New UMBC-led research inFrontiers in Microbiology suggests that viruses are using information from their environment to “decide” when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has implications for antiviral drug development.
A virus’s ability to sense its environment, including elements produced by its host, adds “another layer of complexity to the viral-host interaction,” says Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences and senior author on the new paper. Right now, viruses are exploiting that ability to their benefit. But in the future, he says, “we could exploit it to their detriment.”
Not a coincidence
The new study focused on bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria, often referred to simply as “phages.” The phages in the study can only infect their hosts when the bacterial cells have special appendages, called pili and flagella, that help the bacteria move and mate. The bacteria produce a protein called CtrA that controls when they generate these appendages. The new paper shows that many appendage-dependent phages have patterns in their DNA where the CtrA protein can attach, called binding sites. A phage having a binding site for a protein produced by its host is unusual, Erill says.
Even more surprising, Erill and the paper’s first author Elia Mascolo, a Ph.D. student in Erill’s lab, found through detailed genomic analysis that these binding sites were not unique to a single phage, or even a single group of phages. Many different types of phages had CtrA binding sites—but they all required their hosts to have pili and/or flagella to infect them. It couldn’t be a coincidence, they decided.
The ability to monitor CtrA levels “has been invented multiple times throughout evolution by different phages that infect different bacteria,” Erill says. When distantly related species demonstrate a similar trait, it’s called convergent evolution—and it indicates that the trait is definitely useful.
A delta phage, the first identified in the new study to have binding sites for CtrA. (Transmission Electron Microscope image captured by Tagide deCarvahlo at UMBC’s Keith Porter Imaging Facility)
Timing is everything
Another wrinkle in the story: The first phage in which the research team identified CtrA binding sites infects a particular group of bacteria called Caulobacterales. Caulobacterales are an especially well-studied group of bacteria, because they exist in two forms: a “swarmer” form that swims around freely, and a “stalked” form that attaches to a surface. The swarmers have pili/flagella, and the stalks do not. In these bacteria, CtrA also regulates the cell cycle, determining whether a cell will divide evenly into two more of the same cell type, or divide asymmetrically to produce one swarmer and one stalk cell.
Because the phages can only infect swarmer cells, it’s in their best interest only to burst out of their host when there are many swarmer cells available to infect. Generally, Caulobacterales live in nutrient-poor environments, and they are very spread out. “But when they find a good pocket of microhabitat, they become stalked cells and proliferate,” Erill says, eventually producing large quantities of swarmer cells.
So, “We hypothesize the phages are monitoring CtrA levels, which go up and down during the life cycle of the cells, to figure out when the swarmer cell is becoming a stalk cell and becoming a factory of swarmers,” Erill says, “and at that point, they burst the cell, because there are going to be many swarmers nearby to infect.”
A Caulobacter bacterium divides, producing a stalked cell (right) and a swarmer cell with a flagellum (left). (public domain)
Listening in
Unfortunately, the method to prove this hypothesis is labor-intensive and extremely difficult, so that wasn’t part of this latest paper—although Erill and colleagues hope to tackle that question in the future. However, the research team sees no other plausible explanation for the proliferation of CtrA binding sites on so many different phages, all of which require pili/flagella to infect their hosts. Even more interesting, they note, are the implications for viruses that infect other organisms—even humans.
“Everything that we know about phages, every single evolutionary strategy they have developed, has been shown to translate to viruses that infect plants and animals,” he says. “It’s almost a given. So if phages are listening in on their hosts, the viruses that affect humans are bound to be doing the same.”
There are a few other documented examples of phages monitoring their environment in interesting ways, but none include so many different phages employing the same strategy against so many bacterial hosts.
This new research is the “first broad scope demonstration that phages are listening in on what’s going on in the cell, in this case, in terms of cell development,” Erill says. But more examples are on the way, he predicts. Already, members of his lab have started looking for receptors for other bacterial regulatory molecules in phages, he says—and they’re finding them.
New therapeutic avenues
The key takeaway from this research is that “the virus is using cellular intel to make decisions,” Erill says, “and if it’s happening in bacteria, it’s almost certainly happening in plants and animals, because if it’s an evolutionary strategy that makes sense, evolution will discover it and exploit it.”
For example, to optimize its strategy for survival and replication, an animal virus might want to know what kind of tissue it is in, or how robust the host’s immune response is to its infection. While it might be unsettling to think about all the information viruses could gather and possibly use to make us sicker, these discoveries also open up avenues for new therapies.
“If you are developing an antiviral drug, and you know the virus is listening in on a particular signal, then maybe you can fool the virus,” Erill says. That’s several steps away, however. For now, “We are just starting to realize how actively viruses have eyes on us—how they are monitoring what’s going on around them and making decisions based on that,” Erill says. “It’s fascinating.”
UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have received a five-year, $13.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty from groups underrepresented in biomedical science. Funding is through the NIH Common Fund Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which was founded last year to support efforts to hire groups of diverse, early-career research faculty.
The grant will enable the universities to hire a group of four faculty members at UMBC and six at UMSOM, each of whom will have cross-campus appointments at both institutions.
“Faculty hired under UM-FIRST will advance our teaching and research missions and serve as leaders for institutional change as we pursue our vision of a diverse professoriate,” says William LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC. “These faculty and those who follow will also serve as role models for future generations of underrepresented students.”
Dean William LaCourse teaches Chemistry 100 in spring 2022. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Fostering culture change
The grant aims to build self-reinforcing communities of scientists committed to diversity and inclusive excellence through the recruitment of early-career faculty who are competitive for assistant professor positions and have demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion. UMSOM and UMBC will measure their progress against clearly defined metrics of institutional culture change, diversity, and inclusion to determine if hiring efforts and other evidence-based strategies are achieving the program’s goals.
The grant “is designed to foster sustainable culture change and promote inclusive excellence by enabling us to hire a diverse cohort of new faculty and to support faculty development, mentoring, and promotion opportunities,” says James Kaper, the lead on the grant and the James and Carolyn Frenkil Distinguished Dean’s Professor, vice dean for Academic Affairs, and chair of microbiology and immunology at UMSOM.
Building on a legacy of inclusion
The NIH FIRST grant builds on UMBC’s highly esteemed Meyerhoff Scholars Program, launched more than 30 years ago, which has led UMBC to become a leading university for developing underrepresented STEM undergraduates. UMBC is now the nation’s number #1 producer of Black undergraduates who go on to complete a PhD in the natural sciences or engineering and #1 for Black undergraduates who complete an M.D./Ph.D.
Nykia Walker, a Pre-professoriate Fellow in biological sciences, studies how breast tumors initiate metastasis. (Image courtesy of Nykia Walker)
UMBC’s efforts to promote faculty diversity in STEM include the PROMISE Academy and ADVANCE, which has increased women faculty in STEM by 70 percent at UMBC since 2003.
The College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences’ Pre-professoriate Fellowship offers incoming faculty two-year appointments as research assistant professors, with structured mentoring and other scaffolds for success. Faculty who came to UMBC through this program in biological sciences, physics, and chemistry have already been converted to tenure-track assistant professors.
Unwavering dedication
The recent $10M INCLUDES grant awarded to UMBC further builds a robust, diverse pipeline in STEM at UMBC by supporting postdocs from underrepresented groups, and the PROMISE Allegiance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program offers professional development and community to all graduate students and postdocs at UMBC and throughout the University System of Maryland.
UMSOM’s efforts to promote a diverse STEM and health-science pipeline include the UMB CURES program for middle and high school students, several internship and summer research programs for college students, and multiple post-graduate training programs that give underrepresented minority scholars direct experience in a laboratory setting.
Like many of these other initiatives, “The true strength of UM-FIRST,” LaCourse says, “ is in the unwavering dedication of the leadership, faculty, and staff of these two institutions to inclusive excellence and social justice.”
