Georgia State University Research Magazine, Fall 2019

YOUR BRAIN ON JAZZ | 6

A RISING TIDE | 26

THE MEASURE OF A MIND | 32

Could learning to improvise music have far-reaching effects inside the brain?

How one professor is confronting the global spread of non-communicable diseases.

A team of scientists is using AI to transform the way we think about mental illness.

GE O R G I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

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FALL 2019

YOUR CITY, OUR LAB. In the heart of downtown Atlanta, Georgia State scientists are focused on solving the problems that keep you up at night.

See the power and potential of our work at research.gsu.edu.

CONTENTS

FORWARD 5 NOTEWORTHY 40 NOW YOU SEE IT 46

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A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

BIG DATA FOR DEPRESSION

At Georgia State’s Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence, faculty are studying how to stop or prevent domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.

To tackle the growing global burden of chronic disease, public health professor Collins O. Airhihenbuwa is developing interventions that can be effective across cultures.

And bipolar disorder. And ADHD. And schizophrenia. Professor Vince Calhoun and his collaborators are using artificial intelligence to yield new insights into mental health disorders.

FIGHTING BACK

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY PETER STRAIN | PHOTO BY STEVEN THACKSTON

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FROM THE VICE PRESIDENT

Building a Better Future IN RECENT YEARS, Georgia State has become a national model for student success, eliminating academic achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity or income.

Outside the classroom, our faculty are also making enormous strides in research.

From 2010 to 2017, Georgia State grew its research expenditures by 148 percent and climbed more than 50 places in the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey. That rapid expansion makes us one of the nation’s fastest-growing research institutions. But these kinds of numbers aren’t the only measures of success.

As a member of the Georgia State faculty for nearly 20 years, I’m most proud of our research impact, which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our campus. As you’ll read in this issue, our researchers are working overtime to address some of the most urgent issues facing communities around the world, from health disparities to teacher shortages to sustainability.

We’re also recruiting world-class faculty who are pioneering new approaches to longstanding problems.

Biomedical sciences professor Cynthia Nau Cornelissen (p. 12) is developing what could be the first vaccine

for gonorrhea, an infection that is becoming almost untreatable because of antibiotic resistance. Vince Calhoun (p. 32), Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, is working at the intersection of engineering, computer science and neuroscience, using machine learning to improve our understanding of mental health disorders. And public health professor Collins O. Airhihenbuwa (p. 26) is bridging the cultural gap to help treat chronic diseases more effectively in developing nations.

I believe at Georgia State, our researchers’ innovation, creativity and potential impact is without limit. After reading through this issue, I think you’ll agree.

Michael P. Eriksen Interim Vice President for Research & Economic Development

Publishers Don Hale, Andrea Jones Editor Jennifer Rainey Marquez Contributors LaTina Emerson, Jennifer Rainey Marquez, Scott Michaux, Jill Neimark, Rebecca Lynn Rakoczy, Tony Rehagen, Bonnie Rochman Creative Director Renata Irving Art Director Matt McCullin Contributing Illustrators Reid Schulz, Peter Strain Contributing Photographers Meg Buscema, Carolyn Richardson, Ben Rollins, Steven Thackston Send address changes or story ideas to: Jennifer Rainey Marquez, editor, Georgia State University Research Magazine P.O. Box 3983 Atlanta, GA 30302-3999 email: jmarquez@gsu.edu Georgia State University Research Magazine is published by Georgia State University. The magazine is dedicated to communicating and promoting the high level of research at Georgia State University, as well as the outstanding accomplishments of its faculty. © 2019 Georgia State University | 20-RES0896

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PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

A GREENER BUS FLEET 9 | BEATING BACK SUPERBUGS 12 | ORIGINAL INTENTS 14

BREAST CANCER’S RACIAL GAP

BY SCOTT MICHAUX | PHOTO BY STEVEN THACKSTON

TRIPLE-NEGATIVE BREAST CANCER is a disease known by what it lacks: hormone receptors and proteins that oncologists can target with drugs. Absent any of these markers, treatment options are limited. It’s also a disease that primarily affects women of color.

Across the nation, the mortality rate of women with aggressive triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is 39 percent higher for African Americans than women of European descent. In Fulton and DeKalb counties, the difference in mortality spikes to 45 percent.

Biology professor Ritu Aneja wants to know what’s driving the disparity. She has published a paper in Cancer Causes & Control illuminating the probable links between neighborhood disadvantage and breast cancer risk. And she is conducting a nine-digit zip-code analysis of Fulton and DeKalb counties, looking for the non-biological factors that may contribute to TNBC’s racial disparity, such as economic stress, violence, food deserts and lack of sidewalks or green space.

“We’re trying to distinguish the biology from the non-biology to see how much contribution each of these parameters has towards the state we are in,” says Aneja, who in 2015 co-founded the International Consortium for Advancing Research on TNBC, which includes researchers from 35 institutions across 17 countries and has led to numerous collaborative breakthrough studies.

Aneja wants to unleash that collaborative spirit locally to tackle TNBC. Over the summer, she convened a group of 25 community stakeholders — a “Pink Panel” of public health experts, religious leaders, business executives, educators, clinicians and local politicians — to discuss how to address the disparity in metro Atlanta.

“This is our way of giving back, by serving as a platform to bring all of these people together to begin the conversation,” Aneja says. “Georgia State is in the business of providing solutions. We’re known for resolving the academic disparity problem. Now we’re going to solve the breast cancer disparity problem.”

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FORWARD CREATIVITY

Making It Up as You Go Along Associate professor Martin Norgaard studies how jazz improvisation affects the brain.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | PHOTO BY STEVEN THACKSTON

JAZZ ARTIST LOUIS ARMSTRONG once said, “never play a thing the same way twice.” Although musical improvisation — composing new passages on the spot — is not unique to jazz, it’s perhaps the genre’s most defining element. While improvised jazz solos are spontaneous, there are rules, says Martin Norgaard, associate professor of music education.

“In tonal jazz, improvisation is not ‘free,’” he says. “It’s always tied to the chord structure that the melody is based on.”

In other words, improvisation is an incredibly complex form of creative expression, yet great jazz improvisers like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or John Coltrane make it seem effortless.

Which makes you wonder: what’s happening inside jazz players’ brains as they simultaneously compose and play music?

“As a musician, you feel that there’s something different about the way your brain is working when you improvise,” says Norgaard, a violinist who came to the U.S. in 1985 to study jazz.

“You’re tapping all your stored knowledge and adapting it to a chord structure in real time.”

While earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, Norgaard began studying the effects of musical improvisation: interviewing jazz artists and students about their thoughts during the process of improvisation, analyzing the solos of Charlie Parker for patterns and asking musicians to perform a secondary task while improvising to see how it affects their performances.

Last spring, he teamed up with Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor of physics and astonomy, and asked advanced jazz musicians to sing pre-learned and improvised music while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, a test that measures activity in the brain.

In the study, published in Brain Connectivity, the researchers found decreased brain connectivity during improvisation.

Norgaard says the finding isn’t as surprising as you might think.

“This idea of ‘flow’ — where you’re completely immersed in an activity — has been linked to deactivation of some brain areas,” says Norgaard. “It may be that performing improvisation engages a smaller, more focused brain network, while other parts of the brain go quiet.”

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In his most recent study, published in August in the Journal of Research in Music Education, Norgaard examines the “far transfer effect” of improvisation — how learning to invent music in the moment affects other cognitive abilities.

“For nearly three decades, scientists have explored the idea that learning to play an instrument is linked to academic achievement,” says Norgaard. “Yet at the same time, there are many types of music learning. Does the kid who learns by ear get the same benefits as the kid who learns notation or the kid who learns to improvise?”

The researchers started by conducting a pre-test, in which they asked two sets of middle school kids to each perform two tasks: one that tests cognitive flexibility, or the brain’s ability to taskswitch, and another that tests inhibitory control, or the brain’s ability to focus on relevant information and block out irrelevant information. The middle-schoolers played instruments, but only some studied jazz through the Georgia State Rialto Jazz for Kids program. They found that the jazz students drastically outperformed their concert band peers.

“Still, we didn’t know: are kids with high levels of cognitive flexibility simply drawn to jazz, or is it the improvisation that produces the effect,” says Norgaard.

To follow up, he and his collaborators asked the school’s band director to divide his entire concert band — 155 7th and 8th graders — into two groups. Each group learned about jazz, but only half learned improvisation. Then each group was given the same two brain tests. The result: improvisation training led to a significant improvement in cognitive flexibility.

“Their scores started looking like the scores of the kids who had studied jazz from the pre-test,” says Norgaard.

The improvements were only apparent in the 8th graders; 7th-grade students instead saw a small improvement in inhibitory control.

“It’s hard to say what’s driving the difference in effect. Maybe it’s the age of the kids or maybe it’s the number of years spent playing an instrument,” says Norgaard. “In the future, we need to look into whether improvisation has different cognitive effects depending on a student’s age or experience.”

Watch as Norgaard and jazz guitar instructor David Frackenpohl improvise on stage at researchmagazine.gsu.edu.

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FORWARD HOMELESSNESS

Overlooked No More Professor Eric Wright recently led a study of homelessness and human trafficking among metro Atlanta youth.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ

IN 2015, sociology and public health professor Eric Wright organized a survey of homeless youth in Atlanta. Earlier the same year, the city had performed a one-night survey, which determined there were 585 homeless people under the age of 24. But providers in the area disagreed.

“Providers were distressed by the number of homeless LGBT youth who needed services,” says Wright. “I volunteered to try to get a more accurate count.”

He dispatched dozens of students and graduate assistants to canvass the city and five core metro counties — Fulton, Cobb, Clayton, Dekalb and Gwinnett — over three months. The resulting Atlanta Youth Count and Needs Assessment estimated the number of homeless youth in the metro area to be more than 3,300.

Three years later, Wright repeated the count, this time with a grant from the National Institute of Justice*. Last fall, the student canvassers, led by project manager and sociology Ph.D. student Ana LaBoy, completed a field count of homeless individuals between the ages of 14 and 25. They also administered a 100-question survey covering topics ranging from housing history to sex and labor trafficking. (Participants were anonymous and received a $10 gift card for completing the survey.)

Although the city of Atlanta has reported the overall homeless population is dropping, Wright says his research shows the number of homeless youth has remained relatively stable. The 2018 count estimates there are 3,372 youth who are homeless (either on the street or in shelters) or precariously housed (staying in a motel, for instance, or couch surfing). There are many factors driving homelessness among young people, LaBoy says.

