UF Explore Magazine | Fall 2018

FALL 2018

Fall 2018, Vol. 23, No. 3

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Extracts Research Briefs

Resilience After the Storm Helping a stronger Puerto Rico emerge after Hurricane Maria

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The Elephant’s Child Science is better than fiction for an evolutionary biologist

Asteroid Origins New theory could help protect Earth

Dr. Kent Fuchs President Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research Board of Trustees Mori Hosseini, Chair David L. Brandon Ian M. Green James W. Heavener Leonard H. Johnson Thomas G. Kuntz Daniel T. O’Keefe Rahul Patel Marsha D. Powers Jason J. Rosenberg Robert G. Stern Katherine Vogel Anderson Anita G. Zucker Explore is published by the UF Office of Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. © 2018 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu Editor: Joseph M. Kays joekays@ufl.edu Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Ivan J. Ramos

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Writers: Joseph Kays Stephenie Livingston Cindy Spence

Communicating Science for Good Pioneering tactics for creating change

Photography: Kristen Grace Kaitlin Hall John Jernigan Jesse Jones Tyler Jones

The Conversation

Web Editor: Jewel Midelis

Flu Fighter

Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron

About the cover: This Puerto Rican flag appeared on the famous Yokahú Tower in El Yunque National Forest shortly after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in September 2017.

Illustration by K. Kinsley-Momberger

Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville Member of the University Research Magazine Association www.urma.org

Still Exploring UF's Research and Scholarship

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millions

all 2018 represents the 60th issue of Explore magazine. From Volume 1 Number 1 in 1996 to Volume 23 Number 3, the stories in these pages have tracked the arc of research and scholarship at the University of Florida over nearly a quarter century.

That arc has helped UF become a top 10 public research university with aspirations to climb even higher. One measure of that growth is the amount of research funding awarded to our faculty annually. In 1996, research awards surpassed $200 million for the first time. In 2018, UF received a record $837.6 million in research funding, surpassing the previous record set in 2016 by $113.6 million.

That first issue of Explore featured a story on the opening of the Sid Martin Biotechnology Development Institute, which today is recognized as the top biotech incubator in the world. The Fall 2000 issue focused on the university’s strength in butterfly research. Today, UF’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity is home to more than 10 million specimens, making it one of the world’s largest butterfly and moth collections. And a 2006 story featured efforts by ophthalmology Professor William Hauswirth and colleagues to develop gene therapies for blinding diseases. That story David Norton said “clinical treatments are still years away,” but last December those ambiVice President for Research tions became reality when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Luxturna, a gene therapy developed in part by Hauswirth to treat a blinding disease called Leber congenital amaurosis.

All of these successes are the result of sustained research over many decades, backed by support from many public and private funding sources and a commitment from university leaders.

This issue of Explore highlights new examples of the many ways in which UF research makes a difference. $40 College of Our faculty were quick to respond to the devastation Liberal Arts & Sciences Hurricane Maria wreaked on Puerto Rico and now they are providing their expertise to rebuild the island.

Research by two of our astronomy professors has College of provided new insights into asteroids in our own ENGINEERING solar system and planets orbiting other stars.

Sharks and other chondrichthyans are windows into evolutionary history and UF conCollege of tinues its world leadership in studying these MEDICINE Fiscal Year 2018 unique creatures At a time when facts are routinely questioned, it’s imperative that we communicate science effectively, so the work of the Center for RESEARCH AWARDS Public Interest Communications couldn’t be more important.

As UF’s research enterprise continues to grow, we look forward to sharing many more stories in Explore about the science and scholarship being conducted by our faculty. millions

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Obesity Rates Up New Data Reveals High Florida Obesity Rates lorida’s obesity rate may be higher than originally thought. A widely used national health survey puts the overall obesity rate in the state at 27.8 percent, but a new study based on an analysis of a robust clinical data repository shows a rate of 37.1 percent – nearly 10 percentage points higher.

The findings by researchers from University of Florida Health, Florida Hospital in Orlando and the Tampa-based nonprofit Obesity Action Coalition were reported in the journal Obesity Science and Practice.

The researchers calculated obesity rates in Florida by analyzing data from the OneFlorida Data Trust, a database of medical claims information and electronic health records data for more than 12 million people statewide. To establish their findings, they compared those obesity rates with data from the national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, or BRFSS, said Stephanie Filipp, the study’s lead author and a UF College of Medicine statistician.

The study is one of the first to make such a comparison, she said.

Data culled from more than 1.3 million adult Floridians’ electronic health records was based on patients’ objective measurements during at least two health care visits between 2012 and 2016, whereas height and weight information for the BRFSS was self-reported by respondents

during the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual 2013 telephone survey.

Why the discrepancies?

“The data make all the difference. People responding to surveys tend to over-report their height and underreport their weight,” said Matthew Gurka, a UF College of Medicine health outcomes and biomedical informatics professor and the study’s senior author.

Having objective obesity estimates from electronic health records is important because it helps policymakers decide how to focus their resources, Gurka said.

“There is an urgency to address and understand true rates of obesity because there’s a lot of other healthrelated issues that are coupled with it,” Filipp said.

To determine Florida obesity rates for the study, the researchers used body mass index, or BMI, based on a person’s height and weight for adults ages 20-79 living in Florida. A BMI of 30 or higher indicates obesity.

The OneFlorida Data Trust is part of the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, a network of hospitals, health systems and clinics throughout Florida that includes the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of Miami. Together, they provide health care to more than 40 percent of Floridians.

Doug Bennett

The Gulf

Gigi Marino

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UF History Professor Wins Pulitzer

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istory professor Jack E. Davis won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History for his book “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” the Pulitzer Prize Board announced in April.

“Jack’s considerable talent lies in his ability to take on large, sweeping subjects, boil them down to the human level and make them a compelling read,” UF Provost Joe Glover said. “‘The Gulf’ is no exception. It is a remarkable book, and we are incredibly proud to have him on our faculty.”