Bats as biomonitors, community connections to the zero-waste movement, and oyster aquaculture are just a few of the topics that students in UMBC’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment (ICARE) master’s program are exploring through Baltimore-centered community-engaged research. As the first cohort in the program heads into their second and final year, they are excited about their work and looking ahead to becoming the next generation of environmental science leaders.
“B” is for bat
Chris Blume, M.S. ’23, geography and environmental systems,has studied bobcats, bees, and birds. So when he came to ICARE, he jokes, “I had to choose another ‘b’ animal.” Jokes aside, in his undergraduate and working experience, Blume found that “the social aspect was missing” in conservation science, which often focused on wildlife. “And that’s what drew me to ICARE, because it seemed like there was a focus on the community.”
In his project, Blume is using bats as biomonitors to detect levels of heavy metals in different neighborhoods across Baltimore. “Because of their biology and their ecology, they make great biomonitors in rural environments,” he says, “but I wanted to see how that works in urban places.”
Bat boxes are most successful when they get ample direct sunlight and are about 15 – 20 feet off the ground.Chris Blume shows off one of his bat boxes before installing it.Chris Blume examines a bat from one of his bat boxes.
How can bats provide information about heavy metals? Through their guano (poop). “I have literally a fridge with a bunch of guano,” he says, waiting for analysis later this fall. In addition to the guano analysis, Blume is giving away bat boxes to local residents and offering evening “bat walks” to teach local Baltimoreans about these important native critters. He’s also created citizen science opportunities by posting acoustic recordings of bat calls on a public website, where anyone can listen and help identify which bat species show up where.
In the future, Blume wants to pursue a Ph.D. and continue his bat research, as well as continue to create citizen science and community engagement opportunities.
Building the bridge
Natalia Figueredo, M.S. ’23, geography and environmental systems, has always been community-oriented, influenced by her early childhood in Bolivia and her teenage years in Queens, New York. In New York, she noticed that “there were all these big projects going on in communities, and the community didn’t ask for them,” she says. She wanted to do something different.
After working with the Ironbound Community Corporation in Ironbound, New Jersey, she became passionate about doing inclusive research for mutual benefit, and ICARE was a perfect fit to advance her career. “What interested me about this program,” she says, “is that it was trying to build that bridge between scientific research and community engagement.”
Figueredo’s research project focuses on engaging South Baltimore residents in the zero-waste movement, in the context of recent battles over a nearby trash incinerator. She is also working closely with partners at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, in addition to her faculty mentor Maggie Holland, associate professor of geography and environmental systems.
Natalia Figueredo (second from left) meets with members of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. (Courtesy of Figueredo)
Figueredo is surveying residents from across the city about their waste management practices and access to the zero-waste movement. She’s also interviewing South Baltimore community leaders and conducting focus groups with neighborhood residents. Figueredo hopes to find out whether they feel supported in pursuing zero-waste goals and to learn what local knowledge and practices already exist related to the movement—whether or not the residents identify them as such.
Research always comes with bumps in the road, but overall Figueredo has had a rewarding experience so far. She wanted to choose a graduate program where people would champion and support her, she says—“and that’s definitely how I feel with the ICARE team.”
Putting research into practice
Darryl Acker-Carter, M.S. ’23, marine, estuarine, and environmental science, is studying a new method of oyster aquaculture with partners at the company Solar Oysters. Traditionally, oysters have been cultivated in wire baskets at the water’s surface. A new system, called the Solar Oyster Production System (SOPS), uses a solar-powered ladder structure to rotate the baskets through the entire water column. The goal is to produce healthier, more-uniform oysters in less space. At the end of the growing season this fall, Acker-Carter will compare oyster size, survival rate, and meat-to-shell ratio of oysters in the experimental rotating ladders, non-rotating ladders, and traditional surface-only baskets at a site in Curtis Bay, in south Baltimore.
Acker-Carter has been interested in oysters for several years. “I like social science, but I also like the biological side of things, and I saw that nexus through oysters,” he says. To some, how to best cultivate oysters may seem like a purely scientific question, but “when you actually get down to, ‘Let’s make some change,’ it’s all social science,” Acker-Carter says, “because it’s all managing people and their perspective about how to harvest oysters and their relationships to natural resources.”
The ICARE program has helped Acker-Carter see how research fits into community engagement. “I used to think research was very isolated,” he says, “but in ICARE, you’re putting that research into practice. You can create benefit in the community by doing the research, and giving people access to that data.”
Darryl Acker-Carter holds a very small blue crab on a boat.Darryl Acker-Carter (holding orange bucket) helps harvest oysters.A surface view of the rotating solar-powered aquaculture system used in Darryl Acker-Carter’s research project.
Committed to community
For program leader Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences, ICARE is exceeding expectations. “I am thrilled with how the program is going,” she says. “The students themselves are so strong. They are motivated. They are engaged. They are very sharp, and they’ve bonded as a cohort, which makes us really happy. I do think that’s a huge secret to success—having students feel like they are part of a network of peers supporting each other.”
The community partners have also been critical for the program’s success. One session led by Stephen Freeland, director of the individualized study program at UMBC, brought students and partners together for a brainstorming session across projects and topic areas, embodying the program’s commitment to bridging science and community. “Just bringing everyone to the table, literally, and helping everyone see that their voice is equally important in solving these environmental problems and doing the research was really powerful,” Mendelson says.
Mendelson shares that she and her fellow faculty have also been developing their community-engagement skills in working alongside their students. “I’m amazed at how important relationships are, and trust,” Mendelson says. “Building relationships with members of the community has been much more interesting and complicated than I expected. It’s work. But it’s good work.”
That community engagement piece makes ICARE different from other environmental science programs, explains Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences. “We’re definitely tackling different issues in different places than lots of environmental science has, even 10 or 20 years ago,” he says, “so it’s really satisfying to see that coming into place.”
“ICARE fulfills so many of the stated missions and goals of UMBC—to connect with community, to address the climate crisis, to increase diversity and inclusion,” Mendelson says. She looks forward to working with the second cohort of ICARE students, who started this fall, preparing them for successful careers in environmental science and leading local change.
After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, you might picture a virus as a nasty spiked ball – a mindless killer that gets into a cell and hijacks its machinery to create a gazillion copies of itself before bursting out. For many viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the “mindless killer” epithet is essentially true.
But there’s more to virus biology than meets the eye.
Take HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. HIV is a retrovirus that does not go directly on a killing spree when it enters a cell. Instead, it integrates itself into your chromosomes and chills, waiting for the right moment to command the cell to make copies of it and burst out to infect other immune cells and eventually cause AIDS.
Exactly what moment HIV is waiting for is still an area of active study. But research on other viruses has long hinted that these pathogens can be quite “thoughtful” about killing. Of course, viruses cannot think the way you and I do. But, as it turns out, evolution has endowed them with some pretty elaborate decision-making mechanisms. Some viruses, for instance, will choose to leave the cell they have been residing in if they detect DNA damage. Not even viruses, it appears, like to stay in a sinking ship.
Mylaboratory has been studying the molecular biology of bacteriophages, or phages for short, the viruses that infect bacteria, for over two decades. Recently, my colleagues and I have shown that phages can listen for key cellular signals to help them in their decision-making. Even worse, they can use the cell’s own “ears” to do the listening for them.
Escaping DNA damage
If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, phages are certainly your friends. Phages control bacterial populations in nature, and clinicians are increasingly using them to treat bacterial infections that do not respond to antibiotics.
The best studied phage, lambda, works a bit like HIV. Upon entering the bacterial cell, lambda decides whether to replicate and kill the cell outright, like most viruses do, or to integrate itself into the cell’s chromosome, as HIV does. If the latter, lambda harmlessly replicates with its host each time the bacteria divides. This video shows a lambda phage infecting E. coli.
This video shows a lambda phage infecting E. coli.
But, like HIV, lambda is not just sitting idle. It uses a special protein called CI like a stethoscope to listen for signs of DNA damage within the bacterial cell. If the bacterium’s DNA gets compromised, that’s bad news for the lambda phage nested within it. Damaged DNA leads straight to evolution’s landfill because it’s useless for the phage that needs it to reproduce. So lambda turns on its replication genes, makes copies of itself and bursts out of the cell to look for more undamaged cells to infect.
