Nearly all living things — fish or fowl, human or humpback whale — encounter industrial chemicals all the time, and whether this contact is harmful, lethal, or harmless largely depends on the amount of exposure.

For example, it’s known that exposure to triphenyl phosphate (TPhP), a chemical used as a , is harmful to humans and aquatic species at relatively high levels, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting a risk evaluation of the chemical in recent years.

Now comes new research from a �ֲ���ý team comprising Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams and three recent graduates, who have done the first examination of the effect of TPhP exposure in everyday life, a level known as “environmentally relevant concentrations,” discovering that everyday exposure to TPhP is harmful to zebrafish embryos and larvae — and, potentially, to human beings as well.’

Published as the cover article in the May 2024 issue of the journal Toxics, their paper, “Environmentally Relevant Concentrations of Triphenyl Phosphate (TPhP) Impact Development in Zebrafish,” was for its interest to readers and research importance.

Williams’ coauthors are �ֲ���ý alumni Ben Schmandt ’22, Gabrielle Smart ’23, and Mfon Diduff ’24, each of whom contributed to the research while working in the Williams lab as students.

Spanning three years, the �ֲ���ý research project studied TPhP exposure on zebrafish, a species that shares around 80 to 85 percent of its DNA with humans, making it an effective model for research on the effects of toxicants on both aquatic species and humans.

“With toxicants, if you throw enough at [an organism], there will be an effect. But that doesn’t make it relevant. That’s why this paper is particularly exciting.”

Larissa Williams

In the findings, says Williams, send a clarion call for more research. “We know that TPhP is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant that many organisms, including humans, are exposed to. Now we know that it is likely a developmental toxicant at environmentally relevant levels. That’s worrisome. It’s critical to understand the implications of that exposure.”

The �ֲ���ý research exposed zebrafish to TPhP at everyday levels, which is in parts per billion, rather than parts per million, which most researchers have focused on.

“We were looking at exposure at the nanomolar level, a thousand times less concentrated than other studies had reported,” says Williams. “With toxicants, if you throw enough at [an organism], there will be an effect. But that doesn’t make it relevant. That’s why this paper is particularly exciting.”

The team discovered that parts-per-billion TPhP exposure harmfully affected developing zebrafish through multiple biological pathways, though the exact harmful mechanism is still not fully understood.

They found that TPhP-exposed zebrafish larvae were stunted in size and suffered from heart swelling (pericardial edema), both of which are also seen at higher exposure levels. The fish also suffered from oxidative stress, causing cell damage within hours of exposure.

Like many research endeavors, the �ֲ���ý project got inspiration from how researchers like Williams have long-running and productive collaborations with fellow researchers far from �ֲ���ý.

Years ago, while reviewing a scholarly paper for a journal, Williams came across triphenyl phosphate “as a novel obesogen, which is a chemical that interacts with your endocrine system or your hormonal system.”

That led to conversations with two researcher collaborators who have expertise with toxicants, Kari Sant of Michigan State University and Alicia Timme-Laragy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Williams asked Sant, who is an expert in obesogens, “Do we know much about triphenyl phosphate in zebrafish?” “Not a ton,” Sant replied. “You should go for it.’”

Fast forward to the start of the 2021–22 academic year, the senior year of Ben Schmandt ’22, and a conversation between Williams and Schmandt about their senior thesis project. Williams suggested looking at TPhP. “Ben looked into the literature and found the level at which TPhP is found in surface waters. So that’s where we started, at the nanomolar level, a thousand times less than the micromolar level that everyone else has been working on.”

Williams credits Schmandt for bringing urgency to the project. “Ben was interested then, and continues to be interested now, in environmental contaminants. It was very important that the project be relevant, indicative of concentrations of this chemical that aquatic organisms see — that we get exposed to — versus levels that are already known to have an effect.”

She says the project was “right up Ben’s alley, in terms of interest. Ben really ran with it. And then we further ran with it with Gabby and Mfon.”

“It’s been an amazing labor of love to turn a research project into a scientific publication,” said Schmandt, who is now a research associate in the Claussnitzer Lab at the Broad Institute, working to understand how our genetic backgrounds impact the likelihood of developing heart disease. “I know I wouldn’t be doing this work today without everything I learned from working with Larissa, Mfon, and Gabby on this project.”

As an undergraduate at �ֲ���ý, Schmandt “felt torn for a long time between a love for the environment and a passion for laboratory work.” The TPhP project united those two adversaries. “I found a passion for the specific ways the environment and genetics interact. Across contexts of pollution and disease, these interactions highlight just how little we still understand about how our surroundings impact us through our genes — that’s the mystery that brings purpose to my research.”

The research, conducted in Williams’ lab at the Bonney Science Center, involved exposing zebrafish larvae to TPhP over five days, a sufficient span to measure the chemical’s effects on this fast-growing species. That’s another reason that zebrafish are a magically effective research model. They grow from larva to adult in just 90 days, and are transparent. “At the age of 48 hours, zebrafish have produced hemoglobin, so we can see the heart,” Williams says.

The �ֲ���ý researchers photographed and measured the size of the larvae by looking at them under a stereoscope in Williams lab. The team then measured heart rates manually, observing each beat. Using a stopwatch, the researcher counts the number of heartbeats within a 30-second interval. The researchers also checked for swelling around the heart and scored it on a scale from 1 (severe swelling) to 5 (normal). And, to see if the chemical affected blood circulation, they used another microscope to capture heart movement and blood flow in the larvae.

Among other takeaways, the �ֲ���ý research success shines light on the college’s innovative and successful STEM Scholars program — which, along with other initiatives at �ֲ���ý — has opened pathways and removed barriers for students interested in science, including coauthor and recent graduate Mfon Diduff, who majored in biochemistry.

She is now a research technician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center with eyes on a medical career. “I had always loved science but never saw myself doing scientific research in the lab,” she says.

Contributing to the research paper, specifically how TPhP in the environment negatively impacts overall organ development, has inspired her to learn “more about the factors that contribute to our health, specifically maternal health, as I intend on becoming an OB-GYN.”

She now has a vision of her future self. “I absolutely see being that physician who tends to the needs of her patients while also being a researcher who goes above and beyond to know why we see such occurrences that pose imminent danger in medicine and public health.”

