Category: Education

Three University of Vermont faculty have been named to a list of the world’s most impactful researchers, based on the number of times their published studies have been cited by other researchers over the past decade. Researchers on the list are in the top 1 percent of all scholars whose work has been cited by others. The prestigious Highly Cited Researchers list is compiled and published annually by Clarivate Analytics.

UVM faculty named to the list are Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment and Gund Professor at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources; Mary Cushman, professor of medicine and of pathology and laboratory medicine in UVM’s Larner College of Medicine; and Russell Tracy, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of biochemistry in the Larner College of Medicine.

“The University takes great pride in the recognition of these outstanding faculty members as among the most highly cited scholars in the world,” said David Rosowsky, University of Vermont provost. “UVM is recognized nationally and internationally as a leader in research, scholarship and academic programs in the environment and health. As our research activity continues to grow, and as we continue to invest not only in great teacher-scholars but also in helping them publicize and promote their work to broader audiences including the general public, we can expect additional citations and other scholarly impact recognitions. My heartiest congratulations to Drs. Ricketts, Cushman, and Tracy.”

Ricketts conducts interdisciplinary research on real-world conservation problems in Vermont and worldwide. He is a pioneering scholar in the field of Ecosystem Services, which seeks to quantify the benefits that nature provides to people through forests, wetlands, reefs and other ecosystems.

Much of Ricketts’ work explores the essential role of wild bees in pollinating global food crops, from coffee to blueberries. Ricketts recently co-led the first study to map U.S. wild bee abundances and their importance for agriculture, and he served as a review editor for the U.N.’s recent report on the global status of pollinators. He is also using big data to investigate the relationship between the environment and human health.

At the World Wildlife Fund, Ricketts co-founded the Natural Capital Project, a science-action partnership among Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, WWF and The Nature Conservancy. He has authored more than 100 scientific publications and served as lead author on a five-year, U.N.-sponsored effort to assess global ecosystems and their contributions to human wellbeing.

Both Cushman and Tracy conduct research and publish as key investigators on a number of longitudinal health studies, including the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS), Multi-Ethnic Study of Atheroslerosis (MESA), and Cardiovascular Health Study, among others.

Cushman, who is also the medical director of the thrombosis and hemostasis program at the UVM Medical Center, is editor-in-chief of the newest journal of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis – Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis – and is on the board of directors of UVM’s Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI). She was recently awarded the American Heart Association’s Population Research Prize.

Cushman is an international expert on the epidemiology of coagulation, inflammation, and other vascular-related domains in relation to etiology and pathogenesis of stroke, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular diseases and other diseases of aging. She has been a recipient of continuous National Institutes of Health funding for more than 20 years. 

Tracy, who was previously recognized as one of the 400 most highly influential biomedical researchers between 1996-2011 based on data obtained from Elsevier, is the recipient of several international research awards, including the 2015 Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association

He is an expert in the field of coagulation, inflammation and adaptive immune systems in cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other chronic diseases and has made major contributions to our understanding of inflammation in atherosclerosis and as a major cause of CVD and non-CVD morbidity and mortality in “well-controlled” HIV infected individuals. He is a distinguished investigator if the CVRI, and has been consistently funded by the NIH for more than 35 years.

Cushman and Tracy lead a large research laboratory and mentor UVM graduate students in the clinical and translational science and public health programs, postdoctoral students, as well as medical students and residents and fellows in UVM Medical Center training programs.

The methodology that determines the high-impact researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts from the Institute of Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics. It uses Essential Science Indicators, a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data from the Web of Science, the premier web-based environment of scientific and scholarly research literature totaling over 33,000 journals.

View the Highly Cited Researchers 2018 list.

Source: UVM News

Each year brings new research showing that oil and natural gas wells leak significant amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane.

A new University of Vermont study just published in the journal Environmental Geosciences is the first to offer a profile of which wells are the most likely culprits.