Tapping the cell’s communication system
Some phages, instead of gathering intel with their own proteins, tap the infected cell’s very own DNA damage sensor: LexA.
Proteins like CI and LexA are transcription factors that turn genes on and off by binding to specific genetic patterns within the DNA instruction book that is the chromosome. Some phages like Coliphage 186 have figured out that they don’t need their own viral CI protein if they have a short DNA sequence in their chromosomes that bacterial LexA can bind to. Upon detecting DNA damage, LexA will activate the phage’s replicate-and-kill genes, essentially double-crossing the cell into committing suicide while allowing the phage to escape.
Scientists first reported CI’s role in phage decision-making in the 1980s and Coliphage 186’s counterintelligence trick in the late 1990s. Since then, there have been a few other reports of phages tapping bacterial communication systems. One example is phage phi29, which exploits its host’s transcription factor to detect when the bacterium is getting ready to generate a spore, or a kind of bacterial egg capable of surviving extreme environments. Phi29 instructs the cell to package its DNA into the spore, killing the budding bacteria once the spore germinates.
https://youtu.be/MkUgkDLp2iE
Transcription factors turn genes on and off.
In our recently published research, my colleagues and I show that several groups of phages have independently evolved the ability to tap into yet another bacterial communication system: the CtrA protein. CtrA integrates multiple internal and external signals to set in motion different developmental processes in bacteria. Key among these is the production of bacterial appendages called flagella and pili. Turns out, these phages attach themselves to the pili and flagella of bacteria in order to infect them.
Our leading hypothesis is that phages use CtrA to guesstimate when there will be enough bacteria nearby sporting pili and flagella that they can readily infect. A pretty smart trick for a “mindless killer.”
These are not the only phages that make elaborate decisions – all without the benefit of even having a brain. Some phages that infect Bacillus bacteria produce a small molecule each time they infect a cell. The phages can sense this molecule and use it to count the number of phage infections taking place around them. Like alien invaders, this count helps decide when they should switch on their replicate-and-kill genes, killing only when hosts are relatively abundant. This way, the phages make sure that they never run out of hosts to infect and guarantee their own long-term survival.
Countering viral counterintelligence
You may be wondering why you should care about the counterintelligence ops run by bacterial viruses. While bacteria are very different from people, the viruses that infect them are not that different from the viruses that infect humans. Pretty much every single trick played by phages has later been shown to be used by human viruses. If a phage can tap bacterial communication lines, why wouldn’t a human virus tap yours?
So far, researchers don’t know what human viruses could be listening for if they hijack these lines, but plenty of options come to mind. I believe that, like phages, human viruses could potentially be able to count their numbers to strategize, detect cell growth and tissue formation and even monitor immune responses. For now, these possibilities are only speculation, but scientific investigation is underway.
Having viruses listening to your cells’ private conversations is not the rosiest of pictures, but it’s not without a silver lining. As intelligence agencies all around the world know well, counterintelligence works only when it’s covert. Once detected, the system can very easily be exploited to feed misinformation to your enemy. Similarly, I believe that future antiviral therapies may be able to combine conventional artillery, like antivirals that prevent viral replication, with information warfare trickery, such as making the virus believe the cell it is in belongs to a different tissue.
But, hush, don’t tell anybody. Viruses could be listening!
The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has allocated $500,000 to carry forward the landmark Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), led by UMBC in close collaboration with area partners.
The BES has been collecting data for more than 20 years on the Baltimore region’s watersheds, ecology, and social issues related to the environment. From 1998 to 2018, the BES was one of just two urban Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States. The groundbreaking project helped generate momentum for the now-thriving field of urban ecology.
Headquartered at UMBC’s Technology Research Center, BES has engaged UMBC researchers in fields as diverse as ecology, art, and environmental engineering. Dozens of researchers from other institutions have conducted experiments and made insightful discoveries about urban ecology through the study. Even more have analyzed the data produced by BES researchers—which is entirely public—for their own work.
Long-term partnership
As NSF’s funding priorities shifted in 2019, the agency did not renew funding for the BES, despite the program’s impact. Since then, BES leaders at UMBC and dedicated external colleagues have found ways to keep the core data-collection systems going to provide uninterrupted information to researchers around the world.
The team advocated for UMBC to be “a center of gravity to continue studying Baltimore’s ecosystem,” as a nexus for a strong existing network of scientists with a broad range of expertise, says Chris Swan, professor of geography and environmental systems and director of the BES.
The U.S. Forest Service made sense as a leader to help carry the work forward, as the agency “has always been a strong partner all through the Baltimore Ecosystem Study,” says Claire Welty, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering. The new allocation from USFS will ensure that this partnership—and the important work of the BES—continues.
Chris Swan, director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Connections with public impact
With support from UMBC administrators—particularly Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research—Swan, Welty, and others have worked hard to find new funding sources for BES projects. In addition to the U.S. Forest Service allocation, NSF awarded Peter Groffman, a long-time collaborator at the City University of New York, $600,000 to continue collection of long-term stream chemistry data in the Baltimore area. The funding, awarded in September 2021, is part of the NSF’s Long Term Research in Environmental Biology Program.
The new funding from NSF and USFS “is designed to keep the core going,” Swan says. “It will fund our quarterly and annual science meetings. It will support some of the co-PI summer salaries, technician salaries, field equipment and vehicle usage, some student support, and a little bit of travel.”
The quarterly meetings, in particular, are a key benefit the BES offers to the community. “Policymakers come to our quarterly meetings to listen and ask questions about the latest science,” Welty says. “They view the meetings as an important resource.” Attendees include staff from the Maryland Department of the Environment, Baltimore City Public Works, and more.
These important public connections, and the understanding that BES data have a real public impact, motivate Swan, Welty, and others to ensure BES continues for years into the future. “We’re going to keep going because we are a strong network of experts with so much to contribute,” Swan says. “We do science, but we also reach into the community, and NGOs, and policy—and we do that well.”
Baltimore Harbor is connected to Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States and an area of intense research interest. (Rebecca Schley/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Serving up the data
In addition to collecting data and hosting quarterly meetings, UMBC support has allowed the BES to keep its website up and running. This is where researchers, policymakers, and other interested parties can access the data from any study conducted as part of BES—from water quality to the results of re-greening efforts. The website is incredibly important, Swan says, “because one of the main things we do is serve up the data we collect to the public.”
Educational materials for K-12 teachers on related topics are available on the website. BES leaders also send out regular communications to a listserv of more than 500 researchers. Communications include content from the quarterly meetings and occasionally additional updates, such as relevant research papers and conferences.
Undergraduate and graduate students also benefit from access to BES data, Welty explains. Open access allows them to “discover things we haven’t yet begun to imagine from all this soil, water, and vegetation data collected for over two decades.”
A network, not a place
Swan and Welty are quick to point out that even though the BES meetings take place at UMBC, and the university hosts the website, BES itself is not a place. “We are a huge network of people, and anyone who wants to join, who’s doing socio-environmental research on Baltimore, can,” Swan says.
He notes that other organizations that have lost major NSF funding have found ways to continue their work fruitfully—and the BES plans to do the same. With champions at UMBC and on Capitol Hill, including U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the program’s future looks bright.
Steiner is thrilled to see new funding arriving to keep this important work going. “As a public R1 research university, we are committed to ensuring our work has a strong public impact,” he says. “We highly appreciate the support of our elected officials, and the partnership of researchers across the region, to fulfill this mission.”
A new collaboration between scientists in the U.S. and Brazil hopes to increase our ability to predict how biological communities may change in a warming world. The researchers will investigate differences in biodiversity in tropical and temperate streams to better understand the differences between organisms in these ecosystems. The National Science Foundation has supported the project with a three-year, $500,000 seed award.
