The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts, Chelsie and Danny interview Emily Greeson. Emily works in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department in the Contag lab at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on studying and engineering genes in bacteria to create new functions. Recently, Emily has been working on Bacillus subtilis, a soil bacterium, and adding temperature-sensitive repress...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts, Chelsie and Danny interview Hariharan Ramakrishnan. Cisplatin is an incredibly powerful chemotherapy drug used to treat a variety of cancers. However, its side effects, such as kidney toxicity and painful neuropathy, may result in dose reduction or termination of treatment increasing patient mortality. Physicians must closely monitor the patient’s kidney f...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Anna Kim and Roksana Riddle. The United States CDC estimates 2.8 million drug-resistant infections resulting in 35,000 deaths yearly. Pseudomonads are amongst the most resistant to antimicrobials, not only in clinical settings but equally in plant systems like P. syringae. P. syringae is a causative agent for multiple diseases af...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sam Barans. Sam researches patient histories of trauma in populations at Clinical High Risk for psychosis at the University of New Mexico. With estimates of trauma exposure ranging from 54 to 97% in this population, it's important to identify trauma risk factors and focus treatment on patients' history of trauma. Sam's research a...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. Zahra is a senior studying Comparative Cultures and Politics with Minors in Global Public Health and Epidemiology and Computational Math, Science, and Engineering. Aware of the racial bias in police use of force, Zahra's research focuses on the impact police administrative policy can have on police behavior, especially...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alissa Ball. Alissa is an undergraduate researcher in the Plant, Soil and Microbial Science Department looking at using fungi to clean up heavy metals. Current methods of heavy metal removal create toxic byproducts, so her work aims to investigate how effectively fungi can accumulate heavy metals, thus giving an environmentally frien...

 On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. This research explores Gap Junctional Intercellular Communication (GJIC) as a bioindicator of cancer. Cells use GJIC for the signaling of proteins and stresses. When a cell is stressed, it will close its gap junctions, signaling uncontrolled cell proliferation. These experiments have specifically focused on using GJIC...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Zach Miller. A therapeutic window is a dose range between the minimum effective drug dose (MED) to the minimum toxic drug dose (MTD). Many commonly-used cancer drugs, including chemotherapies such as Doxorubicin, are highly toxic to normal tissues and have narrow therapeutic windows. The drug concentration should constantly remain be...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Andrew Deleruyelle. How can one go about measuring the effects forests have on combatting climate change? As a student of forestry, Andrew has observed changing climates and wondered what can be done to quantify the largescale ecological patterns they’re experiencing. When Andrew finished an ecological data monitoring and analysis co...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maddy Eischer.  As a student pursuing a dual degree in Apparel & Textile Design and Genomics & Molecular Genetics, Maddy has long felt the societal pressure to pick one of her passions in school and in a future career. Instead of choosing between these two dichotomous interests, Maddy has managed to use her research to highli...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Charlotte Best. Charlotte works in a lab that studies the influence of the gut microbiome (all the bacteria in our gut) on the brain and behavior. She is in charge of analyzing its effects on individual neurons and she also found that MRI impacts certain neurons in a negative way, which hasn't been documented before. If you’re intere...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lauren Emerick. Lauren is a junior studying Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, working for Dr. Roloff in the Applied Forest and Wildlife Ecology Lab. Lauren has been researching the behavioral changes in invasive wild pigs ( Sus scrofa ) in response to management activities in the state of Michigan. Wild pigs are a...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Marchal. Gregory's research investigated influenza vaccine hesitancy. This project uses experimental data from rural Wyoming to analyze how risk preferences and perceptions of uncertainty influence parental influenza vaccine hesitancy. Their key finding is that parents who perceive that there are more "unknowns" in the risks...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Grant Bruninga. Inland lake herring can be found in lakes all around the state of Michigan as well as the Great Lakes. However, recent increases in habitat destruction, chemical runoff, and pollution have caused significant declines in lake herring populations. Since lake herring are important prey species to much notable predatory f...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview June Oh. How can an English major help promote critical science literacy for STEM undergraduate students? As a humanities scholar, June has been a part of an IRB-approved interdisciplinary pedagogy project that develops a first-year writing course for STEM undergraduate students. With a team of collaborators in the College of History...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Hess. The U.S. electrical grid, the system of control centers, substations, poles, and wires that provides electricity to almost all American homes pre-dates the computer and Internet revolutions. Introducing computers to the operation of this grid allows for the grid to react faster than any human being could, either to prot...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Philip Engelgau. Philip's research aims to understand how banana fruit is able to synthesize its characteristic aroma compounds. The chemicals that banana fruit produce and that we sense as banana-like are derived from the same metabolic routes as valine and leucine, common, primary metabolites that are essential to the day-to-day me...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Claire Kopenhafer. The Hubble Space Telescope has given us many gorgeous images of galaxies, with bright stars and swirls of dust, but there's a lot more going on than we can easily see. Stars are born out of compressed gas, and gas is constantly flowing in and out of galaxies. Most of this gas cannot be seen in Hubble's pictures, bu...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alassane Sow. Alassane is an undergraduate researcher working in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics currently working on germinating symbiotic and parasitic fungi in the order Pezizalies. They are also a part of a nationwide project that focuses on creating a way to consistently grow Morels outdoors and in high tun...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Brooke Devries. Brooke is a second-year Ph. D. student working with Dr. Hanne Hoffmann. Her research focuses on daily rhythms in the body called circadian rhythms. You'd be surprised at how many things, from sleep to metabolism, to mood and energy, have predictable rhythms throughout the day! These rhythms are all coordinated by a ti...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Azam Ali Sher. Azam is a dual major Ph. D. candidate in Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology (CMIB) & Environmental Sciences and Integrative Toxicology (EITS) , and a BEACON research fellow at Michigan State University. There are around 3 million infections and 36,000 deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant (AR) bacteria in...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Megan Mikhail. Megan’s research focuses on the intersection between biological and environmental risk for eating disorders, with a particular focus on underserved and marginalized populations. Historically, eating disorders have been stereotyped as “vanity disorders” that predominantly affect advantaged (i.e., white, wealthy) individ...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Serena Lotreck from MSU's Plant Biology & Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering . Serena’s research is focused on helping researchers in the plant sciences navigate the flood of available information when designing new hypotheses and experiments. Since the 1980s, there has been a 3% increase per year in scientific...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maria Milan from MSU's Civil and Environmental Engineering . Rural Alaskan communities face challenges unique to other areas in the United States. Energy usage and costs are high due to the shipping of materials and cold winters. Many communities are in need of more efficient housing to combat the cold weather and provide a safe, com...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Paul Bylsma from MSU's Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education . This thought project discusses the simultaneous proximity and distance that most of us in the academic world felt as a result of COVID online learning. Paul and his collaborators use a unique theoretical lens that foregrounds the role of the body in learning to describe h...