Tag: University of Vermont

Dr. Harry Chen has been named executive director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing and public health officer at the University of Vermont. He begins work on October 15.

Dr. Chen served as commissioner of the Vermont Department of Health for six years. He was also a three-term Vermont State Representative and served as acting secretary of the Vermont Agency of Human Services. While serving as acting secretary, Dr. Chen was a co-chair for of the President’s Commission for Alcohol, Cannabis and other Drug Use at UVM.

“Through a national search and thorough interview process, it became clear that Dr. Chen possesses the unique experience, talents, skills, and qualities to lead the Center of Health and Wellbeing and promote an effective public health model for the campus,” said Tom Sullivan, UVM president.

“His strong leadership skills coupled with his collaborative approach will be critical assets to the future success of our Center for Health and Wellbeing and our campus community,” said Annie Steven, vice provost for students affairs.

“I am delighted to join UVM and excited to share my passion for improving health and well-being for all who live, work, learn and play within the UVM community,” Chen said.

Dr. Chen’s public health experience is extensive. He led the statewide response to the catastrophic flooding of tropical storm Irene. He has played a regional and national leadership role in the public health response to the opioid crisis. He also provided national leadership in guiding the Center for Disease Control’s Office of Infectious Disease and its role in implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act. In the past year, Dr. Chen co-led the first Emergency Medicine residency program for the Global Health Service Partnership of the Peace Corps in Uganda. 

Dr. Chen served as attending physician for the emergency departments at the Rutland Regional Medical Center and the Fletcher Allen Medical Center for over 22 years and has been a member of the UVM’s Larner College of Medicine faculty since 2001. He attended the University of Michigan for his undergraduate degree and the University of Oregon for his medical degree.

Source: UVM News

Mechanical engineering doctoral student Dan Orfeo is the winner of UVM’s first Pitch It, Fab It competition aimed at students. The pitch contest has focused on entrepreneurs in the Vermont community in the past.

Pitch It, Fab It invites participants to pitch their product ideas to a judging panel. The winner earns the opportunity to work with the staff and equipment at UVM’s Instrumentation Modeling Facility to take their rough concept to the working prototype stage. The IMF is a custom design and fabrication facility that helps UVM faculty create equipment for their research.

Orfeo won the contest, held October 9 in Waterman Manor, for a device that will allow a ground penetrating radar system developed by faculty in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences to better identify abandoned land mines, distinguishing them from rocks and other underground objects that are similar in size.

Winners are chosen based on how original and practical their product idea is. An additional criterion for the pitch contest is how challenging and interesting it would be for IMF, which contributes the equivalent of $5,000 in time and materials to the winning project, to build and help design the product.

There were 11 presentations in all at the October 9 event, some by individual students, some by teams. Products ranged from a prototype for a much improved hospital gown to a microbial fuel cell that could power a greenhouse during the Martian winter to a plan for upgrading cell phone cameras to create high end video that could be used in film-making to a device that could retrieve orbiting space junk.

UVM has run the community-oriented Pitch It, Fab It competition for four years.

“It’s been a great success,” said Richard Galbraith, UVM’s vice president for research.

But over that time period, there’s been a “groundswell of interest among students at UVM in entrepreneurial activity,” Galbraith said.  “It didn’t make sense to do it for the general public and not for UVM.”

The university will hold the first Pitch It, Fab It competition for faculty in 2019, while continuing to sponsor annual contests for the community and students.

Galbraith was pleased with the turnout at the first student event

“It’s fabulous to see this much enthusiasm and this many people turning out,” he said.

The device Orfeo is designing is a custom magnetron for orbital angular momentum radar. It uses an emerging technology to scatter radar waves around the area it is scanning. Objects that are the shape of landmines will register as a stronger signal.

IMF will help Orfeo design and build a resonance chamber for the device.

The Pitch It, Fab It program has had a number of successes. One of the most notable winners was Alice and the Magician, which makes products that infuse cocktails with flavors. The prototype IMF helped develop enabled the company to secure $1 million in venture funding. 

Judges for the pitch contest included Galbraith; Chris Thompson, director of Generator, a Burlington makerspace; and Mike Lane, director of UVM’s Instrumentation and Technical Services group, of which IMF is a part.

Pitch It, Fab It is sponsored by the Office for the Vice President for Research.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont has again been named a Top 50 Green School by the Princeton Review, climbing to the #3 spot this year, up from #4 last year.

This annual ranking of the 399 most environmentally responsible colleges takes stock of the efforts schools are making to adopt sustainable policies, prepare students for citizenship and careers in a world defined by climate concerns, and provide a healthy and sustainable environment on campus.