Each of the coauthors, said Williams, used the project to further their path toward purposeful work. Schmandt was inspired by the environmental science side, Diduff by the public health aspect, and Gabby Smart ’23, now in veterinary school at Washington State, “was really excited to be working with animals, which we find with a lot of our pre-vet students prior to vet school.”

Smart notes that “animals may even be more affected by some of the chemicals we researched. Being in the veterinary field gives me a front row seat on how exposure to such chemicals affect animal health and longevity. I hope to continue to be an advocate for both environmental and animal health, which in turn will have a positive impact on human health.”

For the Williams lab, the next chapter in the research is to zero in on how and when TPhP does what it does to developing animals.

All developing animals, whether zebrafish larvae or human fetuses, “are exposed to a lot of different chemicals,” she explains. “It’s really the timing of that exposure that really matters, what we call the window of susceptibility.”

Alcohol is a familiar example. “Alcohol in a human fetus is highly toxic very early in pregnancy, but becomes less toxic as the fetus develops. If there is exposure early on, it has a much larger impact than later on. Many chemicals work that way. Part of what we do in our lab is to figure out that window.”

With a new grant from Maine INBRE, the lab will do more precise toxicant testing at different stages of zebrafish development. “We were able to show that chronic exposure over the entire developmental period impacted them. Now what we want to know is, as the heart’s developing and you add a toxicant, how does that change the trajectory of development?”

That knowledge “will help us unpack the biological mechanisms behind the phenotypes that we’re seeing. That will be data used by my thesis students this coming year.”

The 14 �ֲ���ý students poured out of vans, stretched briefly, and got to work handing out plastic buckets, clipboards, work gloves, PVC pipe, and other odds and ends. 

They had trekked from Lewiston to Sandy Point Beach in Yarmouth, Maine, in early May, not for a day at the shore but to help with an ongoing project to monitor an invasive crab species that’s blamed for a massive decline in New England’s soft-shell clam industry. 

Most wearing soon-to-be-muddy boots, the students in the course “Biological Skills: Invasive Green Crab Inventory and Monitoring,” taught by Lecturer in Biology Jesse Minor ’02, were met at the beach by Jessie Batchelder, a fisheries project manager at Manomet, a nonprofit conservation organization .

Manomet’s data-collection work requires a lot of helping hands, which is partly why the �ֲ���ý crew joined the work. Another reason is suggested by the phrase “Biological Skills” in the course title.

In recent years, the biology department has designed several new Short Term courses to “give students specific, marketable training that they could highlight in applications for internships or jobs,” said Don Dearborn, a �ֲ���ý professor of biology and associate dean of the faculty. 

Skills taught this year included everything from PCR (​​a technique to amplify specific sections of DNA) and 16S microbiome sequencing, which identifies microbes in the human body, to tree and shrub identification and how to design a behavioral experiment.

For his skills course, Minor assigned a variety of roles and tasks to each student, from photographer to gear caretaker. He switched the roles around for each field trip to ensure that skills training was passed all around, and to give the students a chance “to think and reflect about the science they are doing and also their role within the group.”

Minor’s speciality is in field-centered pedagogy, which he first experienced at �ֲ���ý, learning geology field techniques from Dyk Eusden ‘80 and other geology professors. As a senior, Minor completed an honors thesis that involved extensive fieldwork in the Presidential Range. 

His course extends the work that Minor did at the University of Maine while teaching an honors course focused on green crabs. “They represent a Maine-based environmental problem that provides an accessible and interesting topic for a skills-based Short Term,” he said.

European green crabs are thought to have arrived on the East Coast in the 1800s, brought over in the ballast water of ships from Europe. In the past 50 years, the crab population along the New England coast has been steadily rising, coinciding with warming ocean waters.

“They’re voracious predators of shellfish,” said Batchelder, and they are here to stay. “There’s been a lot of efforts to trap and remove populations, and people trap thousands of pounds of crabs and it doesn’t make a dent on the population.”

With that in mind, current strategies focus on understanding the crab population, finding ways use the crabs — in food, as fishing bait, or as , something a New Hampshire distillery is trying — and on understanding “how to manage the resources that are impacted by the green crab populations,” said Elizabeth Schueler, president of Manomet.

The crab information collected in Yarmouth will be added to Manomet’s , one that will help researchers better understand the green crab population, including where the crabs find food, when they’re most active, and what other environmental factors affect them. “It’s great to have the data that the �ֲ���ý students are collecting,” said Batchelder.

After the students geared up, they hiked down to the beach, under the bridge, and over to the rocky shoreline. The tide was falling — an ideal time to start collecting the data. 

Katie Ney ’25 of Baltimore carried a camera to visually document the work. Sandy Point was the most navigable location that they monitored. Hermit Island in Phippsburg, and Five Islands and Robinhood Cove in Georgetown were more rocky and muddy. “This is the nicest one so far,” she said with a laugh.

A few students got to work measuring the intertidal zone, stretching a tape all the way from the receding waterline into the brush at a point where the beach meets the hill. Minor took a few students to the other end of the beach, and Ney’s group began their data collection.

First, they set out a quadrat, a one-meter frame made out of PVC pipes meant to isolate an area for collecting data. After setting it up along the shoreline, they began looking for crabs. 

“We also use [the quadrats] in our site assessment,” explained Lindley Friedman ’26 of Park City, Utah. “We’ll lay it down and we’ll kind of be like, ‘OK, what percentage of this area is mud, rock, or bedrock?’ and we use it to collect that data.”

The group probed the area, lifting up rocks and swaths of half-dried seaweed in their search for the crabs. They found plenty of periwinkle snails clinging to the rocks, but crabs were small and scarce. Green crabs can grow up to four inches in width and are identified by the five small spines on either side of their eyes. 

They carefully measured each tiny crab they found, dead or alive, with a caliper, marking down the size, the number of claws, and if it was a female, with a wide abdomen, or a male, with a more narrow abdomen. Even the liveliness of the live crabs was evaluated and recorded.

After collecting field data on the green crabs, the students selected a few to take back to campus. In a Bonney Science Center lab, guided by Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams, they learned another skill: DNA haplotyping, which they used to trace the crustaceans’ historical geographic origins back to the Mediterranean.

As Short Term drew to a close at the end of May, the �ֲ���ý students created research posters and presented their findings to Manomet and the �ֲ���ý community.

“And that’s one of the skills, too,” said Minor. “You learn how to tell the story of your work.”