Often, LGBT youth are homeless because they’ve been kicked out of their families’ homes, she says. In other cases, homelessness can be a spillover effect of the city’s lack of affordable housing.

“In urban areas, failure to launch is a big problem. Kids may leave home but then they can’t make it on their own,” says Wright. “We hear about the ‘boomerang generation,’ but some kids don’t have any place to boomerang to. And in metro Atlanta, to find an apartment is very expensive, making these kids more financially vulnerable.”

The researchers also found homeless youth were at high risk for human trafficking. More than half of the survey respondents reported they had been victims of either sex or labor trafficking in their lifetime. About 36 percent had experienced trafficking while they were homeless.

“This was a higher number than we were expecting,” says LaBoy, who notes this is one of the few studies to track the prevalence of sex or labor trafficking. “Nationally, most studies are based on prosecutorial data. This is the first prevalence study ever to be conducted in Atlanta, and it’s the first study to look at the intersection of trafficking and homelessness, which seems to have a lot of overlap, especially among young people with adverse childhood experiences.”

The survey found that 46.7 percent of respondents who experienced high levels of trauma reported trafficking while homeless, compared to only 18.9 percent of their less traumatized peers. Gay and transgender youth also had a significantly higher risk of trafficking compared to their straight or cisgender peers.

Wright and his team are now developing a set of recommendations for community leaders and service providers about how to help homeless youth who are being trafficked.

“We hear a lot about sexual exploitation, yet the survey shows that labor trafficking may be an even bigger problem among this population,” says Laboy. “Given that homeless youth are likely to work ‘under the table’ in informal arrangements, it makes it very murky. It’s a tough problem for which there is no easy solution.”

* *This project was supported by Award No. 2016-MU-MU-0002, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

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POLLUTION

WHEN THE BIG YELLOW BUS GOES GREEN A team of Georgia State economists finds that cleaning up school buses pays dividends in the classroom.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | ILLUSTRATION BY REID SCHULZ

EVERY YEAR, CAR MANUFACTURERS roll out new models with sleek styling, improved safety features and better fuel economy. Yet there’s one vehicle on the road that has remained almost unchanged since the 1970s: the yellow school bus.

Buses, which carry more than 25 million U.S. children to and from school every year, still largely lack features that became standard decades ago, including airbags, air conditioning and even seatbelts. They also still pump out diesel exhaust, a major source of harmful pollutants, at a time when diesel vehicles account for just three percent of total automobile sales in the U.S. “The combination of diesel fuel and an aging fleet — in Georgia, 600,000 students ride buses that are at least 12 years old — means that school buses are some of the most polluting vehicles on the road,” says Wes Austin, an economics Ph.D. student at Georgia State. “Kids are more susceptible to air pollution than adults, yet they’re breathing in bus fumes twice a day, every school day.”

Some school districts are slowly giving their bus fleets a greener makeover, retrofitting older diesel-burners to reduce the amount of emissions they produce. A recent study led by Austin found that these engine retrofits, which are relatively inexpensive, can improve not only students’ health but also their academic performance.

Austin and his colleagues, Garth Heutel, associate professor of economics, and Dan Kreisman, assistant

professor of economics, analyzed a decade of test score data from school districts in Georgia, and measured changes over time, comparing districts that retrofitted a lot, some or none of their school buses. They found that retrofits were linked to gains in test performance, particularly for English tests.

“We estimate that if a district retrofits its entire bus fleet, the effect would be slightly greater than the effect of going from a rookie teacher to one with five years of experience,” says Kreisman.

The researchers also looked at how retrofits affected the outcomes of standardized fitness tests given to Georgia students, and found a significant improvement in respiratory health and aerobic capacity. Although previous studies have shown that pollution harms students with respiratory conditions like asthma, this study is the first to demonstrate that even students without preexisting health conditions are vulnerable to the health effects of bus emissions.

Considering that it costs only a few thousand dollars to retrofit an older bus, the return on investment is huge, the researchers say.

“According to our calculations, if an average district retrofits just 10 percent of its bus fleet, the lifetime value of improved test scores (for example, from higher earnings in adulthood) is approximately $2.5 million,” says Austin. “The value of improved aerobic capacity is $950,000.”

The estimated cost to the district? Just $90,000.

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FORWARD DISPLACEMENT

FINDING THE WAY Georgia State joins the CDC’s Prevention Research Center network with a new Clarkston-based office focused on migrant health.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | ILLUSTRATION BY REID SCHULZ

W

HEN AYUB MOHAMMAD was in eighth grade, members of the military detained him on his way to school and tried to conscript him into forced labor. When he refused, he was beaten and tortured.

“That day, I decided I had to leave Myanmar,” says Mohammad, who is a member of the Rohingya ethnic group, which has been subject to brutal persecution in the country.

In high school, he fled across the border to Bangladesh where, along with dozens of other Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees, he boarded a boat bound for Malaysia. After 27 days floating in the Indian Ocean, many without food or water, the group was rescued by the Sri Lankan navy.

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Mohammad spent four years in Sri Lanka before a resettlement program sent him to the U.S. He arrived in Clarkston, Ga., in February 2012. A little more than two years later, he founded the Burmese Rohingya Community of Georgia (BRCG), a nonprofit dedicated to supporting refugees and immigrants.

“When I came here, I didn’t see anyone helping refugees except resettlement agencies, and typically only for a very short period of time, about three to six months,” Mohammad says. “But it takes much longer than that for people to become acclimated and self-sufficient.”

BRCG is one of a dozen partners — community groups, agencies, nongovernmental organizations

and new citizens — who are informing and directing the work of Georgia State’s new Clarkston-based Prevention Research Center (PRC), which opened on Sept. 30. The center, funded by a $3.75 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), is focused on the health and health disparities of migrants and refugees.

The PRC network’s dedication to communitybased participatory research makes it unique.

The advisory board, which includes BRCG, helps guide the center’s research and offers input on health concerns that should be addressed.

Heval Kelli (B.A. ’08), cardiology Fellow at Emory University who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 2001, chairs the board. Community engagement is overseen by Mary Helen O’Connor, assistant professor of English at Perimeter College and director of Georgia State’s Center for Community Engagement.

“Having taught in Clarkston for more than a decade, I’m excited to have an initiative that is developing innovative approaches to address persistent disparities in this community,” says O’Connor. “We look forward to learning together how to make measurable and sustainable improvements in the health of our friends, neighbors and students.”

The center’s core research project addresses the health and well-being of migrant children by adapting SafeCare, an evidence-based parenting program. (Learn more on p. 24.) Georgia State researchers will use SafeCare to conduct the first systematic effort in the nation to develop culturally and linguistically relevant care and interventions for migrant and refugee children.

Led by Daniel Whitaker, professor in the School of Public Health and co-director of the National SafeCare Training and Research Center, the project examines whether the program can improve the parent-child relationship, alleviate parenting stress, and boost children’s social and emotional health.

“We are deeply honored to join the CDC’s Prevention Research Center network, which has played a vital role in advancing public health in this country for more than 30 years,” says Michael Eriksen, interim vice president for research and economic development at Georgia State, who is the center’s director. “Nationally, very little is being done to address issues affecting refugee communities, and having a campus inside Clarkston presents a tremendous opportunity to work with a population that needs support and research.”

The Roots of Poor Health Two Georgia State researchers examine how life circumstances affect the health of refugees in Clarkston.

BY REBECCA LYNN RAKOCZY

WHAT DOES A LOW SODIUM DIET mean to a person who doesn’t know how to decipher a food label? What does diabetes mean to someone who views disease as a supernatural, not physical, state of being?

These are some of the questions Georgia State researchers recently tried to answer in a study of refugees living in Clarkston, Ga. Led by Iris Feinberg, associate director of Georgia State’s Adult Literacy Research Center, the researchers interviewed 136 refugees and 40 health care providers in Clarkston. The study aimed to provide a better understanding of the participants’ individual social and health needs and how they intersect with social determinants of health, or the economic and social conditions that influence people’s well-being.

“Social determinants of health can include things like housing, food and education,” says Feinberg. “We know that poor access to these things prolongs poor health at both the individual and community level.”

Data were collected by the Adult Literacy Research Center at the College of Education and Human Development, the School of Public Health and the Center for Community Engagement at the university’s Clarkston Campus.

The researchers found not just significant language and cultural barriers, but what Feinberg calls an “alarming” contribution to poor health by social determinants. The data show community members have limited access to transportation, poor education and literacy skills, low income and high levels of stress — major factors in overall health outcomes, Feinberg says.

“Clarkston is a superdiverse community, with about 4,000 refugees who have settled here,” says Mary Helen O’Connor, director of the university’s Center for Community Engagement, and the study’s co-investigator. There is a dire need to provide appropriate support to individuals and the community to improve health outcomes.”

The data will help researchers create culturally and linguistically appropriate health education materials and training in cultural competence for health professions students and volunteers. They also have developed a geo-coded map of social determinants of health in Clarkston, which will help inform future interventions to help the community.

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FORWARD Q&A

When Bacteria Fight Back Biomedical sciences professor Cynthia Nau Cornelissen on the rising threat of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea and her work to develop the world’s first vaccine against the superbug.

INTERVIEW BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ PHOTO BY BEN ROLLINS

Listen as Cornelissen discusses her work on the Research Podcast from Georgia State University.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that gonorrhea may soon become virtually untreatable thanks to antibiotic resistance. How did this happen?

Ever since antibiotics were first introduced, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, also known as the gonococcus, has become resistant to them within a very short period of time. It’s due to the biology of the bug. The gonococcus has an enormous capacity to take up DNA from the environment and integrate it into its own genome. In doing so, it picks up resistance factors very, very effectively.

What’s the current recommended treatment?

Two drugs are used simultaneously to treat gonorrhea: ceftriaxone, which is given intramuscularly, and azithromycin, which is given orally. The hope is that by using both drugs we can stave off resistance. But unfortunately, that therapy has already begun to fail in some patients.

Can physicians go back and start prescribing some of the older antibiotics again?

Unfortunately, the gonococcus not only accumulates new resistance, it maintains the resistance markers for older drugs as well. Usually, there’s what we call a fitness cost associated with a resistance marker. When you don’t use that drug anymore, the pathogen will lose its resistance to it. But that’s not what has happened with the gonococcus. That’s why the CDC considers it an urgent threat pathogen.

It’s also concerning because the number of people getting infected is growing, right?

Overall, the incidence of sexually transmitted infections is skyrocketing, and gonorrhea is no exception. From 2014 to 2017, gonorrhea incidence increased by 67 percent in the U.S., and syphilis incidence increased by 76 percent. The numbers are just enormous, although the good news is with syphilis there isn’t much antibiotic resistance, thankfully, and the treatment of choice is still penicillin. Gonorrhea is really the poster child for resistance.

