Norwich University Newsroom

By Sean Markey

Category: News

December 07, 2017

From genetic engineering to digital forensics to the plays of Harold Pinter, campus labs across the sciences, professional disciplines, and humanities showcase the talent, curiosity, and impact of Norwich faculty and students. Portraits of nine diverse researchers and the labs they work in.

BY SEAN MARKEY
The Norwich Record | Winter 2018

To appreciate the transformative effect that a lab can have on a campus, consider this: Ten years ago, a storage room on the second floor of the Tompkins science building was converted into a dedicated biology lab with a $200,000 grant from the Vermont Genetics Network, a funding arm of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Since then, Dana Professor of Biology Karen Hinkle, who also serves as the associate vice president for NU’s Office of Academic Research, has been one of many faculty researchers to use the facility to advance her research. Hinkle specifically investigates the signaling pathways of Fyn, a protein known to be involved in cancer, collaborating with Bryan Ballif at the University of Vermont as a sub-grantee of his NSF-funded lab. “It’s really basic science,” Hinkle says, referring to her quest to understand fundamental aspects of those interactions.

Numerous students have been involved in Hinkle’s work over the years as research assistants or summer research fellows and now countless more will be involved, too. For the second year in a row, students in Hinkle’s spring cell biology class will spend the entire course investigating a new protein that may interact with Fyn. Hinkle says thanks to a three-year NSF subaward from Ballif’s parent grant, she is finally walking the walk of using novel classroom inquiry to teach and engage the next generation of scientists. “It’s exciting to tell [my students], and I think they get it, that this is new. No one on the planet has ever understood these relationships before.”

By Sean Markey

Category: News

December 07, 2017

From genetic engineering to digital forensics to the plays of Harold Pinter, campus labs across the sciences, professions, and humanities showcase the talent, curiosity, and impact of Norwich faculty and students. Portraits of nine diverse researchers and the labs they work in.

BY SEAN MARKEY
The Norwich Record | Winter 2018

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Tom Shell is a chemical biologist who builds molecules crucial to research into targeted drug-delivery systems known as photo-pharmaceuticals. Working in his lab, Shell synthesizes molecules similar to Vitamin B12 called alkylcobalamins that bind to nearly any cancer drug and put its cell-killing powers on hold. Before that happens, however, Shell attaches a light-sensitive trigger to the alkylcobalamin. Hit the with right wavelength of light, the molecule jettisons its cancer drug, sending it on its tumor-destroying way.

Other researchers have explored triggers sensitive to UV light, despite its major drawback—our skin is very good at absorbing it. Shell was the first to build triggers sensitive to near-infrared light, which passes deep into human tissue. The scientist says his research could one day help doctors treat patients with head and neck cancers where surgeries would be unsightly, if not difficult, while minimizing damage to healthy tissue elsewhere in the body.

Shell collaborates with Brian Pogue, a physics and surgery professor at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering and Geisel School of Medicine who co-directs the college’s Optics in Medicine Lab. “We have the light-delivery tools and the background in mouse models of cancers and human treatments, which can help. But what we lack is expertise in chemistry and synthesis and development of molecules,” Pogue says. “Tom brings the exact expertise that we need.”

By Sean Markey

Category: News

December 07, 2017

From genetic engineering to digital forensics to the plays of Harold Pinter, campus labs across the sciences, professional disciplines, and humanities showcase the talent, curiosity, and impact of Norwich faculty and students. Portraits of nine diverse researchers and the labs they work in.

BY SEAN MARKEY
The Norwich Record | Winter 2018

Assistant Professor of Biology Allison Neal and biology major Joshua Sassi ’18 have spent two weeks each of the past two summers stalking the oaks and grasslands of the 5,300-acre UC Hopland Research and Extension Center in Northern California. Their quest: capture Western fence lizards by the hundreds to collect field data on a malaria parasite endemic in the reptiles. “It’s one of the best-studied natural systems that hasn’t been affected by human interventions, like antimalarial drugs,” Neal says. In all, the pair bagged close to a thousand lizards—measuring, numbering, and drawing blood samples at a field lab before releasing the reptiles into the wild. At Norwich, the researchers used microscopy to survey blood samples for Plasmodium mexicanum malaria infections and other parasites and prepared samples for DNA analysis. Neal’s research continues a long-term study of the lizard population and its parasitic interloper now entering its 41st year. The project’s data points of basic science provide valuable research that can inform future studies of disease dynamics and climate change.

Sassi focused his second season in the field and lab on an undergraduate summer research fellowship to investigate and develop a coinfection prediction model in Western fence lizards between malaria and an intestinal parasitic infection known as Schellackia. An abstract of his work earned him the university’s College of Science and Mathematics Board of Fellows Prize for research. Neal, meanwhile, recently received a $25,000 Vermont Genetics Network grant to study a parasite much closer to home—schistosomes, microscopic worms found locally in certain water-loving birds, mammals, and snails that causes “swimmer’s itch” in humans.

Field Hazards:
1. Sunstroke. 2. Rattlesnakes. 3. Barbed goat grass seeds. (Ice picks in plant form.) 4. Wily lizards.

Field Gear:
1. Sunburns. 2. Snake gators. (Josh) 3. Heavy boots and pants. 4. Fishing poles rigged with small nylon nooses, pillowcases to collect captive lizards, Norwich t-shirt, “I Will Try” attitude.

By Sean Markey

Category: News

December 07, 2017

From genetic engineering to digital forensics to the plays of Harold Pinter, campus labs across the sciences, professional disciplines, and humanities showcase the talent, curiosity, and impact of Norwich faculty and students. Portraits of nine diverse researchers and the labs they work in.

BY SEAN MARKEY
The Norwich Record | Winter 2018

Brian Glenney is your typical skateboarding, graffiti-spraying, private military college assistant professor of philosophy with a rock star resume and the punk playlist to match it. A graduate of St. Andrews and USC, Glenney specializes in social and sensory perception, exploring philosophical theories about what it is to see, hear, and touch in the world around us. He has spoken about his work at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art has also come calling, showcasing his collaborative street art/icon design reimaging of the wheelchair access symbol.

Glenney’s wide-ranging research often relates to perception and labels of disability vs. diversity, and more recently subversion in sport—that notion that genius rule-benders, if not breakers, drive innovation. To wit, Socrates, Charles Dickens, and the guy who invented the cross-over dribble. So what does that have to do with labs? Well, more than you might think. Glenney recently collaborated with colleagues at UVM to survey local skateboarders on their attitudes and behaviors around helmet use. The National Institutes of Health, which funded the research via a Vermont Genetics Network grant, is keen to understand the behaviors and risks of extreme sports.

Glenney sees the project as a potential first step for a larger, lab-based study. At a prior post, Glenney founded a philosophy and psychology lab, where students helped create the Kromophone, prototype goggles, and now an app that turns colors into sounds, upending how we experience the world. Such undergraduate projects demonstrate “that philosophy is reliably practical,” Glenney says. “If anything is awesome about Norwich, it’s that the students demand some kind of practical upshot to what they’re learning.” A lab is “a perfect place to show philosophy actually engages the world that you touch and see. It’s not just theoretical.”

Expert on:
1. The perceptual theory of 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith.
2. Molyneux’s Question: Could a blind person who knows a cube and sphere by touch identify them by sight if it were restored?
3. Socrates’ hobbies if alive today: “I think he would skate and do graffiti.” *

* OK, make that an educated guess.