“I was struggling,” admitted Loral O’Hara.

The NASA astronaut was explaining, via Zoom, to a class of �ֲ���ý sophomores what they were seeing on her shared screen: a video of O’Hara wearing a huge spacesuit, fumbling around underwater in a large pool, aka NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, Texas.

To paraphrase the famous Apollo saying, O’Hara had a problem: Her safety tether had gotten tangled in some tools right in front of her. 

The tether is needed so “you don’t accidentally become disconnected and float off into space,” she explained. “It’s really important” (yes, astronauts still excel at understatement). Untangling it with hands wearing huge astronaut gloves is “like trying to use oven mitts to untie a knot.” 

At the time, O’Hara was chagrined. But she now knows that it was OK to flub a task when the consequences were low. “I could have made that mistake in orbit someday when the consequences are much higher. Being able to make a mistake, fix it, and laugh about it and learn from it — that’s a really important skill, not just for spacewalks, but also for life.”

It was just the sort of message that Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams and Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks wanted their students, a cohort of impressionable sophomores on the cusp of becoming science majors, to hear. 

These sophomore are STEM Scholars, in the second of a two-year academic program that helps incoming students who are interested in STEM majors begin to think like young scientists, problem-solve like young scientists, and, most of all, believe in themselves as young scientists. 

The program is part of a �ֲ���ý effort to disrupt an old mindset about what it takes to succeed in majors related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM. 

The mindset, entrenched in U.S. higher education for generations, says that having the right stuff for STEM means that you survive while others fail. Indeed, introductory STEM courses are often known as just that: “weed-out” courses.

And while weeding out might be valuable in gardening, finding a great NFL quarterback, or naming the winner of a TV reality show, it’s now understood that weeding out in STEM courses only proves the shortcomings of the teaching model, not the student. 

At �ֲ���ý, that’s changing.

“We don’t believe that certain people can do STEM and certain people can’t,” says April Hill, the Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM. “If you are accepted to �ֲ���ý College, we believe that you are fully capable of not just getting a STEM degree, but thriving along the way.”

STEM Scholars take a year-long First-Year Seminar, then a year-long course sophomore year. This fall’s sophomore course had 30 students, taught in two sections by Williams and Banks. This fall’s first-year STEM seminar was taught by Aleksander Diamond-Stanic (physics and astronomy) and Katy Ott (mathematics).

Instead of a divide and conquer approach, the STEM Scholars program focuses on support and community building. The STEM Scholars “is not meant to be a competitive community,” says Hill. “It’s where you can learn and thrive together while building your science skills.”

While the primary goal of the program is to better serve the demographic of students who, data show, have frequently suffered negative STEM outcomes at �ֲ���ý and nationally — Black students, Latinx students, first-generation students — “we also have STEM Scholars who have other reasons to be part of a community that is interested in supporting each other,” says Hill. 

To that end, O’Hara was asked by Edgar Sarceno ‘23, a prospective math and physics major from Santa Fe, N.M., for advise on how to overcome coursework challenges. Lean on your community, O’Hara said, such as group study sessions.

She also suggested a visualization strategy: Think about past successes to bolster confidence in meeting a current challenge. “When I get to a really hard task, I think back to when I struggled and succeeded.”

Hill meets with many of the 28 “alumni” STEM Scholars who are now juniors and seniors, talking with them about STEM and, to help the program achieve sustainability, helping them train to be mentors to the program’s first- and second-year students.

“I’ve gotten the most joy in the last two weeks, talking to these students. It’s hard for all our students” — required masks, physical distancing, and limited social and other activities — “but they’re finding their own way to thrive. They’re studying like crazy — and feeling really proud of what they’ve accomplished in these courses.”

During the Zoom session, O’Hara did a fine job at meeting the sophomores where they are, on the verge of deeper STEM study. In a happy coincidence, her stories echoed themes of the college’s Purposeful Work program, particularly how one’s satisfaction and success in what we pursue must be aligned with what feels purposeful. 

“Pay attention to what you really enjoy,” O’Hara said, “what you find most fun and exciting, as well as actively seeking new and different experiences.” 

Banks says she often talks to students about what feels purposeful to them — about “being aware of what your own personality is telling you, what skill sets you’re developing, what things you’re drawn to — and how you might be able to best serve the world, the community, your school, whatever, just by being you.”

This fall, O’Hara was one of 10 scholars, researchers, and other professionals that Banks, Williams, and other professors brought into their STEM Scholar classrooms.

“The speakers contributed to many of our course goals,” explains Williams, such as bolstering students’ confidence and enthusiasm in science and math, and having a growth mindset. “Loral spoke explicitly to this,” said Williams.

O’Hara, who Zoomed in from Star City, the earthbound home of the Russian space program, traced her path from her childhood in Houston to becoming an astronaut based in Russia, where she continues her training until her chance to blast off on a mission to the International Space Station.

Long gone are the Apollo days when being an astronaut meant you were either a commander or a pilot.

O’Hara’s 13-member class of astronauts includes a Navy submarine warfare engineer; a microbiologist who studies organisms in subsurface environments, such as caves and deep-sea sediments; an emergency room physician; a commander of a Navy flight test squadron; a medical surgeon and combat helicopter pilot; and a SpaceX engineer with unusual prior experience: as an ice driller in Antarctica and commercial fisherman in Alaska.

“It’s a huge diversity of backgrounds,” O’Hara says. “This is one of my favorite things about the astronaut office: It shows that there’s no one path to success.” The diversity of the astronaut class also underscores another goal of the course, says Williams, “that the best science and math is done by diverse teams.”

Recalling her own path, O’Hara shared how, as a child, she loved to explore, hiking in the woods and mountains. Eventually it led her to latch onto the idea of being an astronaut (growing up in Houston also helped foment the idea). 

“I wrote a letter to NASA, and they wrote me back and told me to follow my dreams and study a STEM field,” O’Hara said. 

After earning a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas and a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue, she did deep-ocean engineering and operations work at Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, including experiences with the and the . 

O’Hara, who became friends with Williams while at Woods Hole, was selected to NASA’s astronaut training program in August 2017. 

Careers can have a tidy and linear appearance when we look back, O’Hara says. Sitting in Star City, where she is now eligible for a mission assignment, it might seem “easy to connect the dots and see how the pieces of your life come together.” 

