Neanderthal tools,” was posted online Aug. 26 by BBC News.

Metin Eren

Eren is a graduate experimental archaeology student in the Department of Anthropology of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

The article quotes Eren, lead author on the study, as saying that technologically the research found no clear advantage between the tools of Homo sapiens versus the tools used by Neanderthals.

“When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of ‘stupid’ or ‘less advanced’ and more in terms of ‘different,'” Eren is quoted.

Excerpt

“Early stone tools developed by our species Homo sapiens were no more sophisticated than those used by our extinct relatives the Neanderthals.

That is the conclusion of researchers who recreated and compared tools used by these ancient human groups.

The findings cast doubt on suggestions that more advanced stone technologies gave modern humans a competitive edge over the Neanderthals.

The work by a US-British team appears in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The researchers recreated wide stone tools called “flakes,” which were used by both Neanderthals and early modern humans.

They also reconstructed “blades” — a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens. Some archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as evidence for the superior intellect of our species.

The team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted.

They found no statistical difference in the efficiency of the two stone technologies.”

Read the full story at BBC News

Tags Dedman College, Metin Eren, SMU Department of Anthropology

Energy & Matter

Proton-smasher’s awaited flood of data creates big job for SMU researchers

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 3, 2008
1 Comment on Proton-smasher’s awaited flood of data creates big job for SMU researchers

At 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in April, a handful of SMU scientists continue working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, called by its acronym CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. A scattering of lights illuminates the windows in several buildings along the Rue Einstein, where researchers from dozens of countries and hundreds of institutions are combining their expertise on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the biggest physics experiment in history.

Ryszard Stroynowski, chair and professor of physics at SMU, points out each building in succession to a group of visitors. “By October, every light in every one of these windows will be on all night,” he says.

By then, the LHC is expected to be fully tested and ready to work. When the largest particle accelerator ever constructed becomes fully operational, it will hurl protons at one another with precision to a fraction of a micron and with velocities approaching the speed of light. These conditions will allow physicists to recreate and record conditions at the origin of the universe — and possibly discover the mechanisms that cause particles in space to acquire their differences in mass.

For Stroynowski, who has worked for almost 20 years to help make the experiment a reality, words seem inadequate to capture the anticipation surrounding its imminent activation.

“It is somewhat like that of a 6-year-old kid on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa Claus,” he says. “The time stretches almost unbearably long.”

The LHC will be the site of several experiments in high-energy physics with high-profile collaborators such as Harvard and Duke and national laboratories including Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley and Fermilab. None of the experiments is more imposing than ATLAS, one of two general-purpose particle detectors in the LHC array. At about 42 meters long and weighing 7,000 tons, ATLAS fills a 12-story cavern beneath the CERN facilities in Meyrin, Switzerland, just outside Geneva. It is a tight fit: ATLAS overwhelms even the vast space it occupies. A catwalk, not quite wide enough for two people to stand side by side, encircles the device and allows an occasional dizzying view into its works.

Size Matters
The detector’s scale will help to focus and release the maximum amount of energy from each subatomic collision. A series of bar codes on each of its parts ensure that the detector’s components, whether palm-sized or room-sized, are aligned and locked with the perfect precision required for operability. Scientists from 37 countries and regions and 167 institutions participated in its design and construction.

As U.S. coordinator for the literal and experimental heart of the ATLAS detector — its Liquid Argon Calorimeter — Stroynowski is helping to finalize the last details of the detector’s operation in anticipation of the extensive testing, scheduled to begin in August. He leads an SMU delegation that includes Fredrick Olness, professor, and Robert Kehoe and Jingbo Ye, assistant professors in the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College.

SMU scientists are completing work on the computer software interfaces that will control the device, which measures energy deposited by the flying debris of smashed atoms. A cadre of University graduate students and postdoctoral fellows also is working on data processing for ATLAS’ 220,000 channels of electronic signals, an information stream larger than the Internet traffic of a small country.

An estimated 53,000 visitors crowded the CERN facilities on the organization’s “Day of Open Doors” April 6, eager for a glimpse of the work that CNN International has named one of the “Seven Wonders of the Modern World.”

