homenews

$7M to build better life sciences workforce

November 27, 2023

A new partnership between the state of Utah, higher education, and life sciences industry leaders aims to keep Utah competitive globally by training and supporting students entering the workforce with highly technical skills. The University of Utah and Utah State University will be leading the effort to close that gap.

On Monday, Nov. 20, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced a Life Science Workforce Initiative that will kick off his administration’s priority to bolster bioscience at a press conference hosted at bioMérieaux.

“We know that this sector is part of the bright future of Utah,” Cox said. “We’re so excited for what is already happening here, but we have to meet the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow. And we do that by giving more opportunities to incredible students and companies here in the state of Utah.”

The goal of the initiative is to close the anticipated workforce gap between the needs of bioscience companies and the number of potential employees available. From 2012 to 2021, the state’s job growth in life sciences was the highest in the country, but Utah companies still need more workers. From biological technicians to specialized Ph.D. researchers, the skilled workforce degrees Utah companies need include biochemists, chemical engineers, materials scientists and others.

BioUtah, an industry trade association, teamed up with the Utah System of High Education’s Talent Ready Utah agency (TRU) to connect legislators with industry and university leaders from every state college and university to help state elected and education leaders better understand the needs of the life sciences workforce.

The initiative is modeled after the state’s Engineering Initiative, which was launched in 2001 to boost the number of engineering graduates each year and has increased Utah’s new engineer numbers by 240%. Like the Engineering Initiative, the state will provide financial incentives to Utah colleges and universities for additional high-yield degree graduates. The state estimates life sciences degrees could grow by 1,250 graduates.

Top NASA honor goes to U Students

November 27, 2023

Challenged to devise a way to extract and forge metal on the moon, a team of University of Utah engineering students has won top honors in a NASA-sponsored competition with their proposal for refining the iron that is abundant at the lunar surface.

The group, led by graduate research assistant in metallurgical engineering John Otero and Collin Andersen, a graduate student in the U’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering, adapted a century-old process known as carbonyl iron refining, or CIR, for use in a lunar environment with its non-existent atmosphere, freezing temperatures and low gravity. They proposed using a two-chamber process in which a reactive gas phase concentrates disparate iron particles into a powder product that is more than 98% iron with properties favorable for additive manufacturing, according to their presentation.

“There were multiple times we came close to scrapping the concept, but each time we found the strength to go a little farther. Our small group was driven by a genuine belief in the concept and curiosity of what would happen,” said Andersen , a doctoral student in materials science and engineering from Providence, Utah. “This honor has validated the perseverance, effort, and dedication of exploring an innovative and applied idea.”

In the top photo, University of Utah engineering students, left to right, John Otero, Christian Norman, Olivia Dale and Collin Andersen celebrate their team’s win at NASA’s 2023 BIG Idea Challenge held last week in Ohio.

SRI Stories

November 21, 2023

While doing field work in Costa Rica, Sylvia continued her research by using Oxford Nanopore’s MinION, a portable technology that allows for DNA and RNA sequencing wherever you are.

Sylvia works in an SRI research stream that focuses on using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies to barcode and sequence DNA. This allows her lab to uncover new species and their phylogenetics. NGS allows in-house sequencing within the lab, rather than having to send it off to a company or lab. Or with the portable MinIOn, on a Costa Rican beach.

Sylvia’s main project is focused on ant-plant symbioses. She works to identify a third party within that symbiosis which is a crucial piece of the mutualistic interactions between ants and plants. The ants can’t get certain nutrients from their host plant, so the third party, mealybugs, are essential for this mutualistic relationship. She’s identifying the species of mealybugs involved, and after that, will look more closely at the nitrogen-fixing microbiome surrounding this entire process.

Sylvia is planning to go to graduate school, pursuing research in the biotech field. She’s a Social Justice Advocate, connecting U housing residents to resources and creating safe communities where they feel like they belong. She’s also part of the U’s undergraduate chapter of SACNAS, designed to support Chicano, Hispanic and Native American STEM students.