Yet many people don’t realize they have it because it’s often asymptomatic in women. That is a problem because the bacteria can ascend into the upper genital tract and cause really serious complications, including ectopic pregnancy, pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. It can also disseminate and get into the bloodstream. Before antibiotics were around, Neisseria gonorrhoeae often caused endocarditis (an infection of the lining of your heart chambers and valves that can lead to heart problems and stroke) and meningitis (an often-fatal infection that causes the membranes that surround your brain and spinal cord to become inflamed).

Why don’t we have a vaccine yet against gonorrhea?

A big reason is because Neisseria gonorrhoeae is what’s referred to as a chameleon. That means it can change its surface structure at an

incredibly high frequency. It can change its surface antigens, which are substances that produce an immune response, at a rate of one in 100 to one in 1,000 cells, by turning them on and off.

That means it’s extremely hard to find something stable that you can use as a vaccine target — an antigen that is present in all strains and doesn’t change over time. You could develop a vaccine that’s protective against one particular strain and one particular sequence of antigens, but as soon as it varies, that’s it. Game over.

It also means that our immune system can’t really mount a good immune response, because as soon as our bodies learn to fend it off, the bacteria changes.

So, you don’t develop a natural immunity if you’ve successfully fought off an infection?

No, and that’s another reason that developing a vaccine is challenging. We can’t look at the immune system of someone who has been exposed to Neisseria gonorrhoeae and cleared it, and say: Okay, what about this person’s immune response is different and therefore protective? Because there is no natural protection following an infection.

How are you working around these challenges?

My lab is focused on the gonococcus’s ability to hijack host proteins for their own use. All bacteria require metals like iron and zinc to make energy. And all mammals, including humans, go to great lengths to hide metals away from invading pathogens. That process has been referred to as “nutritional immunity.” The host sequesters metals by producing specific proteins that bind them up, so bacteria can’t get at them. It essentially starves the bacteria.

To overcome that nutritional immunity process, most successful pathogens deploy molecular metal cages called siderophores, which snatch the iron or other metal out of these binding proteins and bring it back to the bacteria. But Neisseria gonorrhoeae don’t bother with that. Instead, they snag the host proteins directly and extract the metals right off of them. They can do this because they are so sensitive to human proteins — gonorrhea does not infect any animal but humans — and have developed dedicated receptors for them.

If we can block that process with a vaccine that targets those receptors, though, we could stop the infection.

And these receptor targets don’t change as frequently as other antigens?

No. The nice thing, with respect to vaccine development, is that all gonococcal strains produce that system and moreover they’re not subject to this high frequency variation process. We also know that they’re crucially important. When I was a post-doctoral trainee, the lab I was working in created a mutant that couldn’t produce this system, and we found that it could not cause infection at all in humans.

Program participant Dustin Lemons teaches at Alpha Academy High School in Rockdale County, Ga.

IN THE CLASSROOM

WHERE ARE THE BLACK MALE STEM TEACHERS? Metro Atlanta needs more science and math teachers. It also needs more diverse teachers. A new Georgia State project aims to deliver both.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ | PHOTO BY CAROLYN RICHARDSON

IN THE LAST 30 YEARS, the number of people working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations has shot up 79 percent, outpacing overall job growth in the U.S. As demand for these skills continues to rise, experts say there’s an urgent need to direct more young people into STEM careers.

Yet the rush to fill STEM jobs is hamstrung by the country’s shortage of qualified STEM teachers. In the College of Education and Human Development, professor Christine Thomas and assistant professor Natalie King are working with two local school districts to recruit STEM professionals into teaching, and develop them as leaders in the classroom and beyond.

“Having that STEM career background means they can better prepare students for what the college programs look like, what the jobs look like,” says Thomas. “We also want teachers who can be advocates, both for kids and for what an exemplary educational program should look like in math and science.”

Thomas and King are particularly focused on recruiting Black and Latinx men. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that just two percent of teachers are Black men, yet research shows their presence in classrooms matters. In STEM fields, where Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in the workforce, representation is also critical to help students imagine * themselves as scientists, engineers or mathematicians.

“By standing in front of the class and saying ‘I was an engineer and these are the skills that you need to succeed,’ it

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opens up new possibilities for what students believe they can become,” says King.

The project is funded by a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Thomas and King are working with community organizations, including Morehouse College, 100 Black Men of South Metro and local religious groups, to help recruit 30 teacher-Fellows. Each will spend one year earning a master of arts degree in teaching at Georgia State, after which they will be placed in positions in Rockdale and Fulton County school districts.

“It’s a bidirectional relationship where we’re learning from one another,” says Thomas. “We know the evidence-based practices on the research side, and the districts can inform us about what’s working in schools.”

During their first five years in the classroom, the teacherFellows will receive additional support and professional development in the form of signature learning experiences.

These experiences will be designed over time depending on the needs of the students, and may include shadowing principals, attending leadership workshops, participating in the Atlanta Science Festival or simply working through problems together as a cohort.

“We don’t want them to get burned out,” says King. “Our goal is that those who come through this program will become leaders within their schools and districts, and will help to strengthen STEM education in the state of Georgia. The support mechanisms are in place to ensure their success.”

FORWARD CAREGIVING

WHEN BEING A PARENT MEANS BEING A NURSE Associate professor Regena Spratling is helping parents care for children with extraordinary medical needs.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ

TWO DECADES AGO, Regena Spratling started her nursing career at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, working in a technology dependent care unit. The kids there — who ranged in age from babies to teenagers — all had complex, chronic issues that made them reliant on medical equipment like ventilators, tracheostomies or feeding tubes.

Children who require this type of care don’t spend their lives in a hospital, though. They go home, they attend school — bringing the breathing machines and feeding tubes along with their backpacks and pencil cases.

“For families, it’s like having an intensive care unit in the home,” says Spratling, associate professor in the Byrdine F. Lewis College of Nursing and Health Professions. “A lot of people don’t even know this exists until they’re in the situation. Parents think, ‘I go home with all this stuff? How do I do that?’”

Caring for children who require constant monitoring and technology often takes a toll. As a nurse, Spratling saw many parents who struggled with anxiety, depression and a lack of confidence in their ability to provide proper care.

“The parents are managing this equipment on the level of a nurse, on top of dealing with their kids’ appointments, medications and everything else,” she says. “In some cases, if anything goes wrong, it’s life or death.”

To better support these parents, Spratling is developing a series of short educational modules.

Her project, which is funded by a $423,314 grant from the National Institutes of Health, is designed to help caregivers navigate the technologies as well as common symptoms like coughing or wheezing.

“We’re all looking for resources online these days, and we want to provide quality information that is accessible regardless of where you are,” says Spratling.

She adds that the modules are not meant to replace the education parents receive when their child leaves the hospital. The assumption is that parents have been trained to care for their kids, but may need a refresher or reminder of what to do in a given situation. The modules can also educate caregivers about a change to their child’s care, like going from one type of respiratory support to another.

Spratling will recruit participants for a feasibility study to analyze how the modules affect caregivers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression, health literacy, competence in providing care and the ability to manage family issues at home. After that, she hopes to make the modules more widely available, translate the content into Spanish and create additional modules based on user feedback.

“In my experience, these families and kids are very perseverant,” says Spratling. “But they are also very understudied and underserved. It’s a small population, but the needs are huge.”

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FORWARD LANGUAGE

Decoding the Constitution Law professor Clark Cunningham is using linguistic analysis to shed light on the original meaning of America’s founding documents.

BY JENNIFER RAINEY MARQUEZ

THE STATE OF MARYLAND AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FILED A LAWSUIT in 2017 against President Donald Trump, arguing he had violated the U.S. Constitution by accepting payments from foreign officials in the form of hotel room bookings at Trump International Hotel near the White House. (The Constitution prohibits federal officials from receiving a “present, Emolument, Office, or Title” from a foreign state without the consent of Congress.)

The case was unusual in that it hinged on the meaning of a word — emolument — that has almost vanished from use since the Constitution was written in 1787. Trump’s attorneys maintained the definition was a narrow one that would not include hotel profits.

Lawyers for Maryland and D.C. argued the opposite.

“This word might as well be from another language,” says Clark Cunningham, professor of law and the W. Lee Burge Chair of Law and Ethics. “It’s hard to know, what did ‘emolument’ generally mean 200 years ago?”

Cunningham’s research focus is applying corpus linguistics, or the study of how language is used in very large data sets of texts, to legal interpretation.

Legal interest in this field has exploded in the past two years, after Brigham Young University digitized a large collection of historical documents known as the Corpus of Founding Era American English, and built an interface that allows the documents to be easily searched and indexed.

Cunningham likens corpus linguistics to going back in a time machine and eavesdropping on everyday Americans’ speech. Providing evidence of how words were used in the late 1700s is particularly important in today’s legal system because of the

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theory of interpretation known as originalism. This doctrine, which a majority of current Supreme Court Justices subscribe to, places the primary emphasis in deciding constitutional cases on the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution when it was ratified in 1789.

“The Constitution derives its authority not from its drafters but from the thousands of people across the 13 states who ratified it,” says Cunningham.

“The question, for example when it comes to the word emolument, is not what James Madison thought it meant. But what did those people who ratified the Constitution think it meant? Linguistic analysis is a scientific way to try to answer that question.”

While the case was making its way through the courts, Cunningham was working on research project with a linguist at Northern Arizona University named Jesse Egbert, in which they analyzed more than 2,500 uses of the word “emolument” in texts written between 1760 and 1799.

They found the word frequently appeared with other nouns, as part of a list. And “emolument” appeared most often as the last word in the series, just after the word “and” or “or.” In 69 instances, it was preceded by the words “and other,” meaning the first things in the list were also considered to be types of emoluments.

“The discovery and analysis of these ‘and other’ phrases showed that ‘emolument’ could be applied to a remarkable variety of things, and often functioned to conclude a list as a catch-all word,” says Cunningham. Their research found no support for Trump’s legal team’s argument that emolument was used with a narrow meaning.

Their study formed the basis of what’s known as an amicus — or “friend of the court” — brief, an

analysis typically offered from experts in the subject matter of a legal case who are not directly involved in the litigation. Cunningham and Egbert’s application of quantitative and qualitative analysis to interpret Constitutional meaning attracted much attention, including a story in the Washington Post the day the brief was filed. The editorial board at Law.com wrote that their “analytical method illustrates that attorneys and jurists do not, and should not, exercise any monopoly power on the authoritative approaches to interpreting the language of the law.”