Biodiversity is under threat from shifts in temperature, weather patterns, and habitat availability worldwide, says Chris Swan, co-lead on the project and professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC. “Scientists like myself study what regulates the number of species that you see and the combination of species that you see, and why they occur the way that they do,” Swan says. “Those patterns are changing due to global change.”
The new study will focus on functional diversity, a concept that looks at species’ traits and the roles they fill in the ecosystem, rather than just the number of different species present. For example, in a forest, there might be a large number of bird species, but if they all eat seeds, there’s low functional diversity. Functional diversity would be higher if, among the same number of species, some ate seeds, others ate insects, and others ate small rodents.
“What is the functional response in terms of biodiversity to this global change? That’s what we’re studying,” Swan says. The results could help scientists make predictions about how species in temperate climates might adapt to rising temperatures.
Chris Swan stands near native plantings. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Big questions, small organisms
The study will include researchers from UMBC, Virginia Tech, and University of California-Riverside in the U.S., and São Paulo State University and São Carlos State in Brazil. Streams near São Paulo, Brazil, and Blacksburg, Virginia, will represent tropical and temperate climates, respectively. The team will collect data from each stream monthly for a year.
They’ll manually measure the number of invertebrate species and how many of each species are present. Invertebrates they are likely to find include a wide variety of insects, worms, and crustaceans (such as crayfish). The team will also record traits of each individual, like its size and whether it was collected from the streambed, swimming in the water channel, or flying in the air above the stream.
On top of data on all the organisms, the researchers will also record information about the stream environment, like acidity, temperature, and the presence of nutrients like nitrogen, plus the streambed material (rock or sand, for example), the stream’s sun exposure, and more.
They will intentionally include large and small streams, too. The size of the stream “has practical implications,” Swan says, because in addition to small streams making up 60 percent of all river miles, “if you change a landscape, say by development, you are more likely to flatten a small stream than a large stream. So they are disproportionately under threat.”
Small streams make up 60 percent of all river miles. (Tobias Wrzal/public domain)
Tropical trend
Some differences between species in tropical versus temperate streams are known. For example, tropical organisms tend to be smaller and have shorter life cycles. Their populations also tend to be smaller. This means local populations disappear through random effects more often in tropical ecosystems, creating space for other species to fill their functional roles.
The new study will produce a much larger data set than previously existed, to further clarify some of these differences between temperate and tropical stream ecosystems and possibly discover new ones.
One of the collaborators, Kurt Anderson at UC-Riverside, focuses on modeling ecological data. The team will “use the parameters that we estimate from the field data to tune his models,” Swan says, “so we can make predictions and test our hypotheses about what could happen in the future.” One hypothesis might be that as the world warms, organisms in temperate streams could start to take on traits more common in the tropics.
Biodiversity is the key to success
Beyond the research, the collaboration also presents unique opportunities for international education. The U.S. and Brazilian faculty leads will offer a joint online course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, where they will read and analyze academic papers related to the study. “We realized that learning, teaching, and discussion styles are not the same in the two countries,” Swan says, so this class will give students and faculty alike the chance to navigate new ways of interacting along with discovering new science.
One core point Swan will emphasize with his students is the importance of biodiversity on a global scale. In ecology, the presence of a wide variety of organism types and the functions that they perform is called the “portfolio effect.” Just like a diverse financial portfolio, a diverse biological “portfolio” of species is less likely to suffer heavy losses across the board as conditions change—something is bound to adapt and survive. Also, “if you have more species, then you have more niches filled,” Swan says, “so resources are being used more efficiently.”
“Variety in life is the whole kit and caboodle,” Swan says. “If you didn’t have variety, nothing would be able to adapt. There would be no adaptation to change.”
With ample biodiversity, though, adaptation to change is much more likely. But what that looks like—which species will adapt successfully or will be most at risk—is still unknown. Starting with tiny organisms in streams, Swan and colleagues are working to help figure that out.
It can take more than 10 years and a billion dollars to get one new drug approved, and less than 10 percent of drugs succeed in clinical trials. Part of the problem is that common techniques used to study drug candidates, such as simple cell cultures and mouse models, don’t accurately represent how a drug will behave in the human body, says Chengpeng Chen, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Chengpeng Chen (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
The low success rate motivated Chen to pursue development of more realistic models of human organs, starting with the liver. The hope is that researchers will one day use these models early in the drug development process to rule out drug candidates that are doomed to fail later on. That way, companies can quickly divert resources to projects with more promise. A new five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institute for General Medical Science will support Chen’s interdisciplinary work.
Chen learned about the concept of “organs-on-a-chip” during his postdoctoral research. These 2D, usually plastic devices use tiny amounts of liquid in tiny tubes to imitate organ function. He was hooked on the idea of creating miniature, realistic models of human systems. In addition to supporting drug development studies, such systems can increase understanding of many diseases, without the ethical issues that accompany using animal or human subjects.
Recreating the liver—in miniature
Chen’s first goal is to perfect his liver model, which goes a step beyond an organ-on-a-chip. Instead of a 2D mimic in plastic tubes, “We’re mimicking everything—the cell types, the architecture, and also the 3D microenvironment of the cells,” he says. Ultimately, he hopes to expand to other organs, but the liver is an important place to start, he says. The liver is involved in the metabolism of many drugs, and liver diseases are common.
Other models have recreated single cell types in the liver, but if successful, Chen’s will be the first to include all four major cell types interacting with each other the way they do inside the body.
“We can recreate the architecture of the real tissue, so when we put the cell types together, we think they will show total liver function,” Chen says. “But if we want to study them separately, we can separate them easily.”
While this might sound like the beginning of a quest to grow artificial organs for transplant, “We’re not there yet,” Chen says. He and his group will create “miniaturized liver functional units” that represent all the functionality of the liver on a tiny scale, mainly for biomedical research purposes. While a complete liver contains about 500 billion cells, each model will have approximately 2 million cells and be about the size of a typical thumbtack.
The goal is to create a model that researchers anywhere can replicate. “We want to make this technology standardized and modular,” Chen says, “so that anyone can build the model like Legos.”
Curtis Jones (right), discusses experimental results with fellow chemistry Ph.D. student John Terrell (center) as Chengpeng Chen looks on. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Metabolism monitoring
Once Chen’s team optimizes the model, Chen is interested in looking at how the extracellular matrix—the material in between cells that binds them together and helps shuttle material from cell to cell—influences activity inside the cell, and how it changes during the course of disease.
G.K. Monia Kabandana conducts research in the Chen laboratory. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
A disease known as liver fibrosis induces changes in the extracellular matrix (ECM), stiffening and thickening the liver. Some researchers have looked at how the ECM affects various functions within liver cells, but not at how it may drive metabolic processes. That’s what Chen’s team will look at first with the new model, which should give more comprehensive results than looking at single cell types alone.
They’ll investigate how ECM changes affect essential metabolic pathways like energy production, construction of lipids and amino acids, and oxidative stress. Then they’ll conduct an untargeted sweep of all metabolites in the cell, measuring whether and how they are affected by ECM changes.
Shared facilities on campus administered by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, such as the Keith Porter Imaging Facility and Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex, will make the work possible.
Fighting fatal diseases
In the long term, “the ultimate biological goal is to find new therapies for fibrosis diseases,” Chen says. “New knowledge is needed. We’re starting with the liver in this project, because liver fibrosis is one of the most prevalent fibroses. And it’s fatal.”
Liver fibrosis is similar to cardiovascular diseases where tissue thickens, Chen explains. Earlier, “We initiated blood vessel studies, because in cardiovascular diseases, the blood vessels are stiffer. It’s called sclerosis, but it is very similar to fibrosis,” he says. “They both have extracellular matrix microstructure changes.”
There are other diseases that involve ECM changes, too. “If we can figure out how those changes cause disease,” Chen says, “it’s not just a fundamental science question, but also has biomedical applications.”
Chengpeng Chen (right) and his four graduate students: Tao Zhang, G.K. Monia Kabandana, John Terrell, and Curtis Jones.
