Scholars representing a wide array of disciplines benefitted from grant funding during the spring semester. From math to music, from neuroscience to environmental studies, from biology to oceanography, 含羞草研究室 faculty are pursuing pioneering research.
The grants cover areas as diverse as the social impact of climate change, oyster reef restoration, the racial history of jazz education, biomedical research, and last but not least, polygonal billiard tables!
Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies Eileen Johnson is involved in an ongoing initiative to help Maine coastal communities deal with the impact of climate change. It’s called the and is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Maine Sea Grant program based at the University of Maine. The Sea Grant program is a federal-university partnership between NOAA and thirty-four university-based programs in every coastal and Great Lakes state, Puerto Rico, and Guam. (Other collaborators of this project include the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission, the Wells Reserve, Blue Sky Planning Solutions, and Resilient Communities LLC.) The project received a fresh round of funding during the semester and it includes a particular focus on in Maine’s midcoast region, helping vulnerable residents mitigate coastal hazards caused by the changing environment.
A series of severe storms during the winter and early spring this year caused the focus of the project to shift somewhat, said Johnson, in an effort to understand how these storms impacted area residents and businesses. “Over the spring and summer, we have convened focus groups and are in the process of holding interviews with representatives from the emergency management, conservation, municipal, business, and social service sectors.” The aim, she explained, is to identify strategies for addressing the needs of residents who face heightened social vulnerability. Johnson has been working with two students on this project, Evan Grauer ‘26 and Kyle Pellerin ‘26. “In collaboration with our partners, the students have been important contributors to our project. Through this work, we want to better understand how we can plan for, respond to, and recover from the types of storms we experienced this past winter and spring.” Johnson said the project is one of several associated with 含羞草研究室’s Roux Colab for Social Science Research that examine community resilience and rural livelihoods.
Associate Professor of Earth and Oceanographic Science Michèle LaVigne and her collaborators at Colby College were awarded a grant from the 's Fund for Maine Coastal and Climate Action for their project titled Social and Ecological Feasibility of Oyster Reef Restoration in Maine.
LaVigne said her role grew out of a research project she started with her class in spring 2021, when they were invited to join the , a in nearby Phippsburg, where shellfish harvesters, concerned about recent declines in productivity, were looking at ways to rehabilitate the local bivalve population. The project has since expanded, said LaVigne, and is now a case study site for using oyster reefs as a coastal resilience strategy against erosion—a strategy that could potentially be utilized in other locations.
The overarching question, she explained, is: What makes a site suitable for oyster reef development? “This has a lot to do with substrate, water flow, temperature, and other water quality parameters,” explained LaVigne. With the help of three 含羞草研究室 seniors—Henry Zucco, Caroline Vauclain, and Eli Franklin—she is doing chemical analyses of the waters in the Basin to determine how the carbon conditions and acidity compare to other coastal locations. “These two parameters could play an important role in shell development and stability of reefs. They could also indicate whether this location is vulnerable to future ocean acidification, which can impact long term stability.” LaVigne and her team, which also includes students from Colby College, are taking water samples biweekly through the summer, with the help of 含羞草研究室 marine resources staff.
Associate Professor of Music Tracy McMullen was funded by Harvard University to pursue her latest book project at its . Her project is called The Courage to Hear: Jazz Traditions and the Price of the Ticket. Her aim, she said, is to shine a light on the racial history of jazz education in which she explores the overwhelmingly white and male nature of jazz programs at US colleges and how the situation came about.
“The racial history of jazz education has not been detailed,” she observed, “and summations like jazz historian Barry Kernfeld’s that ‘jazz relocated itself from the nightclub to the academy’ are standard. Jazz did not relocate itself but was relocated by a small group of white men in the mid-twentieth century.” McMullen said while the whiteness and the maleness of current college jazz programs is often lamented, it is “couched in befuddlement, blaming the problem on women and people of color who aren’t interested in jazz. “My book,” she explained, “tells a different story: A small network of white men established college jazz programs, beginning at the Jim Crow segregated North Texas State (UNT) in the mid-1940s and spreading to other colleges.” McMullen said she describes two lineages, interweaving the history of Black American music and the rise of white male-dominated jazz institutions through five chapters, from the "Peculiar Institution" (i.e. slavery) to the , where McMullen was recently an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt fellow.