But she assured Williams’ students that when you’re 18 and looking ahead, it’s not always clear how things will fall into place. “That was definitely the case for me,” she said. 

“If you had asked me in high school, if I would be working on deep-ocean research vessels by my 30s, I probably would’ve given you a sideways glance and asked, ‘What’s a research vessel?’” 

The message resonated with Mariam Josyula ‘23 of Longboat Key, Fla.

“It’s inspiring to talk with people who come from different backgrounds and taken different paths, but have still become so successful. You have to work hard and persevere, but your dreams are possible.”

Saying goodbye to Jennifer Doudna after Commencement 2019, �ֲ���ý biologist Larissa Williams called out, “I can’t wait to hear about your Nobel!”

Well, that didn’t take long. On Wednesday, the 2020 and research colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for their discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, a radically accessible approach to editing the DNA of any organism.

During Commencement weekend in 2019, Williams, an associate professor of biology, had the honor of serving as Doudna’s faculty host. A traditional Commencement role, the faculty host helps the visiting dignitary feel at ease, welcomed, and well-guided through the many and varied weekend events.

At the honorand dinner the night before Commencement, held at the downtown Royal Oak Room, each faculty host offers a welcoming tribute to their guest, followed by a toast. In her remarks, Williams put Doudna’s groundbreaking work into lay terms.

Williams described how Doudna and her colleagues were able to “uncover a gene editing process that already existed in nature.”

That process was found in bacteria and archaea, which had developed a primitive immune system as a defense against attacking viruses. Simply put, these organisms would “cut up invading viruses,” Williams said. From that, the researchers were able to “figure out how this system worked and then how to manipulate it to edit DNA from any organism.”

The resulting technology, known as CRISPR-Cas9, is “a set of molecular scissors that can cut and edit the genome of any organism on earth,” said Williams. “This technology has been used worldwide to not only understand biology, but change biology as we know it.”

For example, “agricultural crops are being made hardier in their response to drought, mutations are being accurately corrected in laboratory cancer cell lines, and the yield of biofuel from algae has been doubled.”

With the discovery of CRISPR and its “unimaginable utility” has come the “recognition of the ethics of its use, especially in humans. Dr. Doudna has risen to the challenge of being involved in those conversations.”

At �ֲ���ý today, students and faculty routinely use the CRISPR technology. For Williams, it allows her students to “edit any gene they desire in zebrafish in a matter of hours.” Before CRISPR, “a single gene knockout and the characterization of that effect would take an entire Ph.D. thesis to complete.”

And this fall, more than 50 students are working with Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Martin Kruse in two sections of his course “Gene Editing in Biology and Neuroscience.” Kruse reports that his students have been some impressed to know of Doudna’s connection to �ֲ���ý. 

Among other topics, Kruse’s students are looking at the evolution of CRISPR techniques and various approaches used to deliver DNA-modifying enzymes into an organism. They’re also discussing ethical implications of genome editing techniques for society.

In 2019, in presenting the citation for Doudna’s honorary degree at Commencement, Dean of the Faculty Malcolm Hill noted that “scarcely a day passes without news coverage” touting the “revolutionary potential” of the CRISPR technology.  And “not a single day passes without our guest thinking deeply about the nature of her work and its possible consequences — and urging us to do the same.”

For a moment, the camera shows an inflatable boat, bobbing in the water near a remote Pacific coral reef where Kelton McMahon ’05 does fieldwork.

Then the camera drops into the clear blue water, revealing the subject of his research: hundreds of grey reef sharks and blacktip reef sharks, each five to six feet long, swimming together in massive schools around the reef.

“How can coral reefs be so productive and biodiverse with a backdrop of such low nutrients?”

McMahon, an assistant professor of biological oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, showed the footage during his Jan. 14 talk at �ֲ���ý because it was awesome, yes, but also because it represents a paradox first noticed by Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle in the 1830s.

Kelton McMahon gestures while speaking to a junior seminar taught by Larissa Williams, associate professor of biology, on Jan. 14. A Purposeful Work infusion course, the seminar features speakers who help students make connections between coursework and the types of work they’d like to pursue after graduation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The paradox: Since Pacific coral reefs are in the nutrient-poor open ocean, there shouldn’t be enough food for two species of apex predator to coexist in such big numbers.

In other words, “How can coral reefs be so productive and biodiverse with a backdrop of such low nutrients?” McMahon said.

McMahon was the first of several scientists Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams invited to campus this semester, to speak with the students in her junior seminar and then give a public talk. Williams’ class is a Purposeful Work infusion course, where students learn about ways they can take course material into the real world.

McMahon is an ocean ecogeochemist, a title that suggests the depth of his interdisciplinary work. Over the course of his career, he and his colleagues have been developing and applying a suite of geochemistry tools, collectively called compound-specific stable isotope analysis (CSIA), that help scientists understand food webs better than ever before.

Kelton McMahon ’05 takes a tissue sample from a grey reef shark off the Phoenix Islands, home to pristine coral reefs. (Mark Priest)

McMahon told his �ֲ���ý audience about two of his current projects, which apply CSIA to real-world problems.

But first, a few terms:

Trophic level: A living thing’s place in the food chain. For example, plants are at trophic level 1, herbivores are at trophic level 2, carnivores that eat herbivores are at trophic level 3, and so on.

Producers/consumers: Producers are organisms that make their own food, as plants do through photosynthesis. Consumers get their food by eating other organisms.

Amino acids: The compounds that make up proteins — essential for life.

Isotope: Atoms of a given element with the same number of protons and electrons, but different numbers of neutrons. An atom of carbon-12 has six protons and six neutrons (light carbon), while carbon-13 has six protons and seven neutrons (heavy carbon).

Isotope analysis: Measuring the ratio of heavy to light isotopes in a sample, which provides a chemical “fingerprint” of physical, chemical, and biological processes that have impacted those atoms. For example, by measuring the isotope ratios of a piece of shark muscle, we can understand how energy moves through a food web, from coral at the bottom to shark at the top.

CSAI gets specific

Scientists have used conventional “bulk” isotope analysis for decades, but it has its limitations, McMahon said. The bulk method gives you the average isotope value of all the atoms in an element in an organism. It doesn’t distinguish whether an isotope of carbon, for example, came from one or another compound in the body of a shark.

That means a lot of detail gets lost.

“All the different compounds in the body tell a different piece of the story about how organic matter is made by primary producers and passed on to upper trophic level consumers through the food web,” McMahon said.

