Grad News Forum

Each spring, Thayer School of Engineering hosts an Open House and Exposition, welcoming the public to see how engineering prepares students to innovate in medicine, public policy, law, architecture, design, technology, entrepreneurship, and more.

For the full story go to Dartmouth Now.

The students of the Microbiology and Immunology Program have had a remarkably successful year, receiving a variety of awards and recognition.  Mike Molloy from the Usherwood lab won a Copenhaver Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding senior graduate students, and Yolanda Nesbeth was a Kauffman Fellow Finalist.  These fellowships are for individuals interested in pursuing a career in venture capital and entrepreneurship. As only approximately 30 such fellows are chosen globally each year, being named a finalist is a huge honor.

Representing the Hogan lab, Diana Morales won a Best Poster Award at the Microbial Stress Response Gordon Conference, Amy Piispanen received an ASM Conference Travel Award, and Angelyca Jacksonwas appointed to the Epithelial Cell Training Grant, as was Alicia Ballok in the O’Toole lab.  Chelsea Boyd of the O’Toole lab won the best poster at this year’s Graduate Student Poster Session, and Crissy Megli of the Taylor lab won the John Collier award for one of the top student posters at the Microbial Toxins and Pathogenicity Gordon Research Conference.  From the Berwin lab, Rustin Lovewell was an invited speaker at the New York Immunology Conference, and Kevin Hart won ‘Best Poster’ at the Vermont Cancer Center Clinical and Translational Research Symposium. The success of our students on a local and national level speaks volumes, and we extend our congratulations and thank them for their hard work.  On a more light-hearted note, Jay Baird of the Fiering lab won the First Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest that was organized by the Lieb lab.

We had several students graduate this year: Carla Cugini (Deborah Hogan’s lab); Victor De Vries (Randy Noelle); Raquel Martinez (Taylor lab); Daniel Mielcarz (Lloyd Kasper’s group); and Yolanda Nesbeth (Jose Conejo-Garcia). Yolanda Nesbeth was also named the Class Day graduate student speaker.

In other news, there were several faculty promotions. Drs. Deb Hogan and Brent Berwin were promoted to Associate Professor, and Dr. George O’Toole was promoted to Full Professor.  Drs. David Leib and Bruce Stanton also joined the Microbiology and Immunology Department.  Both are senior faculty with a wealth of research experience.  Dr. Ron Taylor is the director of a recently awarded INBRE grant from the NIH, whose central goal is to develop interactions among the various colleges in NH and to provide students at those colleges research experience.  Several members of the Microbiology and Immunology Department are also participating in a nanotechnology grant award aimed at cancer therapeutics, and which represents a collaborative effort between Dartmouth Medical School, the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and the Thayer School of Engineering.

by George O’Toole

photo (left to right) Alicia Ballok and Chelsea Boyd

photos by Erin O’Flaherty

Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, is a long way from Hanover, New Hampshire, but because of the world-class research collaboration between Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Emmanuel Balandya, MD has made that long trek to pursue his keen interest in finding better ways to combat AIDS. With an estimated 33 million people currently living with HIV infection worldwide and 2.7 million new infections each year, this is a laudable pursuit.

Balandya is a trained physician (finishing at the top of his class) and a member of the faculty at MUHAS. He has seen firsthand the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Because of his excellence as a student and physician, Emmanuel was selected to represent MUHAS at Dartmouth as a short-term scholar in 2008. During this stint at Dartmouth, Balandya decided to apply to the Program in Experimental and Molecular Medicine (PEMM) to earn a PhD. He was accepted in 2008 and is now a PhD candidate, working in the laboratory of Dr. Timothy Lahey. Balandya has been funded, in all these endeavors, through a Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program grant (directed by Dr. Ford von Reyn and Dr. Kisali Pallangyo).

Balandya was captivated by Dr. Lahey’s interest in the role of immune factors in human semen in modulating mucosal transmission of HIV, a rather forgotten area in HIV research. Prevention of the transmission of HIV will be difficult until there is a better understanding of all the factors involved in infection. Semen contains infectious HIV at all stages of HIV infection, so it is necessary to clarify its role in the transmission process.