In addition to student survey responses of how sustainability influences education and life on campus, the ranking considers a number of data points provided by the university. Some of the stats that propelled UVM to its top-three green school ranking include:

• 100 percent of undergraduates are required to take courses in sustainability.
• 28 percent of researchers are engaged in sustainability research.
• 1,099 students living in UVM’s Sustainability Learning Community.
• 20 Eco-Reps teach their fellow students about sustainability in daily life.
• 100 percent certified renewable electricity is purchased for campus.
• 49 percent of waste is recycled or composted.
• 25 percent of food is Real Food (local, organic, fair trade, or humanely raised).
• 13 campus buildings have attained LEED certification.
• 100 percent of residence halls collect organics for composting.
• 100 percent of used cooking oil is converted into biodiesel.
• 0 containers of bottled water are sold on campus. 

See the Top 50 Green School ranking on the Princeton Review website.

Source: UVM News

Hailing from 43 states and 15 countries, the Class of 2022 is the most academically talented in UVM’s history.

So who are the students that make up our newest class? We talked to three first years (Nicole from South Carolina, Hunter from Colorado, and Alex from Vermont), each just starting out in their journey, to learn a little bit more about their paths to UVM, their hopes for the future, and their advice for high school students in the midst of the college search.

Read more about the Class of 2022.

Source: UVM News

A research team, including University of Vermont scientist Nate Sanders, found that when water temperatures heat up for corals, fish “tempers” cool down, providing the first clear evidence of coral bleaching serving as a trigger for rapid change in the behavior of reef fish.

Publishing in Nature Climate Change on October 22, the researchers show how the iconic butterflyfish, considered to be sensitive indicators of reef health, can offer an early warning sign that reef fish populations are in trouble.

The international team of scientists spent more than 600 hours underwater observing butterflyfish over a two-year period encompassing the unprecedented mass coral bleaching event of 2016. Led by marine ecologist Sally Keith of Lancaster University, the team examined 17 reefs across the central Indo-Pacific in Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

During the initial data collection, the researchers were unaware that the catastrophic bleaching event was on the horizon. Once underway, the researchers realized that this serendipitous “natural experiment” placed them in a unique position to see how fish changed their behavior in response to large-scale bleaching disturbance. 

The team sprang into action to repeat their field observations, collecting a total of 5,259 encounters between individuals of 38 different butterflyfish species. Within a year after the bleaching event, it was clear that, although the same number of butterflyfish continued to reside on the reefs, they were behaving very differently.

“We observed that aggressive behavior had decreased in butterflyfish by an average of two thirds, with the biggest drops observed on reefs where bleaching had killed off the most coral,” said Keith. “We think this is because the most nutritious coral was also the most susceptible to bleaching, so the fish moved from a well-rounded diet to the equivalent of eating only lettuce leaves—it was only enough to survive rather than to thrive.”

Early warning

“This matters because butterflyfishes are often seen as the ‘canaries of the reef,'” said Nate Sanders, director of UVM’s Environmental Program and professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. “Due to their strong reliance on coral, they are often the first to suffer after a disturbance event.”

Such changes in behavior may well be the driver behind more obvious changes such as declining numbers of fish individuals and species. The finding has the potential to help explain the mechanism behind population declines in similarly disrupted ecosystems around the world.

By monitoring the fishes’ behavior, “we might get an early warning sign of bigger things to come,” said co-author Erika Woolsey of Stanford University. And the new work shows that  animals can adjust to catastrophic events in the short term through flexible behavior, “but these changes may not be sustainable in the longer-term,” said co-author Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

UVM and the oceans

“UVM is known for its work on how climate change is affecting forests, mountains, and of course Lake Champlain. This work goes beyond that and highlights the impacts of ongoing climate change on biodiversity in the ocean,” says Nate Sanders. 

Sanders’ role in the new reef fish research started—surprisingly—with ants. “I wanted to know how the behavior of individuals scales up to influence entire collections of species,” he explained. “Do interactions between individuals matter for entire communities and ecosystems? A few years ago, Sally Keith and I began talking about whether what I know about ants applied to what she knows about coral reef fish. And thus began an amazing collaboration.”

“It’s not just that we’ve documented a climate change effect on these reefs,” said Sanders, a community ecologist and fellow in UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment. “It’s important that we’re beginning to understand why these changes happen, and are building the knowledge to try to predict when, and where, these kinds of changes may happen in other ecosystems in the future.”

Source: UVM News