As a result, if you sample two animals and get back different isotope ratios, it’s difficult to know why. It could be because the animals have a different trophic position — they feed at different levels of the food chain.

Or it could be because different producers are at the bottom of each animal’s food web. Or it could be a combination of both.

Sharks! Watch this video clip of sharks swarming in the waters near the Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Video by Camrin Braun.

In other words, McMahon said, you can’t figure out who’s eating what at what time.

CSAI can help, as McMahon and his team demonstrated by sampling grey reef sharks and blacktip reef sharks who live near the coral reefs around the Phoenix Islands, a 10-day boat ride from Hawaii.

Over the course of several years and many controlled feeding studies — where scientists know the isotope values in both the food and the consumer — McMahon and his colleagues figured out that certain amino acids, called “trophic” amino acids, change their isotope value as they move through the food chain, whereas other amino acids, called “source” amino acids, stay the same from phytoplankton to shark.

By measuring the changes in trophic amino acids as they move up the food chain, you can find an animal’s trophic level, McMahon said. CSAI can also reveal how an amino acid was made — important, since different producers like coral and phytoplankton make the same amino acids in different ways.

So, using a single analysis, McMahon can determine how many steps removed an animal is from the bottom of the food chain and identify the isotope signal at the bottom of the food web.

Pacific coral reefs are home to some of the most biodiverse systems on Earth — a paradox, since reefs exist in the nutrient-poor open ocean. (Mark Priest)

“This has been a really powerful tool for looking at trophic dynamics, who’s eating what in complex systems,” McMahon said. “That information gets recorded in the biochemical signals in our consumers’ tissues.”

For years, oceanographers thought that grey and blacktip reef sharks coexisted because they fed at different trophic levels. CSAI, however, revealed that even though the sharks are similar in size, swim together, and both eat a variety of smaller fish, they feed in two totally different food webs.

The base of a grey reef shark’s food chain is largely phytoplankton, which exist in the open water. Blacktip reef sharks, on the other hand, rely on a food web with corals on the reef itself at the base.

Kelton McMahon ’05 speaks with students in a junior seminar taught by Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams on Jan. 14. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It’s this compartmentalization of the food web, the division of resources, that’s helping promote the coexistence of these apex predators,” McMahon said.

CSIA can also tell us about the effects of climate change, McMahon said. In January, he’ll return to Antarctica — one of several �ֲ���ý alumni who conduct research there — to continue a study on how climate change and human activity, like past whaling, affect the lives of penguins over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years.

On the Antarctic Peninsula, his team will take feathers from living penguins and also dig penguin tissue out of the ground, searching for samples that show what penguins were eating throughout the last 10,000 years.

CSIA helps scientists trace the past, McMahon said, but it could also afford a view forward.

In this video, Kelton McMahon ’05 conducts a test excavation of penguin tissue, which could potentially provide thousands of years of data on the penguins’ diets and the environmental conditions in which they lived. (Video courtesy of Kelton McMahon)

“By exploring how past ecosystems responded to disturbance, we can begin to predict how the food web supporting these penguins in the future will change, in response to, say, continued warming,” McMahon said.

CSIA has “allowed us to shed some really interesting light on how organic matter moves through a wide range of systems,” he said. “The molecular isotope tools we are developing provide a powerful tool to help us start predicting what the future might look like.”

�ֲ���ý has announced eight faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective Aug. 1 for the 2018–19 academic year.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees.

Malcolm Hill is vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý College.

“One of the joys of working at �ֲ���ý is to be surrounded by exceptionally talented and creative people. This year’s tenured and promoted faculty provide outstanding examples of the consequential scholarship and creative work going on at �ֲ���ý,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“As leaders in their respective fields and through their continuing hard work, these faculty offer our students unparalleled opportunities in the classroom, and give us all an opportunity to engage with the important ideas of our time.”

Meet the eight newly promoted professors, learn their research fields, and discover why they teach.

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Associate Professor of Religious Studies Ali Humayun Akhtar

Ali Humayun Akhtar has been promoted to associate professor of religious studies. (Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavallero

Jonathan Cavallero has been promoted to associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi

Raluca Cernahoschi has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki

Jakub Kazecki has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Mathematics Katharine Ott

Katharine Ott has been promoted to associate professor of mathematics. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams

Larissa Williams has been promoted to associate professor of biology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Promotions to full professor

+Professor of Politics Stephen Engel

Stephen Engel has been promoted to professor of politics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio

Lisa Maurizio has been promoted to professor of classical and medieval studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Would you like something to sip on while you read? Coffee or tea? Beer, wine, or rum? Would things go better with a Coke?

How about all six? That’s the menu for a new course, “Six Beverages That Changed the World,” which economist Jim Hughes and six students will design from scratch during �ֲ���ý’ 2017 Short Term.

Economics professor Jim Hughes will use this copper still to make rum in the course “Six Beverages That Changed the World.” (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Hughes, the Thomas Sowell Professor of Economics at �ֲ���ý, says that today’s world is marked by characteristics that resulted from the production, popularity, and distribution of those six beverages. They shaped trade, figured in the rise and fall of empires, and, through their role in the Atlantic slave trade, fundamentally affected the histories and societies of the Americas.

The course will even include lab sessions exploring how those beverages are made. “I think this is the first course taught by an economist at �ֲ���ý where we needed a Cuisinart, safety glasses, and a fire extinguisher,” says Hughes, who is equipped with a miniature still for making rum.

The “Six Beverages” design process demonstrates the creative potential of Short Term — �ֲ���ý’ five-week spring semester during which faculty and students choose a single academic endeavor, out of many, to concentrate on.

“Short Term can allow an incredibly intense focus,” says Margaret Imber, associate professor of classical and medieval studies and associate dean of faculty, in which role she designs and coordinates programming for faculty development.

Such a focus “is just a luxury you don’t have during the fall and winter semesters,” she says, when “you know you’ve got competition from the other courses for the mindspace of your students.”

Short Term supports off-campus study in locations far and near. Here, Sara Buscher ’19, Karly Oettgen ’19, Tyler Sorkin ’18, Marcus Ross ’19, and Bobby Dee ’19 make notes about red spruce trees during a Short Term field trip to the Saco Heath Preserve in Saco, Maine. Assistant Professor of Biology Brett Huggett leads the course “North Woods” that brought the group to the preserve. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Short Term, Imber says, “you have their complete imagination. And that is just intoxicating.”