Balandya and Lahey’s first study together focused on the mechanism by which HIV infects immune cells called CD4+ T cells. They found that factors in semen help protect these cells from HIV infection. This is important because CD4+ T cells play a key role in the overall HIV transmission process. This work was recently published in The Journal of Immunology and has been presented at several global HIV meetings.

Their work has expanded our understanding of this understudied area of HIV research. With studies on the immune potential of human semen currently a priority area in HIV pathogenesis research under the National Institutes of Health, this work will take them to the forefront of the global HIV transmission research agenda.

Balandya appreciates the opportunities he’s been afforded at Dartmouth and recently commented on his experience here, “I am greatly indebted to Dr. Lahey for his mentorship, Drs. von Reyn and Pallangyo and the entire Fogarty team at Dartmouth and to the PEMM faculty and students for their support.” Clearly, Dartmouth is lucky Balandya chose to do his work here.

by Jennifer C. Davey

Leah Somerville, a Dartmouth graduate alum, was recently featured in Science Magazine.

Somerville’s co-authored paper, entitled “A Genetic Variant BDNF Polymorphism Alters Extinction Learning in Both Mouse and Human,”  was published by Science in January of 2011.

Somerville received her PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in 2008, and has since joined the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.

Read the full published paper here.

With a mutual interest in the future of women in science, Kristina Lynch, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Julie Hogue, Behavior Counselor for the Mascoma Regional Valley School District, have joined efforts to design a mentoring program geared toward bringing together high school girls and women in science at Dartmouth. Now in its second year, the program consists of six participants from Mascoma—three seniors and three juniors—and six Dartmouth graduate students.

According to Hogue, “[the program] is a way for the girls to get exposure to sciences and scientists and also a way for the Dartmouth women to gain some perspective on their accomplishments—to really see how far they’ve come.”

From left: Mingyun Yuan, Julie Skinner, Julie Hogue, Linnea, Dakota, Katrina

With the guidance of their mentors, the girls are developing new perspectives and realizing that there’s more to science than just difficult math and technical terms. By connecting with scientists on a personal level, each girl is able to recognize that a future in science is within her reach.  As Hogue explains, “the Dartmouth volunteers are real people that the girls can relate to.”

When asked about her favorite things to do at Dartmouth, Linnea, a senior from Mascoma, says, “we sometimes tour buildings on campus—the greenhouse was my favorite!” Program facilitator Julie Skinner, a PhD candidate in the Physics and Astronomy Department, adds, “they’ve also been to a public lecture given by a Nobel Laureate.”

Their time together isn’t all tours, science, and lectures, though—they also enjoy getting together to chat over coffee at local Hanover café Rosey Jekes.

While none of the girls has specific plans for college yet, they all agree that the time spent with their Dartmouth mentors has been invaluable.  Not only has it increased the girls’ interests in science, but it has also helped get them excited about college, or as Linnea puts it, “life after high school.”

by Tennile Sunday
photo by Tennile Sunday

Professors Robyn Millan and Brett Anderson are currently in Antarctica preparing for a test flight of a high-altitude balloon payload to study precipitation of radiation belt relativistic electrons. Karl Yando has been working on developing a new mechanical design for this particular payload, and Leslie Woodger continues data analysis for relativistic electron precipitation and developing a thermal model for the BARREL payloads. At the other end of the world, Professor Kristina Lynch and Philip Fernandes are in Svalbard participating in the launch campaign for Dartmouth graduate alumnus Marc Lessard’s RENU rocket.

Professors Jim LaBelle and Micah Dombrowski spent most of January and February in Fairbanks, Alaska, participating in the successful CHARM-2 rocket launch. As a part of a NASA GSRP fellowship, Micah also spent the month of September at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Nick Bunch defended his thesis on experimental investigations of bursty auroral radio emissions in January, and is now in a postdoc position at Stanford.

Summer was also a busy time for the Physics Department. James Lundberg spent the summer in New Mexico at Langmuir Labs observing x-ray burst activity from lightning strikes, and Thiago Brito and Zhao Li both attended the GEM Workshop in Snowmass, Colorado, and the NASA “Living with a Star” Summer School at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado. Zhao went on to spend the rest of the summer at the High Latitude Observatory at NCAR, where Professor Mary Hudson has been on sabbatical for six months. A highlight of Hudson’s six months ‘Out West’ was participating in the graduate student retreat at Breckenridge, Colorado, in September for NSF-CISM graduate students from Dartmouth, BU, CU, Berkeley, Rice and Alabama A&M University.

