November 10, 2009

Rick Salisbury receives Presentation Award

Rick Salisbury received the Best Student Platform presentation award based on his presentation at Proctor and Gamble as part of the Annual Ohio Valley Society of Toxicology meeting. His abstract, entitled "TCDD-induced inhibition of the 3'IgHRR is mediated by an interaction between the AhR and NF-kappaB/Rel proteins" was one of four PhD student abstracts selected for platform presentation.

June 26, 2009

Chad Ferguson and Katherine Kapo receive PhDs in Environmental Science

Drs. Chad Ferguson and Katherine Kapo received their PhD degrees after successful defenses of their dissertations. Congratulations to the program's latest PhD recipients!

June 1, 2009

Karen Simpson to attend summer program on Complex Systems

Kaen Simpson was selected for a full scholarship to attend the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School in New Mexico held from June 7-July 4.  

May 11, 2009

Katherine Kapo receives Graduate Excellence Award

Katherine Kapo, who will graduate in Spring 2009 as the fifth graduate of the ES PhD program, is being honored as our program's recipient of the Graduate Excellence award for 2009 from the School of Graduate Studies. She tackled a unique and exciting topic in the risk assessment of watersheds and aquatic ecosystems which provided statistically based rankings of stressors that impaired aquatic life. She has published two papers in excellent international journals and a technical report for the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency based on her work here at WSU, with more in preparation. Katherine had 20 presentations at national and international meetings during her PhD, including 6 countries in Europe and southeast Asia. She has been recruited by the U.S. Geological Survey to train their personnel on her unique watershed analyses method and was awarded a grant to conduct joint research with the Dutch Ministry of Health and Environment for 2 months. Katherine is advised by Dr. Allen Burton in WSU’s Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences.

Congratulations to Katherine on this well-deserved award!

April 15, 2009

Arijit Guin and Ramya Ramanathan receive PhDs in Environmental Science

Drs. Arijit Guin and Ramya Ramanathan received their PhD degrees after successful defenses of their dissertations. Congratulations to the program's latest PhD recipients!

March 2, 2009

• Shawn Devlin wins Biology Award for Research Excellence (BARE)

Shawn Devlin, a fourth year ES PhD student in the laboratory of Dr. Yvonne Vadeboncoeur, was recently honored with a Biology Award for Research Excellence (BARE) of $800 from the Department of Biological Sciences at Wright State.  These awards are funded through a number of departmental fund raisers, including the annual Department of Biological Sciences Golf Scramble.  Shawn’s award-winning research involves the use compound specific stable isotope analysis (CSIA) of Phospholipid Fatty Acids (PLFAs) as a tool for constructing foundational carbon pathways via autotrophic and heterotrophic microbes in aquatic systems. PLFA-CSIA signatures could be used to determine whether bacteria are reliant on C fixed by benthic algae or if they are exploiting other C sources. Carbon utilization by bacteria may influence algal and bacterial production rates which could then effect ecosystem function and shape lake food web dynamics.

Congratulations to Shawn!

February 9, 2009

• Vadeboncoeur awarded $850,000 collaborative NSF grant to study primary productivity in Lake Tanganyika

Yvonne Vadeboncoeur (Biological Sciences) and Pete McIntyre (University of Michigan) have received news that their proposal entitled “Consumer control of high-productivity low-nutrient ecosystems: Enhancement of primary productivity by grazing fish in Lake Tanganyika” will be funded by NSF for $850,000. Lake Tanganyika is the second largest lake in the world, and its nearshore, or littoral, waters are home to hundreds of fish and invertebrate species found nowhere else in the world. Fish densities and diversity in the littoral zones of African rift valley lakes are unparalleled in freshwater ecosystems, and the productivity of fishes in littoral Lake Tanganyika is similar to marine coral reefs. This high animal productivity is energetically dependent on photosynthesizing algae that grow in the rocky littoral zone of the lake. The algae maintain astonishingly high productivity rates in the face of both intense grazing and an extreme scarcity of the inorganic nutrients necessary for plant growth. Vadeboncoeur and McIntyre will explore whether grazing fish actually have a net positive effect on their algal food resource by recycling nutrients necessary for algal growth. Furthermore, they will test whether grazing fish increase total ecosystem productivity by increasing the amount of nitrogen fixation while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of phosphorus retention.