Hughes’ course is one of several supported by a program that capitalizes on Short Term’s distinctive qualities. The Short Term Innovative Pedagogy and Course (re)Design program, aka STIP, enables faculty and small teams of students to create brand-new courses or reimagine existing ones for the next academic year.

Students get to craft the look and feel of courses that they and their peers will take. And faculty benefit from the perspective on learning at �ֲ���ý that only students can provide. “That is a real �ֲ���ý thing,” says Imber, “where students help design the work that students do.”

Other new courses being designed this Short Term are a first-year seminar piloting the use of iPads in teaching and learning mathematics; and “Experiencing Children’s Literature,” an exploration of real-world conversations and controversies surrounding children’s literature.

Psychology professor Krista Aronson is leading that effort as a complement to the Picture Book Project: A �ֲ���ý College Collection Portraying People of Color, the unique children’s book collection she has amassed at Ladd Library.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Susan Stark is leading the first redesign of a department’s senior thesis experience during Short Term 2017. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Courses being redesigned this Short Term include, for the first time, a department’s senior thesis experience. Susan Stark, associate professor of philosophy, and students who recently completed philosophy theses are exploring strategies for improving this capstone experience — especially the role that metaphilosophy, or the study of philosophy, might play.

While STIP supports faculty in refreshing the curriculum, Short Term’s Practitioner-Taught Courses feature seasoned professionals in various fields, often �ֲ���ý alumni, who teach from deep expertise. The PTC is one of three major components of the college’s Purposeful Work initiative, which guides students in aligning their values, interests, and traits of character toward a lifetime of meaningful work.

An example? M.E. Ashley Hart ’91, a veteran marketing expert with 25 years on the national scene, is teaching the digital marketing practicum “Changing the Art and Science of Marketing.” Her students are learning the rudiments of digital marketing the hands-on way: undertaking the steps to build and market a company brand of their own, from research to copywriting to exploiting social media.

In Short Term, “you have their complete imagination. And that is just intoxicating.”

Imber’s “incredibly intense focus,” meanwhile, takes on a different meaning with Short Term “methods” courses, immersive experiences that help students internalize practices and concepts crucial to their majors.

For instance, “Political Inquiry” is an introduction to the array of the approaches used to study politics. The one course that all politics majors are required to take, “Political Inquiry” homes in on the essential practice of identifying and evaluating crucial research decisions.

Taught by professors Stephen Engel and Senem Aslan, this year’s edition uses questions about democracy and democratization as a framework for the concepts of research and writing at issue. “So, for instance, when we discuss conceptualization and measurement,” Aslan says, “we give examples from the democracy literature” — such as, how do scholars define democracy? How do they measure it?

Faculty have long capitalized on Short Term’s one-track structure to get students off campus, and destinations for classes this year range from Alaska (archeological fieldwork) to China (literature and culture) to Germany (an environmental studies visit to the “green city” of Freiburg).

For the second time, Assistant Professor of Biology Larissa Williams will bring a class to study ecology and evolutionary biology in the Galápagos Archipelago. Co-led by Greg Anderson, assistant in instruction, the group will spend three weeks in what, thanks to Charles Darwin, is renowned as the birthplace of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

“That is a real �ֲ���ý thing, where students help design the work that students do.”

The Galápagos islands, of course, are also well-known for native wildlife not found elsewhere, thanks to geographical isolation that allowed evolution to follow its own path. During its visit, the �ֲ���ý class is visiting six islands to explore ecosystems terrestrial and marine — explorations that stimulate both the senses and the intellect.

Students and their professor, Larissa Williams, play with a curious sea lion during their 2014 Short Term trip to the Galapagos Islands. (Biology Department photo)

“All 19 of us strutted to the beach in full snorkeling attire, wetsuit and all, through the town of Isabela,” Galápagos participant Hannah Loeb ’16 blogged in 2014, during the first iteration of the course, as she and her classmates headed to the ocean to swim with marine iguanas, sea turtles, Galapagos penguins, sea lions, and colorful fish. “It was definitely quite a sight for the locals.”

If much of what happens during Short Term builds academic muscle, other endeavors allow students to flex those muscles. The Short Term Action/Research Team program operated by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, for instance, situates students in intensive community-engaged work.

STA/RT research projects range from mental health and public health outreach to the work that Julia Nemy ’18 is doing with Whiting Farm, a nonprofit working farm in Auburn. Nemy, a double major in environmental studies and French from San Francisco, is doing regulatory research to gauge the feasibility of installing an industrial kitchen at the farm.

A challenge facing Lewiston-Auburn in terms of nutrition, she says, “is a lack of resources to teach people how to process and cook their own food.” Kim Finnerty, who runs the farm for the nonprofit John F, Murphy Homes, wants the kitchen “to not only process some of her own crops, but be able to hold cooking classes and lease the space to vendors to process their own items like jams and sauces.”

Nemy’s introduction to agricultural research was quite different from her STA/RT work: During study abroad in Madagascar, she developed a set of case studies representing the agricultural output of one region of the island.

Award-winning Algerian filmmaker Lyes Salem is working with Short Term students in a filmmaking course — conducted entirely in French.

All these offerings point to how, in recent years, �ֲ���ý has dialed up the academic intensity of Short Term. The work being done is better intellectual nutrition than ever for students, and its impacts are reaching beyond these five weeks to enrich the �ֲ���ý curriculum overall.

Still, more than five decades after Short Term began, it retains a sense of genre-jumping, free-spirited, going-for-it adventure that animates courses like “L’art du court! Writing, Acting, and Filming a Short Movie.”

This French and francophone studies offering takes students through the process of writing and producing a short film entirely in French. Associate Professor Alex Dauge-Roth has invited actor–filmmaker Lyes Salem to guide the way as students develop characters and dialogue, perform in French, and learn the gamut of filmmaking techniques.

“It’s up to the students to decide where to go with their short films,” says Dauge-Roth. “This course will be fun, allowing them to explore and express emotions, share views about issues, discover the linguistic ‘other’ within themselves — and become familiar with that new ‘moi’ through acting, editing and communicating in French.”