Cunningham notes that although some legal scholars have pushed back on his approach, the idea that you could interpret the Constitution with something like scientific rigor is significant.

“I’m not advocating that judicial decisions should somehow be made by computers,” he says. “But if you can discern the original meaning of a word or phrase,

that’s where you start.”

It’s an endeavor that has become possible only since the advent of the kind of computing power required to analyze large data sets. Before then, the search for original public meaning was criticized as lacking an objective basis. Lawyers could make an argument for anything by cherry-picking particular texts. But by doing mass computerized analysis of hundreds of thousands of documents, Cunningham says, scholars can take empirical evidence into account. He and Egbert are now putting together a plan for increasing the integration of applied linguistics into judicial decision-making.

“We’re just getting started,” Cunningham says, “but I think it’s entirely possible that 20 years from now, people will look back and say this is the most important development of the decade in terms of truly understanding the Constitution.”

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BY JILL NEIMARK | ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER STRAIN | PHOTOS BY STEVEN THACKSTON

IT’S A HOT JULY EVENING AND I’M AT A PARTY filled with strangers, watching as a troubling scene unfolds before my eyes. A woman sits on a living room couch, being plied with drinks by her male companion. When she tries to stand she sinks back unsteadily. A few moments later, I glance over and see the man leading her away. I turn around to hear several other partygoers discussing the situation. Should they intervene? If so, how? What about the friend who brought her here?

I can’t intervene myself, because I’m not really there. I’m wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset in the office of Laura Salazar, professor of health promotion and behavior in the School of Public Health. Salazar and her colleagues wrote the script for this brief film — called “Real Decisions” — as part of her ongoing research on the impact of interactive educational tools and their ability to stem violence.

It’s a fully immersive 3D short produced with the help of Georgia State’s Creative Media Industries Institute as well as faculty and doctoral students with expertise in infectious diseases, neuroscience and behavioral science. In the VR film, the same scene plays out four different times, with four different endings. Each ending highlights one of the “four D’s” of effective bystander intervention: direct (directly intervene), distract (distract either individual), delegate (seek help from someone with more influence) or delay (check in with the young woman later).

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The VR program is so vivid that a month later, as I write this, I still feel as if I had been there — and as if I had actually experienced the interventions. “It feels like you’re in the room and they’re talking directly to you, and that’s more powerful than didactic learning,” Salazar explains. “We’re conducting a pilot study now with 40 male and female Georgia State undergraduates to measure the impact of ‘Real Decisions.’ We’re analyzing whether viewing it changes bystander attitudes, intentions and behaviors even a month after students are shown the film.”

Salazar’s project is just one example of the kind of work coming out of the Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence, established in 2017. Led by psychology professor Dominic Parrott, the center brings together a diverse group of researchers from psychology, social work, public health and criminal justice to understand what fuels violence and what we can do to prevent it.

They study everything from “toxic” masculinity to bystander intervention, what constitutes consent to sex and how alcohol fuels violence.

“Violence doesn’t happen in isolation,” says Parrott, who sees breaking down academic silos as critical to understanding and preventing assault.

He explains that violence is connected, like a starburst, to mental and physical health, personality, relationships, family systems, intimate partnerships, community, the broader culture and social ecology.

Violent acts can be influenced by peer group values, alcohol, gender and concepts of masculinity.

“We’re trying to cut across all those boundaries,” says Parrott.

HOW “MAN ENOUGH” CAN FUEL VIOLENCE It has been a quarter century since the Violence Against Women Act was passed by Congress, an act that created and supported programs to dramatically improve national and local responses to domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education let colleges know they would lose federal funding if they didn’t do a better job of protecting students. As a result, most instituted mandatory orientation or education for incoming freshmen. In 2014, the White House established a task force to help protect students from campus violence, and in 2015, Congress introduced the Campus

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Accountability and Safety Act, which required better coordination with local police departments when accusations are made.

And yet in spite of all this effort, and even with the indelible imprint of #MeToo, interpersonal violence still plagues our society nationwide.

Global estimates published by the World Health Organization indicate that about one in three women has experienced either physical and/ or sexual partner violence or nonpartner violence in their lifetime.

Across the country, about 23 percent of undergraduate females and 5.4 percent of undergraduate males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence or incapacitation, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.

Violence against minorities, marginalized groups and those in the LGBT community is also problematic. Most victims don’t report the incidents, believing it’s a personal matter, or because they fear reprisal.

Researchers at Georgia State are hoping to change that by developing tools that can help prevent or de-escalate violence.

Addressing internalized masculine norms is one key.

New research shows that internalized toxic masculinity (where rape or coercion is seen as a badge of honor, where “no” is thought to mean “maybe” or “yes,” and where hostility towards women fuels anger) can serve as tinder to fuel assault. With Parrott and other colleagues, associate professor of psychology Kevin Swartout has found that men who adhere strongly to these domineering masculine norms may feel compelled to be sexually aggressive and coercive toward an intimate partner in order to maintain their dominance. They also experience more anger at gay men. One Georgia State study found hyper-masculine norms led

to anger when participants were shown a video depicting intimate behavior between gay men.

It’s important to address the full range of sexual violence, the researchers say, because rape is not solely defined by the use of physical force. Collaborating with other universities, Swartout, Parrott and Sarah Cook, a psychology professor and associate dean in the Honors College, have uncovered evidence that while the overwhelming majority (over 80 percent) of men are unlikely to perpetrate any sexual violence,

almost 10 percent of men use tactics such as verbal coercion or getting their partner drunk. That’s far more prevalent than those who use any means, including physical force (just 1.5 percent). Because this second group of men can and do perpetrate rape, says Swartout, addressing campus social norms and providing education around consent is critical.

One way to affect behavior is through the peer group — a young man’s friends. Often, in campus life, peer groups can share toxic masculine norms. (Witness the scandals associated with fraternity hazing rituals.) According to

Swartout, research going back to the 1960s shows young men from about age 14 to 24 are most influenced by their same-age peers, more than their parents, teachers or other authorities. Peer groups with high hostility toward women may egg each other on, while those with low hostility may keep each other in check.

“Peer networks can influence male sexual aggression positively or negatively,” Swartout says.

Still, attitudes and behavior may evolve during adolescence and young adulthood. In 2015, Swartout found men who had been aggressive or violent in high school sometimes turned over a new leaf in college.

“Some of them actually stopped being violent,” says Swartout. “We think it’s because moving to

campus is one of the few times in a young person’s life when they can have a clean slate, and their social networks almost entirely turn over.”

In essence, they might have traded up their peer group for a more enlightened bunch of buddies.

More recently, Swartout teamed up with Salazar and Monica Swahn, Distinguished University Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health, to conduct a longitudinal study of men’s changing mores as they go through the college experience and integrate into a new peer group.

Called FreshMEN of Georgia and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the project assessed the changing attitudes of male first-year college students recruited from 30 colleges across Georgia. Swartout says his long-term plan is to create a program that infuses pro-social norms and attitudes into these male peer groups.

The Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence brings together a diverse group of faculty to understand what fuels violence and what we can do to prevent it. From left to right: Center director Dominic Parrott, professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences; Laura Salazar, professor of health promotion and behavior in the School of Public Health; Kevin Swartout, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences; Leah Daigle, professor of criminal justice and criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

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BLURRED LINES Alcohol is an ever-present social lubricant in our society. And, says Parrott, it is one of many causes of assault — although the likelihood that alcohol will cause violence in a given situation depends on a range of other factors. Half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol consumption. Drinking loosens inhibitions and makes it easier to push past consent. Research by Salazar has found assault tends to happen more often in the presence of a cluster of risk factors, including alcohol. (Other factors include watching pornography, subscribing to exaggerated male stereotypes and having friends who encourage sexual violence.)

Alcohol contributes because, as research by Parrott, Swartout and colleagues at Purdue University shows, drinking drives aggression and impairs executive functioning.

It also impairs proper processing of risk.

Inebriation causes a cognitive phenomenon called alcohol myopia — where attention is wholly captured in a kind of spotlight effect by what is immediate and in front of you, while the normal ability to monitor all the other stimuli around you is impaired. A male or female who is drunk may only see the person before them, as if he or she were a player on stage in a darkened theater.

Alcohol also has a negative impact on bystander intervention.

In a 2019 study led by Parrott and doctoral student Ruschelle Leone, young men discussed whether to show sexually explicit images to a young woman who did not wish to see the images — a way of simulating sexual violence in the lab. (Only one of the men was an actual participant, the others appeared to be participants but had been recruited and supplied

with scripts.) Some of the men consumed alcohol and others did not. Drinking had the strongest effect on men with the highest intent to help.

“Alcohol reduced the likelihood that a bystander will intervene,” says Parrott, “particularly for men who would typically want to help in that situation.”

Parrott adds that women who report being assaulted say that in 23 percent of cases there were other people around who could have stopped it. When bystanders were present prior to a sexual assault and had an opportunity to intervene, they had consumed alcohol in 88 percent of those cases.

For vulnerable females, alcohol alters judgment, decreases reaction time, impairs decision-making and delays the recognition of danger. According to Leah Daigle, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, female students in their first year of college who are heavy drinkers belong in a “red zone” of risk, and are more vulnerable to sexual aggression than older students. Preventive education programs for college students have maximum benefit during this early period.

This is especially important because, says Daigle, recurring victims experience a large proportion of all victimization incidents. In a 2008 study of sexual victimization of college women, Daigle and her colleagues found that although just 7 percent of college women experienced more than one sexual victimization during an academic year, those incidents accounted for over 70 percent of sexual victimization incidents reported in the study.

“If we can intervene after an initial victimization,” says Daigle, “we can dramatically reduce the risk of additional incidents.”

For that reason, providing education as to what consent truly means is profoundly important. Salazar has created another interactive program called “Real Consent” — which has separate modules for both men and women — that has been proven effective in helping to prevent violence and increase pro-social bystander intervention.

“Oftentimes there are gray areas when initiating sex. Sexual assault is not always about a guy physically forcing himself on an incapacitated woman,” says Salazar.

The program focuses on understanding effective and real consent, the role of alcohol in negating consent and enhancing empathy for victims. There are myths about consent, according to Salazar, such as “the idea that a woman says ‘no’ when she means ‘yes’ or the way she dresses can indicate whether she wants to have sex.”

The program deconstructs those myths and explores gender roles that men and women adopt

DRINKING DRIVES AGGRESSION AND IMPAIRS EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING. IT ALSO IMPAIRS PROPER PROCESSING OF RISK.

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EVERY CHILD DESERVES A VIOLENCE-FREE HOME A parent education program aims to protect kids from abuse and neglect.