In his review of “The Gulf” for The New York Times in May 2017, Philip Connors wrote, “In Davis’ hands, the story reads like a watery version of the history of the American West.

Both places saw Spanish incursions from the south, mutual incomprehension in the meeting of Europeans and aboriginals, waves of disease that devastated the natives and a relentless quest by the newcomers for the raw materials of empire. There were scoundrels and hucksters, booms and busts, senseless killing in sublime landscapes and a tragic belief in the inexhaustible bounty of nature.”

“The Gulf” also won the Kirkus Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a New York Times Notable Book and made a number of other “best of” lists in national publications.

“Jack Davis’ book on the Gulf of Mexico is a spectacular contribution,” said David Richardson, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “We are thrilled that the Pulitzer committee felt the same way in awarding him the prize in history. In the tradition of the best historians, Jack weaves a story of a place and its peoples and their uniquely American identity. Jack excels as a scholar and writer in the classroom and beyond. We are proud to have him among our faculty.”

When Davis first conceived of “The Gulf,” the Deepwater Horizon accident that dumped 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico had not yet happened. That Davis was writing a history of the Gulf around the same time as the largest oil spill in history was coincidental, but it allowed him to focus on aspects other than the spill, which he says, “seemed to rob the Gulf of Mexico of its true identity.”

“I wanted to restore it, to show people that the Gulf is more than an oil spill,” he said. “It’s got a rich, natural history connected to Americans, and it’s not integrated into the larger American historical narrative. That’s a wrong I wanted to correct.”

Gigi Marino

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Matt Splett

Jürgen Bulitta, center, is an associate professor of pharmaceutics in the College of Pharmacy, and principal investigator of two federally funded grants that aim to identify new drug combinations of existing antibiotics to better target deadly bacterial superbugs. Assisting Bulitta with the research are postdoctoral research associate Dhruvitkumar Sutaria, left, and former lab technician Jonathan Beutel.

Slowing Hospital Superbug New antibiotics to target bacteria

UF

Health researchers are developing new antibiotic drug combinations to attack one of the world’s deadliest superbugs.

The superbug Acinetobacter baumannii, or A. baumannii, is a bacterial pathogen resistant to many antibiotics. Commonly found in hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities, A. baumannii is among the most challenging hospital-acquired pathogens in the world. It appeared at the top of the World Health Organization’s 2017 list of priority pathogens that “pose the greatest threat to human health.”

Treatment of A. baumannii infections costs an estimated $389 million per year in the U.S. alone and

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is associated with mortality rates as high as 80 percent.

A. baumannii infections can no longer be treated with a single antibiotic; therefore, researchers around the world are eagerly developing new drug combinations and new antibiotics to combat this bacterial superbug.

“Acinetobacter baumannii can cause serious infections of the respiratory tract and bloodstream, and also impact burns and combat wounds,” said Jürgen Bulitta, an associate professor of pharmaceutics in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, and principal investigator of two recently funded UF Health studies related to antibacterial drug development. “These infections are notoriously difficult to treat and can be

deadly if they enter the respiratory system or bloodstream.”

The National Institutes of Health awarded a $3.4 million, five-year grant to UF, Case Western Reserve University and Monash University in Australia to study novel antibiotic dosing strategies against A. baumannii. Bulitta and coinvestigators George Drusano and Arnold Louie from the UF College of Medicine aim to identify new combinations of existing antibiotics that will better target A. baumannii.

In addition, a $2.2 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was awarded to the three researchers from UF Health, along with Robert Bonomo from Case Western Reserve University, and Brian Luna and Brad Spellberg from

the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. This team seeks to validate animal infection models that support research and development of new antibiotics against A. baumannii.

“A lack of validated animal infection models for preclinical studies of Acinetobacter baumannii presents a significant hurdle for the development of new, useful therapeutics,” said Drusano, director of UF’s Institute for Therapeutic Innovation at Lake Nona. “If we can validate the animal models, then we can make a tangible contribution to combat this bacterial superbug.”

Matt Splett

Elegant Simplicity T

he worm could hardly be more different from the scientists studying it.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a nematode the size of a pencil point with a mere 959 cells.

The cell count in the average human is roughly 30 trillion.

Humans are capable of high reason (86 billion neurons). The worm – well, it wiggles (302 neurons).

A UF Health scientist and his Chinese collaborators, however, recently discovered the mechanism behind a form of hearing loss affecting tens of millions of people by examining two proteins the worm and humans share, even 600 million years after their common ancestor split down two forks in the evolutionary road.

Their research, published in the journal Neuron, expands the fundamental understanding of cell mechanics and could one day assist researchers in curing hearing loss or other genetic diseases that may yet be tied to related proteins.

“We are very excited by this finding,” said Rui Xiao, an assistant professor in the UF College of Medicine whose research involves geriatric medicine and pharmacology. “The beauty of basic scientific research is that it is sometimes unpredictable. You really don’t know where the project will lead you or who it might ultimately help.”

In collaboration with Lijun Kang, a professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, the researchers discovered that these two “transmembrane channellike” proteins, known as

TMC1 and TMC2, influence how neurons and muscle cells conduct electrical signals, said Xiao.

Genetic mutations in one or both of the TMC1 and TMC2 genes can cause partial or total hearing loss in humans, although the mechanism had been unknown.

The study by Xiao and his colleagues suggests that TMC proteins may act like an errant gatekeeper in the cell’s protective plasma membrane.

Mutations of TMC will prevent a normal electrical signal, generated when hair cell sensory receptors in our inner ears respond to sound waves, from flowing through neurons leading to the brain.

That means the brain is unable to interpret the signal as sound.

The type of hearing loss typically caused by mutations of these proteins is called autosomal recessive nonsyndromic hearing loss, which represents up to 8 percent of all genetic hearing loss, Xiao said.

This revelation was made possible by C. elegans, a common worm found in Florida and around the world that is a bit of a scientific rock star. The nematode has been the subject of research that has generated three Nobel Prizes. It is the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced and has been the subject of zero gravity research on the International Space Station.