Interdisciplinary effort
Some may be surprised that Chen is in the chemistry and biochemistry department, given the biological and even engineering nature of his work. Chen is part of a new generation of scientists that doesn’t hesitate to forge connections across disciplines.
“I really don’t see a boundary for chemistry work,” Chen says. With the new grant, he plans to add at least two new graduate students to the group, who will receive training in a wide range of techniques and disciplines.
Whether developing technologies to generate new models, measuring biological functions in tissues, or studying the roles of individual metabolites in chemical pathways, Chen’s work puts him at the frontier of scientific research and in position to have a significant public impact.
Like bacteria, fungi can cause disease inside your body and on your skin, or even grow on medical equipment like catheter tubing and wound dressings. Many fungal diseases are treatable with antifungal medications, but drug resistance is a growing problem. With a new four-year, $1.3 million grant from NIH, Jeffrey Gardner and his students will be looking for new ways to target disease-causing fungi.
Typically, drugs that treat fungal disease prevent the fungus from making its cell wall, which either kills the fungus outright or weakens it enough that the immune system can finish it off. But that method is highly susceptible to developing resistance.
“But what if you had an external attack on the fungus? What if there were enzymes that actively degraded the fungal cell wall, which is not going to generate resistance easily?” asks Gardner, associate professor of biological sciences. “Our goal is to find enzymes that effectively break down the fungal cell wall, that can be used as a treatment in parallel with cell wall synthesis blockers, or on their own.”
Homing in on the right enzyme
With the new support from NIH, Gardner’s lab will investigate hundreds of bacterial enzymes to figure out which best target Aspergillus fungus, a group of common disease-causing mold species. Previous work from other groups has found particular bacterial species that slow down fungal growth. Gardner’s team will start by looking at every gene and protein in these bacteria to figure out “which genes are turned on, and which proteins are made, while the bacteria are degrading and eating the fungus,” he explains.
Gardner expects that should whittle down the candidate list from about 4,000 genes to a few hundred. “How do we figure out which ones of those couple hundred actually matter? That’s where our genetic system comes in,” he says. The team will generate bacterial strains that lack a functional version of each of the candidate genes and see which strains are less efficient at eating the fungus.
That process should further narrow the list of genes to a few dozen, Gardner says. Then, they’ll produce strains that are missing different combinations of the candidate genes. When they find a combination that can’t survive at all on fungus alone, they’ll be confident the genes knocked out in that strain are the ones necessary to eat the fungus. Finally, they’ll run biochemistry experiments to determine the function and mechanism of each enzyme.
Filaments of Aspergillus fungus (Giles Chapelain/CC BY-NC-ND)
From one to a billion
This kind of brute-force methodology, involving hundreds of unique strains of bacteria, highlights the advantages of working with species that multiply incredibly fast. “That’s the power of microbiology—you can go from a single cell to an overnight culture with a billion cells,” Gardner says. “You can do many, many experiments at a scale and at a speed that really isn’t possible with, say, a fly or a mouse system.”
The culmination of the project will be “identifying the enzymes, knowing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and how well they’re doing it,” Gardner says.
The power of microbes
As a microbial researcher who cares about “interesting bits of biology that have no medical relevance at all,” Gardner says he never imagined he would receive an NIH grant to pursue work with clear biomedical implications. But as his research at UMBC over the last decade has progressed, he’s realized his work can transcend typical disciplinary boundaries. “I think that’s the exciting part, and the power of microbial systems, that you have that latitude,” Gardner says.
His first major grant from the Department of Energy focused on bacteria’s role in biofuel production. A second project funded by the National Science Foundation looks at how bacteria contribute to the carbon cycle by breaking down dead matter on the forest floor. And now, with funding from NIH, his group will look at how bacteria can help fight fungal disease.
“If you can find an interesting bug, with some interesting physiology, the types of questions can really span major different areas,” Gardner says.
The techniques often remain the same, though. “Our wheelhouse is genetics, systems biology, and physiology,” Gardner says. In the new project, “We’re leveraging an established pipeline to work on a problem that is a step away from what we have traditionally done. We’ve got lots of tools and tricks for working with the bacteria.”
The wide range of methods used in Gardner’s lab means that his group offers great training opportunities for students. With the new grant, Gardner is looking forward to adding two new Ph.D. students and several undergraduate researchers to his team.
Jeffrey Gardner and Cassandra Nelson, Ph.D. ’17, biological sciences, in the Gardner laboratory. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Essential support
Gardner knows, from personal experience, the importance of research training and mentorship along a scientist’s full career path, including in his time at UMBC. Before applying for this current grant, he took advantage of a program offered by UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences specifically for people seeking major NIH grants. The program, orchestrated by Phyllis Robinson, professor of biological sciences, included workshops, critique partners, and mentoring. “That was absolutely essential for my success,” Gardner says.
Moving forward, if the project goes well and Gardner is able to secure a second round of funding in a few years, he says the next questions will be, “How do we engineer the enzymes to be more potent? How do we make them do their job of killing fungi better?” The lab could even ask which combination of enzymes would target a specific fungus most effectively, or provide the broadest protection against many fungal species.
But for now, they’ll focus on nailing down the basics, he says. “We need to find out who’s there and what they’re doing first.”
Ever since humans could first observe sunspots about 400 years ago, we’ve been using them to try to define the solar cycle. Approximately every 11 years, solar activity such as sunspots and solar flares ebbs and flows, causing changes to weather patterns on Earth and occasionally threatening telecommunications. Predicting these changes reliably could help everyone from farmers to the military.
Traditionally, scientists have used the concept of a “solar minimum,” when solar activity is reduced, to mark the beginning of each cycle. But the “solar minimum” framework is somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, explains Robert Leamon, research scientist at the Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER), a UMBC partnership with NASA.
Leamon led new research showing that a “solar clock” based on the sun’s magnetic field, rather than the presence or absence of sunspots, can precisely describe and predict many key changes throughout the solar cycle. The new framework offers a significant improvement over the traditional sunspot method, because it can predict surges in dangerous solar flares or changing weather trends years in advance.
Specifically, the new research, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, shows that the solar cycle operates as a distinct sequence of events. Notable, and sometimes abrupt, changes occur at each one-fifth of a cycle. That’s true regardless of the exact length of a given cycle, which can vary by several months to a year. In a nod to music enthusiasts, Leamon and colleagues call it a “circle of fifths.”
Robert Leamon (courtesy of Robert Leamon)
Finding the landmarks
The new paper by Leamon, Scott McIntosh, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Alan Title, at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, builds on work by Leamon, McIntosh, and Daniel Marsh, also at NCAR, published in 2020. That paper demonstrated the existence of a solar cycle phenomenon the research team dubbed “the terminator.”
The sun’s magnetic field changes direction each solar cycle, but there is overlap between consecutive cycles. The sun’s magnetic field is sometimes called the polar field, because it either points to one of the sun’s poles or the other. A terminator marks when the previous cycle’s polar field has completely disappeared from the sun’s surface, and is quickly followed by a dramatic rise in solar activity.
The new paper points to additional landmarks along the journey through a full solar cycle from terminator to terminator. These landmarks are clearer and more consistent than using sunspots as a guide to cycle length. For example, “The max number of sunspots doesn’t quite align with when the polar field reverses, but the polar field reversal happens at exactly one-fifth of the cycle going from terminator to terminator,” Leamon says.
At two-fifths of a cycle, dark areas called “polar coronal holes” re-form at the sun’s poles. At three-fifths of a cycle, the last X-flare, a class of very large and potentially dangerous solar flares, occurs. At four-fifths, sunspots are at a minimum—but this landmark is less consistent. And then the sun passes through another terminator, after which solar activity rapidly picks up again. Other phenomena, such as UV emissions, also line up nicely on the fifths.
The dark area represents a coronal hole on the sun’s surface. The new solar clock framework can predict formation and dissolution of coronal holes. (NASA/SDO)
Symptoms and causes
The team picked out patterns in data collected daily by two ground-based observatories. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, Canada has measured solar radio flux, which serves as a useful proxy for solar activity, daily since 1947. The Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University has collected daily measurements of magnetic fields on the sun’s surface since 1975.