This project will help to guide efforts to protect the hundreds of unique species and the globally-important fishery of Lake Tanganyika by clarifying two critical issues. First, fishermen are catching too many fish in many lakes worldwide, including Lake Tanganyika. This overharvest may remove too many nutrients from the lake, or reduce the rate of nutrient recycling so that algae grow more slowly. By that mechanism, fishing could actually undercut the future productivity of the lake. Second, climate change is warming the surface waters of the lake and reducing the seasonal winds that cause cold, nutrient rich waters to periodically well up from the depths of the lake. Reduction in the frequency of influx of these deep-water nutrients is cutting off the algal growth that sustains the fish. This research will offer the first thorough evaluation of how these human-imposed factors will affect the productivity of Lake Tanganyika, which supports a regional human economy. This project will support both African and American Ph.D. students and partnerships with African and global non-profit organizations will broaden the impact of the research.

October 9, 2008

• Rooney publishes book examining causes and consequences of environmental change

 Dr. Tom Rooney, along with his co-editor Don Waller at the University of Wisconsin, published "The Vanishing Present: Wisconsin's Changing Lands, Waters, and Wildlife."  The book's thirty chapters examine changes in Wisconsin over the past several decades.  Individual chapters explore changes in habitats like wetlands, prairies, lakes, and forests, while others focus on particular taxonomic groups like birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, and plants.  This book is the first in North America to examine how global change--cumulative land use change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and climate change--is influencing ecosystems across an entire state.

This book was supported by grant from the National Science Foundation and published by the University of Chicago Press. 

October 1, 2008

Stireman wins Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence: Early Career Achievement

Dr. John Stireman studies insects and their interactions with other organisms in order to explore fundamental problems in ecology and evolution. In just two and a half years, John has been funded by two separate grants from the National Science Foundation-at a time when funding at NSF has plummeted to historic lows. Dr. Stireman has a strong record of publication, with a total of 14 peer-reviewed research articles published or in press since he began at Wright State University in 2005, including papers in top tier journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Evolution, the Annual Review of Entomology, American Journal of Botany, and others. He has presented his research at numerous professional meetings, including several invited symposium lectures at national and international conferences. Dr. Stireman has developed an active laboratory group, including undergraduates, master's, and Ph.D. students and has taught a number of courses on topics related to his research interests, including General Ecology, Invertebrate Zoology, Evolution, and Entomology. He serves as advisor to Jeremy Heath in the E.S. Ph.D. program.

This award brings the number of winners in this category to four among active E.S. Ph.D. program faculty in the last five years. Congratulations to John for keeping the streak alive! Who's next?

October 1, 2008

Higgins Receives DOE Grant to Study CO₂ Sequestration

Dr. Steve Higgins recently received a 3-year grant from the US Department of Energy to study the long-term behavior of rocks and minerals exposed to CO₂-bearing fluids in an effort to test the viability of various proposed geologic containment strategies. His project titled "Kinetic complexity of mineral-water interface reactions relevant to CO₂ sequestration: Atomic-scale reactions to macroscale processes" involves a collaborative effort between WSU and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The project will utilize Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) in conjunction with Vertical Scanning Interferometry and reactor-scale investigations (1) to describe how mineral topographic relaxation occurs and relate these observables to the rate and mechanism of fluid-mineral interaction, (2) to understand how the surface reactivity of a mineral varies as a function of orientation, and (3) to describe how grain morphology evolves with exposure time. Corresponding macro-scale experiments will be employed to assess performance of nanometer-scale models across larger length and time scales and to predict behavior of CO₂ sequestration systems by forward modeling for the thousands to perhaps tens of thousands of years over which gas containment must be evaluated.

September 9, 2008

Ritzi receives new NSF grant to study aquifer systems

Arijit Guin and Ramya Ramanathan are ES PhD students in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, advised by Profs. Bob Ritzi and David Dominic. They have been supported on the three NSF grants listed below. Their work aims to develop a high resolution model for the processes of subsurface fluid flow and mass transport. They are using a geometry-based approach to simulate the stratal architecture of the subsurface and the corresponding heterogeneous aquifer properties developed from field studies of fluvial sedimentary deposits. The aquifer heterogeneity will be simulated on a fine grid, perhaps as fine as one cubic centimeter resolution, which could involve over 60 trillion grid elements. The model is being run on one of the largest non-defense supercomputers at the Environmental and Molecular Science Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. The work is expected to provide rich opportunities for petascale computational experimentation on subsurface reactive transport, upscaling, and uncertainty analysis.

