Author: vermontnews

Memories of the Kenyan refugee camp where Madina Haji spent the first nine years of her life are never far from her mind. They have motivated the UVM senior to work toward a degree in middle-level education so she can one day teach in Somalia. In the meantime, she is building a reputation as a leading advocate for refugees in Vermont.

Haji’s passion to help new refugees started not long after she arrived here in 2004 with her mom, four younger siblings and a few handbags with all their possessions. She started reaching out to refugee students in her high school, and later helped them apply to college while a student at the Community College of Vermont. At UVM, she has taught at a local elementary school and worked on a major study focused on how to strengthen the partnership between refugee families and the Winooski School District.

Haji’s latest endeavor, however, as a Civil Rights Intake Specialist for the Vermont District of the U.S. Department of Justice, United States Attorney’s Office may be her most impactful. The part-time contractor position has taken Haji around the state to community events, public meetings and other places where refugees gather to listen to their concerns and explain how the U.S. Department of Justice can assist them.

“I love going out into the community and talking to people about civil rights and what they can do if they find themselves in a situation where they think their rights have been violated,” says Haji, whose parents fled to Kenya from war-torn Somalia before she was born. “A lot of people don’t know that they even have rights, so letting them know what they are and what they can do when they are mistreated is very rewarding.”

Helping refugees through service and research

Haji’s outreach efforts are often based on experiences she went through as a new refugee. At CCV, for example, she worked with Parents for Change to help refugee students at her former high school navigate the college application process. “A lot of them didn’t know anything about the process,” says Haji, who received inaccurate advice that prevented her from enrolling at UVM. “I was the only youth involved in the project and I think students liked being with someone they knew who was around their age.”

After transferring to UVM, Haji’s goal was to become a nurse and help people in Somalia. After realizing nursing wasn’t a good fit, she turned her focus to education. “I have a weak system and found that I couldn’t witness people suffering so much,” says Haji. “Now I want to work in schools, because Somalia needs big help. I want to do whatever I can to make it safe and livable and free again.”

In addition to being a fulltime student and working 35 hours a week at Sears, Haji has worked for the Burlington Parks & Recreation Summer Nutrition Program and as a substitute teacher at the Integrated Arts Academy. These experiences have made her a valuable member of a UVM research team led by Assistant Professor Shana Haines and Associate Professor Cynthia Reyes in the College of Education and Social Sciences.

Haji, who speaks Mai Mai and is a devout Muslim, arranges interviews with Somali-Bantu families during which she serves as an interpreter and cultural liaison for the study focused on improving partnerships with refugee families and local school systems. She works alongside doctoral students Achraf Alamatouri of Syria and Hemant Ghising from Bhutan, who are also conducting similar studies for their dissertations in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program. 

“We wanted to engage students who have had the same experiences as the people in the communities in which we’re doing the research to help guide the process and be our leaders and cultural brokers,” says Reyes. “I can’t overstate how much help it has been to be able to talk with Hemmet, Achraf and Madina about the experiences of the people we interview and what it means, especially later when we debrief,” adds Hayes.

The not-so-easy path to becoming a U.S. citizen

Haji’s path to becoming a U.S. citizen in March of 2017 was not easy. As a teenager, she wanted to return to Kenya after enduring racists comments from classmates. Over time, though, she grew confident in her abilities to help refugees overcome similar obstacles, and started to thrive. “Thinking back, there were situations where it was wrong for those people to have acted in those ways to me,” says Haji. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know it was a violation of my rights. Now I can let people know that they have resources available to them.”

The signing of an executive order by President Trump limiting access to refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries has Haji concerned about her future plans. Wherever she lands, the people living there will undoubtedly benefit from her passion and expertise. 

“I would like to travel back and forth to help in Somalia, but sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to considering all that has happened recently with our government,” says Haji, whose relatives were prevented from traveling to the U.S. during the initial ban. “But I’ve grown to love America and would really like to continue on this path if that’s how to works out.”