“It was fun to get to know and go hiking with students across CISM institutions, with research interests ranging from solar to ionospheric physics,” commented Hudson.

In September, Matt Broughton took a field trip to Toolik Lake and Poker Flat, Alaska, to add antennas to the arrays and set up a four-antenna array for riometry on four separate frequencies. A collaboration with Dartmouth graduate alumnus and current Siena  Professor Allan Weatherwax, the project is believed to be the first time riometry has been attempted on so many frequencies simultaneously.

Working with Research Professor Richard Denton, Shuo Wu has begun a project to simulate magnetospheric whistler chorus waves. These waves are thought to be important for the acceleration and loss of radiation-belt electrons that can damage satellites and endanger astronauts in space. Shuo will be developing her simulation code from the code that former Dartmouth graduate student Yonggang Hu developed to simulate ion-cyclotron waves.

by Kristina Lynch
pictured Physics grad students around the world… The top and bottom of the Earth at the same time!
top left the balloon group in Antarctica; Top right: the rocket group in Svalbard

“Replace the word ‘problem’ with the word ‘opportunity’ in all your thoughts.”

- Matthew Keith Groves

In looking back at the Graduate Forum newsletters from the past several years, they are all similar—the year has been great, our faculty received grant funding, we graduated students and were rewarded with recruiting more—and this remains true for 2010. The year promised to be eventful and it did not disappoint. As the institution continued to maneuver through a significant period of restructuring and change, we found ourselves seizing the opportunity to positively embrace these challenges rather than allowing them to weigh down our productivity. As we did last year and the year before that, the Department of Genetics continues to perform above expectations.

Our faculty continues to attract new funding despite the competition. Our graduate program continues to enjoy growth and success, having six students successfully defend their theses and inviting seven new students to join genetics labs. The department continues to expand as more technicians and postdocs are hired to support both new and ongoing research projects.

The fact is we will enjoy having the opportunity to build upon another successful year in the Department of Genetics.

by Cheryl Bush

This year was quite eventful for the Department of Earth Sciences.  We were shocked by the untimely death of James Scott.  James’ PhD student Derek Smith is now working with Marilyn Fogel at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. We graduated six students in the last year—one PhD and five MS’s—and welcomed nine new graduate students.  The graduated students are now working in the industry or studying for higher degrees at other universities.

Brian Dade recently replaced Carl Renshaw as chair of the department.  Carl is the Principal Investigator on a $2.5 million NSF grant that will fund an educational outreach program, in which Dartmouth graduate students will educate local middle school students in science, technology, engineering and math.

Bob Hawley’s glaciology group has grown considerably this year.  In addition to a new Post Doc (Eric Lutz), there are two new graduate students: Thomas Overly (PhD, IGERT Fellow) and Blaine Morriss (MS).  Thus far, Bob’s group has garnered over $1 million in external support.  Last summer, Bob, Gifford Wong (PhD, IGERT Fellow), and Zoe Courville (UNH Post Doc) traveled to Summit Camp, Greenland, to procure a 100m ice core as well as conduct several snowpit studies.  This summer, the glaciology group will be working on six concurrent, externally-funded projects, which will take six Dartmouth grad students and faculty to Greenland this summer to undertake three independent field campaigns.  Gifford, who recently returned from an austral summer abroad, also participated in drilling the longest American ice core (3331 meters!) while working on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core Project.

Meredith Kelly’s research group is comprised of four graduate students who use exposure age dating and lake sediment records to understand past climate changes.  Meredith was recently awarded an NSF Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change grant to study the mechanisms of climate change in the southern tropical and mid-latitude Andes during the Holocene.  Justin Stroup (PhD) and Sam Beal (PhD) organized and led a research expedition to map glacial geology, collect boulder samples, and obtain lake sediment cores near Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru. Laura Levy (PhD, IGERT fellow) conducted a successful field season to East Greenland in September, and she has since been analyzing boulder samples and lake sediment cores. Tom Baker (MS) will travel to Thunder Bay, Ontario this spring to collect boulder samples that he will use to study the eastward drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz.

