Tag: University of Vermont

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

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

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

Senior environmental studies major Nell Carpenter is holding court, in a friendly, peer-to-peer kind of way, with eight fellow students in her PSS 212, Advanced Agroecology class at Bread and Butter Farm in Shelburne, where the group will be taking soil samples as part of a weekly on-farm lab that’s a feature of the course.

Clipboard in hand, Carpenter lays out the plan for the day. “We’ll be bagging three cups for every two-acre sample site, as well as taking penetrometer readings everywhere that you do a core, a six-inch core, as well as moisture meter readings,” she says. 

The students hang on her words.

Carpenter’s impressive command, and her fellow students’ attentiveness, didn’t just happen. They’re the product of a carefully thought-through redesign of PSS 212 prompted by the Engaged Practices Innovations (EPI) Grants program, an innovative University of Vermont initiative that is systematically making student learning at the university deeper, more impactful – and often more fun.

The EPI program encourages faculty members in all disciplines to apply for grants from the Office of the Provost that allow them to rethink and rebuild their courses around a series of “high impact practices,” teaching approaches – like students partnering with faculty on research projects – that studies have shown inspire and motivate them to learn more deeply.

Fifteen EPI grants have been awarded since the program was created in 2015 covering academic disciplines ranging from classics and Asian studies to physics and wildlife biology, as well as innovations in Student Affairs and Residential Life. The outcomes of all the projects make clear they are having the intended positive impact on engaged teaching and learning practices and the student experience at UVM. 

EPI has had a transformative effect on PSS 212 and its work with five Vermont farms, including Bread and Butter, UVM’s Catamount Farm, Diggers’ Mirth Farm, The Farm Between and Jericho Settlers Farm. 

Something missing

Plant and Soil Science professor Ernesto Mendez has taught the seniors-only advanced course for 10 years. It always gave students an opportunity to learn the foundational principles of agroecology – that agricultural land should be viewed as an ecosystem and the people who work the land as part of a social fabric, both of which deserve respect and care – not only in a classroom setting but also on local farms.

But there was always something missing.

A key tool Mendez wanted his students to acquire in the class, ideally through first-hand, on-farm experience, was a foundational element in his own work called participatory action research, or PAR, where researchers collaborate on an equal footing with the people they’re studying to make sure the work has value for all parties.

The problem? Participatory action research requires participation, and the farmers weren’t interested.

“I had asked them, there’s a possibility we could be doing something of value for you,” says Mendez. “But they had always been like, you know, the labor is great in terms of the benefit we get, and we like the students,” but the research itself wasn’t a priority.

And while the class did feature student research, in the form of soil testing on the farms, the farmers’ lack of engagement robbed it of its power.

“When you create an artificial research project, so the students are just learning how to collect data, it’s not that meaningful,” Mendez says.

After years of watching students do soil tests, the farmers’ position evolved. Two years ago, they decided research would be an effective tool in addressing some of the challenges they were facing. 

Specifically, they asked if the students could help them gauge the health of their soil over time, establishing a baseline in year one, then measuring it annually each year with a new crop of students.

That represented a great opportunity for Mendez and his students – but also an intimidating responsibility.

Could farmers trust the accuracy of the data students were collecting, which could drive business decisions affecting their livelihoods?

The salience of that question hit home after a pilot version of the course in 2017 yielded data that Mendez knew was not up to snuff. 

Mob activity

Soil health was a topic of interest for all five farms the students visit weekly in teams of six to eight, especially so for Bread and Butter Farm, which produces organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and pork the farmers sell locally. 

Owner Corie Pierce and land-manager Brandon Bless practice a form of land management called mob grazing, which mimics the behavior of the wild ruminant herds of buffalo, elk and deer that once roamed the Great Plains.

“The animals played this important role of walking through, fertilizing, eating just a little bit, trampling the rest of it as mulch and moving on,” which created some of the most fertile land on earth, with “topsoil several feet deep,” Pierce says.

For the past nine years, the farmers – with Bless taking the lead the past three – have practiced just this kind of intensive rotational grazing, moving their cows, and the enclosing fences with them, up to four times each day.

While the farmers know intuitively that the practice has enriched and restored their pastureland – an end in itself in agroecology, but also a means of a creating nutrient-dense diet for their herd – they have a clean slate with a new piece of land they’ll be managing that’s much in need of revival after years of dairying, haying and heavy machinery depleted and compacted the soil.