Source: UVM News

Researchers have long known that glucose — or sugar — fuels cellular activity, including cells involved in immune response. While previous research focused on sugar stores external to the cell, a surprising new discovery finds that dendritic cells — the messengers of the mammalian immune system — draw from sugar stores within the cell. This new knowledge could lead to targeted treatments to increase immune activity (in cancer therapy, for example), or suppress immune reactions (like in patients with multiple sclerosis). 

Published in the journal Cell Metabolism, this novel finding adds an important missing piece to the puzzle of how early immune responses are powered from a metabolic standpoint, and provides immunologists with a new area of focus in their ongoing effort to regulate immune activity.

“By either enhancing or depleting this sugar warehouse within the cell, the hope would be that we could either influence or dampen immune reactions,” says study author Eyal Amiel, assistant professor at the University of Vermont in the Department of Medical Laboratory and Radiation Science in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “What we’re really in the business of is finding new switches to toggle to that effect, and this finding provides us with a new target that regulates immune activity. 

The finding gives immunologists a key piece of new information to better understand how the early part of the bioenergetics of a dendritic cell immune response is generated. This is especially significant given the importance of timing when it comes to immune response and the speed at which the switch of inflammation can be either increased or suppressed. 

“What’s surprising is that the intracellular sugar pool is the more important one early on,” says Amiel, who co-authored the paper with Phyu Thwe, a doctoral student in Amiel’s lab, and three external researchers. “The reason that is so important is because in any kind of immune protection scenario it is absolutely a race against time between the microbe and mammalian immune response.” 

When Amiel and his colleagues impaired the ability of dendritic cells to access the internal warehouse of sugar, the cells were less effective at stimulating an immune response in a number of measurable ways. “The really exciting thing is we believe our findings likely extend to other cells of the immune system and are not dendritic cell-specific” says Amiel. 

In a previous paper in Nature Immunology, Amiel and lead author Bart Everts, assistant professor at the Leiden University Medical center in the Netherlands, found that the early consumption of glucose is vital to the activation of cells, in terms of the production and secretion of proteins that are essential to the cells’ immune function.

Amiel has started conducting new research on mice with deficiencies in glycogen synthesis only in dendritic cells to measure the impact of blocking the creation of the intracellular glycogen supply on the longer-term immunological capacity of those cells. “We know that if we prevent their ability to use glycogen during that early window there are long-term consequences for the abilities of those dendritic cells to stimulate T-Cells, even hours and days after the fact.”

 

Source: UVM News

Picture a Vermont farmer. Does a grizzled, seventh generation dairyman come to mind, Holsteins and silo in the background?

A new $180,000 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to a consortium that includes the University of Vermont and three partners aims to complicate that image.

“We tend to use one brush to paint the picture of farming in Vermont,” said Linda Berlin, director of UVM’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, the grant’s lead partner. “Historically that may have worked, but today it’s more complex.”

While dairy farming remains an important part of the state’s economy and landscape, contemporary Vermont farmers are an increasingly diverse lot, says UVM anthropology professor Luis Vivanco, co-director of the university’s Humanities Center, another partner on the grant.

“Many are female; they vary in age, ethnicity and race; and they produce a wide range of agricultural products,” he said. “The goal of the grant is to tell the story of this changing dynamic in an engaging way that brings people together.”

The other partners are the Vermont Historical Society, the Vermont Folklife Center and the Vermont Farm to School Network.

The group received a $90,000 grant from the NEH. As part of its Challenge Grant program, the agency requires the partners to raise a matching amount. 

Eight Vermont farmers, comics and digital videos

The three-year grant program sets out a thoughtful process for developing and telling the story of contemporary farming in Vermont, one that draws on the expertise of all the partners.

To begin the project, an advisory panel drawn from the grant partners and supplemented by humanities scholars and farmers in the state will select eight Vermont farmers from diverse geographic, gender, cultural and racial backgrounds, different farming sectors, and varying ages, and invite them to document their stories through oral history.