“My parents are my heroes,” she said. “I look up to them because I have seen how much they’ve gone through, raising two children in a foreign country, far away from what’s familiar and far from where they called home. They did all of this just to make sure their kids would have a good life and a good future.”

Sylvia was born in Cheongju, South Korea, but at a young age moved overseas with her family. She traveled many places, but spent a lot of time in Mexico, and came to the U as an international student. Sequencing DNA has not only proven “portable” for Sylvia Lee; when she graduates with BS in biology and minor in chemistry, they’ll be infinitely “portable” as well.

Second highest-energy cosmic ray ever

November 21, 2023

John N. Matthews standing beside large telescope mirrors at the Telescope Array Project's florescence detector station. Credit: Joe Bauman. Banner Photo Aboe: Artist’s illustration of the extremely energetic cosmic ray observed by a surface detector array of the Telescope Array experiment, named “Amaterasu particle.” OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY/L-INSIGHT, KYOTO UNIVERSITY/RYUUNOSUKE TAKESHIGE

The Telescope Array has since observed more than 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, though none approaching the Oh-My-God-level energy. No observations have yet revealed their origin or how they are able to travel to the Earth.

On May 27, 2021, the Telescope Array experiment detected the second-highest extreme-energy cosmic ray. At 2.4 x 10²⁰eV, the energy of this single subatomic particle is equivalent to dropping a brick on your toe from waist height. Led by the University of Utah (the U) and the University of Tokyo, the Telescope Array consists of 507 surface detector stations arranged in a square grid that covers 700 km²(~270 miles²) outside of Delta, Utah in the state’s West Desert. The event triggered 23 detectors at the north-west region of the Telescope Array, splashing across 48 km² (18.5 mi²). Its arrival direction appeared to be from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

“The particles are so high energy, they shouldn’t be affected by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields. You should be able to point to where they come from in the sky,” said John Matthews, Telescope Array co-spokesperson at the U and co-author of the study. “But in the case of the Oh-My-God particle and this new particle, you trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it. That’s the mystery of this — what the heck is going on?”

Mechanisms of plant microbes

November 17, 2023

“They have a pretty complicated and well-defined system for responding to pathogens.”

The post-doctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences is this year’s recipient of the College of Science Outstanding Post-Doc Award.

Symeondi's fascination with genetics has led her to research an impressive variety of topics, eventually bringing her to Talia Karasov’s Lab at the University of Utah in 2020.

Her research is focused on investigating the complex interactions between plants and microbes, particularly the effectiveness of certain microbes as pathogens, and plants’ unique immune responses to them:

Because microbial pathogens have the ability to evolve very quickly, the research on them must be dynamic as well. One of the powerful implications of these studies applies to agricultural crops, which can be particularly vulnerable to infection. “When a farmer grows a crop that is a monoculture, it's a single genotype,” says Symeondi. “So the moment there is a microbe that can cause disease in this culture, it wipes out the whole field.”

In order to understand these outbreaks, it is critical to decipher the mechanisms of these microbes, especially why they are pathogenic in one genotype versus another. In the future, Symeondi hopes to expand this research in order to inform farmers about how best to protect their crops: “We would like to utilize agricultural data and collaborate with different labs to see if we can predict outbreaks, and use different genotypes to prevent pathogen spread” she says.

Presently, Symeondi is grateful to have the lab running smoothly post-pandemic (she arrived in Utah in October 2020 when Covid-19 was still wreaking havoc) and is excited to be expanding the scope of her studies. When she isn’t busy exploring plant genetics, Symeondi loves to be in the outdoors, hiking, visiting national parks, and spending time with her dog, Muninn.

Isotopes: Science’s Common Currency

November 16, 2023

“One of the really cool things about isotope geochemistry is that it really crosses disciplinary boundaries,” Bowen says. “It’s a subfield that grew out of earth science, geology and geochemistry, but it’s useful in everything from forensic science to water research to planetary science.”

Bowen grew up in rural Michigan and spent his childhood outdoors, which grew his love of nature and the earth. He received his bachelor’s in geology at the University of Michigan and went to UC Santa Cruz for a PhD in earth science. Bowen came to the U as a postdoc before joining Purdue University as a faculty member for seven years. He returned to the U through the Global Change and Sustainability Center and is now Professor of Geology & Geophysics and Co-Director of the Stable Isotope Facility for Environmental Research (SIRFER).