The worm’s scientific popularity is due, in part, to a simplicity that belies a fortuitous genetic complexity. Beyond the manageable number of cells and neurons,

Jesse S. Jones

Tiny nematode guides hearing research

Rui Xiao, a geriatrics and pharmacology researcher in the UF College of Medicine, works in his laboratory.

the worm is transparent, allowing an easy microscopic view of its organs. It also reaches adulthood in three days and has a lifespan of about three weeks, which means researchers can more quickly study successive generations. That makes the species especially useful for aging research.

Yet, C. elegans carries about 19,000 protein-coding genes compared with about 35,000 for humans, and roughly 80 percent of the nematode’s genes are related to those found in humans.

So by studying the worm, scientists hope to gain insight into the mechanisms behind human disease.

Xiao and his colleagues were able to show that the mutations in the worms’ TMC1 and TMC2 genes largely prevented them from expelling eggs from their bodies. While the mutations’ impact on the species

is different from that in humans – egg laying versus hearing – the principle is the same.

The worm’s muscle cells can’t communicate with its neurons because the mutations have shut off the electric flow between them like a closed faucet, the researchers found.

In fact, if the worm’s TMC1 and TMC2 genes are replaced by the same genes from humans or other mammals, the nematode’s defective reproductive system starts operating normally, indicating that TMC proteins might work in a similar way among different species.

Xiao conducts research in the UF College of Medicine’s Department of Aging and Geriatric Research and also is a faculty member in the Institute on Aging.

Bill Levesque

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Snagging Card Skimmers NYPD testing UF device

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redit card skimmers – electronic devices criminals stick on ATMs and gas pumps to secretly suck up your sensitive financial information – may have finally met their match.

UF researchers have teamed up with the New York City Police Department’s Financial Crimes Task Force to deploy the “Skim Reaper,” a device that instantly detects the presence of a skimmer, allowing law enforcement and merchants to take action before the card’s data can be stolen.

Real-world trials are already underway – UF built five detectors for NYPD, which is deploying them in all five New York City boroughs for field testing.

Preliminary UF tests show the device is able to detect skimmers with high reliability. Consumers may be able to get their hands on one in six to nine months, and it may be small enough to fit in your wallet.

“Payment card skimming remains a popular crime, and attackers can easily get into the business using a few inexpensive parts purchased over the Internet,” said Patrick Traynor, co-director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research at UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. Traynor helped develop the skimmer detector.

Lt. Gregory Besson with the NYPD Financial Crimes Task Force, said card skimmers are a rapidly growing problem.

“In New York City, we saw a surge in ATM skimming

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in the past few years, as evidenced by the increase in devices recovered by our agency, the NYPD,” he said.

“In 2015, we recovered 48 devices, and two years later that number had doubled to almost a hundred devices in 2017. Correspondingly, our arrests more than doubled for the same period, from 48 skimming-related arrests in 2015 to 134 skimming arrests in 2017.

“The big takeaway is that we’re always seeking new innovative ways to tackle this growing crime type, and we welcome trying new tools that would aid us towards that goal.”

Card skimming costs more than $2 billion a year globally in fraudulent charges, according to the website ATM Marketplace.

Credit card skimmers come in two varieties: those that are placed inside a legitimate card reader – think of those security stickers on gas pumps showing they’ve been inspected and are clear of internal skimmers – and those that have their own card reader, known as overlay/insert skimmers.

Criminals can attach an overlay skimmer to an ATM, gas pump or in-store payment terminal in seconds, park nearby and collect data via Bluetooth as customers use their cards. They often return a few hours later, retrieve the skimmer and leave unnoticed.

Overlay skimmers are far more common than the internal type because they’re easy for criminals to install and difficult to detect. It’s those overlay skimmers that

Prototype of the Skim Reaper, a device developed by UF engineers that alerts consumers if a magnetic strip card reader is unsafe.

the new detection device was designed to snag.

The skimmer detector prototype works like this: A plastic card the same size of a credit or debit card is inserted into the card reader. The detector inspects the card slot and alerts the user if the reader is unsafe.

In the real world, a consumer could simply insert the detector into the reader before using his or her own credit or debit card. The detector would immediately notify the consumer if something is wrong.

“While more-secure chip cards are becoming more common, their universal use, especially in ATMs and gas pumps, is likely years away,” Traynor said. “That means those old-fashioned swipe cards with the magnetic strips on the back will be around for the foreseeable future – along with their vulnerabilities.”

Until the skimmer detector is available to the public, law enforcement officials offer these tips for consumers to protect themselves:

Wiggle the card reader before you insert your card. If it feels loose, don’t use it.

Cover your hand while entering your PIN, even if you think no one is watching.

If the security seal on a gas pump card reader is broken or has been tampered with, don’t use it.

Use gas pumps close to the building and in view of the cashier Use a credit card, not a debit card.

“Vendors and law enforcement need better tools to protect this payment channel,” said Nolen Scaife, a doctoral researcher who worked on developing the skimmer detector. “That’s precisely what this research has set out to accomplish, and we believe that this tool will go a long way in the fight against card skimmers while allowing payment terminal operators to continue leveraging their existing equipment.”

Steve Orlando

Nanomaterials In 4D

New electron microscope scans in real time

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hen famed physicists Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska first introduced the transmission electron microscope (TEM) in 1933, it allowed researchers to peer inside cells, microorganisms and particles that were once too small to study.

For decades, these highpowered instruments had been limited to taking static snapshots of specimens, which only tell part of the story. Now researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Florida are filling in the blanks to make this story more complete.

The team is part of an effort to develop a new type of TEM that takes dynamic, multi-frame videos of nanoparticles as they form, allowing researchers to view how specimens change in space and time. Knowing how these particles form could change how researchers design future drug-delivery

systems, paints, coatings, lubricants and other materials for which having control over nanoscale properties can lead to large effects on macroscale materials.

“We have demonstrated that TEM does not have to be a microscopy method solely used to analyze what happened after the fact – after a reaction ends,” said Nathan Gianneschi, professor of chemistry, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering at Northwestern, who co-led the study. “But, rather, that it can be used to visualize reactions while they are occurring.”