On the new land, the farmers are keen on using students to precisely measure the impact of mob grazing “on the depth of the soil and the species that are growing there,” Pierce says. She and Bless could then evaluate “how that translates to our animals’ health and productivity.”

Flash of insight

The EPI program, and some old-fashioned creative thinking, were instrumental in guaranteeing the class delivered to Pierce and Bless and the other farmers accurate, reliable data – at the same time ramping up student engagement.

With the help of EPI funds, Mendez and several colleagues, including Plant and Soil Science faculty Martha Caswell and Vic Izzo, Karen Nordstrom from Environmental Science and Joshua Faulkner from UVM Extension, threw themselves into the PAR process, meeting regularly with the farmers to learn exactly what each wanted the student-led research program to accomplish. It is also paying for the analysis of soil samples that aren’t done at UVM and for a rigorous evaluation of the program’s impact on student learning – one of the requirements of an EPI grant.

But the biggest change came from a flash of insight – that the five talented students, including Carpenter, in the new Undergraduate Research Fellows program, who worked with Mendez research group, the Agroecology and Livelihoods Collaborative, could be redeployed.

“We started thinking about linking them to the program,” he says. “We would put one in charge of each farm and they would help the students collect the data. They’d get trained, connect with the farmers, set everything up and would be like team captains.”

That vision prompted Mendez and his team to apply for the EPI grant.

Checking it twice

It’s hard to imagine a better example than PSS 212 of the impact the EPI program can have on student engagement.

After Carpenter finished her information session with fellow students at the start of their lab at Bread and Butter Farm, the group descended on a greenhouse and engaged in a whirlwind of simultaneous soil testing activity: measuring the moisture content of the soil, gauging its pressure at depths of six and 12 inches, bagging soil samples just so at key spots for biological analysis later. Some students did the physical work, others acted as scribes taking down the measurements, still others checked the notetakers’ work for accuracy.

The due diligence – and academic engagement that came with it – is just what Mendez and his colleagues predicted would happen after the research took on real meaning.

For senior environmental studies major Harper Simpson, the knowledge that she’s making a real contribution is a powerful motivator.

“It gets our team on our toes, since we’re the baseline year, and that’s pretty awesome,” she says. “It also makes me want to do well for Ernesto and his research results, as well as the farmers.”

But perhaps the greatest impact of a program designed to promote engaged student learning has been on the Undergraduate Research Fellows.

In weekly meetings of the five fellows, supported by off-the-cuff sessions with Caswell and Izzo, teaching assistant Katie Horner, a doctoral student in the collaborative, and Nordstrom, the fellows are learning soft skills like leadership, reflection and teamwork.

“There is this really cool dynamic between all of us, where we really are lifting each other up together,” Carpenter says. “We learn both about how to navigate these things as humans as well as learning about the material.”

Everyone knows about learning by doing, Carpenter adds, but the fellows program takes things a step further.

“It’s learning by teaching,” she says. “It’s incredible. It’s not something everyone might be interested in, but I think for the five of us and for myself personally it’s a really incredible way to be steeped in this, as opposed to just having stacks of books on my conference table.”

In addition to Carpenter, Undergraduate Research Fellows include Lizzy Holiman, Food Systems and Ecological Agriculture; Emily McCarthy, Environmental Studies; Allie Pankoff, Environmental Science; and Elise Schumacher, Food Systems. The EPI program is funded and administered through the Office of the Provost. Learn more about the EPI Grant Program.

Source: UVM News

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

The University of Vermont’s Wellness Environment was featured on the network news program, CBS This Morning, on December 12. 

The story features interviews with the program’s director, James J. Hudziak, a professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, and with students in the program.

“A major university is using neuroscience to encourage kids is to tap into their books instead of kegs,” the story opens.

In UVM’s Wellness Environment, known as WE, students live in a substance-free dorm, take a required neuroscience course taught by faculty in the university’s Larner College Medicine and are given incentives to stay healthy like access to a free gym membership, nutrition and fitness coaches and an app that enables them to track their activities and moods.

WE’s enrollment has grown from 120 when the program launched in 2015 to over 1,200 today. WE’s growth means that nearly one-quarter of UVM’s undergraduate on-campus population lives in substance-free housing.

See the story on the CBS This Morning website.

Source: UVM News