Recipient of this year's College of Science Excellence in Research Award, Bowen founded the Spatio-Temporal Isotope Analytics (SPATIAL) Lab, which uses stable isotope techniques to look at a lot of different areas of application of isotope geochemistry. “Isotope science has been kind of limited by our ability to make measurements,” says Bowen.

The SPATIAL Lab

The SPATIAL group has pushed forward uniting isotope geoscience with data science, which helps facilitate data sharing within and between fields of study. This data can then be leveraged to tackle bigger systems questions.

One main focus of work within the SPATIAL group is reconstructing Earth’s climate through its geologic past and using that data to see changes in climate, ecosystems, and biogeochemical cycles, which can then be compared to modern day. The SPATIAL group is also studying how natural cycles operate today, such as the water cycle. Additionally, they also study spatial conductivity, or movement of things on the Earth’s surface, such as water, people, plants, and products.

One example is by using isotopes, Bowen looks at where plants are getting water from in the subsurface of the earth, which can show the stability of water supply within a community and help predict how water resources will change due to climate change.

“There’s an intimate coupling between the physical and biological processes that constitute a system,” Bowen says. “Isotopes are a common currency. The elements and isotopes that go through the water cycle or rock cycle are the same ones that go into an elephant or ponderosa pine. We can really bridge the gap and understand the connection across these spheres.”

Contextualizing current and future trends

“The Earth’s been through a lot,” Bowen says. “There’s a lot of context that shows how unusual what’s happening right now is. We’re pushing the climate system and carbon cycle much faster than it’s ever gone at any point in the geologic record.”

Bowen’s climate change research includes tracking the sources of water, such as where water originates before it makes its way to southern California. The isotopes of water in the Imperial Valley in California look more like isotopes in Colorado water than in water elsewhere in southern California. Most of the Imperial Valley water is irrigation water diverted from the Colorado River. The irrigation water becomes wastewater from irritation because of overwatering, and then it enters the groundwater. This has implications when agricultural runoff affects groundwater, as it could contain pesticides and other chemicals used in agricultural work.

The SPATIAL lab runs an annual summer course for graduate students, which provides training and experience in large-scale, data-intensive, geochemically oriented research. The course consists of a discussion and lecture in the morning, delivered by specialists in the field. Laboratory experiences introduce new techniques and hands-on learning.

“We live in a pretty amazing place for geology,” Gabriel Bowen says. He appreciates the geology of Utah from the air, as an amateur pilot. He flies a Cessna 182, mostly for geology sightseeing. He also participates in charity flying, taking people around Antelope Island for sightseeing of the Great Salt Lake. “I try to take my scientist and artist friends out to see things from a different perspective.”

A Utah Fossil’s Journey to Harvard

November 16, 2023

Carrie Levitt-Bussian ^.Banner photo above: Artistic reconstruction of Megasiphon thylakos and comparisons with modern tunicates. Courtesy of Natural History Museum of Utah.

It looks like an unassuming, light gray, palm-sized rock with a thick “Y” on it.

That “Y” is, in fact, an animal — the ancestor of a modern sea squirt. It’s much older than any such relative previously found in the fossil record, and also much better preserved. If you’re into the grand story of evolution and, say, insights into the earliest days of vertebrates, this is remarkable enough to warrant a nine-page writeup by a team from Harvard University in Nature Communications. We’ll get to that.

But Levitt-Bussian, MS'13 in geology, has handled thousands of fossils — from ancient footprints to prehistoric poop to spectacular dinosaur skulls; her favorites are the ceratopsians, like triceratops. And what sticks out about this fossil has more to do with how it arrived in her custody, and how it left.

As the paleontology collections manager for the Natural History Museum of Utah, “I am a librarian, but for fossils,” she said. Boxes of rocks come and go all the time. Usually, though, the new arrivals don’t look like they were seized as evidence of a crime.

