The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Liang Zhao. Liang is a 2nd-year Ph. D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a lab member of the Environmental Virology Laboratory . His current research focuses on the prediction of fluctuations of COVID-19 incidences in communities through the application of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). As the...

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Merve Nur Kursav. She is currently a Ph. D. candidate in Mathematics Education at MSU and a research assistant in the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) with anticipated graduation in Spring 2022. She received a graduate student award, and she has been recognized as a Fulbright Scholar and a Scholarship Undergraduate Teaching and Le...

Kayleigh is a Ph. D. Student in the Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy . Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, many coastal communities along the northeastern coast were completely decimated. In the following 10 years, various efforts have been made by national, prefectural, and local governments to assist residents as they recover from the disaster. However, th...

 On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace in academia, and how COVID-19 has had a harder impact on different groups of scholars, especially women and people of color. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny a...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jen Fry. Jen is a Ph. D. student in the Department of Geography at MSU . Particularly limited research has been conducted on the experiences of Black female volleyball players who played in Europe, and how place, space, and geography are intimately intertwined with how they experience life abroad based on their identities (Etzel et a...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on discovering the different ways that the electric fish Mormyrids determine their sex genetically. Her research involves searching for the AMHR2 gene in many mormyrid species to begin piecing together how each fish population may have evolved distinctly. If you’re interested in talking about yo...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Nick Chargo. Nick’s research is focused on preventing osteoporosis by changing the composition of the bacteria in the gut. Menopause is a well-known cause of osteoporosis, but the bone loss also occurs as a side effect of some diseases and medications. One phenomenon associated with conditions that cause osteoporosis is gut bacterial...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Justin Wigard. As a 2021-2022 Scholarship of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (SUTL) Fellow, Ph. D. Candidate Justin Wigard, along with Assistant Professor Megan K. Halpern in the Lyman-Briggs College , is exploring the intersection of art and science studies in the classroom via drawing comics. More specifically, Wigard -- a Ph....

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Nathan Kauffman. Nate's research revolves around developing novel radiopharmaceuticals and delivery strategies to combat solid cancers. His thesis focuses on using locally delivered internal radiation therapy to induce a systemic immune response against cancer. One of the hallmarks of cancer is the ability to escape recognition by th...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Robert Stanley. The invasive Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis, EAB), the most destructive forest tree insect in North American history, threatens the majority of the native American ash species. This includes green ash, white ash, pumpkin ash and black ash. Green ash was widely used as a street tree, white ash is famous for bas...

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jenna Beffel, a 4th-year doctoral student in MSU's Department of Human Development and Family Studies and the lab manager of the Family Stress Lab . Jenna's research through the Family Stress Lab focuses on families with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)- specifically, the outcomes and experiences of the typically developi...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kylie Smith. Our brains are protected by a tight-knit biological wall called the blood-brain barrier. This barrier prevents potentially dangerous substances in our blood from accessing sensitive brain tissue but also restricts access to therapeutics or imaging agents intended for brain delivery. Kylie's research focuses on how to...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Andrew Kearney. Andrew is a student in the MSU Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering . Due to the low water activity (aw) and high osmotic pressure, sugar is generally recognized as a low microbiological risk source to human health. As a low moisture commodity sugar may receive little to no additional processing i...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Ti'Air Riggins. Have you ever wondered what it's like to wake up one day and realize that you can move anything below your neck? For some people who have a stroke or have been in major accidents, this is a reality for them. Fortunately, there has been a recently developed technology called implantable probes also known as microel...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Abdo Korayem, Daniel Maldanado, Max Manz, and Maria Milan about their research projects. This episode took place live at the COGS Fall Welcome Back event. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm.org . You can ask questions...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Yoni Lewis Israeli. Heart disease is a leading cause of death around the world, and heart defects at birth are the most common of all birth defects in humans. Modeling the developing human heart in the lab using 3D heart organoids (or miniature hearts) allows access to developmental stages that cannot be studied in humans. Yoni's...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Isabel John and Lauren Wiklund. Mental health stigma is a significant barrier to receiving mental health care. The two primary approaches to reducing mental health stigma are normalcy and solidarity. Normalcy refers to efforts to reduce stigma by increasing understanding of the frequency and prevalence of mental illness and the s...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Conor Bertucci. With the projected population growth of over 2 billion people in the next 30 years, food and energy production will have to increase drastically to keep up with our demands.  Fresh water and arable land are finite resources that are constantly diminishing due to environmental stresses. The cultivation of microalga...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Cameron Bennett. Cameron is a recent graduate from Lyman Briggs College who majored in genomics and molecular genetics and human biology. Since her sophomore year at MSU, Cameron has done research with the Braasch lab in the Department of Integrative Biology studying the function of duplicated endothelin genes unique to a group o...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kewalin Samart. Drug discovery takes a significant amount of time and fundings due to its complicated clinical process to get new drugs approved. Computational drug repurposing is an efficient alternative that is more cost- and time-effective in discovering new drug indications from existing drugs. One important concept of drug r...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Nick Ivanov. Information technology is ubiquitous, but it is not equally available to everyone - this phenomenon is known as the technological divide. One aspect of the technological divide is the ability to have a quality Internet connection in certain regions. Specifically, billions of people on Earth have no access to a reliab...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Moh Alhaj and Nicole Mancina. Led by Dr. Ramani Narayan, the Biobased Materials Research Group (BMRG) design and engineer new biobased and biodegradable, compostable polymer materials and bioprocesses using agricultural crops and residues (i.e.: soybean, corn), lignocellulosic biomass, and algae. Bioplastics developed from these...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Avery Tilley from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife . Avery's interest in conservation medicine, wildlife disease, and public health spurred him to investigate if white-tailed deer could be used to predict West Nile virus risk to humans. With recent studies discussing how certain species can act as a warning or monitoring...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Gia Haddock. Gia is a senior Fisheries and Wildlife student at MSU. Having an interest in disease, amphibians, and sociology, Gia combined the three with their undergraduate research. They study the current behaviors, knowledge, and opinions of those involved in the amphibian pet trade through the lens of disease spread. Currentl...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Alex J. Roy. Alex is a dual-enrolled BS/MS student in Lyman Briggs and the Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics . He works in the Neubig Lab in the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology . Alex studies the mechanisms of an ultra-rare genetic disorder called GNAO1 Encephalopathy. Patients, of which there about...