“Before, we just had snapshots of what things looked like in particular instances of time,” said Brent Sumerlin, the George Bergen Butler Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida, who co-led the study. “Now, we are beginning to see the evolution of materials in

real time, so we can see how transformations occur. It’s mind blowing.”

The research was published in the journal ACS Central Science. Mollie A. Touve, a graduate student in Gianneschi’s laboratory, is the paper’s first author.

Gianneschi and Sumerlin’s novel technology has three major components: polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA), a robotic system that assembles the experiments and a camera attached to the microscope that captures the particles as they form and change.

An expert in PISA, Sumerlin has long used the technique, which makes large quantities of well-defined soft materials, in his laboratory.

He specifically uses PISA to form self-assembling micelles, a type of spherical nanomaterial with many applications – from soaps to targeted drug delivery.

Although micelles are well known for having interesting functions, there are knowledge gaps in how they actually form. Gianneschi and Sumerlin wondered if they could use an electron microscope to watch micelles – in action – as they self-assemble with PISA. “Because these materials are on the nanometer length scale, we obviously needed an electron microscope to observe them,” said Gianneschi, a member of Northwestern’s International Institute of Nanotechnology. “So, essentially, we wanted to use the electron microscope as a test tube.”

With high precision and reproducibility, the team’s robotic system assembled all of the chemicals needed to make the particles. Then, the microscope’s electron beam triggered a reaction that caused the micelles to begin to form. Although Gianneschi’s camera system did not capture the micelles’ entire transformation, it did allow the researchers to see part of it.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that we pulled this part off,” Gianneschi said. “But optimizing the system – so we can see the reaction’s entire trajectory – will keep us busy for the next few years.”

Still, Gianneschi and Sumerlin are pleased that they have introduced an important element to electron microscopy: time. Gianneschi likens their achievement to the process of cooking.

“Imagine cooking dinner without being able to watch it,” he said. “You can follow the recipe, but you don’t really know how it’s going.

You can’t watch the meat brown on the stove or the dough rise. You need to be able to observe it directly.

We take that for granted in normal life.”

“With traditional chemical analysis, sometimes the output is a two-dimensional line with a few peaks and valleys, and we use that to gain an idea of what’s happening,” Sumerlin added. “But now we are actually making nanostructures and watching them form. This is a big change.”

Amanda Morris

Micelles

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SmartPath

Irrigation doesn’t have to use fresh water

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niversity of Florida scientists will work with growers to encourage their use of alternatives to fresh water by using new smart irrigation systems.

This way, growers can lower their risk of transferring pathogens from water to crops, said Eric McLamore, an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering in the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“To reduce the inherent risk that results from using alternative irrigation water, technology is needed to provide data-driven support to help farmers manage water effectively,” McLamore said.

Farmers also can use the technology to use less fresh water to grow their crops. In addition, they can meet the

Food Safety and Modernization Act requirement of testing water quality within eight hours of sampling, McLamore said.

McLamore will lead the Center for Excellence, made up of scientists from five institutions, including UF/ IFAS. The universities are using a new, $5 million, five-year U.S. Department of Agriculture grant as part of the Water for Food program.

Support from the grant will allow researchers from the universities to develop a new technology called SmartPath.

With SmartPath, growers can ask themselves if they want to mix, say, brackish water with fresh water.

“Each grower is different,” McLamore said. “Rather than creating a one-size-fitsall technology, SmartPath

develops a library where growers can survey the technology for their particular situation to see if they want to switch to alternative irrigation water sources. But it’s an informed decision.”

In the second phase of the project, scientists will link treatment and sensing systems to measure physical, chemical and biological criteria including temperature, pH, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nitrate and phosphate as well as bad bacteria, McLamore said.

Scientists will integrate sensors into a decisionsupport system using the “Internet of Things” platform, which provides growers with rapid feedback on the system, including economic feasibility.

To ensure broad applicability, researchers will focus on four key regions of the U.S., with varying drought conditions – Florida, Texas, Iowa and Maryland. They also will zero in on three types of alternative water sources – treated domestic wastewater, brackish groundwater and surface water that does not meet regulatory requirements, McLamore said.

“Through laboratory testing in our one-of-a-kind test-bed facility at UF/IFAS, and field case studies in all regions, SmartPath will develop and validate smart water-treatment systems, coupled with sensors for a variety of scenarios,” he said.

“This Center of Excellence will increase the use of alternative water for irrigation of fresh produce, thereby decreasing freshwater withdrawals and closing basin water gaps,” McLamore said.

SmartPath will train a transdisciplinary cohort of 12 graduate students and 20 undergraduate students, and researchers will interact with more than 1,000 students per year through various formal and informal teaching activities.

“We anticipate reaching at least 1,000 stakeholders through integrated extension, research and education efforts that include hands-on workshops and online learning modules in 2D and 3D,” McLamore said.

Tyler Jones

Brad Buck

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One Scoop or Two

Vanilla could be new crop for Florida farmers

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or dessert, how about a scoop of ice cream flavored with vanilla from Florida’s farmers? Because so many consumers enjoy vanilla, University of Florida scientists hope to help Florida farmers grow the bean.

Consumers have an appetite for vanilla. The U.S. leads the world in imported vanilla beans, said Alan Chambers, an assistant professor of horticultural sciences in the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Madagascar grows about 80 percent of the world’s vanilla, but that island lies thousands of miles from the companies that buy vanilla beans and convert them to extract, Chambers said.

That’s all the more reason UF/IFAS wants to see if vanilla can be grown commercially in Florida.

“Everything we could grow would be consumed,” said Chambers. “We believe the market is there. It’s got huge potential.”

“There are only a few places in the U.S. with favorable conditions to grow vanilla on a commercial scale, and South Florida is one that has several advantages,” said Elias Bassil, an assistant professor of horticultural sciences who’s working with Chambers on the vanilla research.