“There was Customs tape — red, scary tape all over the boxes,” she recalled. (“EVIDENCE,” some of the tape sternly warned: “DO NOT OPEN.”)

Here’s the backstory: Federal law enforcers had seized a large collection of fossils from the Cambrian period, roughly twice as old as the oldest dinosaur. These weren’t common trilobites like the casual, law-abiding collector might pay a few bucks to take home from a roadside quarry. They were amazing finds, many from federal land. The people who illegally took them had some knowledge of what to look for and hoped to sell them in Canada.

So for a long while, these ill-gotten Cambrian fossils were part of a case involving the Bureau of Land Management. Then came the question of where they should end up.

Read the full story by Daniel Potter at NHMU's website/blog.

‘Lunar Forge’ Project at NASA

November 16, 2023

John Otero and Hong Yong Sohn. Banner Photo Credits: NASA/Advanced Concepts Lab

NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge is an annual, nation-wide competition that gives college students the opportunity to play a pivotal role in the future of space exploration. In response to a yearly prompt that tasks participants to solve a specific space-based problem, teams of undergraduate and graduate engineering get to work developing creative and innovative concepts. After all project proposals are submitted, five to eight teams are selected to receive a combined total of $1.1 million to further build and develop their system, which they then present to at the BIG Idea Forum in the fall of that year.

The U team is one of seven finalists for the 2023 challenge, titled “Lunar Forge: Producing Metal Products on the Moon.” Onsite and self-sufficient metal production is essential to NASA’s goal of creating a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. Every added ounce of rocket pay-load is expensive and limited, so to transport all the metal needed for lunar infrastructure from earth is out of the question. Yet to create a metal production pipeline on the moon isn’t simply a matter of taking the techniques used on earth, plopping them down on the Sea of Tranquility, and expecting them to work.

Not only does the unique makeup of lunar material need to be taken into account, but the moon’s weaker gravity (one sixth of earth’s), lack of an oxygenated atmosphere, essentially non-existent atmospheric pressure, extreme cold (with nighttime temperatures dipping below -200 degrees Fahrenheit), and constant bombardment of solar winds all pose significant obstacles to earth-centric metallurgy. Additionally, the production methods must be as resource efficient as possible, and transportable.

Read the full story at the College of Engineering.

SRI Stories

November 15, 2023

My name is Lauren, I’m a senior majoring in biology and philosophy of science, and I was a member of the first cohort of the Science Research Initiative (SRI), first-year research program in the College of Science. For my project in the antibiotic discovery stream, led by Dr. Josh Steffen, I cultured a library of halophilic bacteria that thrive in the Great Salt Lake. In a time when most of my classes were online, the SRI offered the opportunity for hands-on learning, both in a lab and in the field. In just my second semester, I was gaining valuable research skills and synthesizing concepts from my other classes.

When I told Dr. Steffen that I loved science but didn’t think research was for me, he helped me find a role where I could play to my strengths and apply my scientific expertise.

Now, as a science writer intern for the College of Science (I’m posing here with my fellow interns), I talk to students and faculty about their research and turn their experiences into stories that everyone can engage with regardless of their background.

zebrafish (Danio rerio)

So, it turned out that laboratory research didn’t end up being the path for me. Even so, my participation in the SRI has been one of my most radical experiences at the U. During my time in the program, I developed confidence in the lab, professional connections and a lasting community within the College of Science. One of my favorite projects I covered was a paper from the Gagnon Lab about a chemical sunscreen called gadusol found in zebrafish. The research paper reading skills I learned from the SRI came in handy on that one!

There may be a point in your academic career at the U where, like me, you aren’t sure you even belong at the university – or in science at all. But the SRI and Dr. Steffen helped me see that a career in science can take many forms, not just being “at the bench” but wordprocessing away on a laptop telling stories about science. Sky’s the limit for you as a science major as well.

I am honored to have been among the first cohort of SRI students and gratified to see how the program has already developed in the few years since its conception. Already, SRI scholars are producing great work, and I’m excited to hear (and write about) their imminent discoveries across all disciplines of science.

by Lauren Wigod
Science Writer Intern

SRI Stories is a series by the College of Science, intended to share transformative experiences from students, alums, postdocs and faculty of the Science Research Initiative. To read more stories, visit the SRI Stories page.