Once the team noticed the changes that occur at exactly one-fifth of a cycle, they asked, “How many different solar things can we look at? And then we realized they all overlap on this same set of fifths,” Leamon says. Different parameters shift at different points on the cycle, but “everything is tied to these five landmarks.”
This new theory of a solar clock changes the focus from sunspots to shifts in magnetic field. “It’s almost like symptoms and causes,” Leamon says. While sunspots are an important symptom, the magnetic field is the underlying cause driving the solar cycle.
The longest threads
This shift in framework improves researchers’ ability to predict events in the solar cycle more precisely and further in advance, which gives people like satellite operators time to make preparations as needed based on predicted solar activity. Once observatories detect an initial polar field reversal, the precise length of the first fifth of the cycle is set. That means the timing of the other fifths (and their associated events) is a simple matter of multiplication.
The new framework also puts tighter bounds on the period within the cycle when severe flares are expected, which is useful information for people on Earth. Rather than a gradual shift from minimum to maximum activity, the period from terminator to about three-fifths of a cycle seems to be the peak period for flares, with a rapid drop-off after that point until the next terminator. The current cycle began after a terminator in December 2021, and the new framework predicts the last major flares should occur in mid-2027.
Leamon points to a quote by physicist Richard Feynman to explain the value of a theory like this one, that accounts for many variables within a system. “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry,” Feynman said. Leamon and colleagues’ new theory is an example of one of these long threads—precisely predicting many aspects of the solar cycle with a single, simple parameter, and making it easier for humans to be ready for changes driven by the sun.
A new study in Science Advances led by UMBC’s Tianle Yuan used satellite data from 2003 – 2020 to determine the effect of fuel regulations on pollution from cargo ships. The research team’s data revealed significant changes in sulfur pollution after regulations went into effect in 2015 and 2020. Their extensive data set can also contribute to answering a bigger question: How do pollutants and other particles interact with clouds to affect global temperatures overall?
Tiny particles in the atmosphere, which are called aerosols and include pollution, can harm human health, but they also often have a cooling effect on the planet because of the way they interact with clouds. However, estimates of the extent of that effect range by a factor of 10—not very precise for something so important.
When pollutant particles from ships enter clouds low in the atmosphere, they decrease the size of individual cloud droplets without changing the total volume of the cloud. That creates more droplet surface area, which reflects more energy entering Earth’s atmosphere back to space and cools the planet.
Instruments on satellites can detect these differences in droplet size. And the air over the ocean is generally very clean, making the relatively narrow ship tracks that snake across the ocean easy to pick out. “Most of the original cloud is unpolluted, and then some of it is polluted by the ship, so that creates a contrast,” Yuan explains.
While ship tracks can be relatively obvious in satellite data, you have to know where to look and have the time and resources to search. Before advances in computing power and machine learning, Yuan says, Ph.D. students could focus their entire thesis on identifying a group of ship tracks in satellite data.
“What we did is automate this process,” Yuan says. His group “developed an algorithm to automatically find these ship tracks from the sea of data.”
This huge advance allowed them to generate a comprehensive, global map of ship tracks over an extended period (18 years) for the first time. Next, they will share it with the world—opening the door for anyone to dig into the data and make further discoveries.
A figure from the new study shows an image collected by NASA’s MODIS satellite of the U.S. West Coast (left) overlaid with ship tracks detected by the research team’s algorithm (right).
Disappearing act
Even before pollution-limiting regulations were put into place, Yuan and his colleagues found that ship tracks didn’t occur everywhere ships were traveling. Only areas with certain types of low cloud cover had ship tracks, which is useful for adjusting the role of clouds in climate models. They also found that after Europe, the U.S., and Canada instated Emission Control Areas (ECAs) along their coastlines in 2015, ship tracks nearly disappeared in those regions, demonstrating the efficacy of such regulations for reducing cargo ship pollution in port cities.
However, shipping companies didn’t necessarily reduce their pollution output across the board. Instead, they made changes to adapt to the new rules. Ports in northern Mexico (not part of the ECA system) saw increased activity, and pollution “hot spots” built up along the boundaries of the ECAs as ships altered their routes to spend as few miles as possible inside the restrictive zones.
In 2020, though, an international agreement set a much more restrictive standard for shipping fuel across the entirety of global oceans, rather than only near coastlines. After that, the only ship tracks the team’s algorithm could detect were those in the cleanest clouds. In clouds with even mild background pollution, the presumed ship tracks blended right in.
Another figure from the paper shows how regulations affected ship tracks. In the middle panel, blue areas show how ships were carefully avoiding the Emission Control Areas near the coasts. The red and orange areas show increased traffic just outside the ECA boundaries and at ports not affected by the regulations. In 2020 (bottom panel), blue areas indicate that ship tracks largely disappeared even in areas with high ship traffic.
Climate conundrum
It seems obvious that reducing pollution from ships would produce a net benefit. However, because particles (such as shipping pollution) have a cooling effect when interacting with clouds, reducing them significantly could contribute to a problematic uptick in global temperatures, Yuan says.
That’s another reason it’s important to firm up the degree to which particulate pollution cools the planet. If the cooling effect of these pollutants and other particles is significant, humans will need to balance the need to prevent extensive warming with the need to reduce pollution where people and other species live—which creates difficult choices.
“Ship pollution alone can create a substantial cooling effect,” Yuan says, “because the atmosphere over the ocean is so clean.” There is a physical limit to how small cloud droplets can get, so at a certain point, adding more pollution doesn’t increase the clouds’ cooling effect. But over the ocean, because the background is largely unpolluted, even a small amount of pollution from ships has an effect.
Ocean pollution is also an outsize driver of the cooling effect of aerosols, because low clouds, which are most conducive to creating ship tracks, are more common over water than on land. And, as Yuan reminds us, “the ocean covers two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.”
Low clouds over the ocean. (Nicolas Raymond/CC BY 2.0)
The bigger picture
Moving forward, Yuan and his colleagues are helping address this conundrum by continuing their work to define more precisely the role clouds play in climate. “We can take advantage of the millions of ship track samples we have now to start to get hold of the overall aerosol-cloud interaction problem,” Yuan says, “because ship tracks can be used as mini-labs.”
By analyzing data from a relatively simple and well-controlled system—narrow ship tracks running through very clean clouds—they can come to conclusions they can be confident about.
Other research teams can also use the team’s data set and algorithm to come to their own conclusions, amplifying the potential public impact of this work. That spirit of collaboration will help scientists and communities determine how best to approach global challenges like pollution and temperature change.
A new study has confirmed that a black hole eight billion light years away is zipping away from its galaxy’s center at 2,000 kilometers per second, or more than 4.5 million miles per hour. The result also provides, for the first time, very strong evidence that it is possible for two black holes to merge.
The galaxy where this is happening, named 3C 186, was first discovered in 2017. Initial observations suggested that 3C 186 was the result of two galaxies (and their respective black holes) merging. However, there were still other possible explanations for the physical distance detected between the galaxy’s center and the black hole. The new study, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, strongly supports only one of the remaining scenarios: that two black holes merged and the resulting black hole is moving away from the galaxy’s center.
“This is probably the most clear-cut case” illustrating this phenomenon that scientists are aware of, says Eileen Meyer, associate professor of physics. She is co-lead of the new study with Gianluca Castignani at the University of Bologna.
Figure 1 from Meyer and Castignani’s paper shows galaxy 3C 186. The black hole (blue lines/bright white area) is offset from its galaxy’s center (green lines).
Speedy departure
The two major findings—the black hole merger and its ouster from the galaxy’s center—are related. Theorists have predicted that if two black holes were to merge, they would release huge amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves, Meyer explains.
Sometimes, “depending on how the black holes are spinning and their relative mass and how they’re oriented,” she says, that energy is not equally distributed in all directions. If there is “a lot of gravitational wave energy in one direction, there is consequently going to be literally kinetic energy given to the black hole in the other direction.” That means the black hole is going to move—in this case, very quickly.