CHILD ABUSE ISN’T ALWAYS a ripped-from the-headlines case of physical or sexual violence.

Sometimes it’s a parent’s inability to provide for a child’s basic needs or protect a child from harm.

It might be a young mother who can’t afford child care, so she leaves the kids in front of the TV and locks the door. Or parents who don’t understand how to interact with their child in a developmentally appropriate, positive way — maybe because their own parents never modeled the same behavior.

SafeCare, a parent training program developed by emeritus professor of public health John Lutzker, helps moms and dads of young children develop the skills they need to become better parents. The National SafeCare Training & Research Center (NSTRC), housed within the Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development, works to bring this model to the masses by training and supporting child welfare agencies around the world.

The program focuses on building three important parenting skills. The first is positive parent-child interactions: teaching parents how to structure routines to stop young children from acting out and the importance of engaging and playing with their kids to build a strong relationship. SafeCare also educates parents about child development, so they can have appropriate expectations for their kids.

“This could be as simple as explaining what the rules are, what they can expect if they follow the rules and what they can expect if they don’t,” says Shannon SelfBrown, professor of health promotion and behavior, and co-director of the NSTRC. Second, the program emphasizes home safety and supervision, because parents are often referred to child welfare services because of unsafe living conditions or lack of appropriate supervision. Third, it teaches parents about child health — how to know when kids are sick or injured, and what to do.

The SafeCare model targets parents of kids from birth to age 5, which is the age group that’s at the highest risk for child maltreatment reports. The program is used in more than 120 accredited sites across the U.S. and in international settings.

“We know SafeCare is working for families,” says Daniel Whitaker, professor of health promotion and behavior and NSTRC’s co-director. “Now we’re looking at how we can increase our reach to serve more families each year.”

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that can create misunderstandings. It also covers male victimization.

Her approach has been a success. Salazar’s research shows that men participating in “Real Consent” were significantly less likely to perpetrate sexual violence, and significantly more likely to intervene as a bystander in a situation that might lead to nonconsensual sex. Soon, says Salazar, the program will be made available to other universities.

Connecting researchers with university leaders is an important part of the center’s work, says Parrott.

Five years ago, Georgia State hosted a campus climate forum, which brought scholars together with college administrators and those working in student health centers. Out of that conference grew the Administrator-Research Consortium, a nationwide network, and a campus climate survey, crafted by Swartout along with colleagues, campus advocates, students and law enforcement. The 30-minute survey, which has been adopted by more than 300 universities nationally and internationally, measures the prevalence of campus sexual misconduct and related attitudes about both perpetration and victimization on campus. It was pre-tested with more than 2,200 students and is organized into modules other universities can adapt to their needs.

In 2018, The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine used results from data that had been gathered in 2015 by the University of Texas System. With Swartout’s help, the researchers examined sexual harassment of women across STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. They found women enrolled in medical school experienced “alarmingly high rates of sexual harassment,” says Swartout, with 47 percent of female students reporting they had been sexually harassed. For women studying engineering, the rate of harassment was 27 percent, and for women studying science, 20 percent.

Long term, says Parrott, he hopes that the center’s interdisciplinary approach and its focus on adapting research to help solve societal problems will serve as a national model.

“In my view,” he says, “this is the only way we can address this extraordinarily complicated – but preventable – problem.”

Listen as Dominic Parrott discusses the intersection of alcohol and assault on the Research Podcast from Georgia State University.

A Global Perspective The gravest health threats facing developing countries are not viral outbreaks or parasites, but chronic conditions such as heart disease and cancer.

Professor Collins O. Airhihenbuwa has pioneered a culturally informed approach to confront the global spread of these diseases.

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BY TONY REHAGEN | PHOTOS BY STEVEN THACKSTON

ollins O. Airhihenbuwa was a graduate student studying health planning and administration in Tennessee when he first realized there was a problem. When his professors talked about health issues facing developing countries, they focused on the income, formal education, nutrition and other resources that these places lacked — and the impact those deficiencies had on the health of the people. But to Airhihenbuwa’s mind, the well-meaning instructors were only painting half the picture.

Airhihenbuwa knew the full scope of life in many of these countries because he had lived it. He had grown up in Benin City, Nigeria, in the 1960s, the son of subsistence farmers. By the standards he was being taught by Western researchers, his parents — who did not work for wages — would have appeared poor, but they farmed their own land and traded for everything they couldn’t grow or make. Scientists might have seen no meat on young Airhihenbuwa’s plate and declared his diet unbalanced, yet his seasonal plant-based diet conferred all the nutritional benefits he needed. Some might have declared his parents uneducated because they lacked formal schooling, without taking into account their organic and practical knowledge and life wisdom, which had been passed down through the culture and community.

“Hearing the way my parents’ generation and the people I grew up with were described left me wondering why the focus was on what was missing,” says

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Airhihenbuwa. “Instead, I felt we needed to address what was there.”

That realization has informed the past four decades of Airhihenbuwa’s research in global health management and policy. While today the phrases “social justice” and “social determinants of health” are routinely used to describe a way of looking at how a community’s economic and social conditions shape individual physical and mental health, Airhihenbuwa has long been a pioneer in this more holistic approach. He has studied everything from HIV in South Africa to nutrition among African Americans here in the U.S. He has developed a cultural model, known as the PEN-3, that is used in several countries to develop public health programs and address health inequality.

“In public health right now, there are three concepts that are en vogue: health disparities, culture of health and the cultural determinants of health,” says Michael

Eriksen, interim vice president for research and economic development and founding dean of the university’s School of Public Health. “Airhihenbuwa’s work deals with the intersection of these concepts because he’s focused his career on looking at things like poverty and race and education level and their impacts on health. Not just the behaviors, but the root causes that determine that behavior.”

That’s why Eriksen brought Airhihenbuwa to Georgia State, where he will lead a new interdisciplinary team known as the Global Research Against NonCommunicable Disease (GRAND) Initiative. Part of the university’s Next Generation research program, meant to build strength around innovative research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing issues, the GRAND Initiative will look at ways to combat chronic conditions such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, respiratory disease, mental illness and drug abuse and alcoholism — collectively the leading causes of mortality on Earth — through the wider lens of social, structural and cultural determinacy. He and his colleague Nida I. Shaikh, assistant professor of nutrition in the Byrdine F. Lewis College of Nursing and Health Professions, will examine the structures and systems behind individual behaviors that contribute to these widespread diseases, from eating certain foods to failing to seek preventative treatment, and try to better understand them.

“Understanding the social determinants of health is so crucial in understanding global health disparities,” says Airhihenbuwa. “This is the way we’re going to close the gap of inequity.”

Airhihenbuwa first switched his focus from business to healthcare as an undergraduate at Tennessee State University because he thought he wanted to work at the macro level managing healthcare facilities. But as he delved into micro aspects of the field, he found he was more curious about the people behind the numbers.

“I wanted to understand why people die and why they are sick,” he says. “To make sense out of people and their agency.”

Central to Airhihenbuwa’s research is the difference between addressing health disparity and addressing health equity. A popular metaphor imagines a group of fans watching a football game from behind a fence. Some are tall enough to see over the fence, others cannot. Equality means bringing a bench for all to stand on, but though it elevates everyone, some may be still too short. Equity means looking at individuals, sizing up their situation and providing each a riser that allows them to see the game.

Researchers like Airhihenbuwa look deeper, to the roots of the structural inequity, and ask: Why do you need the fence? This is the social justice question.

For Airhihenbuwa, the answers always revolve around

cultural context. In the late 1990s, while teaching at Pennsylvania State University, Airhihenbuwa studied the high mortality rate from diet-related diseases among African Americans. Traditional social science rested on the perceived connection between socioeconomic status and the overwhelming availability of cheap and unhealthy fast food in the poorer communities in which many African Americans live. In short, they ate diets high in fat, saturated fat and salt because that’s all that was offered to them.

Airhihenbuwa felt that wasn’t the complete picture. He and his research team began studying African Americans’ eating practices, and found that the participants

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How Culture Impacts Health Airhihenbuwa’s PEN-3 cultural model consists of three domains, each of which include three key factors that form the acronym PEN. The domains are Cultural Identity (Person, Extended Family and Neighborhood); Relationships and Expectations (Perceptions, Enablers and Nurturers); and Cultural Empowerment (Positive, Existential and Negative).

Cultural Identity looks at the potential points of entry for intervention, such as family members, healthcare workers or communities as a whole. Relationships and Expectations evaluates local attitudes toward health problems, including healthcare services, but also the influence of family and friends in nurturing decisions about health. Cultural Empowerment takes into account local beliefs and practices.

PEN-3 CULTURAL MODEL

Cultural Identity

• Person • Extendend Family • Neighborhood

Relationships & Expectations

• Perceptions • Enablers • Nurturers

• Positive • Existential • Negative

Cultural Empowerment

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themselves agreed their diets were largely independent of their socioeconomic status. Yes, there was often a dearth of healthy options in urban neighborhoods, but there was also food culture that included nutritious dishes like green vegetables. (Less healthy dishes like chitterlings and pot liquor — or “potlikker,” the liquid in which meat, fish and vegetables has been cooked — are also associated with African American food culture, but these were consumed infrequently.) The study concluded that the structural changes in food availability and accessibility would have to occur in concert with culturally informed individual choices of what to eat.

But cultures are complex webs of customs, beliefs and social institutions that continually evolve, conflict and overlap with one another. How can a researcher decipher the key components that affect an individual’s health?

Airhihenbuwa himself was faced with this challenge early on. In 1989, while studying the impact of HIV and AIDS in Africa, he developed a framework to help simplify the process, a model that has helped countless researchers over the past 30 years.

Airhihenbuwa’s PEN-3 cultural model puts culture at the core of the development, implementation and evaluation of public health interventions. (See sidebar.)

Since its inception, the model has been applied by scientists in the study of HIV, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, malaria, nutrition and even cigarette smoking.

The model is used to provide context, highlighting not only the aspects of a culture that are harmful to health, but those that are positive to health, including the people, structures and traditions that are benign or beneficial in unconventional ways.

“It helps me set aside my own biases and, at the same time, not be overwhelmed by the fact that I have biases,” says Chandra Ford, a professor at the University of California – Los Angeles Center for Health Equity, who studied and collaborated with Airhihenbuwa at Penn State. “PEN-3 helps us address our own fallacies. It helps us realize that even when we show up meaning to do good, we bring assumptions that can harm communities.

It’s almost radical in public health. We usually view everything through the lens of the problem. But the first ‘P’ in PEN is not ‘Problem,’ it’s ‘Positive.’”