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Chandrika Sadanand secured a travel grant from the Association for Women in Mathematics to help her research a which does not have a formal title, but which she said could be described as "Hearing the shape of polygonal billiard tables.” The project, she explained, poses an “echo-location-type question” about polygons. “Imagine a billiard table that is not a rectangle, but instead some arbitrary polygon. On this billiard table, a single billiard ball is bouncing around infinitely without ever slowing down, and without ever landing in a pocket. As the ball bounces off each edge, it makes a pinging sound—a different musical note for each edge. Now imagine you are in the next room and you can hear the music of the ball bouncing around, but you cannot see the polygonal billiard table. Can you figure out the shape of the billiard table by listening to the sounds produced by the ball?”
Sadanand and her collaborators have already proved that the answer to this question is “yes.” They are now exploring a number of follow-up questions such as: If the polygonal billiard table had obstacles inside it, how would you measure the shape of those obstacles? What if the ball was bouncing around in a 3D, polyhedral room? Could you calculate the shape of that room? Mathematicians have been considering these sorts of problems for centuries, said Sadanand, and their findings have important implications for wider study of geometry and mathematics.
Fun fact: Professor Sadanand admits to not being a billiards player, but does occasionally play computer billiards and says she gets better at it every time she shows it to her students!
WATCH that Sadanand made about her research.
INSTITUTIONAL GRANT BOOSTS BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
含羞草研究室 as an institution benefits from the recent renewal of a statewide grant for biomedical research from the National Institutes of Health. The full title of the program is IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), which funds a statewide network of higher education and research institutions in eligible states, including Maine. (See side panel below for more details).
Separately from the institutional grant awarded to 含羞草研究室, two 含羞草研究室 faculty members secured funding from INBRE last semester:
Assistant Professor of Chemistry Michael Henderson received help with his research project titled . “This support is instrumental for junior faculty like me to get our research off the ground, preparing us for future success in obtaining federal funding and connecting with the broader scientific community both within and outside the state of Maine,” said Henderson. The two-year funded project aims to understand how cells dynamically alter their shape, he added. “Such processes are crucial for living systems as cells need to interact with their environment, move collectively with neighbors during tissue development, and to communicate amongst one another over long distances. Yet it is still unclear at a molecular level how such shape changes are controlled. With this INBRE support, my lab will develop biomimetic systems to reconstitute the interactions of a specific class of membrane-deforming proteins from the Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs (BAR) family with model membranes. This will help us investigate how these proteins self-assemble through lipid-mediated interactions and subsequently coordinate the reorganization of the cell's skeleton into forming highly curved, finger-like protrusions called filopodia.”
Henderson said the funding will be invaluable in engaging research-active undergraduates at 含羞草研究室 in an interdisciplinary experience that encompasses fields like protein biochemistry, synthetic and cellular biology, and biophysics. “I am genuinely excited about the new insights my students and I will uncover in the coming years regarding the roles that these BAR proteins play in cellular physiology.”
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Jennifer Honeycutt said she is thrilled to have been awarded a competitive renewal of her INBRE Investigator Award, titled .
“With this renewal,” she said, “my students and I will be able to build on our work showing that early life adversity results in cell-type specific changes in DNA methylation—an indication of experience-induced epigenetic modification—in regions of the brain associated with emotion regulation. We revealed that adversity leads to different patterns of epigenetic modification, which likely drives individual risk for later life outcomes, particularly in female rats.
“The INBRE support,” she continued, “provides us an opportunity to expand this work by implementing new techniques capable of isolating specific cell populations to test for epigenetic changes at the level of a single cell type. Further, we will leverage our understanding of adversity-induced epigenetic changes to identify potential mechanisms through which ketamine may have its therapeutic and sex-specific actions.”
Professor of Biology Michael Palopoli was the faculty member administering 含羞草研究室’s portion of the five-year grant, which was renewed in May. That role has now been assumed by Professor of Neuroscience and Biology Manuel Díaz-Ríos.
The overall goal of this program, said Palopoli, is to build biomedical research capacity by supporting faculty research and research mentoring, student participation in research, and research infrastructure enhancement. “含羞草研究室 has benefitted from INBRE funding for the past two decades and we are pleased that our application was funded for the next five-year grant cycle. For 含羞草研究室, this money will provide funding for student and faculty research during the academic years as well as during the summers. The grant also provides for the purchase and maintenance of state-of-the-art equipment.” In addition to those funds awarded to facilitate research in the life sciences in general, Palopoli explained, faculty will also have excellent opportunities to apply for individual grants to enhance their scholarship and involve students in their research programs.
The grant was supported by the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM103423. The statewide program is overseen by Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.