The research, conducted by Civil and Environmental Engineering professor George Pinder and James Montague, his former doctoral student, is based on a study of 38,391 natural gas and oil wells in Alberta, Canada. Companies in that province are required to test wells at the time they begin operating to determine if they have failed and are leaking natural gas, which contains methane, and to keep careful records of each well’s construction characteristics.

The study used a machine learning algorithm to correlate wells that leaked and those that didn’t with a set of 16 characteristics.

The analysis yielded a cluster of traits that was predictive of whether a well would fail and leak, highlighted by three:

• wells that deviated from a vertical drill line;
• older wells, drilled before modern drilling practices were put in place; and
• wells with greater circumferences, whose larger casings required larger volumes of cement that increased the likelihood of voids.

For a subset of 4,024 wells for which the algorithm had access to more complete information, including the fluid properties of the oil or natural gas being mined, the researchers were able to identify leaking wells with 87 percent accuracy.

For a larger sample of 28,534 wells, where the fluid property was not known and taken into account, 62 percent of leaking wells were identified accurately.

“The big picture,” Pinder said of the study’s findings, “is that we can now have  tool that could help us much more efficiently identify leaking wells. Given that methane is such a significant contributor to global warming, this is powerful information that should be put to use.” 

“Provincial and state regulatory agencies never have enough inspectors or financial resources to locate, let alone repair, leaking wells,” said A. R. Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell and an expert in oil and natural gas well design and construction, who was not involved in the study. “The methodology created by this research will be invaluable to those agencies because they can now focus inspections on wells most likely to be leaking now or to leak in the future.”

The findings also shed light on how new wells should be designed and constructed to minimize the chance that they will leak, Pinder said.

About 12.5 percent of the wells in the Alberta database were leaking at the time they were to become operational. More research is needed to look at methane leaks over time as wells age, said Montague, the study’s lead author.

“The failure rate is likely to underestimate the number of wells that will eventually fail and leak, given the clear possibility that they will degrade with age,” he said.

Research published in June in Science estimated that natural gas wells are leaking 13 million metric tons of methane each year, 60 percent higher that EPA estimates, offsetting much of the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed reducing the monitoring of oil and natural gas wells and has created a variety of regulation exemptions.

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Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont’s TRIO Upward Bound program has received a supplemental grant from the U.S. Department of Education to boost academic programing in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for students attending Winooski High School and Burlington High School who are from low income families or are the first in their families to attend college.  

Upward Bound, funded through the U.S. Department of Education, has over 950 programs at colleges and universities across the country. Its goal is to spur college attendance among low income and first generation students.

“The STEM field offers strong job and career opportunities,” said Adam Hurwitz, director of UVM Upward Bound. “Upward Bound is interested in ensuring that the students we serve receive strong education and training in this area.”

UVM Upward Bound will use the $40,000 supplemental grant to purchase technology that will engage students in STEM study, from 3-D printers to Raspberry Pi computers to drones, and to hire two instructors.

The new grant dovetails with another recent STEM initiative undertaken by UVM’s Upward Bound program, Hurwitz said. The university recently joined a consortium of 50 colleges with Upward Bound projects that will implement a three-year STEM curriculum called Teaching Through Technology, or T³, developed by the University of Alaska with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The T³ program provides students with both a robust STEM curriculum and complementary tech support for both instructors and students from the University of Hawaii.

The supplemental grant is instrumental, Hurwitz said. “With the technology and the additional instructors, we’ll be able to make the most of our partnership with T³.”

The Upward Bound STEM program will begin in the spring and be delivered via two classes per month offered on Saturdays and during school breaks. The program will  continue in the summer.

Community partners to boost student engagement

Hurwitz also hopes to enlist partners, both at UVM and in the surrounding community, to help boost student engagement in the STEM curriculum, once the T³ program is up and running.

“A big piece of the curriculum is to find community projects where students can put into practice some of the STEM skills they’re learning in the classroom,” he said. Hurwitz has already launched an outreach effort to recruit potential community partners.