“You can’t just go into a culture and look at the negative and ignore everything else,” says Airhihenbuwa.

“When public health practitioners work with a population that has been studied heavily, they need to be mindful that although there might be an expectation to provide a solution, every individual, family and community has something beneficial going on, something unique. If we can work through the process and identify the positive qualities, we’ll be more likely to get positive results.”

Chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease have claimed the majority of lives in affluent countries like the U.S. for decades, but they are rising fast in developing

By 2030, more people in the developing world will die from chronic conditions than from infectious diseases.

Source: World Health Organization

countries — and striking younger populations. Almost three quarters of all deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and the majority of premature deaths, now occur in low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Some of the reasons behind the global rise of NCDs are positive: people are living longer thanks to improved sanitation, wider access to vaccines and progress in fighting infectious diseases like malaria. Others are less so: Urbanization often leads to increased air pollution and more sedentary lifestyles. The diseases also tend to produce worse outcomes in poorer parts of the world. A 2014 report from the Council on Foreign Relations notes that NCDs that are preventable or treatable in developed countries are often death sentences in developing countries. As a result, there’s an urgent need for public health interventions that can be effective across cultures.

The GRAND initiative will work to develop a thorough and holistic approach to reducing the global impact of chronic diseases. It’s easy to see why Georgia State tapped Airhihenbuwa, who was previously dean of the College for Public Health at Saint Louis University, to head up the initiative. In addition to the invention of the PEN-3 model, he’s had stints as a visiting scholar to United Nations agencies like the WHO and has served on the board of Scientific Counselors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Across the globe, our major health problems have shifted from infectious diseases to chronic diseases,” says Eriksen. “Yet at the same time, places like Africa are still dealing with infectious diseases like malaria and Ebola.

We need to work upstream to affect behaviors, and that’s the area where Airhihenbuwa has a unique ability to contribute because of his understanding of place and culture as determinants of that behavior.”

While the School of Public Health will lead this initiative, faculty from Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Byrdine F. Lewis College of Nursing and Health Professions and the College of Arts and Sciences will collaborate and offer expertise.

“Chronic diseases are expressions of inequities in society,” says Airhihenbuwa. “What we want to do in GRAND is to focus on the sources of those inequities by examining issues of structural racism and cultural contexts. That way, we can design and sustain interventions that work at the local and global levels.”

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THE

MEASURE OF A MIND

Meet the Georgia State scientists who are using big data to help transform the way we think about mental illness.

BY BONNIE ROCHMAN | ILLUSTRATIONS BY REID SCHULZ

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Mental health is perceived as a touchy-feely discipline. Practitioners – psychiatrists and psychologists, among others — are interested in how people feel, think, behave. In a world in which data are used to evaluate nearly everything, mental health has seemed a category apart. How could you possibly use data science to evaluate the complex machinery that makes up a person’s mind?

Vince Calhoun, one of the world’s top experts in brain imaging and analysis, has been pondering this question for a while. As an undergraduate in electrical engineering, he was intrigued by how engineering principles can be used to model the human body – blood flow, for example. That led him to pursue bioengineering in graduate school.

At Johns Hopkins University, he connected with a psychiatry group doing neuroimaging.

“I was the only engineer,” says Calhoun, founding director of Georgia State’s new Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), which is working to use big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to change the way we think about mental health disorders.

“The joke was that I was the engineer analyzing the psychiatrists.”

It was no joke. Calhoun, a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Georgia

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State, realized technology has the potential to address “lots of the hard questions” psychiatrists were asking. At TReNDS, a collaboration among Georgia State, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, he’s searching for answers, using the center’s resources to delve into identifying biomarkers associated with brain health and disease.

“We’re working on really leveraging the synergy between all these institutions,” says Calhoun, who was recruited from the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, where he was president until Georgia State lured him to Atlanta last year.

Calhoun’s work centers on applying AI and data-driven analysis to brain imaging data, employing algorithms he’s developed to yield a more nuanced understanding of the brain and how it functions, as well as how it’s affected by mental or neurological illness. To do this,

From left: Jean Liu, associate professor of computer science; Jessica Turner, professor of psychology and neuroscience; and Vince Calhoun, Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and founding director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS).

he creates neuroinformatics tools that help researchers make sense of increasingly large data sets. Calhoun’s tools are designed to assist scientists as they collect, manage, analyze and share data.

If Calhoun had his way, brain scans would be a standard part of medical care.

“If I could, I would get a brain scan early on everyone and then throughout their lives,” he says.

“It would be a real treasure trove of data because by the time someone is sick, it’s often too late to help or understand how the problem developed.”

For starters, mental illness can be trickier to pin down than physical illness. It’s shaped by genetic and environmental factors, stress among them. While there are all sorts of biomarkers for identifying physical illness — blood tests for diabetes, X-rays for broken bones, CT scans for cancer — detecting mental illness is more

PHOTO BY STEVEN THACKSTON

elusive. Calhoun and the team of scientists he’s assembling at TReNDS are helping reshape the mental health landscape by using AI to pull more data from brain imaging scans, creating a new picture of mental illness in the brain. Calhoun, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Brain Health & Image Analysis, is developing algorithms to improve our understanding of how the brain functions, its structure and genomics, so that sophisticated math and computer science can be deployed to better understand people with mood and psychosis disorders.

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hat if the brain is like a book written in a language we don’t yet understand?

Calhoun is trying to decipher it, developing techniques to help doctors and scientists understand what’s written within.

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He specializes in weaving together information from multiple data sets — a technique called data fusion — to provide better insight into complex problems.

At three pounds and 86 billion neurons, the human brain is an engineering marvel, with neurons communicating with one another to form circuits and transfer information that governs walking and talking, sleeping and waking — and so much more. It’s the body’s command center, so when it malfunctions, it matters.

“One challenge is that the brain is the most complex organ in the human body,” Calhoun says.

“We don’t fully understand how it works, but we know that mental health diagnoses are imperfect.”

Someone who has schizophrenia, for example, may share the same symptoms with someone who has bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia itself is a diagnosis by exclusion. You must rule out bipolar disorder, depression and mood disorders by asking a lot of questions about what an individual is experiencing.

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“We don’t even know if we’re trying to treat an actual clearly defined disorder or a suite of symptoms,” says Calhoun. “The categories are not as precise as they should be. We’re trying to come up with benchmarks.”

Take twins: If your identical twin has schizophrenia, you have just a 50 percent chance of developing it, too. To make matters more complicated, mental illness is also polygenetic, hinging upon an intricate mix of genes and environment. Consider that one person’s experience with schizophrenia — or any mental health disorder, for that matter — can vary widely from another’s, and it becomes clear why it has been challenging to develop treatments for mental illness.

Calhoun also has a personal stake in trying to better understand how the brain functions.

His father has Parkinson’s disease and bipolar disorder has been diagnosed in his family, albeit after the course of his research was established.

“It’s made me see why this work is important,”

he says. “Mental illness really impacts everybody.”

Calhoun recently received nearly $4 million from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop new models that use brain imaging and genomic data to better predict mental health disorders. It’s critical work: About one in five Americans lives with a mental illness. In 2017, that was nearly 47 million people.

As part of the NIMH grant, Calhoun and his colleagues are comparing two approaches to diagnosis: the conventional approach that relies upon a checklist of symptoms to generate a diagnosis and one that analyzes brain data. It may sound simple, but it’s far from it. Calhoun is overlaying various types of brain imaging with genomic data, mixing them together mathematically using machine learning and AI to identify unique data sets that contain more useful information than imaging or genomic data can provide on its own.

“We are focused on leveraging many different

kinds of data, which is unique,” Calhoun says.

“We’re not just looking at does the wiring in your brain change or does the activity in your brain get stronger or weaker or does your genome look a certain way? We are trying to combine all that information together because no data set captures all the available information.”

Our goal is to look at the brain in a more holistic way,” he says. “We try to let the data speak and help us understand what is going on in inside.”

T

his approach can be applied to any number of mental illnesses and brain disorders, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Learning to determine which data correlate with which condition helps make doctors’ lives easier and helps patients end diagnostic odysseys, months or years spent searching for the right diagnosis.

One of Calhoun’s projects involves looking at a sample of children to see who, over time, will

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develop mental illness. The study is designed to track the normative development of children, but Calhoun, who always sees things a bit differently, is using the data to see if some of the children have higher scores for symptoms of depression or psychosis by the time they’re in their 20s.

“Then we go back five years earlier and say, given that data, can we design a predictor of a specific mental illness emerging?” Calhoun says.

He’s also using deep learning to filter out people who are unlikely to be responsive to a certain medication, saving them time and frustration, and developing machine learning models to predict cognitive decline — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — from a younger age.

At Georgia State, Calhoun works closely with Jessica Turner, professor of psychology and neuroscience, on a number of projects, including a study that seeks to pin down the mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Understanding the mechanisms behind these disorders is the first step to finding what Turner calls “druggable or treatable targets so that we can minimize suffering and maximize functionality.”

These disorders are messy,” Turner says.

“They’re not hard and fast. Not all treatment works on everybody. We want to uncover why some people are responsive and some aren’t.”

As a cognitive neuroscientist, Turner is interested in what it means to be human. She attempts to answer that question by analyzing neuroimaging measurements and genetic variations.

“How can we measure a mind?” says Turner.

“What in the brain can we measure that relates to what we can measure in behavior? You are not going to answer that with 10 people off the street.

You need big data.”

In schizophrenia, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of changes in genes can make a person more or less susceptible. Establishing correlations between genetic changes and brain images of people with and without the condition can help determine who will break with reality and hear, see and think things that people without schizophrenia don’t experience.

“If we were going to look at one gene and one part of the brain at a time, we’d be here forever,” says Turner, who has a long collaborative history with Calhoun on a number of psychiatric imaging and genetics projects. “If I’m going to design a study, I have specific hypotheses about what is

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“How can we measure a mind? What in the brain can we measure that relates to what we can measure in behavior? You are not going to answer that with 10 people off the street. You need big data.”

— Jessica Turner

playing a role in schizophrenia that I collect data about. Then another researcher comes along and asks, what about something else, maybe the age of onset and childhood trauma? So, you end up collecting millions of data points because you don’t want to miss anything. Then you have to be able to discern what’s important and what’s not.”

That’s where Calhoun’s work comes in, developing algorithms that identify patterns in large data sets.

“The richness of this approach that we are taking at TReNDS is bringing in every piece of information that we can. It’s rare to get so many people together in one place who can do that,” says Turner.

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omputer scientist Jean Liu is helping.

Another recruit from the Mind Research Network, Liu specializes in imaging genetics, using AI to find links among brain abnormalities seen on imaging, genetic profiles and epigenetics — how environmental factors affect gene expression.