Chambers and Bassil, both faculty members at the Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead, are trying to connect the genetic and physiological dots to help South Florida farmers eventually grow vanilla.

Chambers researches genetics and breeding, and

Bassil studies vanilla physiology and biotechnology to understand how the plants respond to common environmental stresses.

The scientists are studying vanilla genetics so they can grow the best beans.

Chambers has brought over 100 accessions to his lab. Accessions are types of plant material from which a scientist can select those genes needed to produce ideal vanilla cultivars.

“We are mining the genetic diversity represented in our collection in order to find those key genes that underlie the most important traits associated with superior quality and productive vines,” said Bassil.

“We have several modern biotechnological tools at our disposal to achieve this.”

Chambers sees potential to breed new vanilla cultivars fit for farmers to produce plenty of the crop. He also hopes to breed great-tasting vanilla.

“Vanilla has global appeal, but lacks the foundational research that led to superior crop cultivars such as apples, strawberries, tomatoes, wheat and most other food crops,” Chambers said. “We don’t even know what we’ll find when we start looking for new traits and fruit qualities.

Therefore, the true genetic potential of vanilla is still enigmatic, and vanilla science could be at the very foundation of new and exciting future possibilities to delight consumers with novel sensory

attributes from vanilla-based products.”

For now, those who grow vanilla in South Florida are hobbyists.

“We have growers and homeowners interested in producing vanilla, but we don’t have scientifically validated information and accessible resources available yet,” Chambers said.

That’s why Chambers and Bassil caution that even if they can develop a vanilla bean that grows well in local conditions, farmers would cultivate it as a secondary crop.

The two scientists envision many domestic opportunities for vanilla growers, including local, organic, domestically grown, niche quality opportunities like novel flavor combinations and added income through tourism.

With vanilla, Chambers draws comparison to the

origins of other UF/IFAS breeding programs.

“But we’re just getting started,” he said. He compared the scientists’ experimentation with blueberries 50 years ago or strawberry 100 years ago in Florida. “At least UF/IFAS has a history of crop establishment and supporting new, promising species.”

Brad Buck

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Signs of Migration Military seeks warning of human migrations

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atural and agricultural disasters can lead to massive human migrations, and a University of Florida scientist will lead a group that will improve our ability to predict the patterns of those movements.

Rachata Muneepeerakul, an associate professor in agricultural and biological engineering in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to study human movement patterns. UF’s portion of the grant is about $3 million. The balance of the grant is for the work done by researchers at other universities with whom Muneepeerakul will collaborate.

The Department of Defense wants to know as far in advance as possible when and where these mass migrations are likeliest to happen. That way, the federal government can know when and where to deploy military force and where to send humanitarian aid, as just two possible examples, he said.

“Migration can potentially cause many problems: social or political tension, depletion of resources, crime, etc.,” Muneepeerakul said. “If we cannot adequately predict migration patterns, we won’t be able to devise plans to deal with these problems and will be caught off guard.”

To predict migration patterns, researchers will try to develop a modeling platform to improve scientists’ ability to anticipate human

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movements caused by different environmental changes.

While many researchers have proposed migration theories, they’ve been fragmented, Muneepeerakul said. Some researchers have focused on what caused the migration or what happens once people arrive at their new location. This study will pull together work from researchers in many fields at UF and at other universities.

Examples of case studies that the researchers might investigate include: Hurricane Mitch: The second deadliest hurricane on record, the hurricane devastated much of Central America in 1998, causing historic flooding. Nearly 3 million people left the area, he said.

Many people migrated to the U.S., especially Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina for jobs in food processing, construction and the service sector.

Hurricane Maria: Last year, Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico’s communications systems and other infrastructure. Many of those displaced citizens wound up in Florida and the northeastern U.S. Drought: More than 30 million people need food and more than 10 million of them are on the brink of famine in Somalia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen.

Brad Buck

Migrant workers harvest sweet potatoes in Suwannee County in October.

Migration Trends

Changing Florida Worker Population

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s the University of Florida IFAS Extension director for Hendry County, Gene McAvoy has seen firsthand a sea change in the types of workers now coming to the United States to work on farms.

“It used to be 95 percent or more of the workers were from Mexico,” McAvoy said.

“Now, it’s about 50 percent from Haiti and the Caribbean. The population has changed as many workers are deported or voluntarily return to Mexico.”

Now, a UF/IFAS researcher will begin a twoyear study this fall on this new worker population in south Florida. Gulcan Onel, an assistant professor in the food and resource economics department, has received two grants: one from the UF/ IFAS Southeastern Coastal Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, and another from the UF Office of Research. She will lead a team of multidisciplinary researchers on the study.

“Central American and Caribbean immigrants, especially Haitian Creole, have begun to fill in the void left by the decrease in Mexican migrant workers,” said Onel, whose research focuses on immigration, labor markets and farm workers. “This change highlights cross-cultural differences as they begin to integrate into rural United States communities.”

According to Onel, these cross-cultural differences in social, health and economic statuses are poorly understood in these new migrant communities, and can have profound impacts on worker productivity, healthcare, and earnings potential.

“For example, Haitian workers may have different belief systems that prevent them from seeking help when they become sick,” Onel said.

“Mexican workers may have tighter social and family networks in the U.S., while Haitian workers may be more socially isolated. Differences like these can impact mental

Food Security Egypt Illustrates Global Food Security Issues

S

and physical health, and consequently the overall wellbeing and productivity of farm workers.”

The research team will combine different aspects of health – mental, physical and occupational – to create a framework for overall health, Onel said. “One affects the other, they are intertwined, so we have to examine and address each aspect to understand overall wellbeing,” she said.

“We will conduct health assessments, including physical health, anxiety, depression and feelings of social isolation,” Onel said.

“We will combine that information with social networks and demographic/ occupational backgrounds of both Hispanic and nonHispanic immigrant workers.

The data will help us build a new framework of rural well-being.”

In the future, Onel hopes that her study will be used to develop culturally mindful interventions to reduce health and safety risks and improve the livelihoods of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic migrant farm workers.