Grants:

High-Performance Computing to Evaluate Hierarchical Heterogeneity Paradigms in Sedimentary Aquifer Systems, National Science Foundation, (2008-2011, $300,000)

Modeling Hierarchical Aquifer Architecture from Centimeter to Kilometer Scales, National Science Foundation, (2005-2008, $223,679)

Collaborative Research on Reactive Transport: Modeling Spatial Cross-Correlation Between Hydraulic and Reactive Aquifer Attributes as Determined by Sedimentary Architecture, National Science Foundation, (2006-2009, $107,305, WSU, $284,043 U Buffalo)

Publications:

Guin, A., and R.W. Ritzi, 2008, “Studying the effect of correlation and finite-domain size on spatial continuity of permeable sediments,” Geophysical Research Letters, V35, L10402, doi:10.1029/2007GL032717

Ramanathan, R., R. Ritzi, and C. Huang, 2008, “Linking hierarchical stratal architecture to plume spreading in a Lagrangian-based transport model,” Water Resources Research, V44, W04503, doi:10.1029/2007WR006282

August 18, 2008

Environmental Science PhD faculty and students represent at the Ecological Society of America meeting

Wright State ES PhD faculty and students co-authored 24 presentations at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Milwaukee on August 3-8. Presentations were authored by ES faculty John Stireman, Tom Rooney, Yvonne Vadeboncoeur, Jim Runkle, and Don Cipollini, along with ES students Sean Devlin, Jim Milks, and Jeremy Heath. This was by far the largest contingent that Wright State has ever sent to the Ecology meetings and is a sure sign of Wright State's growing influence in this area.

June 14, 2008

Sweta Bose and Kathryn Barto receive PhDs in Environmental Science

Drs. Sweta Bose and Kathryn Barto received their PhD degrees after successful defenses of their dissertations in Spring 2008. Congratulations to the program's first PhD recipients!

June 11, 2008

Barto receives Graduate Excellence award

Kathryn Barto, who will graduate in Spring 2008 as the second graduate of the ES PhD program, was recently honored as our program's recipient of the Graduate Excellence award for 2008 from the School of Graduate Studies. Kathryn is often recognized as the leader of her cohort and is a recipient of a competitive EPA GRO fellowship. She tackled a controversial topic in plant ecology and mastered a wide array of techniques and statistical tools in her research, which she can eloquently describe in presentations and in writing. She has published four papers based on her work here at WSU so far, with more in preparation. Kathryn was recently offered two post-doctoral positions as a result of her work and has accepted one at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, an arrangement that extended from collaborations outside of WSU that she fostered during her PhD. Kathryn is advised by Dr. Don Cipollini in the Department of Biological Sciences.

Congratulations to Kathryn on this well-deserved award!

May 1, 2008

• Rick Salisbury-award winner

  Rick Salisbury, an ES PhD student in the lab of Dr. Courtney Sulentic in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, won an Ohio Valley Society of Toxicology (OVSOT) student abstract competition and was given a monetary award in mid-April. Additionally, Rick was second runner-up and awarded a plaque for the student poster competition at the 2008 Toxicology and Risk Assessment Conference in Cincinnati, OH on April 16. The title of his award-winning presentation was "Role of NF-êB/Rel proteins in mediating the repressive effects of TCDD on 3'IgH RR activation."

  Congratulations to Rick!

January 11, 2008

• Dual successes for Hammerschmidt for E.S. Ph.D. faculty member

  Dr. Chad Hammerschmidt, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences has received word that a proposal, entitled "Mercury Biogeochemistry on the Continental Shelf and Slope." will be funded by the National Science Foundation-Chemical Oceanography program.

  Little is known about the sources and cycling of toxic methylmercury in marine systems. Methylmercury is the form of mercury that bioaccumulates and biomagnifies in marine food webs, especially piscivorous fish, and represents the primary human health concern related to mercury in the environment. Benthic mercury methylation on the continental shelf and slope is a potentially significant contributor of methylmercury to the marine environment, including biota and the open ocean. This three-year investigation will focus on processes and reactions affecting the seasonal cycling of methylmercury in sediments and waters over a broad region of continental shelf and slope of the northwestern Atlantic Ocean.

  In addition, Dr. Hammerschmidt was recently informed that his alma-mater, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, chose him to receive the 2008 Rada Distinguished Alumni Award.

  Congratulations to Dr. Hammerschmidt! What a way to start the New Year!

