Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The second episode of this four-part series features interviews with Roselane Kithan-Lundquist, and Ifeanyichukwu Eke from MSU's Microbiology department , and Simon Sanchez from the Department of B…

Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The first episode of this four-part series features interviews with Sam Norcia and Char Dengler from the College of Nursing, and Bismarck Amaniampong from the Department of Chemistry. If you’re int…

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Veona Cutinho. Veona works in the Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory at MSU led by Dr. Jose Cibelli. She works with zebrafish embryos and manipulates them so they can be ideal donors for cloning. These tiny embryos are perfect for studying cloning because their developmen…

Yunting Gu is a PhD candidate in linguistics from Michigan State University. Her research in speech production suggests a basis for several universals regarding the sound pattern of languages. Despite the differences in languages, some sound patterns are common to most languages of the world. For example, cross-linguistically, syllables starting wi…

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Kiyotaka Suga, a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies. One of the engaging questions for second language (L2) teachers is how to introduce grammar instruction to help adult L2 learners develop their well-balanced communicative abilities. Most L2 teachers may believe …

Bryan Stanley is a PhD student in the Physics Department. He does Physics Education Research (PER), where he primarily studies informal physics programs. Informal physics programs create physics learning spaces outside of the traditional classroom settings. Examples of these types of programs include, but are not limited to, summer camps, planetari…

When you get a scrape or cut, you might reach for a tube of Neosporin, but have you ever wondered what exactly this antimicrobial ointment does to bacteria, or how bacteria might avoid being killed? Bacteria possess a dizzying variety of specialized protein machinery that help them resist our medicines, complicating treatment of infection. Natasha,…

Blood transfusions can be life-saving procedures for patients in need. However, they can also impart much more devastating complications, leading to poorer outcomes than prior to transfusion, such as infection, inflammation, and even death. This is in part due to the red blood cell “storage lesion”, which refers to the irreversible metabolic and ph…

Period poverty is an important, yet often ignored, public health crisis. The social shame and steep cost of menstrual products often push low-income people to adopt unhygienic practices during menstruation, negatively impacting their health, education, and dignity. Specifically, period poverty significantly impacts young menstruators in universitie…

Alyssa studies the reproductive biology of African electric fish, called mormyrids, with a focus on their sperm and eggs. These freshwater fishes are found throughout lakes and river throughout the African continent and are used by research laboratories across the globe to study questions in evolution, neuroscience, behavior, and other biological d…

Ben is a graduate student in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Michigan State University. His research interests include understanding how species adapt to changing environments, especially thermal stress and conservation of coldwater fishes. Ben uses genomic tools to improve our understanding of species…

On the first episode with the new hosts of The Sci-Files, Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph interview Megan McGrath. Interacting with the world relies on our ability to take in information and stimuli from our environment and integrate it into a cohesive explanation of what it happening around us. But the world is full of constant, unending stimuli..…

On this episode of The Sci-Files, Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph interviewed Chelsie Boodoo and Daniel Puentes about their research. Daniel Puentes graduated from Michigan State University with a Ph.D. in Physics. His work focused on using experimental information to inform nuclear astrophysical simulations describing the creation of elements in s…

Chelsie and Daniel visited the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. For their final interview, they spoke with Dimitri Joseph and Mari Dowling, the new hosts of The Sci-Files. Dimitri Joseph is a 4th-year DO-PhD student in the Pharmacology and Toxicology department. He uses bioinformatics to study disparities in cancer. Mari D…

Chelsie and Daniel visited the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. They continued to interview students briefly about their research. Listen to them speak with Jamily Ramos De Lima and Betul Kara. If you want to discuss your MSU research on the radio or nominate a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at scifiles@impact89fm…

Chelsie and Daniel visit the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. They interviewed students briefly about their research. Listen to them speak with Debkumar Debnath, Sam Weiser and Daniel Marri. This will be a three-part series as Daniel and Chelsie say bye and welcome the new hosts of The Sci-Files soon. If you’re interested …

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brett Volment. Heart diseases represent the leading causes of death worldwide. Researchers commonly use cellular and animal models to investigate and study cardiovascular disease and other diseases. However, these models do not provide the best representation of human physiology. …

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Joshua Kaste. Joshua is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University, and he works in the Shachar-Hill laboratory. His work focuses on building and analyzing mathematical models that describe the rates of all the chemical r…

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts, Chelsie and Danny, interview Jamell Dacon. Jamell is the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His current research focuses on fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Because inclusivity matters in all forms. He intends to investigate, examine and mitigate societal biases to co…

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts, Chelsie and Danny interview Emily Greeson. Emily works in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department in the Contag lab at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on studying and engineering genes in bacteria to create new functions. Recently, Emily has been working on Bacillus subtilis, a soil b…

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts, Chelsie and Danny interview Hariharan Ramakrishnan. Cisplatin is an incredibly powerful chemotherapy drug used to treat a variety of cancers. However, its side effects, such as kidney toxicity and painful neuropathy, may result in dose reduction or termination of treatment increasing patient mortality. Phys…

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Anna Kim and Roksana Riddle. The United States CDC estimates 2.8 million drug-resistant infections resulting in 35,000 deaths yearly. Pseudomonads are amongst the most resistant to antimicrobials, not only in clinical settings but equally in plant systems like P. syringae. P. syri…

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sam Barans. Sam researches patient histories of trauma in populations at Clinical High Risk for psychosis at the University of New Mexico. With estimates of trauma exposure ranging from 54 to 97% in this population, it's important to identify trauma risk factors and focus treatmen…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. Zahra is a senior studying Comparative Cultures and Politics with Minors in Global Public Health and Epidemiology and Computational Math, Science, and Engineering. Aware of the racial bias in police use of force, Zahra's research focuses on the impact police administrat…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alissa Ball. Alissa is an undergraduate researcher in the Plant, Soil and Microbial Science Department looking at using fungi to clean up heavy metals. Current methods of heavy metal removal create toxic byproducts, so her work aims to investigate how effectively fungi can accumulate …