“We have very limited information right now about which genetic mutations lead to psychiatric disorders, and how,” says Liu, an associate professor of computer science.

She and Calhoun are trying to figure out how to predict which children with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will outgrow their symptoms. Up to 10 percent of U.S. kids receive an ADHD diagnosis, but about half no longer experience the inability to focus and/or hyperactivity by the time they’re young adults.

To predict which children will stabilize, Liu and Calhoun are comparing kids with ADHD to adults with the disorder to see if they share the same brain abnormalities. One particular brain region, the cerebellum and inferior frontal region (the bottom frontal region, right above the eyes), appears related to cognitive and attention deficits, so they are homing in on genetic mutations associated with brain development of this area.

“Do we have the power to predict whether symptoms will persist into adulthood?” says Liu. Finetuning treatment could hang in the balance; if providers can determine that the condition will be lifelong, it’s likely that treatment will differ from what’s recommended for ADHD that limits itself to childhood.

“Vince is helping remove the noise,” says Liu. “He’s cleaning up the data so we can analyze it.”

Calhoun has been on cleanup duty for a long time. Psychiatrist and researcher Godfrey Pearlson first met Calhoun when he was a senior research assistant in a psychiatry imaging center at Johns Hopkins that Pearlson directed. Pearlson was using functional MRI (fMRI), which measures brain activity, to try to probe what the brain was doing when a person drove drunk. Subjects would drive in realistic simulators inside a scanner, and Pearlson would watch how their brains reacted.

“Unlike a simple task like pressing a button when you see a stimulus, driving is incredibly complicated,” says Pearlson, now a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. “Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree, and it’s impossible to tell which part of the brain circuits or regions are involved with the behavior.”

Enter Calhoun, who realized that independent component analysis (ICA) — a computational technique that helps separate a whole into parts — could be harnessed to parse which brain circuits were switching on and off. That helped researchers winnow down what they were looking at.

“It simplified and made the whole problem intelligible and subject to analysis,” says Pearlson, who has gone from Calhoun’s mentor to his peer.

Researchers everywhere saw the usefulness of applying ICA to fMRI. It’s now one of the main methods of analysis.

Another scientist might have stopped there. But Calhoun took it a big step further, putting together a “toolbox,” or cheat sheet, for how to apply ICA to imaging, along with associated algorithms.

His toolbox has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by scientists, says Pearlson.

“He’s done the scientific community a favor by distributing this as an open source software tool,” he says. “[The tools] are the sort of thing where people will say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense. I wish I’d thought of it.’”

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NOTEWORTHY SE L EC T FACU LT Y HONOR S A N D ACCOM PL ISH M E N TS Georgia State faculty: Share your research news with us. Send your noteworthy accomplishments to the editor at jmarquez@gsu.edu.

ANDREW YOUNG SCHOOL OF POLICY STUDIES The Georgia Policy Labs have received $1 million from the Arnold Foundation to create a Child & Family Policy Lab, which will focus on increasing the safety, education and economic stability of Georgia’s children and families.

Debbie Kibbe, senior research associate at the Georgia Health Policy Center, has received the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

James Marton, professor of economics, has been awarded $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program affects the food security and health of people aged 60 and older.

Georgia State has been named one of eight AgencyUniversity Partnership Workforce Excellence sites by the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute.

The School of Social Work will receive $579,000 as a Workforce Excellence partner with the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services.

Sam Williams, professor of practice in the Urban Studies Institute, has received the Dan Sweat Award from Central Atlanta Progress. The award honors leaders who are “doing the right thing” for downtown.

BYRDINE F. LEWIS COLLEGE OF NURSING & HEALTH PROFESSIONS Doug Gardenhire, chair and clinical associate professor of respiratory therapy, has authored the 8th edition of “Rau’s Respiratory Care Pharmacology,” the world’s top textbook on medication use in the respiratory care field. Previous editions were written by emeritus professor Joseph Rau. Blake McGee, assistant professor of nursing, has been awarded an American Heart Association Young Investigator Database Seed Grant to study the impact of states’ decisions on Medicaid expansion on stroke severity and rehabilitation outcomes.

Michelle Nelson, clinical assistant professor of nursing, has received the American Association of Nurse Practitioners® Georgia State Award for Nurse Practitioner Advocate Excellence. The prestigious

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award is given annually to a dedicated nurse practitioner (NP) and NP advocate in each state.

COLLEGE OF THE ARTS Karl Kroeppler, adjunct professor, has contributed a piece of artwork, “Intractable 2,” to Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Ruth Stanford, associate professor of art and design, has been honored with an international solo show at the National Art Gallery Zambia. Her photography series, “Foot Traffic,” was conceived during a residency at Wayi Wayi Art Studio and Gallery in Livingstone, Zambia, in June 2018.

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES Michael Black, senior lecturer in neuroscience, has been named president-elect of Nu Rho Psi, the National Honor Society for Neuroscience.

Megan Connors, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, has received a five-year, $834,881 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the agency’s most prestigious grant for early career faculty.

John Horgan, Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, has received $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to research the evolution and spread of the growing male supremacist movement known as “Incel.”

Jun Kong, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, has been awarded $1.14 million from the National Cancer Institute to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence computer vision and big data technologies to advance cancer research.

Peter Lindsay, professor of political science and philosophy, has published a book, “The Craft of University Teaching,” which addresses the question: What does the act of teaching become when treated as a craft?

Kathryn McClymond, professor of religious studies, has received the Ray L. Hart Service Award from the American Academy of Religion. The award recognizes those who have fostered excellence in the academic study of religion. continued on pg. 42

RESEARCH | FALL 2019

CRAVINGS

TRAINING THE BRAIN TO QUIT SMOKING Assistant professor Claire Spears is using mindfulness to help low-income Americans kick the habit.

IN MANY WAYS, the decline of smoking is one of America’s great public health success stories. Before the Surgeon General released a damning report on smoking and health in 1964, more than 40 percent of American adults smoked. Today, just 14 percent do. But the number of smokers isn’t the only thing that’s changed. There’s also been a major shift in who is smoking.

Unlike the white collar, affluent smokers of the “Mad Men” era, today’s smokers have less education and a lower income.

They’re more likely to have mental health disorders. Smoking rates are also much higher among certain racial groups, and African Americans are more likely to die from smoking-related disease than whites.

“Tobacco control strategies have been largely successful, but they haven’t worked for a subset of Americans,” says Claire Spears, assistant professor of health policy and behavioral

PHOTO BY MEG BUSCEMA

sciences. “We know that minority adults of low socio-economic status are less likely to quit, and more likely to develop cancers related to tobacco use.”

Spears recently received $3.15 million from the National Cancer Institute to provide a different kind of support than what’s been offered before. She has developed a program, iQuit Mindfully, that delivers personalized text messages built around mindfulness training.

“Many people smoke as a way to cope with stress, but it doesn’t work in the long term,” says Spears. “Mindfulness is a more effective, durable way to manage stress.”

Mindfulness can also take smokers off autopilot. By focusing a person’s attention on the present moment, mindfulness interrupts the tendency to automatically reach for a cigarette when faced with triggers, including habitual triggers (like after eating), social triggers (like being around friends who smoke) and emotional triggers (like feeling stressed).

“Mindfulness gives you a moment to slow down and consider your response rather than simply react,” says Spears.

“It’s something that you can do for yourself anytime, anywhere.”

However, most existing mindfulness research has focused on higher-income and white populations. With this project, Spears hopes to expose a broader population to the benefits of mindfulness, and study the best ways of teaching mindfulness to different groups. She chose text messaging over an app because it doesn’t require participants to have a smartphone or even Internet access. Texting is also a social behavior, and Spears says social support is a big predictor of success in quitting.

“Even though the participants know the messages are automated, we’ve received a lot of feedback saying, ‘It felt like somebody cared, like I had a coach along the way. Like someone was holding my hand,’” Spears says. “Particularly when you live in an environment that is not supportive, that’s huge.”

A 2019 pilot study shows iQuit Mindfully may be particularly effective for adults of low socioeconomic status.

According to the study, nearly a quarter of participants living in poverty who received the text messages in addition to in-person mindfulness-based treatment had quit smoking at a one-month follow-up.

With the grant, Spears plans to refine the program, integrating the feedback from the pilot study to make it more personalized and more interactive. In the next phase, for example, people will be able to tailor the messages to their schedule. She and her collaborators will then conduct a larger trial with more than 450 participants, looking at whether the program is effective at helping people quit and if so, how it might work differently than other approaches.

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NOTEWORTHY MaryAnn Romski, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and of Communication Sciences and Disorders, has received the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Leadership Award, given for outstanding contribution to the field.

Jessica Turner, professor of psychology and neuroscience, and Vince Calhoun, Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science, have received a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study how symptoms associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression relate to changes in the brain.

Binghe Wang, Regents’ Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Diagnostics and Therapeutics, has been awarded $3.5 million from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to develop a carbon monoxide-based medication as a potential treatment for inflammatory conditions such as colitis.

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Gwendolyn Benson, associate dean for faculty development and partnerships, has been awarded $1.2 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help Clayton County middle school math teachers improve student achievement, particularly for students of color and those who live in low-income communities.

Thomas Crisp, associate professor of early childhood and elementary education, has been named vice president and president-elect of the Children’s Literature Association, an international nonprofit organization that studies children’s literature.

Franco Dispenza, associate professor of counseling and psychological services, has received an Early Career Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association.

David Houchins, professor of learning sciences, has received $3.2 million from the National Center for Special Education Research to study a blended learning literacy program in juvenile justice schools.

Joe Magliano, professor of learning sciences, and Kathryn McCarthy, assistant professor of learning sciences, have received nearly $600,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to analyze students’ reading comprehension.

Lauren Margulieux, assistant professor of learning sciences, co-edited “Blended Learning in Practice.”

The book offers guidelines for researchers and instructors on the theory and practice of blended learning, which combines traditional in-person learning with technology-enabled education.

Cynthia Puranik, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders, has been awarded $3 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to assess the effectiveness of a writing intervention program.

Christine Thomas, professor of middle and secondary education, has received the Benjamin Banneker Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her decades of leadership and advocacy of behalf of all children in mathematics.

COLLEGE OF LAW Erin Fuse Brown, associate professor, has received a grant from Arnold Ventures to develop legal and policy solutions to address out-of-network air ambulance bills.

Paul Lombardo, Regents’ Professor and the Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law, has been elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an independent, nonprofit research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law.

Emily Torstveit Ngara has been named director of the Immigration Law Clinic, which is funded through a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation and will serve immigrants facing deportation throughout Georgia.