He also hopes the program can incorporate STEM job shadows and other career exposure opportunities for students, which could be offered by UVM faculty and by area businesses.

UVM Upward Bound works with 63 students, from rising ninth graders to rising twelfth graders, at the two high schools. The program, which coordinates with the schools’ guidance counselors and teachers, offers tutoring, one-on-one counseling, career preparation and college readiness on site at the high schools and through a six-week summer academic program on the UVM campus. Each year at the end of the summer program, Upward Bound students visit colleges in cities like Boston and Washington, D.C. Rising seniors also work on their college essays and begin selecting potential colleges during the summer program.

Upward Bound programs at the other public colleges in the state work with other Vermont high schools with large low income and first generation student populations.

Upward Bound is part of the U.S. Department of Education’s TRIO program, created by the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965. It provides opportunities for participants to succeed in their precollege performance and ultimately in their higher education pursuits. The goal of Upward Bound is to increase the rate at which participants complete secondary education and enroll in and graduate from institutions of postsecondary education.

Source: UVM News

Want bigger, faster-growing blueberries? New research shows wild bees are an essential secret ingredient in larger and better blueberry yields – producing plumper, faster-ripening berries.

The study, led by University of Vermont scientists, is the first to successfully reveal that wild bees improve not only blueberry quantities, but also size and other quality factors. It finds that wild bees provide major benefits for berry farmers, including: greater berry size (12%), quantity (12%), size consistency (11%), and earlier harvests – by two and a half days.

“Other studies have explored bees’ effects on blueberry yields, but this is the first to show that pollinators can improve the quality of crops as well,” says Charles Nicholson, who led the study as a PhD student in UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. The study is published in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. 

Of the nine berry farms studied across the state of Vermont, the researchers calculated that wild bees could boost production up to 36%, or roughly $136,000 per year, on one mid-sized berry farm alone. On other farms, researchers determined wild bees’ potential benefits to production as roughly 6% on average.

“This study highlights the undervalued work that wild bees do,” says Nicholson, noting that two-thirds of the world’s most important crops benefit from bee pollination, including coffee, cacao (for chocolate) and many fruits and vegetables. “Without them farmers need to find pollination somewhere else, by paying high rental fees to bring in honeybees, for example.”

The findings offer a farm-scale perspective to recent global estimates of wild bees’ economic benefits in the billions annually – roughly equal to that of honeybees, with less associated costs.

Unique research location

Because honeybees visit Vermont blueberries much less often than in other blueberry growing regions, the Green Mountain State is a perfect location to isolate the value of wild bees to berry farmers, researchers say. 

“Most pollination research occurs in regions awash in honeybees,” says co-author Taylor Ricketts, Director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment. “That makes it difficult to really see the job that wild bees can do for farmers.”

The team painstakingly hand-pollinated blueberry plants in all nine research sites – using electric toothbrushes to mimic the buzz pollination of bumblebees, and then painted the collected pollen on over blueberry 5,000 flowers with small brushes. They compared production on these flowers, which received near-perfect pollination, to the naturally pollinated branches. The difference between the two conditions revealed each farm’s “pollination deficit”, the amount by which production could be improved with an increase in wild pollinators.

“Many farmers don’t realize they can be limited by not enough pollinators just like they can be limited by water or nutrients,” says Nicholson.

This study highlights the importance of wild bees to global agriculture, yet the first study to map wild bees across the U.S. – by Ricketts and colleagues – suggests wild bees declined in abundance by 23% between 2008 and 2013, especially in key U.S. agricultural areas. Another Ricketts study recently found that climate change could reduce areas available for coffee production by 88% in Latin America, as well as the bee numbers available to pollinate coffee.

Another reason to protect wild pollinators – for berry lovers, at least – is that wild bees, especially bumblebees, are better at pollinating blueberries than honeybees. Bumblebees have evolved the ability to “buzz pollinate,” vibrating blueberry flowers at a specific frequency to efficiently release showers of pollen. Honeybees are unable to do this, and must instead use less effective techniques to pry pollen from the flower. 