Read more College of Science stories by Lauren Wigod here.

Ingredients for Data Science

November 13, 2023

Posted November 16, 2023

“Sometimes [data science] can feel like alchemy,” Anna Little, Assistant Professor of Mathematics states. “Like we’re just stirring this big pile of math until the results look right.” Little was the featured speaker at the College of Science's Science at Breakfast speaker series on November 2 at the Natural History Museum of Utah. She titled her remarks Challenges of the Modern Data Era.

There are three key challenges today within the field of data science: Determining effective knowledge transfer, how to accomplish reliable data visualization and achieving physically meaningful machine learning. All are issues that Anna Little’s research focuses on solving.

Effective knowledge transfer centers on what it means for two tasks to be similar. With so many different applications, it becomes difficult to accurately predict. “An alternative to assessing similarity is to think about distances depending on conditions in some underlying network, not just the individual points,” Little said, "investigating novel ways of measuring distance.”

Reliable data visualization deals with the patterns that we see when looking at data. Modern data tends to have a very large number of features, which makes it difficult to visualize the data as well as analyze it. Through a process called dimension reduction, one can take a large table and minimize it into a smaller table that’s easier to analyze. However, dimension reduction can also lead to patterns going undetected, or create false patterns, as well as the disappearance of outliers. Little’s research looks into the “best of both worlds” by using linear algorithms with better note properties for the data.

For the last challenge, Little reported that machine learning is currently unreliable when it comes to data science. “AI responses aren’t stable,” Little said. “We want a small change in input to lead to a small change in output, but it often leads to a big change in output, and that makes mathematicians very uncomfortable.” Machine learning has good performance, but it’s difficult for data scientists to understand why or how it comes up with a certain conclusion.

It’s important to design features of machine learning with the characteristics that one wants, and Little focuses on utilizing translation in variant features. This means the features all compute the same, regardless of whether the data has shifted in terms of location or interference.

Anna Little was born in Alabama, but spent a majority of her childhood in Europe. She received a bachelor’s in mathematics from Samford University before completing a PhD in mathematics at Duke University before arriving at the U in 2021.

College of Science

$7M to build better life sciences workforce

$7Mto build bigger, better life sciences workforce

Utah’s life sciences industry is booming—so much so that there’s a gap between the workers that bioscience companies need to grow and the college graduates to fill those jobs.

Top NASA honor goes to U Students

Top honor from NASA to U Students

Challenged to devise a way to extract and forge metal on the moon, a team of University of Utah engineering students has won top honors in a NASA-sponsored competition with their proposal for refining the iron that is abundant at the lunar surface.

SRI Stories

SRI stories: From the lab to Costa Rica

Despite being over three thousand miles away from her lab back in Salt Lake City, Sylvia Lee was still able to sequence the DNA of the species she is studying.

Second highest-energy cosmic ray ever

second highest-energy cosmic ray ever

Mechanisms of plant microbes

Mechanisms of Plant microbes

'Plants do have immune systems or immune responses, and a lot of people don’t realize that,' explains Efthymia ‘Effie’ Symeondi.

Isotopes: Science’s Common Currency

isotopes: Science's Common Currency

From tracking the routes of water throughout the West to determining the levels of carbon in the Paleocene, Gabriel Bowen’s research into isotopes extends into a variety of critical research paths.

Contextualizing current and future trends

A Utah Fossil’s Journey to Harvard

A Utah fossil’s journey to Harvard

The 500-million-year-old fossil doesn’t stick out in Carrie Levitt-Bussian’s memory. Why would it?

‘Lunar Forge’ Project at NASA

'LUNAR FORGE' AT NASA

SRI Stories

SRI Stories: hands-on learning during COVID

This is me out on the frozen bed of the Great Salt Lake, collecting soil and water samples. It might be sunny, but it was freezing, and I think I still have salt stuck in my boots.

Ingredients for Data Science

Ingredients for Data Science

Data science is crucial — but can be faced with plenty of difficulties.