Xiahong Feng’s stable isotope group admitted two PhD students, Alex Lauder and Ben Kopec, under the IGERT program.  The group is using stable isotopes of precipitation to study the impact of sea-ice change on both ocean-surface evaporation and land precipitation in the Arctic under the newly-launched Isotopic Investigation of Sea Ice and Precipitation in the Arctic Climate System (iisPACS) project, jointly led by Professors Feng and Posmentier, of Dartmouth College, and Jeff Burkhart, of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.  Alex and Ben will travel to Greenland this summer through the NSF-sponsored IGERT fellowship program.  They will measure the isotopic composition of vapor over diverse bodies of water and sample lake water for later isotopic analysis.  Thirty degrees further west, Kelly Everhart is planning to finish her Masters project, which characterizes the extent to which sea ice modifies the isotopic composition of precipitation landing on the North Slope of Alaska, early this summer.

Mukul Sharma’s radiogenic isotope lab group admitted two new PhD students, Hannah Hallock and Kelly Landau.  Two old hands in the lab, Tim Blazina, MS, and Yingzhe Wu, MS, will be presenting their work in the AGU fall meeting.  Tim has done extensive field work on New Zealand’s North Island where he is studying chemical weathering.  Yingzhe has been studying the origin of the magnetic spherules at the Younger Dryas boundary, a period of intense climate change that coincided with the disappearance of the Clovis people and mega-fauna of North America.

The fluvial geomorphology group, under the auspices of Carl Renshaw, Brian Dade and Frank Magilligan, admitted one new student, Eirik Buraas.  He will investigate the effect of dams on New England rivers.  John Gartner, a third-year PhD student, was recently awarded two grants.  The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant will help support his research on dam removal and sediment transport, and a National Center for Airborne Laser Altimetry Seed Grant allows repeat LiDAR data at one dam removal. This spring, Nathan Hamm will defend his dissertation on fine sediment dynamics in stream beds.

In other news, Jennifer Bailard just finished another successful field season in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.  Rachel Neurath is nearing completion of her MS thesis on soil carbon cycling in harvested and old growth forests, and Jie Yang is gearing up for his PhD on heavy metal contamination.

By John Gartner, Sam Beal, Kelly Everhart, Gifford Wong, and Mukul Sharma.

Photo: Dartmouth graduate students Gifford Wong (PhD, Earth Sciences), Lauren Culler (PhD, EEB) and Simone Whitecloud (PhD, EEB) during their IGERT trip to Greenland.

The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program (EEB) has had another successful year. We now have 24 students – our largest number ever – enrolled this fall.  We received strong rankings from the National Research Council, and many of our current students hold nationally recognized fellowships, including: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Carissa Aoki and Vivek Venkataraman; GAANN Fellow Alex Shanku; and IGERT Fellows Julia Bradley-Cook, Lauren Culler, Sam Fey, Nina Lany, Marcus Welker, and Simone Whitecloud.  In addition, Ramsa Chavez-Ulloa, Zak Gezon, and Vivek Venkataraman have been awarded outside grants to support their research.

In alumni news, Tom Morrison successfully defended his PhD in September 2010 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming.  Erik Stange has joined the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, while Jim Kellner and Darren Ward are assistant professors at the University of Maryland at College Park and Humboldt State University, respectively.  Alice Shumate was promoted to Associate Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  Rich Hofstetter was featured in The Atlantic and on Public Radio International, and Jay Lennon was quoted in the New York Times.

By Kathryn Cottingham  and Matt Ayres

A paper whose co-authors include current Dartmouth researchers Chen (a PhD Biology graduate alum), Folt, and Thomas Hampton, bioinformatics specialist in the Dartmouth Medical School Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, is one of the papers highlighted in conjunction with the publication of “The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex” by CGB Director John Colbourne and his co-authors in Science. The Dartmouth co-authored paper is titled, “Gene Response Profiles for Daphnia pulex Exposed to the Environmental Stressor Cadmium Reveals Novel Crustacean Metallothioneins” and was originally published in BMC Genomics in 2007.

Read the full article in Dartmouth Now.