What can farmers and policymakers do to protect wild bees? The UVM team has found that maintaining a high proportion of natural bee habitat around farms can help, as well as using less pesticides. Small actions by homeowners can help too, such as mowing less, planting native wildflowers, and putting out ‘beeboxes,’ which are like birdhouses, but for wild native bees.

“This study shows, yet again, that protecting wild bee populations offers important benefits to our agricultural economy,” adds Ricketts. “Maintaining healthy ecosystems can be as important as providing fertilizer or water.”

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2018.10.018

Source: UVM News

Over the years, mechanical engineering professor Dryver Huston and his team have become adept at understanding the needs of what they’ve always thought of as their main customers — the federal agencies that fund their research.

“It’s a bit of a mystery, but we think hard and we can often figure out what the U.S. government wants,” he says.  

But what about the needs of those other customers, the ones who might actually buy the products and services that grow out of Huston’s research, which nearly always has a tech transfer bent?

“We don’t think about them so much,” he admits.

Among faculty seeking to translate their research findings into commercial ventures, Huston’s orientation is the norm, says UVM’s vice president for research Richard Galbraith.

“Faculty have incredible expertise in a specific area,” he said. “But they frequently don’t have expertise in projecting whether or not people outside of their area would be interested in buying a product based on their research. Without that information, it’s like setting off without a compass.”

Thanks to a National Science Foundation I-Corps training that was held on the UVM campus last month, the first ever, a group of eight entrepreneurially minded faculty and student teams — including Huston’s — have gotten to know quite a bit about the needs of their customers.

The group received a full day of instruction from trainers from an I-Corp regional hub in upstate New York — called the Upstate New York (UNY) I-Corps Node — on why customer discovery is central to business success, how to identify key customers and what to talk with them about.  

Then, over a two-week period, each team set out to interview 30 potential customers, reporting on the results during two remote check-in sessions with the trainers and finally in a half-day session that capped the training.

“It was a really good experience,” said Huston, whose research group is commercializing an intelligent ground-penetrating radar system that municipalities can use to map underground infrastructure. Other members of Huston’s team who took the training included electrical engineering professor Tian Xia and post-doctoral student Dylan Burns, who conducted the interviews and gave the team’s presentations.

The university plans to repeat the I-Corps training in the spring and offer it twice a year in the future, working in coordination with the UNY I-Corps node and developing I-Corps trainers from the State of Vermont and the Vermont Center of Emerging Technologies who will help with future trainings.

Long Time Coming

UVM has long wanted to give faculty access to I-Corps, a division of NSF whose mission is to use the customer discovery process to help entrepreneurial faculty explore the commercialization potential of their research for the benefit of society.  

Enter UNY I-Corps, led by group of entrepreneurs and educators from Cornell, RIT and the University of Rochester, one of nine regional I-Corps hubs spread around the county.

“Our program director at NSF encouraged us to bring I-Corps to Vermont,” said Shannon Sullivan, regional director of the node. “They wanted to make sure Vermont entrepreneurs were getting the training and opportunity to participate in the national I-Corps program.”

“When they reached out to UVM, our response was immediate – let’s do this,” said Corine Farewell, director of UVM Innovations, who knew members of the UNY I-Corps from her days working in the tech transfer offices of the University of Rochester and Cornell.

By operating under the auspices of the upstate New York node, Farewell said, which coordinates I-Corps trainings for a range of other schools in upstate New York and surrounding states, UVM’s program became instantly viable.

To make it sustainable over the long run, I-Corps trainings like the one held at UVM are available to a wide variety of groups in Vermont. “Any Vermont startup or potential startup, whether at UVM, Middlebury, Champlain, Vermont Tech or Norwich, or even outside higher education, is eligible to apply,” Farewell said. 

Going National: $50,000, Seven Weeks and 100 Interviews

UNY I-Corps calls the two-week training held at UVM its short course “because it’s like a mini-version of what the national I-Corps Teams program offers,” Sullivan said.