Beverly James

cientists, including many at the University of Florida, are trying to figure out how to feed 10 billion people worldwide by 2050. As they do, some UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers are studying how arid nations can produce enough crops to feed themselves and to avoid civil protests or even war.

Egypt, for instance, lacks sufficient water to grow enough wheat, forcing the country to import half of that type of grain, researchers say.

A new study shows Egypt’s wheat production will likely be insufficient in 20 to 25 years.

Low crop production can grow into a national and global security issue, said Jim Anderson, director of the UF/ IFAS Institute for Sustainable Food Systems.

“Breakdowns in the global food system are not only a root cause of hunger, underachievement and obesity, but also have been identified as a key cause of social unrest and, in some cases, civil war,” said Anderson, a professor of food and resource economics.

As an example, increased bread prices were one reason people protested during the Arab Spring of 2010-2011, said Senthold Asseng, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

Asseng led a recent study on Egypt’s long-term ability to produce its own wheat.

Egypt faces critical agricultural concerns. At 13.2 million tons per year, the country ranks as the world’s leading wheat importer, taking half its

grain from other nations, Asseng said.

In the new study, researchers from UF/IFAS and Egypt found the middle-Eastern nation can grow enough wheat to feed itself through 2040, but after that, production Harvested wheat in an Egyptian field. looks uncertain.

“To feed its population and change on agriculture and become independent from food systems, Asseng said. wheat imports, the EgypThe group enabled this multitian government tries to institutional and bi-national expand wheat production by research, he said. doubling the irrigation area Egypt’s wheat producthrough a new national inition gains global importance tiative,” Asseng said. because many countries “This initiative will make export wheat there. Most Egypt self-sufficient in the comes from Russia, the near future, but will be Ukraine and Romania, insufficient after (the decade Asseng said. The U.S. exports of the) 2040s,” he said. “By relatively little wheat to then, Egypt will have to Egypt – about 100,000 tons start importing wheat, again, in 2017-2018, he said. But the due to declining yields from U.S. and Egypt are linked climate change and increasthrough wheat prices. ing demand with population “On an economic growth.” level, as the largest wheat Climate change will affect importer, the role of Egypt agriculture everywhere in in the global grain market is the world, however, climate critical to any grain- or foodchange will be felt first and producing country or region,” hardest where food shortage Asseng said. “The U.S. is is an issue already, Asseng the fourth-largest wheat prosaid. ducer and number one wheat He and other scientists exporter in the world.” work on the Agricultural Almost every state in the Model Intercomparison and U.S. produces wheat. The Improvement Project, also leading states are Kansas, known as AgMIP – a global North Dakota, Montana and research network.

Washington.

Scientific knowledge through AgMIP is key to Brad Buck understanding the impact and consequences of climate

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14 Fall 2018

K Kinsley-Momberger

ESILIENCE R After the Storm

By Cindy Spence

Helping a stronger Puerto Rico emerge after Hurricane Maria

I

n August 2017, architecture Professor Martha Kohen was teaching Resilience of the Caribbean Islands, a graduate seminar. She started her classes with a roundtable discussion of current events, something she calls the World News Café, an idea she borrowed from sociology.

“We do it every class for 15 minutes or so, and students bring interesting outlooks that can be applied to the class,” says Kohen. “It gets us out of the ivory tower and more linked to what’s going on in the world.”

On Sept. 26, a month into the semester, the news was bleak.

In the week since the last class meeting, Hurricane Maria had hit Puerto Rico. Even the earliest reports from the island indicated the direct hit from the category 4 hurricane was a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions. Overnight a society crumbled: electricity, communications, food, water and infrastructure disappeared.

As the class talked, an idea emerged: Puerto Rico is so close – hop a plane in Florida at lunchtime and you could have dinner in San Juan – wasn’t there something the University of Florida could do?

Kohen thought so and took the lead, making connections across campus, and weeks later, UF hosted displaced Puerto Rican students and faculty. Then at semester’s end, UF's Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism hosted a conference on campus, led by architecture Professor Nancy Clark, focused on tropical storms as a setting for adaptive development and architecture.

But Kohen knew the best way for her students to help Puerto Rico – and learn at the same time – was to put boots on the ground.

When she organized Puerto Rico Re_Start for the spring semester, all the students wanted to go.

“Everyone saw an opportunity to make a difference,” Kohen says. “Everyone wanted to help.”

Kohen cast a wide net in her call to action, leveraging her international contacts, and by March, a small army of 104 students, 35 professors, five U.S. and European universities and one UNESCO chair had teamed up to descend on Puerto Rico for 10 intense days of morning-to-night workshops and charrettes focused on helping the island imagine rebuilding.

The Puerto Rico Re_Start group piled into school buses to tour sites devastated by the storm and then broke into five design labs, each with its own mission (see sidebar). The diverse, multidisciplinary group could have stopped there, handing off its ideas for rebuilding with resiliency and sustainability in mind to the Puerto Rican people, but the connections flourished.

The synergy created by their interdisciplinary work has turned research on Puerto Rico’s rebuilding into almost a fulltime enterprise for Kohen, Clark and research associate Maria Estefania Barrios.

They’ve been to New York, back and forth to Puerto Rico, and presented at a conference hosted by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Along the way, their network has grown.

In New York, at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Kohen found herself talking with a cell service provider who wanted to establish direct satellite connections, not dependent on cell towers and Puerto Rico’s fragile utility grid. Earlier, she had been talking with an architect who told her he had identified 200 community centers that would be good sites for solar power. She made the introductions.

15

Kaitlin Hall

Nancy Clark, Martha Kohen and Maria Estefania Barrios

“I said, ‘Jonathan, do you know Jose Luis? No? Jose Luis, do you know Jonathan?’” Kohen recalled. “I got them together face to face, and now they are working together. Things can happen faster once these connections are made.”

A year after Maria, the UF architects have become glue people, playing a role in connecting NGOs and agencies, entrepreneurs and academics who want to help rebuild Puerto Rico.