At the beginning of May, the areas were sealed off in preparation for the first round of testing. Computers will remotely control the ATLAS experiment, which will not be touched by human hands because of the radiation released by the atomic collisions. Safety is the reason for the elaborate lockdown procedure involving more than 80 keys, each coded to a different individual’s biometric data. The system is designed to lock out any use of the device if even one key is unaccounted for.

“ATLAS has been built to run for at least 15 years with no direct human intervention,” Stroynowski says. “It will be as if we have shot it into space.”

Currently, the initial test run is scheduled to begin Sept. 1.

The Waiting Game
Once data start streaming in, the game of expectations management begins. The ATLAS detector will produce a staggering amount of raw information from each collision, and the most useful bits will be few and far between. Out of 40 million events per second, the researchers hope to pinpoint 10 events a year. The challenge seems a little like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Mars.

“We may get what we’re looking for on the first try, or it may take us three years to find anything we can use,” Stroynowski says. “A big part of our job is to make sure we’re ready when we do.”

Among those entrusted with that task are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in SMU’s Physics Department, including Rozmin Daya, Kamile Dindar, Ana Firan, Daniel Goldin, Haleh Hadavand, Julia Hoffman, Yuriy Ilchenko, Renat Ishmukhametov, David Joffe, Azeddine Kasmi, Zhihua Liang, Peter Renkel, Ryan Rios and Pavel Zarzhitsky.

“I came to SMU for postdoctoral work specifically because of the department’s involvement in the ATLAS project,” says David Joffe, a native of Canada who received his Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University. “For particle physicists, being part of this is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

For Julia Hoffman, who received her doctorate from Soltans Institute for Nuclear Studies in her native Poland, that opportunity has meant expanding her own horizons.

“I learn new, and I mean really new, things every day,” she says. “Different programming languages, different views on physics analysis. I’m learning how it all works from the inside. I work with students and gain new responsibilities. This kind of experience means better chances to find a permanent position that will be as exciting as this one.”

The SMU group works with formulae based in Monte Carlo methods, the “probabilistic models that use repeated random sampling of vast quantities of numbers” to impose a semblance of order on the chaos created when atoms forcibly disintegrate. Results are highly detailed simulations of known physics that will help make visible the tiny deviations researchers hope to detect when ATLAS begins taking data.

These unprecedented computing challenges also have become an impetus for new SMU research initiatives. James Quick, SMU associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies, hopes to contain ATLAS’ vast data-processing requirements with a large-capability computing center located on campus.

Quick visited CERN in April to discuss the details with Stroynowski and other key personnel. The proposed center would provide a first-priority data processing infrastructure for SMU physicists and a powerful new resource for researchers in other schools and departments. During the inevitable LHC downtime, as beams are calibrated and software is debugged, the SMU center’s computing power would be available for campus researchers in every field across engineering, the sciences and business.

“The ATLAS experiment presents an opportunity for the University to step up in a big way, and one that will benefit the entire campus,” Quick says.

He envisions a data processing farm of 1,000 central processing units, each connected to an Internet backbone to allow the fastest possible return on SMU’s ATLAS input. Speed and access are the keys, Stroynowski says, paraphrasing Winston Churchill: “The winner gets the oyster, and the runner-up gets the shell.”

Those who have made their careers in high-energy physics are well aware of the stakes involved in the LHC, he adds, and being the first to process certain data could separate a potential Nobel Prize winner from those who will make the same discovery a day late.

As a group, high-energy physicists are accustomed to taking the long view — and for SMU researchers, the long view has been especially helpful. The ghost of the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have made its home in North Texas, still shadows the recent triumphs at CERN.

The SSC brought Stroynowski to the University, and its 1993 demise through congressional defunding was the impetus for the LHC project. The questions haven’t gone away because the experiment has changed venues, Stroynowski says. Yet even now, as the first test nears, his anticipation is tempered by caution.

“I don’t think we’ll get a beam all the way around [the LHC tunnel] on the first try,” he says.

Indeed, the subject of whether scientists will achieve a beam collision during the first tests or after additional calibration has been the subject of a few lively wagers.

“I think we’ll have to wait at least a few more weeks for that milestone,” he adds. “But in this case, I’ll be more than happy to be wrong.” — Kathleen Tibbetts

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with Dr. Biehl or Dr. D’Mello or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags CERN, David Joffe, Dedman College, Fredrick Olness, James E. Quick, Jingbo Ye, Robert Kehoe, Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU Department of Physics

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