Teams in the short course who excel in the customer discovery process and who have a deep STEM technology innovation are eligible to apply to the national program, a seven-week training that comes with a $50,000 grant so participants can travel anywhere in the United States to conduct at least 100 customer discovery interviews.  

Teams who complete the national I-Corps Teams program have a much higher rate of success when applying for an SBIR or STTR grant, which is frequently their next step, Sullivan said.

“I think this higher success rate among I-Corps grads is related to the fact that they have developed and tested a data-based business model,” said Sullivan.

The national I-Corp Teams program requires participation in the form of a three-person team: an entrepreneurial lead, usually a graduate student or post-doc, who leads the team and the customer interview process; a technical lead, who is usually the faculty member; and an industry mentor, who has real world startup experience.

Academic researchers who already have NSF funding, as Huston does, are automatically eligible to apply for the national I-Corps Teams program, and his team is strongly considering participating. Post-doc Burns would be the entrepreneurial lead. Having also done the short course strengthens their application.

Huston has gotten religion about the value of the I-Corps approach.

“They asked us some tough questions about our product and our customer base,” he said. “You don’t always think about the tough questions; you often ignore the tough questions. Just because your product is cool doesn’t mean it’s a viable thing.”

Faculty and student entrepreneurs interested in participating in the spring I-Corps training should contact UVM Innovations at innovate@uvm.edu or 656-8780.

Source: UVM News

Take a brief walk through the history of UVM’s Billings Library.

Thanks to an $11.4 million renovation completed in the summer of 2018, our most architecturally important building once again houses academic departments, including Special Collections, the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, the Humanities Center, and the Center for Research on Vermont.

Read more about Billings Library’s renovations.

Source: UVM News

A new federal report released today finds that climate change is affecting the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare across the U.S. and its territories.

UVM Professor of Geography Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, who also serves as the Vermont State Climatologist, was the lead author of the Northeast chapter of Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued by the United States Global Change Research Program.

In Volume II of the climate report, greater emphasis has been placed on assessing the risks posed by a changing climate to the peoples, resources, and livelihoods throughout the 10 regions of the U.S. and its territories than in previous assessments. Volume I (Climate Science Special Report) analyzes the impacts of global change. 

The National Climate Assessment is the U.S. Government’s premier resource for articulating the risks and impacts posed to the nation by climate change. It is an interagency effort, bringing together experts from not only the 13 federal agencies of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, but the broader federal government, and hundreds of experts in the academic, non-profit, and private sectors.

Without substantial and sustained global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and regional initiatives to prepare for anticipated changes, the report anticipates climate change is expected to have implications for human health and wellbeing, cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property, and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.

Dupigny-Giroux was selected from nearly 200 experts across the United States nominated by her peers to serve as Chapter Lead on the NCA4. Her work concentrated on assessing the impacts of climate change on multiple sectors and communities across the northeast from Maine to West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

As the State Climatologist for Vermont, Dr. Dupigny-Giroux’s work takes her across Vermont to assist colleagues in state agencies and community organizations to help plan for and adapt to climate change. She is an expert on floods, droughts and geospatial technologies and the ways in which climate affects Vermont’s landscape and people. 

“One of the key takeaways are the observed and anticipated risks posed to our ‘forests, wildlife, snowpack, and streamflow’ in our rural environments as our climate changes,” Dupigny-Giroux said. “Another is that the ongoing impacts to human health are also of great concern to our region. Climate change is also affecting the interconnectedness of the urban centers of the northeast. Finally, northeastern states, including Vermont, continue to be very proactive in planning for and ‘implementing actions to reduce risks posed by climate change.’”

As part of its Congressional mandate, the National Climate Assessment is required to analyze the effects of climate change on a number of topics, including agriculture, ecosystems, and human health. To better prepare the Nation to respond to these changes, there is a need to understand how a variety of climate change impacts are being experienced in different parts of the country, as well as how regional stakeholders are beginning to respond to the risks posed to society by those impacts.

Source: UVM News