From lower left, seniors Minh-Tam Pham and Kathleen Morrill look on as their adviser, biology professor Larissa Williams, scans protein molecules with �ֲ���ý’ new confocal microscope. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý College is now home to a state-of-the-art microscope, only the second of its kind in the state, that professors call a “game-changer” for student learning and faculty research.

Called a “confocal” microscope because of the optical technology it employs, the new Leica SP8 is a versatile, user-friendly device that gives �ֲ���ý a variety of important new or improved imaging capabilities. �ֲ���ý was able to obtain the microscope through a grant awarded by the National Science Foundation.

Taken with a confocal microscope, this image shows two adjacent neurons filled red and green fluorescent dye. The image, says �ֲ���ý neuroscientist Nancy Kleckner, can tell researchers if the cells are coupled, “that is, whether the dye could leak from one cell to the other.” These types of neurons are involved in regulating feeding in pond snails, a specific focus of Kleckner’s research.

The microscope can create three-dimensional internal images of transparent specimens. In addition, unlike some other high-resolution imaging technologies, confocal microscopy requires only minimal, non-destructive specimen preparation — meaning, for instance, that biologists can use it to examine structures and processes within living cells.

The new scope will support research in disciplines including biology, neuroscience, nanotechnology and photophysics.

The �ֲ���ý scientists awarded the grant are Matthew Cote, associate professor of chemistry; Travis Gould, assistant professor of physics; Nancy Kleckner, associate professor of biology; and Larissa Williams, assistant professor of biology and the leader of the application and acquisition process.

The NSF awarded �ֲ���ý the $791,480 grant in September, and the German-built Leica was installed in a microscopy suite in the college’s Carnegie Science Hall in November. The grant was approved on the applicants’ first try. There are other confocal microscopes in Maine, but “the only comparable microscope to the Leica is at The Jackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor,” said Joseph Tomaras, associate director of �ֲ���ý’ office for external grants.

Biology professor Larissa Williams manipulates the specimen stage of �ֲ���ý’ Leica SP8 confocal microscope. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

If the �ֲ���ý team is elated by the Leica’s features and research potential, Williams explains that in terms of �ֲ���ý’ teaching capacity, the new scope is a game-changer. “It’s incredibly important that students have access to this state-of-art technology,” she says.

“This microscope is future-proof.”

Confocal microscopy uses lasers, computers and optical elements to compose a complete image one pixel at a time. Key to this process is a version of the art-photography student’s old friend, the pinhole, which helps remove unwanted information from the image. While the basic principles of the system date back nearly 60 years, it took decades for technology to catch up with theory.

Say “cheese”! A zebrafish depicted by a confocal microscope.

These microscopes create optical sections — the rendering of images in thin uniform layers that can be digitally stacked into a three-dimensional representation. For Williams and Kleckner, this ability to look inside cells is key.

Kleckner’s plans for the scope include research into the nervous systems of pond snails and zebrafish. Williams, who studies the effects of environmental toxicants on animal development, also works with zebrafish, but in the embryonic stage.

Both rely on so-called fluorescence microscopy, in which certain wavelengths of light are used to “excite” — or cause to glow — biological specimens that have been treated with fluorescent dye or genetically modified to light up. Until now — barring a road trip to use confocal scopes in Bar Harbor or at Bowdoin College — their go-to imaging tools were widefield scopes that can’t create optical sections.

The SP8 is a big step forward. “It allows us to make crisp, well-resolved images of deep cellular structures that our older microscopes would show as fuzzy,” says Williams.

For Gould, who specializes in nanoscopy, the Leica’s user-friendliness is an asset when he needs to test results from an experimental microscope that he or a student is working on. “You can just throw your sample on there, and see what you’ve got, in a quick and easy interface.” He’s also intrigued by the SP8’s ability to analyze the workings of fluorescent particles over a period of time within a sample.

The confocal workstation. The Leica microscope itself is to the left of the monitors. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And the new scope’s ability to produce finely tuned wavelengths of laser light to illuminate samples is an advantage across the board.

Cote’s research is in nanotechnology, and the more precisely he can control the color of light that he trains onto nanostructures, the better he can understand their distinctive features.

“The bottom line is that, I think, Leica really has the best system out there, hands down,” says Gould. “It’s extremely flexible, extremely powerful, extremely easy to use. We’re very fortunate that we were able to get a system like this.

“And very fortunate that we got the grant for it on the first try, which is usually not the case.”

The confocal scope shares �ֲ���ý’ microscopy suite with a JEOL scanning electron microscope that the college purchased in 2012. The two instruments are complementary. The SEM can depict smaller objects than the confocal, Cote explains, and is also equipped to chemically identify elements in a specimen. But preparing specimens for it can be destructive to them.

The confocal microscope provides non-destructive, true three-dimensional imaging, even of internal cellular structures and even of live cells. In fact, says Gould, “With the confocal you can target specific biomolecules for imaging, which is an important advantage over electron microscopy.”

“Because of the SP8’s capabilities, researchers at Bowdoin wrote to the NSF in support of our proposal,” Tomaras said. He added that the microscope will be incorporated into professional training in advanced imaging for faculty and students at Southern Maine Community College.

One of several crates in which the Leica SP8 arrived at �ֲ���ý in November 2014. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Larissa Williams, assistant professor of biology. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

Thanks to funding from a network of research and educational institutions in Maine, �ֲ���ý will receive more than $459,000 this year to support biomedical research.

The grant will pay for two faculty projects involving advanced genomic research, as well as other programs and equipment.

�ֲ���ý is one of 13 partner institutions across Maine that share money from the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence program, aka INBRE. With similar programs across the U.S., INBRE is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jason Castro teaches a Short Term course in which he and his students designed a new neuroscience course with a computer-programming emphasis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Maine, INBRE supports projects in biology, biochemistry and neuroscience that focus on functional genomics, a branch of molecular biology that seeks to use the massive amounts of data produced by genomic projects to understand how genes function.

Assistant professors Larissa Williams, a biologist, and Jason Castro, a neuroscientist, are the �ֲ���ý research grant recipients. In a competitive process, their projects were awarded $92,000 apiece annually for five years. All told, INBRE funding for �ֲ���ý over the next five years could total nearly $2.3 million.

Using zebrafish as her test subjects, Williams is investigating a protein known as Nfe2 and its role in protecting embryonic fish against the harmful effects of chemicals that create reactive oxygen species, better known as oxidants. Essential to life in small amounts, oxidants wreak biological havoc in larger quantities.