“There were basically two pieces of evidence that made this story come together,” Meyer says. First, an earlier paper used high-resolution imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope to establish the physical offset between the black hole and the galaxy’s center. “That in itself might not have been weird,” Meyer says, because after two galaxies merge, “stuff is flying all over the place,” and it can take time for the black hole to settle in the center of the new, merged galaxy, she explains.
However, Castignani and Meyer’s new paper confirmed a critical second finding: the velocity of the black hole.
The imaging plus the velocity comes as close as you can in astronomy to proving the scenario that Meyer and her colleagues favor: a merged black hole has been kicked out from the center of its galaxy as a reaction to gravitational wave energy headed in the opposite direction. This is the first time both physical offset and velocity have come together so convincingly.
Eileen Meyer works with a student in her research space.
Shifting understanding
Meyer and colleagues figured out the velocity of the black hole by measuring the radiation emitted by carbon monoxide (CO) gas in the galaxy. They used a ground-based observatory called the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), located in the French alps, to collect the measurements.
The wavelength of the radiation emitted from CO gas increases as it travels across the universe from 3C 186 to NOEMA, a phenomenon referred to as red-shift. The farther away something is, the greater the red-shift will be. Galaxy 3C 186 is stable overall, so one would expect the radiation it emits to all have the same red-shift. However, NOEMA detected radiation with a smaller red-shift coming from the gas near the black hole. That indicates the black hole is moving quickly toward NOEMA relative to the center of 3C 186—in this case, at 2,000 km/s.
Detecting the velocity “was the thing that made us say, maybe this isn’t just some post-merger weirdness, but instead the black hole is offset because it has traveled out from what should have been the center of the galaxy,” Meyer says.
The NOEMA space observatory in the French Alps. (Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique)
Detective work
The research team wasn’t looking specifically for the galaxy 3C 186 when their study began. The initial observations came from what’s called a “snapshot proposal” with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Sometimes space-based observatories like Hubble make observations that require multiple orbits around Earth. But between these major observations, scientists can utilize smaller chunks of time for other studies that need only a quick “snapshot.” The data the researchers receive aren’t of the same quality as longer exposures, but they can be very useful.
In this snapshot study, the researchers received images of a couple dozen of their 100 or so preferred targets as Hubble traversed a partial orbit. “This black hole merger was observed by chance,” Meyer says. “There were odds against us.”
In astronomy, there can be pressure to choose a “safe” proposal, where researchers seek new data on a particular space object that’s already known to be interesting. In snapshot proposals, you often don’t know what you’re going to find, Meyer says, “but sometimes you need to take a chance on the unknown to make new discoveries.’”
As it turns out, this time they made a major discovery, adding to the story of how black holes merge. “When you build a story out of the evidence, it’s a bit like detective work,” Meyer says.
For systems so far away, scientists often can’t directly image everything that’s happening. Instead, Meyer explains, they have to infer what’s going on from the light produced, and it can be hard to narrow down the possible scenarios for what’s actually happening. This new study takes a big step forward by translating theoretical predictions into actual observed phenomena at galaxy 3C 186.
Finding the first
The new finding confirming that two black holes merged, and that the resulting black hole is traveling away from the galaxy’s center, “is actually very important,” Meyer says. “People always want the evidence for the scientific story, and now we have that evidence.”
The results are also encouraging for a new major mission led by the European Space Agency. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will observe gravitational waves from space and could help detect more instances of merged black holes at the centers of galaxies.
“If you find one, you know there’s got to be many more,” given the sheer number of galaxies out there, Meyer says. “The first one is definitely important.”
From cooking and cleaning to fixing your car, understanding chemistry can enlighten all aspects of life. That’s just one reason why Dean William R. LaCourse still loves sharing the joy of his favorite subject in front of a classroom.
It’s not every institution where you can take a class taught by the dean— especially a 100-level course. It’s even less likely to find that dean sprinkling his weekly lectures with silly chemistry jokes and cultural references. But William R. LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) since 2011, does exactly that, co-teaching CHEM 100: The Chemical World to non-chemistry majors with Caitlin Kowalewski, assistant director of undergraduate initiatives in CNMS. Every Tuesday afternoon this spring, LaCourse taught his students how chemistry influences their lives.
The jokes and digressions are designed to keep a complex topic like chemistry light and relatable—even fun. After all, LaCourse tells his students one day in March, “This is not a course that’s supposed to stress you out. It’s an empowering course. At the end, you’re gonna know so much more about chemistry.”
Throughout the class LaCourse affectionately refers to as “the egg lecture,” for example, he teaches the students how best to make hard- and soft-boiled, fried, and baked eggs and exactly why based on the chemistry involved, with the occasional digression. The Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels, for example, make an appearance— apparently they went to war over which end of a soft-boiled egg to open. He also takes a moment to share a favorite recipe his wife makes—showing the students he’s more than a university administrator.
After the short lecture, the students answer discussion questions in groups, coming up with a list of compounds important for cooking, such as baking powder and gelatin, and their roles.
“CHEM 100 is all about empowerment,” LaCourse says. “Understanding how the chemical world affects you gives you more control over your life.” For example, you can avoid trendy health hacks that are actually bad for you, he explains. Understanding chemistry can even help you be more self-sufficient. You may be able to “fix your car, cook better meals, or take stains out of your clothing,” LaCourse says.
Students in the course appreciate that LaCourse makes the content relatable. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a science class before that connects to our daily lives in a way I can understand it,” says Keli Amoako ’25, political science. “He makes you aware of the chemistry in everyday life. I think everybody should have to take a class like this,” adds Moroti Oyeyemi ’25, information systems. There is something for everyone. “I have a great love of baking,” says Meghan Seerey ’23, visual arts, “and he connects the class to the culinary arts.”
For their final projects, students had complete freedom to demonstrate how chemistry affects their lives. Some created “day-in-the-life” presentations, explaining the chemistry in activities like brushing their teeth or doing laundry. Others focused on a particular interest, like skin care, fashion, or scuba diving. One student filmed a baking video, and another designed a brochure explaining how to improve one’s garden through soil chemistry. There were podcasts, poems, and even a musical composition in the key of C sharp. (The musical notation for C sharp, C#, looks like CH, representing carbon and hydrogen, two key elements for life.)
Connected to his roots
For LaCourse, teaching CHEM 100 follows naturally from his values. Even with the added responsibilities of a dean, after also serving as chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department for four years, and a member of the department for 15 years before that, “I still have graduate students and I still teach, because that’s the reason I came here in the first place,” LaCourse says. “I think if you move too far away from those roots that you’ll lose the ability to understand and to be empathetic with those who teach, with those who do research, and the issues that they encounter.”
Never has this been truer than over the last two years, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced administrators to make decisions about whether to shift classes online and other changes to the education experience. In Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, LaCourse and Kowalewski taught CHEM 100 fully online, in part to be in solidarity with the rest of the college’s faculty. “All the challenges with technology, grading, and keeping people’s interest…I could understand what the faculty were going through,” LaCourse remembers.
A non-traditional path
In addition to staying connected with the needs of faculty, LaCourse calls on his own experience to explain why he pursued the deanship and why he works so hard to make sure the college is serving all UMBC students well. He starts to talk about when he became department chair, then pauses.
“Actually, I’m gonna go back even faaather,” he says, revealing the Boston accent that still shows up now and then, despite living in the Baltimore area for decades. “I took a very non-traditional pathway to get where I am.”
He goes on to describe a series of experiences—starting out at a technical college, then pursuing a four-year degree at multiple institutions while working full-time, and a graduate education full of “naïve decisions” due in large part to a lack of guidance and support.
All that is what drove him to pursue leadership. It’s one thing to teach a course that shows students from all backgrounds why chemistry matters—and hopefully improve their lives in the process. It’s another to make changes at the department level, and yet another to be able to lead the college. LaCourse says his motto is “There’s always a better way,” similar to one of President Freeman Hrabowski’s sayings that has been adopted by many on campus: “Success is never final.”