“We need to connect information from churches, banks, authorities, all the people who want to do things but don’t know what everybody else is doing,” Kohen says.

Barrios has received special training to help with a Hunter College databank in its Center for Puerto Rican Studies to help with all the projects related to rebuilding Puerto Rico. Kohen notes that 990 NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations, work in Puerto Rico, but most are not connected with the others.

With the databank, anyone can see who is doing what and team up. All the design labs for Puerto Rico Re_Start are on a website, which is linked to the databank, and they pop up with a keyword search.

And online is where FEMA found the UF team and drew them in to the government’s conversations about how to help in Puerto Rico’s recovery.

The architecture students’ instincts were right. UF could help, and in more ways than one.

16 Fall 2018

Joining Forces When Harold Lathon landed in Puerto Rico with a FEMA team to assess response and recovery options, he says he found storm damage of historic magnitude. That’s quite a statement, considering that Lathon cut his teeth on Hurricane Katrina, and he has seen the aftermath of catastrophic storms such as Hurricanes Sandy and Ike since.

He knew the response and recovery would require a huge team with diverse expertise, and he began to do some research. He came across Puerto Rico Re_Start and decided academia might have resources to offer. He reached out to Kohen.

“I was so impressed with her willingness to work collaboratively,” says Lathon, who is the transportation sector task force lead for National Disaster Recovery Support. “That’s the beauty of recovery, when you can find partners that are willing to work collaboratively.

We will need additional strategic partners from academia, the public sector and the private sector.”

Lathon invited Clark to be a moderator of a panel on ecological urbanism and transportation recovery planning at a FEMA summit in July designed to bring together the best ideas for recovery.

In August, Kohen and Clark hosted Lathon on a visit to UF, and Lathon

U.S. Air Force

A year after Maria, the UF architects have become glue people, playing a role in connecting NGOs and agencies, entrepreneurs and academics who want to help rebuild Puerto Rico.

says he found on campus a wealth of resources that could be leveraged to help Puerto Rico rebuild.

“We have an opportunity to take a holistic, comprehensive look at reconstructing Puerto Rico, and we see a number of programs here at the University of Florida that could help,” Lathon says. “I’m excited to see the work going on in the various labs.”

In his three days on campus, Lathon toured the Powell Family Structures & Materials Laboratory, which researches hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados among other structural stresses. He visited the GeoPlan Center, which uses geographic information systems to support planning for land use, transportation and the environment. He met with engineering Associate Professor

Kaitlin Hall

The “most famous house in Puerto Rico” sits at the bottom of the hill it fell down during Hurricane Maria in Utuado, Puerto Rico.

An aerial view of damaged homes near Añasco, Puerto Rico.

Touring Puerto Rico on school buses and on foot, students assess damage left by Hurrican Maria.

David Prevatt, who studies mitigation of wind damage and the performance of residential structures under high winds.

He also met with Morris Hylton III, director of UF’s Historic Preservation Program, and with Jeff Carney, the associate director for the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience.

The theme that runs through the UF labs and research programs is sustainability and resilience, and those two factors will be the key to both rebuilding Puerto Rico and girding the island against future hurricanes. In the midst of the challenge, he says, there are great opportunities.

“This is the first time in disaster recovery history that we find ourselves in a place where we may be able to provide a sustainable financial solution

in recovery,” Lathon says.

Part of the challenge for Puerto Rico is its condition before Maria. The island never recovered from an economic downturn in 2006-08 and its infrastructure has suffered from decades of deferred maintenance. The power grid was already fragile before it was knocked out by Maria. That makes the Puerto Rico Re_Start approach – planning for sustainability and resilience –particularly attractive.

Now, with appropriations from Congress, roughly $50 billion, there is funding for the kind of planning that can rebuild Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and harden it against future hurricanes at the same time.

“We are looking to all hands on deck to support this effort,” Lathon says.

“Fifty billion sounds like a lot, but it pales in comparison to a $300 billion problem.”

Perilous Position Puerto Rico is accustomed to tropical storms and hurricanes, but the 2017 hurricane season was particularly vicious.

The eye of Hurricane Irma passed north of Puerto Rico on Sept. 6 as a category 5 storm, the strongest on record in the open Atlantic. Irma killed four people in Puerto Rico, cut power to two-thirds of utility customers and caused one-third of the population of 3.4 million people to lose access to clean water.

Reeling from Irma, the island was not ready for the hurricane warning

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U.S. Air Force

“This is the first time in disaster recovery history that we find ourselves in a place where we may be able to provide a sustainable financial solution in recovery.”

— Harold Lathon U.S. Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Jitu Whitehead, a transmission and distribution specialist with the 249th Engineering Battalion, repairs power lines in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.

issued by the National Weather Service on Sept. 18, or the news that Maria had intensified more rapidly than any other hurricane ever measured. On Sept.

19, just hours before landfall, Reuters reported that 60,000 to 80,000 people who lost power during Irma were still without electricity.

On Sept. 20, Maria hit Puerto Rico with winds of 155 mph. Towns directly in the path reported 80 to 90 percent of structures destroyed and power was lost across the island, taking with it access to clean water. National Weather Service equipment on the island was destroyed and communications – internet, telephone lines and cellphone towers – were wiped out.

In the span of two weeks, the record set by Irma as the costliest Caribbean

FLORIDA BA HA MA S

hurricane on record – at $64.8 billion – was eclipsed by Maria’s damage estimate, a whopping $91.6 billion. The death toll in Puerto Rico, first drastically undercounted at 64, is now estimated to be 2,975.

Other effects of the storm – defoliation of the island’s lush tropical landscape by extreme wind speeds – created a surreal atmosphere.

“Our island used to be green, be beautiful. Now it’s brown,” says Luis Rodriguez, a University of Puerto Rico (UPR) architecture graduate student who was hosted by UF after the storm.

“It looks like a nuclear bomb left this.

You wouldn’t think a hurricane could do that.”

UPR architecture Professor Anna Georas, who co-directed Puerto Rico Re_Start with Kohen and began her partnership with Kohen during her visit to UF after Maria, says she almost does not know how to describe the aftermath.