Williams’ lab is one of only three that have published research on the gene responsible for the production of Nfe2 in zebrafish. The gene is found in humans and other animals as well as fish.

“We’re really going to be breaking scientific ground by looking into the effect of the gene,” she says.

�ֲ���ý biology professor Larissa Williams discusses the image of a zebrafish embryo at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory on July 23. Mostly from �ֲ���ý, the students with her are, from left, Nabil Saleem ’15, Roshni Mangar (College of the Atlantic ’16), Katie Paulson ’15 and Sophie Salas ’15. (Bill Church/MDIBL)

Using fish that have been rendered unable to produce the protein, she’ll test the effects of oxidative stress-causing compounds like TBHQ, a common food preservative; the herbicide diquat; and ethanol, better known as beverage alcohol.

In addition to expenses like student stipends and material goods like zebrafish and chemicals, INBRE funds will defray the considerable costs of sequencing the genomes of Williams’ zebrafish subjects to understand the effects of disabling the Nfe2 gene.

Her student assistants, says Williams, will be “getting cutting-edge training in molecular biology and bioinformatics — essentially big biological data sets. It’s the way biology is going, so students will get great training in working with and interpreting these data sets.

“That’s a very, very good skill set to have nowadays.”

Castro studies the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that directly receives information about odors from the nose. In this project, he seeks to understand the organization of that structure, specifically whether the bulb is divided into circuit modules that can be identified through genomic data mining.

Those data-mining studies will be supplemented with physiological and anatomical research to determine whether, or how, the olfactory bulb modules are distinguished from one another physiologically and in their neurological connectivity.

In other words, can genomic analysis be used to anticipate physiological structure and function? “The research will try to ‘close the loop’ — that is, experimentally test predictions based on data mining,” Castro says. “That’s something that has been historically tough to do.”

Castro predicts that the tools and techniques used in the project will be valuable for studying circuit structures throughout the brain, including pathologies underlying psychiatric disorders.

INBRE programs operate in 23 states or U.S. territories. �ֲ���ý joined Maine’s INBRE program in 2001, the year it was created.

INBRE is important to the growth and stability of the scientific establishment in states that receive comparatively low amounts of NIH funding. The program pays for resources that might otherwise be out of reach — for instance, the data sets that both Castro and Williams will draw on for their research.

“The INBRE grants really allow us to train up-and-coming scientists and create new knowledge in an era where other sources of federal science funding are at a low level,” says Williams.

In addition to supporting individual faculty research at �ֲ���ý, INBRE provides institutional support, with an emphasis on student research and travel: INBRE funds six or seven faculty-student research grants and two summer fellowships for undergraduates each year.

INBRE helped build the Imaging and Computing Center at �ֲ���ý, and pays for �ֲ���ý students who take two-week laboratory courses each spring during Short Term at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, the lead institution for INBRE in Maine. It also supports collaborations between partner institutions, such as a molecular biology and bio-imaging course �ֲ���ý is undertaking later this summer with Southern Maine Community College.

Since INBRE’s inception, it has brought $50 million in federal funds into Maine, improved research infrastructure and trained more than 2,000 Maine students in biomedical research techniques, according to the MDIBL. INBRE grants have led to the creation of more than 100 new high-paying Maine jobs in research and education.

In addition to �ֲ���ý and MDIBL, the member institutions are a second major research facility, The Jackson Laboratory; the University of Maine, its University of Maine Honors College, University of Maine System campuses at Farmington, Fort Kent, Machias and Presque Isle; Southern Maine Community College; Colby and Bowdoin colleges and the College of the Atlantic.

In a fourth-floor lab in Carnegie Science Hall, biologist Larissa Williams has student researchers working on big projects involving tiny zebrafish.

In this audio slide show, featuring photographs by Marc Glass ’88, Williams outlines a project now being executed by biochemistry majors James Meyo ’14 of Nairobi, Kenya, and Jenny Chen ’16 of Englewood, Colo.

Under Williams’ guidance, Meyo and Chen are believed to be the first U.S. undergraduates to employ a certain research technique in an innovative way.

The technique, chromatin immunoprecipitation, or ChIP, helps researchers examine how proteins bind to certain areas of DNA strands. The nature of this protein binding determines how genes get turned on and off.

“The novelty of James and Jenny’s work is that they’re conducting this protocol in whole zebrafish embryos,” Williams says. “This is not trivial. In fact, they’re on the cusp of cutting-edge research.”

Williams uses a car analogy to explain protein binding. “The protein is the key to the car, and the DNA is the ignition.” When the protein binds to the DNA, it’s like the key going into the ignition and turning. “The car moves — the gene is turned on.”

Williams and her students will use ChIP to investigate gene expression — what a gene actually does — during the embryonic development of zebrafish.

Besides being a familiar inhabitant of the family aquarium, zebrafish make a great research model, says Williams. For one, there’s the convenience factor. Zebrafish are easy to raise in the lab, and their embryos grow outside their bodies.

Plus, she adds, “humans share 77 percent of our genes with zebrafish, so they are an excellent biomedical model.” The fish also do double duty as a model for environmental research. “The knowledge we learn in the lab, such as the effects of environmental toxins, can be transferred to what fish are experiencing in the wild.”

Chen and Meyo, whose work is being funded through the INBRE Fellowships program, are working in the Williams lab alongside biology majors Dan Jordan ’14 of Washington, D.C., and Allison Tsomides ’14 of Troy, Maine. The latter pair are looking at the production of blood in zebrafish, again from a genetic perspective.

As of early July, the four students in the Williams lab were doing the tedious but crucial work to set up their projects. Yep, it can be boring, says Williams.

“Start over.”

“There’s trial and error just getting projects off the ground,” she says. “But one of the most important things about summer research is teaching students that the process of scientific inquiry will include failure.”

As if on cue, a student approaches Williams reporting something awry with the pH of a solution she’s preparing.

“Start over,” Williams advises. “You’re already over volume, which means your molarity is off.”

Failure, Williams continues, “occurs even in the smallest of contexts.”

But it won’t be long before the students begin generating novel data for their projects. Then, later in the year, they’ll report results in �ֲ���ý research papers or senior theses. Eventually, that thesis or paper could get published in an academic, peer-reviewed journal.

“And they will be listed as co-authors of that paper because they will have had complete ownership of the creation of this new knowledge,” Williams says.