Mary F. Radford, the Marjorie Fine Knowles Professor of Fiduciary Law, has been elected to the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils Estate Planning Hall of Fame and was designated an Accredited Estate Planner (Distinguished).

Jonathan Todres, Distinguished University Professor of Law, has received the Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship, which recognizes faculty members who have compiled a substantial and continuing record of outstanding research and scholarly activity within the previous two years.

Jack Williams, professor, has been appointed resident scholar and senior tribal adviser to the Tribal Council of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the third largest tribe in the U.S. continued on pg. 45

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RESEARCH | FALL 2019

Tim Kellison, director of the Center for Sport and Urban Policy

IMAGE OF CROSS IN FRONT OF SCHOOL

GAME CHANGER

STRONGER, FASTER, GREENER The Center for Sport and Urban Policy is honored for its work helping sports organizations become leaders in sustainability.

CONSIDER THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT of a single sporting event. Fans travel to and from the game in their cars. They may leave their vehicles idling or run generators while tailgating outside the stadium. Inside, the game generates hundreds or even thousands of pounds of waste — think of the napkins and plastic beer cups alone. Lights flicker on, air conditioning units hum and toilets are flushed.

“Every level of the fan experience has some sort of environmental impact,” says Tim Kellison, assistant professor of kinesiology and health. “And while more sports organizations are thinking about sustainability these days, there’s a lot of public awareness and education and research that still needs to be done.”

Kellison is the director of the Center for Sport and Urban Policy, which studies the intersection of sports and cities, with a particular focus on sustainability.

Introduced by the College of Education and Human Development in 2016, 20 years after the Centennial Olympic Games, the center aims to bridge the gap between academic research and the sports industry.

Its work informs government agencies and organizations such as professional sports leagues about the way “green” stadiums and initiatives can contribute to environmentally sustainable development in their cities.

The center has studied the environmental impact of so-called “mega” sporting events such as the Olympics and the Super Bowl. It has worked with the Australian government to develop a framework PHOTO BY MEG BUSCEMA

to guide sustainability efforts for sports organizations in Australia. Last year, center researchers co-authored the United Nations’ Sports for Climate Action Framework, which calls on sports organizations to collectively support and promote sustainability and advocate for climate action. Since the framework was released, 50 organizations have signed on, including the New York Yankees, the National Basketball Association and the U.S. Tennis Association.

In June, the Center for Sport and Urban Policy was the first and only academic group to receive the Environmental Innovator Award from the Green Sports Alliance, which leverages the influence of sports to promote healthy, sustainable communities.

When presenting the award, the alliance noted the center’s involvement in the Playoff Green program at the 2018 College Football Playoff national championship game, where more than 40 Georgia State students, faculty and staff served as Green Ambassadors to promote sustainable behavior.

Kellison and the center’s co-director, Beth Cianfrone, associate professor of sport administration, are already talking with the organizers of the NCAA Men’s Final Four, which Atlanta will host next April, about helping with their sustainability initiatives.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear to sports organizations, from both an economic and a community engagement perspective, that they need to consider their environmental footprint,” says Kellison.

“We’re working to help more teams do more.”

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BOOKS

A RECIPE FOR SAFER FOOD Contaminated food causes 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths each year in the United States. In his recent book, “Outbreak: Foodborne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety,” Distinguished University Professor of Law Timothy Lytton examines the history and complex workings of the country’s food safety system.

It seems like we are constantly hearing about foodborne illness outbreaks in the news. Are outbreaks becoming more common, or is it just that we’re becoming more aware of them?

We don’t know. On the one hand, outbreaks are more visible because public health surveillance systems are constantly improving. On the other hand, some forms of industrial food production may have made our food more vulnerable to contamination than it used to be. For example, the mass production of bagged salad greens allows one batch of contaminated lettuce to cross-contaminate all of the lettuce in a large production run. In the end, it’s hard to determine how great a role each of these factors plays in the growing number of reported outbreaks.

In the book, you note it is very difficult to assign legal responsibility when outbreaks occur and people get sick or even die. What makes it so hard to identify the responsible parties?

There are an estimated 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, yet very few people who get food poisoning go to a doctor. And even if they do go to a doctor, most physicians don’t take a stool sample or send it to a state laboratory to get tested. And even if a physician orders testing, the state lab doesn’t always report it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of the 48 million acute illness episodes every year, the CDC only detects 14,000 that are tied to a particular pathogen. And of those, the government only figures out what food was responsible in about 300 cases.

Consequently, the likelihood of a food producer being held accountable is about as likely as a lightning strike, maybe less.

Still, are high-profile lawsuits and occasional criminal charges an effective deterrent against food contamination and outbreaks?

Yes. Even though a lightning strike is unlikely, people put lightning rods on their homes because if lightning does strike, it can destroy your house. The same is true in the food industry. If you are a food producer, it’s very unlikely to have a foodborne illness traced back to your beef or lettuce or crackers, but if it is, it can damage your brand and, in some cases, ruin your company.

Read the full interview, which includes Lytton’s ideas for improving the country’s food safety system, at researchmagazine.gsu.edu.

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RESEARCH | FALL 2019

ALSO ON SHELVES….

“Grey Area: Regulating Amsterdam’s Coffeeshops”

by Scott Jacques In the Netherlands, so-called “coffeeshops” are permitted to sell cannabis — but only if they obey the rules. Jacques, associate professor of criminal justice and criminology, examines the effectiveness of Dutch drug policy.

“The Black Shoals”

by Tiffany King King, assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, examines the intersection of Black and native studies through the metaphor of the shoal, a barely submerged bank that rises from the bed of a body of water.

“Black Women Slaves Who Nourished A Nation”

by Kimberly Cleveland Cleveland, associate professor of art history, uses artistic renderings to analyze the history and significance of Black wet nurses in Brazil.

“Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health”

by Steven P. Black Black, assistant professor of anthropology, tells the story of a Zulu gospel choir composed of people living with HIV in South Africa.

“Email”

by Randy Malamud What’s the state of your inbox? In this book, Malamud, Regents’ Professor of English, discusses the ever-present email, part of a series on the “hidden lives of ordinary things.”

COVER COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

NOTEWORTHY

INSTITUTE FOR BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, professor and director of the Center for Translational Immunology, has received $9.25 million to establish one of six new centers funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The six Cooperative Research Centers will focus on developing vaccines to prevent sexually transmitted infections.

Bao-Zhong Wang, associate professor, has received $3.26 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to combat influenza virus by developing a universal vaccine that offers more protection against the flu than seasonal vaccines.

J. MACK ROBINSON COLLEGE OF BUSINESS Daniel Bello, professor and director of the Institute for International Business, has received a silver medal from the Journal of International Business Studies for five or more substantive contributions in the first 50 years of the publication. S. Tamer Cavusgil, the Fuller E. Callaway Professorial Chair and director of the Center for International Business Education and Research, has been awarded a gold medal for 11 or more substantive contributions.

Rajeev Dhawan, the Carl R. Zwerner Chair of Economic Forecasting and director of the Economic Forecasting Center, has received two certificates of forecasting excellence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Abbie Griffith Oliver, assistant professor of managerial sciences, has been awarded the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Best Dissertation Award for 2018 for “Think Crisis, Think Female? Shareholder Reactions to CEOs Following Corporate Violations.”

PERIMETER COLLEGE Andrea Hendricks, associate professor of mathematics and associate department chair for online math and computer science, was selected by the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges as a Teaching Excellence Award recipient.

Nancy P. Kropf, dean and professor in the School of Social Work, co-authored the book, “Senior Cohousing: A New Way Forward for Active Older Adults,” with Sherry Cummings of the University of Tennessee.

Cynthia Lester, associate dean of math, computer science and engineering, was named one of 20 Fellows in the Aspire Alliance’s Institutional Change Network

IAspire Leadership Academy. IAspire Leadership Academy helps address the national need to broaden diversity and increase inclusion in science, engineering, technology and math fields, and higher education leadership.

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH Gerardo Chowell, professor and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences, has received the Best Paper Award from Infectious Disease Modelling for his publication “Fitting dynamic models to epidemic outbreaks with quantified uncertainty: A primer for parameter uncertainty, identifiability, and forecasts.”

Daniel Crimmins, professor and director of the Center for Leadership in Disability, has received the George S. Jesien Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of University Centers on Disabilities. The national honor recognizes a distinguished career of excellence and leadership in advancing policy and practice for and with people living with developmental and other disabilities, their families and communities.

Harry Heiman, clinical associate professor of health management and policy, and Richard Rothenberg, Regents’ Professor, have received a two-year, $250,000 grant under Systems for Action, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to study the mobility challenges limiting low-income, chronically ill patients in accessing healthcare, healthy food and other activities that enhance physical and mental well-being.

Ike Okosun, associate professor and director of epidemiology and biostatistics, has been elected to the 2019-20 Board of Directors for the American College of Epidemiology.

Terri Pigott, professor of population health sciences and professor of education policy studies in the College of Education & Human Development, has received a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The award will fund the Modern Meta-Analysis Research Institute, which will provide training in meta-analysis for scholars studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) educational interventions.

John Steward, senior academic professional, has been elected to the Georgia Environmental Health Association’s Board of Directors.

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NOW YOU SEE IT

The Missing Link

BY LATINA EMERSON

Nearly 57,000 children under the age of 5 are hospitalized each year in the U.S. with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which typically causes cold-like symptoms but can lead to serious respiratory distress. RSV is the most common cause of bronchiolitis (inflammation of the small airways in the lungs) and pneumonia (infection of the lungs) among babies in this country, and it’s also a major cause of severe respiratory illness in older adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite decades of work by scientists, there is no vaccine to prevent RSV infection, partly because of a disastrous vaccine failure during a 1966 clinical trial. The early vaccine not only failed to protect children, it made their symptoms worse. Two toddlers died and several infants were hospitalized with what’s known as “vaccine-enhanced respiratory disease.”

Sang-Moo Kang, professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, believes he might have found the missing link to make a safe RSV vaccine. Kang has created a unique adjuvant — a chemical that is added to a vaccine to prime the immune system — and a recent study in Virology showed it can prevent the complication that doomed the 1966 vaccine. In the study, Kang tested his new adjuvant against existing ones. The image above shows inflamed airway tissue from the lungs of mice that received a vaccine with a conventional adjuvant and were then exposed to the virus. Kang’s adjuvant, on the other hand, activated the immune system while preventing lung inflammation.

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RESEARCH | FALL 2019

IMAGE COURTESY OF SANG-MOO KANG

U.S. News & World Report, 2020

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