The themes and stories embedded in the oral histories – identified by UVM humanities faculty and other experts in a three-day “humanities charrette” – will then be expressed in comic books, a proven tool for promoting engaged learning, and digital stories, multi-media videos drawing on photographs and audio files in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society and the Vermont Folklife Center.

The comics and digital stories will in turn form a curriculum for a group of Vermont middle schools, supported by a teacher discussion guide the grant will fund, and designed to spur further discussion about contemporary Vermont farming in each school’s community.

Expertise, contacts and infrastructure developed by the Farm to School Network will help the partners embed the curriculum in the target schools.

Better decisions, closer community

Having a deeper grasp of who is farming in contemporary Vermont “will enable us to bring a fuller understanding to whatever agriculture-related decisions we make,” said Berlin, “whether at the legislative level or in what we honor and prioritize in our communities. We make better decisions about things we understand.”

While the partnership model makes it more likely that the project will yield quality products, it is also an end in itself, Vivanco said. Part of the NEH’s goal is creating “humanities communities, the more unlikely, the better” in ways that, in Vermont’s case, help build strong communities and connections in the state’s cities, towns and villages.

The effort to raise private funds to match the National Endowment for the Humanities grant is underway. Those interested in donating to the program should contact Kurt Reichelt at the University of Vermont Foundation at Kurt.Reichelt@uvm.edu.  

Source: UVM News

Campus hummed Aug. 25, as the Class of 2021 arrived to begin their UVM journey. Among the largest, most academically talented, and diverse classes in UVM history, the students were greeted, as always, by the UVM Welcome Crew – faculty, staff and fellow students who help make the moving part of move-in day a little easier on families.

 

As students settled into their new homes – including UVM’s brand new Central Campus Residence Hall – we met up with a few of them to learn a little more about the Class of 2021. Read their stories:

8:30 a.m. Coolidge Hall.

Soybeans, wheat, sunflowers, corn—these are some of the crops that Elias Whitney’s family grows on the 4,000 acre farm in Necochea, Argentina, where he grew up. Now he’s a first-year student at UVM, “and I hope to study ecological agriculture,” he says. He’s brought with him several large sacks of yerba mate, a traditional tea-like drink of his nation. “Argentina has a huge problem with industrial crops, with tons of herbicides and pesticides,” he says, “I came to UVM because of all of the great courses in environmental sciences—and I really like hiking.” He drinks several thermoses of mate “every day,” pouring hot water over the dried plants and sipping it with a metal straw. After college, he plans to return to his farm, “to use what I’ve learned.”

 

9 a.m. Central Campus Residence Hall.

Ask Sean Hanke about their major and the answer is quick and definitive — linguistic anthropology, possible French minor. Love of language has been a constant in their life, study of Chinese, French, American Sign Language. A gap year before enrolling in UVM this semester took them across most of Europe, Sweden to Italy. On the road for some fourteen weeks in all, their travel budget was built upon jobs working at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant and a local movie theater in hometown Amherst, Mass. Now happily at home in the Wellness Environment, Central Campus Residence Hall, there’s one thing they really miss from home. Hanke shows us the screensaver on their phone, beloved dog Cleat.

 

9:45 a.m. University Heights North.

Indira Kulkarni’s room in the Honors College at University Heights North is still spare and mostly without decoration as she awaits the arrival of her roommate. There’s a post-Wilderness-TREK-soaked bag of clothes and boots on the floor that Kulkarni jokes is “quarantined” until she can get them in the wash. Her TREK group hiked the Long Trail from Camel’s Hump to Lincoln Gap, spending a memorable night in the Stark’s Nest Hut when a storm blew through. Kulkarni, who will major in neuroscience, says she was drawn to UVM by the Honors College community and opportunities to deepen her studies via experience at the UVM Medical Center. Kulkarni’s parents, a nurse and a doctor in the Poughkeepsie, New York, area have sudden-onset empty nest this week as Indira leaves UVM a week after her twin brother enrolled at Bucknell. “I think mom is OK. She cried it out when she dropped me off for TREK,” Kulkarni says.