“The world changes,” LaCourse says, “and most things will have to evolve to keep up.”
Discovery Learning
When LaCourse started as chair, he felt as if there were too many students failing introductor y chemistr y courses. He believed there was a better way—that the introductory chemistry curriculum needed to evolve. As a result, after a collaborative pilot program, introductory chemistry courses added a weekly, team-based, problem-solving session to the lecture component in 2005. These sessions are still a cornerstone of the chemistry curriculum today. The magic happens in the Chemistry Discovery Center (CDC), and LaCourse calls the technique “discovery learning.”
“Chem Discovery was a different way to do it. The vision was to bring students from a passive to an engaged format, to give them the opportunity to discover,” he says. “People love to discover things, to plant new flags.”
Research faculty get to experience that on a regular basis, LaCourse notes.
“Why don’t we give our students the opportunity to discover knowledge?” he says. “Because when you discover it, you own it—and we know that ownership is important for learning.”
After the Chemistry Discovery Center’s introduction, the fail rate in intro to chemistry dropped by half. The CDC plus a shift among UMBC faculty away from the concept of “weed out” courses has led to continued success, including increased retention and attendance.
Creating opportunities for all
Chemistry Discovery was just the beginning. LaCourse has spent nearly two decades working with colleagues across the college and at community colleges in the region to create more opportunities for students through a number of initiatives that supply the support and structure students need to succeed.
UMBC has proven again and again that relatively small, cohort-based scholars programs that generate a sense of community and offer intensive advising can significantly increase student persistence and success rates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). LaCourse isn’t satisfied with that, though—he wants to see more students get that high-touch experience.
“The whole purpose is to give opportunity and a unique education experience to every student that UMBC lets in,” LaCourse says. “The focus is on what we need to do to make that possible.”
Scaling up
The most comprehensive manifestation of this goal is STEM BUILD, a 10-year, National Institutes of Health-funded initiative at 10 universities to diversify the biomedical sciences workforce. At UMBC, the initiative’s motto is, “500, not 50.” That’s 500 students. “Can we do 500, not 50? Can we make things scalable?” LaCourse asks. “Can we take the pieces of community and intensive advising, and make it so many more people benefit from it?”
The goal of STEM BUILD at UMBC is to identify the most effective practices that support student success and find ways to implement them at scale. Perhaps most important, the college is working hard to weave the most effective elements into regular operations so that when the grant funding sunsets in 2023, students will continue to benefit.
STEM BUILD programming includes group research experiences, a summer bridge that teaches laboratory skills and experimental design, and training in communications and research ethics. Advising, community meetings and socials, living on campus in the STEM Living Learning Community, and a rich culture of staff and faculty support are key community-building elements.
STEM BUILD also spawned an Active Learning, Inquiry Teaching (ALIT) certificate through UMBC’s Faculty Development Center. ALIT has helped faculty transition their courses to more engaged formats, such as team-based problem-solving, rather than lectures. Spaces like the CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment, opened in 2010, facilitate this transition. CASTLE has round tables rather than desks, and since fall 2019, the new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building has offered similar classroom environments, plus features like mobile whiteboards. Originally, ALIT was intended only for faculty directly involved in STEM BUILD activities, but has since been expanded to any interested faculty—an example of the ripple effect of initiatives such as STEM BUILD.
Leading the change
LaCourse has also led efforts to capitalize on UMBC’s location in one of the top biotech clusters in the country. After hiring Annica Wayman ’99, M6, mechanical engineering, as associate dean of Shady Grove affairs in CNMS, degree options for UMBC STEM students at the Universities at Shady Grove have grown. “She has a passion for students and helping them be successful,” LaCourse says.
Wayman came back to UMBC from a successful career in international development at USAID specifically to lead the new Translational Life Science Technology (TLST) bachelor’s degree program, which prepares students for immediate, in-demand careers in biotech. “The relevance, innovative nature, and health-related impact of the TLST program is what attracted me back to UMBC as associate dean, and the many students who come into the program,” she says.
LaCourse’s leadership, in conjunction with community college partners, was crucial to bringing it to life, Wayman adds. “Bill’s educational start in community college and work in the private sector before coming to academia made him the perfect visionary for developing a new bachelor’s degree in biotechnology at UMBC.”
And it’s working. TLST grads like Titina Sirak ’20 and Charmaine Hipolito ’20 are already finding success in the regional biotech market, leaving the program with several job offers for biotech positions in hand.
LaCourse also knows that for students to succeed, faculty need to feel supported and be representative of the student body. The ADVANCE program, for example, has increased the number of women faculty in STEM by 180% since 2003. And now, the Pre-professoriate Fellowship program encourages faculty members committed to supporting diversity and inclusion to apply. The goal is for participants to convert to assistant professors at UMBC.
While persistence and success in STEM majors has significantly increased over the last two decades, “How many more successful students could there be if they could see more people like themselves, who they can relate to better?” LaCourse asks.
Doing right by students
Given his own challenges navigating higher education, supporting success for all students, enabling discovery, and encouraging ownership of their education is deeply embedded in LaCourse’s psyche.
One of his current graduate students in chemistry and biochemistry, Amanda Belunis, confirms this. “Dr. LaCourse always says that he is just a guide, and he wants us to be actively engaged in our own education and learn lessons. He pushes us all to reach our full potential and consistently offers constructive feedback and encouragement, usually paired with a funny anecdote or joke,” she says. “I feel confident that when I finish, I will be leaving the program as an independent critical thinker ready to tackle any problem, and I owe a lot of that to him.”
While some students may be likely to succeed regardless of the support available or not, for others, the right environment can make all the difference.
“When people come in, if you give them the feeling that they belong, and that they can do it, and you give them the help that they need, many, many more will succeed,” LaCourse says. This sentiment applies to faculty, too. Both students and faculty “put their future in the hands of the institution, that we’ll do right by them,” LaCourse says.
Nowhere like UMBC
Through his work with individual students in his laboratory, teaching undergraduates, and securing funding for projects that affect many more students, he’s doing his best to make sure the institution deserves its community members’ trust by creating opportunities and offering support.
“Opportunities are what life is all about,” LaCourse says. “It’s up to an individual to take advantage of them, but we have to put those opportunities in front of people and make people believe that they can take advantage of them.” Through programs like STEM BUILD, TLST, transfer student support programs, and more, “that’s what we train our students to believe—that they belong, that they could do the job, that that opportunity is theirs as much as anybody else’s,” no matter their background.
As a non-traditional candidate for a leadership role in academia, LaCourse also appreciates the opportunities he’s been given to make a difference at UMBC—the chances people took on him and his ideas, which sometimes involved creative new methods. Another pause. And then, “Of course I can’t know—as a scientist, I understand there’s no control group for my life,” he says. “But I don’t think I’d be where I am at any other place than UMBC.”
He’s taken it as his mission to pass on those opportunities to UMBC students—they’re why he’s here, after all. As a leader first in chemistry, and now in CNMS as a whole, he’s worked to “break down silos, and work under umbrellas,” as he says, to make changes that do the greatest good.
“You need to understand what everybody’s going through, and what they’re up against,” he says. “That way you can work together better in the long run—and again, we’re all working for the same purpose.”
Vision of what could be
The significant, positive change that has occurred on his watch is already impressive, and the trajectory is still going in the right direction. More students are succeeding in STEM at UMBC. Students who demonstrate high potential, but may not be at the top of their class or have much experience when they arrive at UMBC, are getting the resources they need and finding their way. Faculty and staff are committed to supporting all of them.
Although he’s not retiring yet, LaCourse has decades of experience at UMBC to reflect on. When asked about what a normal day might look like, after mentioning writing grant proposals, dealing with crises, attending leadership meetings, and, of course, teaching CHEM 100, he pauses again, waxing philosophical.
“A day in the life…” he ponders. “It’s really a lifetime, guided by principles and experiences from my own life. So every decision, every action, draws upon everything in the past, and the vision of what could be.”