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jamie Liebold. This research explores Gap Junctional Intercellular Communication (GJIC) as a bioindicator of cancer. Cells use GJIC for the signaling of proteins and stresses. When a cell is stressed, it will close its gap junctions, signaling uncontrolled cell proliferation. These ex…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Zach Miller. A therapeutic window is a dose range between the minimum effective drug dose (MED) to the minimum toxic drug dose (MTD). Many commonly-used cancer drugs, including chemotherapies such as Doxorubicin, are highly toxic to normal tissues and have narrow therapeutic windows. …

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Andrew Deleruyelle. How can one go about measuring the effects forests have on combatting climate change? As a student of forestry, Andrew has observed changing climates and wondered what can be done to quantify the largescale ecological patterns they’re experiencing. When Andrew fini…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maddy Eischer. As a student pursuing a dual degree in Apparel & Textile Design and Genomics & Molecular Genetics, Maddy has long felt the societal pressure to pick one of her passions in school and in a future career. Instead of choosing between these two dichotomous interests, Maddy …

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Charlotte Best. Charlotte works in a lab that studies the influence of the gut microbiome (all the bacteria in our gut) on the brain and behavior. She is in charge of analyzing its effects on individual neurons and she also found that MRI impacts certain neurons in a negative way, whi…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lauren Emerick. Lauren is a junior studying Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, working for Dr. Roloff in the Applied Forest and Wildlife Ecology Lab. Lauren has been researching the behavioral changes in invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) in response to management activ…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Marchal. Gregory's research investigated influenza vaccine hesitancy. This project uses experimental data from rural Wyoming to analyze how risk preferences and perceptions of uncertainty influence parental influenza vaccine hesitancy. Their key finding is that parents who per…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Grant Bruninga. Inland lake herring can be found in lakes all around the state of Michigan as well as the Great Lakes. However, recent increases in habitat destruction, chemical runoff, and pollution have caused significant declines in lake herring populations. Since lake herring are …

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview June Oh. How can an English major help promote critical science literacy for STEM undergraduate students? As a humanities scholar, June has been a part of an IRB-approved interdisciplinary pedagogy project that develops a first-year writing course for STEM undergraduate students. With…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Hess. The U.S. electrical grid, the system of control centers, substations, poles, and wires that provides electricity to almost all American homes pre-dates the computer and Internet revolutions. Introducing computers to the operation of this grid allows for the grid to react…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Philip Engelgau. Philip's research aims to understand how banana fruit is able to synthesize its characteristic aroma compounds. The chemicals that banana fruit produce and that we sense as banana-like are derived from the same metabolic routes as valine and leucine, common, primary m…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Claire Kopenhafer. The Hubble Space Telescope has given us many gorgeous images of galaxies, with bright stars and swirls of dust, but there's a lot more going on than we can easily see. Stars are born out of compressed gas, and gas is constantly flowing in and out of galaxies. Most o…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alassane Sow. Alassane is an undergraduate researcher working in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics currently working on germinating symbiotic and parasitic fungi in the order Pezizalies. They are also a part of a nationwide project that focuses on creating a way to…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Brooke Devries. Brooke is a second-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Hanne Hoffmann. Her research focuses on daily rhythms in the body called circadian rhythms. You'd be surprised at how many things, from sleep to metabolism, to mood and energy, have predictable rhythms throughout t…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Azam Ali Sher. Azam is a dual major Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology (CMIB) & Environmental Sciences and Integrative Toxicology (EITS), and a BEACON research fellow at Michigan State University. There are around 3 million infections and 36,000 deaths cau…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Megan Mikhail. Megan’s research focuses on the intersection between biological and environmental risk for eating disorders, with a particular focus on underserved and marginalized populations. Historically, eating disorders have been stereotyped as “vanity disorders” that predominantl…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Serena Lotreck from MSU's Plant Biology & Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering. Serena’s research is focused on helping researchers in the plant sciences navigate the flood of available information when designing new hypotheses and experiments. Since the 1980s, there has b…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maria Milan from MSU's Civil and Environmental Engineering. Rural Alaskan communities face challenges unique to other areas in the United States. Energy usage and costs are high due to the shipping of materials and cold winters. Many communities are in need of more efficient housing t…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Paul Bylsma from MSU's Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. This thought project discusses the simultaneous proximity and distance that most of us in the academic world felt as a result of COVID online learning. Paul and his collaborators use a unique theoretical lens that foregroun…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Liang Zhao. Liang is a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a lab member of the Environmental Virology Laboratory. His current research focuses on the prediction of fluctuations of COVID-19 incidences in communities through the applicatio…

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Merve Nur Kursav. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Mathematics Education at MSU and a research assistant in the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) with anticipated graduation in Spring 2022. She received a graduate student award, and she has been recognized as a Fulbright Schola…

Kayleigh is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, many coastal communities along the northeastern coast were completely decimated. In the following 10 years, various efforts have been made by national, prefectural, and local governments to assist resident…

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace in academia, and how COVID-19 has had a harder impact on different groups of scholars, especially women and people of color. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nomin…

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jen Fry. Jen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at MSU. Particularly limited research has been conducted on the experiences of Black female volleyball players who played in Europe, and how place, space, and geography are intimately intertwined with how they experience l…

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Lexi Nadolsky. Lexi’s research focuses on discovering the different ways that the electric fish Mormyrids determine their sex genetically. Her research involves searching for the AMHR2 gene in many mormyrid species to begin piecing together how each fish population may have evolved di…