10 a.m. Harris-Millis  

Arianne Conde likes to help her mom in the garden, read sci-fi novels (Red Rising and Inkheart are favs), and “I love to draw and sketch; I’m into watercolor now,” she says. She once thought about being an astronomer, but now her academic interests have returned to Earth: “I’m going to study environmental engineering,” she says. Her senior project last year explored “eco-friendly houses in Vermont,” she says. “I’d like to have job to make houses more sustainable. There are a lot of buildings in the world that could be more green.” The top student at Whitcomb High School, in Bethel, Vermont, Conde received a Green & Gold Scholarship—a full-tuition award to attend UVM. “My friends all call me wide-eyed and weird,” she says with a smile, donning an eponymous hat, “but it turns out everybody is little weird.”

 

10:20 a.m. Central Campus Residence Hall.

Shortly before Tom and Leslie Sullivan crossed campus to meet and greet new students on Friday morning, President Sullivan wrote an email reply to David Saltzman, the father of an incoming student who had written him with kind words regarding the president’s comments on Vermont Public Radio, heard as the family drove into town with daughter Penny. Lo and behold, as the Sullivans walked the halls of the new residence hall welcoming new students they came upon… wait for it… Penny Saltzman. Surprise and laughter at the coincidence led to Penny offering to call her father: “Hey, Dad, I have to tell you something.” She then put her father David, mom Stacey, and sister Jolie on Facetime with the Sullivans. “Thank you for sharing your family with our UVM family,” President Sullivan said. “We’ll take real good care of her.” As they parted ways, the president let Penny know that they live right on campus, “if there’s anything we can do, let us know.”

 

10:35 a.m. Williams Hall.

Move-in day for Mallory McFarland happened earlier this summer, when the Manhattan native relocated with her mom to Burlington. She’ll live at home this year, in a place close to campus. “We were ready for a change,” she says about leaving New York City. “The grass, trees, lake and mountains here are so wonderful.” It was the reputation of the Chinese program that drew McFarland to UVM. She’s studying the language as both a way to honor her roots and prepare for the future, knowing that the skill will be helpful for a number of careers she might pursue. McFarland’s also pursuing a dance minor — a passion she took time to explore after high school, performing and teaching with arts organizations in NYC. And she’s looking forward to creative writing classes, a hobby for the four-time-finisher of National Novel Writing Month. The genre of her four unpublished novels? Fantasy, mostly, she says. She’ll be one of the many fans gathering to watch the Game of Thrones finale at the Davis Center Sunday.

 

10:40 a.m. Harris-Millis  

Zach Harris first traveled to Haiti when he was 10. Since then, the Colorado native has been back more than twenty times — as the founder and director of a youth orchestra with 150 members. Now an incoming first-year student at UVM, Harris is majoring in Community Entrepreneurship. “UVM is a great fit for me,” he says, “I aim to make this orchestra, and my love of community service, into a profitable, sustainable career.” In the wake of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, Zach’s family adopted two Haitian babies—now among his eight siblings.  As a kid, he wanted to help the people of Haiti by starting a soccer team. “But one of my friends there said, ‘We’ve got soccer. What we need is an orchestra,’” he says. So Harris  —  who plays piano, double bass, electric bass, and other instruments — started raising money and has been leading the orchestra (including trips to the U.S.) for the last five years. “We’re just starting a second orchestra in Port-au-Prince now,” he says. When Harris received his letter of admission from UVM earlier this year, he was so excited that he commissioned an artist-friend in Haiti to make a traditional piece of street art out of cut and pounded pieces of steel drum — shaped into the UVM logo.

Source: UVM News