August 17, 2007

• E.S. Ph.D. faculty member, John Stireman, recently coauthored a paper that deals with a central issue in ecology

  (L. A. Dyer, M. S. Singer, J. T. Lill, J. O. Stireman, G. L. Gentry, R. J. Marquis, R. E. Ricklefs, H. F. Greeney, D. L. Wagner, H. C. Morais, I. R. Diniz, T. A. Kursar, P. D. Coley. 2007. Host specificity of Lepidoptera in tropical and temperate forests. Nature 448, 696–699 (09 Aug 2007)

  How many animal species are there and how are they distributed?

  Recent studies of insect herbivore diversity and host range in tropical systems have suggested that early estimates of 50 million animal species on earth (most of which are insects) are far too high because they make an incorrect assumption that most herbivores are highly specialized, particularly those in the tropics. In fact, some recent research suggests that insect herbivores are not as specialized as previously assumed and that Tropical insect herbivores are not more specialized than temperate ones.

  In our paper we analyzed herbivore host range data and beta diversity among plant species from 8 extensive rearing studies of caterpillars spanning a latitudinal gradient from Canada to Brazil and found clear evidence that tropical caterpillars are more specialized than temperate caterpillars. This greater specialization is due (we think) to greater top-down and bottom-up selective forces in the tropics that favor specialization, and it suggests that the diversity of insect herbivores cannot be simply predicted from gradients in plant species diversity. It also suggests that recent estimates of earth's animal diversity are likely too low.

June 19, 2007

• Wright State environmental scientist receives $900,000 grant to help clean up polluted American harbors

  Most of the harbors in America are in trouble. The culprit is pollution. These seaports have been described as the largest and most poorly regulated sources of urban pollution in the country.

  One of the primary obstacles to correcting this problem is a lack of accurate and cost- effective ways to measure the pollution that is present to determine if clean-up is needed.

  “The clean-up costs for these harbors and large rivers can be staggering, costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per site,” said Allen Burton, Ph.D., a professor of environmental sciences at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. “Given these costs, we have to find better ways to determine what does and does not need to be cleaned up.”

  Burton, an expert on the pollution of aquatic systems, has received an innovative $900,000 grant to help develop a solution for this environmental dilemma. He said virtually every harbor in America has pollution problems. “For an example nearby, there are 42 federally designated areas of concern along the Great Lakes, and 41 of these involve harbors in such locations as Chicago, Toledo and Cleveland,” he explained. “Numerous rivers and streams with contaminants from agriculture, industry and development drain into these harbors. These toxic wastes become a pollution source, along with emissions from ships and other sources from the maritime trade.

  “Our goal is to develop a quick, risk assessment monitoring tool for harbors where contaminated sediments are a common problem,” said Burton, who chairs the university’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. His research over the last 25 years has focused on developing effective methods for identifying ecological effects and contamination in aquatic systems.

  “The unique aspect of our grant is that this project will provide the first-ever instrumentation that closely links contaminant exposures (like mercury, arsenic, pesticides, PCBs) with adverse effects on fish and other aquatic life,” he said.

  Burton and his collaborators will achieve this by dropping sensor probes into the bottom of the harbor to record data and collect water samples. The contaminants in the sediment will be measured and the biological exposures and effects will be calculated. These findings then will be integrated into a Geographic Information System to provide statistically based rankings of the likely dominant physical and chemical contaminants across the site.

  “The two major contributions of this research will be (1) development of an integrated capability to assess sites for ecological risk and recovery using accurate exposure and effects data and (2) a straightforward approach to quantitatively measure and graphically demonstrate displays of sediment quality and the dominant contaminant relationships with ecological risk,” he said.

  This will allow site managers, regulators and stakeholders to better understand whether the site is improving or which areas need to be cleaned up.

  Burton said the findings his research team develops may then become a model for use nationwide by three federal agencies, the Department of Defense, Department of the Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  “Our initial development work will be in San Diego harbor, with follow-up work in another west or east coast harbor that is known to be contaminated,” he said. “The findings will be applicable to all the major harbors in the U.S., such as New York, Houston, Pearl Harbor and the Great Lakes.”

  The Wright State research scientist is the principal investigator for the three-year project, and he will be working closely with Navy and EPA researchers.

  Burton’s research work has involved visiting positions in Italy, Portugal and New Zealand. He is president of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and serves on numerous international scientific panels and committees, such as the National Research Council and EPA Science Advisory Board. He has authored more than 200 publications and received more than $7 million in research grants and contracts.

  This grant was awarded through the Strategic Environmental Restoration and Demonstration Program of the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

  For more details, contact Burton at allen.burton@wright.edu or (937) 775-2201.