“People would be driving on the highway, and if they got a signal, they would stop the car and call their loved ones,” Georas says. “Our

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Hurricanes near Puerto Rico in September 2017.

18 Fall 2018

society shut down. We didn’t have food, we didn’t have gas, we didn’t have light, we didn’t have water.

“That’s so toxic for the younger people, so to get them to the University of Florida, where they could feel normal and productive, was very meaningful for them.”

For Georas and Rodriguez, another effect of the storm, the swelling of the diaspora, is disheartening although they understand the urge of their fellow citizens to seek a normalcy they cannot find on the island any longer. Even before Maria, more Puerto Ricans, roughly 6 million, lived outside the island than on the island, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. After Maria, another 200,000 left for the mainland, many to Florida.

Georas noted that many professionals, particularly doctors and nurses, are leaving the island for the mainland, and Rodriguez laments the brain drain, but he understands it.

“I love my island. Every Puerto Rican will tell you, we love our island,” Rodriguez says. “But right now, if I want to have a minimal good life, I have to leave my island. It hurts, but it’s the truth.”

PUERTO RICO

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MARIA

Ben Simons

Puerto Rican Power Crisis Ted Kury and Mark Jamison

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urricane Maria plunged Puerto Rico into the longest blackout in U.S. history and the secondlongest worldwide, with 3.4 billion hours of power lost.

In October, when University of Florida utility researchers Mark Jamison and Ted Kury traveled to Puerto Rico, they joined an international group exploring options to fix the island’s power grid.

Kury, an economist, says everyone wishes there was an easy answer, but nothing about utilities in general, and Puerto Rico’s fragile utility infrastructure in particular, is simple. The island’s utility grid was already suffering from years of deferred maintenance. Many customers were still without power, thanks to Hurricane Irma two weeks before, when Hurricane Maria dealt the knockout blow.

Jamison, the director of UF’s Public Utility Research Center, and Kury made presentations to the governor’s blueribbon task force investigating energy reforms.

The task force will make recommendations on what the future of the utility industry in Puerto Rico might look like.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, is government-owned, so one key question will be whether to keep that model. Another key question will be whether to establish an independent regulatory agency to oversee PREPA. PURC’s expertise is in international utilities, particularly in Africa and in the Caribbean, says Kury, PURC’s director of energy studies and an expert on utility preparedness. Islands, Kury notes, face a different task in hurricane recovery.

Kury said the first thing that struck him in the aftermath of Maria was the amount of transmission infrastructure that was down. While neighborhoods are accustomed to seeing utility crews fixing low-voltage distribution lines along city streets after a hurricane, it is unusual to see devastation to the 100-foot towers that carry high-voltage current along rights of way.

“You knock down a hundred power poles, you can fix those with a bucket truck,” Kury says. “But with transmission lines, you need helicopters and cranes and heavy equipment. The sheer magnitude of the damage to the transmission system was unusual.”

After Hurricane Irma hit Florida, Kury says he was driving down I-75 alongside bucket trucks and crews from Kentucky and Texas and other states. But those crews can’t drive to Puerto Rico.

And transmission lines are complicated. Kury says a major project to extend transmission lines in Oklahoma is taking about 18 months, and that is under the best of circumstances. Puerto Rico had an estimated 80 percent of its 2,400 miles of transmission lines damaged. That repair job will take much longer, he says.

Another solution people often ask him about – burying utility lines – is more complicated than it seems, Kury says.

Typically, communities prefer to place high-voltage power lines 200 feet in the air, as opposed to 10 or 12 feet underground because it keeps electromagnetic emissions at a distance, allowing the fields to dissipate. Another factor to consider with placing utility lines is the most likely source of a

community’s storm damage. If it’s wind, undergrounding could help, but if it’s storm surge, undergrounding exposes power lines to corrosive moisture.

Undergrounding is also considerably more expensive. Kury says burying power lines can cost about $1 million per mile, with geography or population density cutting the cost in half – or tripling it – and it does not always improve service.

“That’s one reason we don’t go around undergrounding everything willynilly,” Kury says. “You can pay more and end up getting worse service.”

Every region has its own idea of what reliable electrical service looks like, and Kury says it will be interesting to explore that question in Puerto Rico.

The North American standard – one outage in 10,000 days – is not a realistic standard everywhere. North American utility systems keep roughly 18 to 20 percent more generation on hand than they need, and that reserve margin is something for which citizens pay.

In Nigeria, where Kury has worked extensively, citizens don’t even have enough generation capacity to meet demand on a normal day. In some countries, 50 kilowatt hours a month is typical, whereas in Gainesville the average household uses 800-900 kilowatt hours a month.

As an economist, Kury thinks intelligent design of utility rates will be important in Puerto Rico, such that those who use more electricity pay more, and those who use less – smaller, lowerincome households – pay less.

Puerto Rico is still working on job one post-crisis – getting the lights back on. Kury says he is looking forward to learning more about job two: figuring out what to do next.

Kury says it is important that Puerto Rico not expect a miracle fix. The perfect source of electricity depends on what a community wants and its own geographic, technological and political constraints. The easy answer does not exist.

“I often get asked what is the best way to generate electricity,” Kury says.

“You know, we’ve had electricity going on 140 years now. If there was one best way to provide it for everybody, we’d probably be pretty close to finding that out right now.”

Cindy Spence

19

“Design is an interdisciplinary activity, It is the typical duty of we architects to synthesize and present the first ideas that must be understood by everybody. I hope these young architects, who worked so hard, are not discouraged.”

— Lucio Barbera

Designing Day and Night Kohen, Georas and the design labs were on day seven of the Puerto Rico Re_Start workshop in March when they got a dose of what Puerto Ricans had been living with since Hurricane Maria.

Power and internet connections went out at the host institution, the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras campus, bringing the design labs to an abrupt halt.

As has been common in Puerto Rico since the hurricane, they found help from a neighbor: Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. They packed up their suitcases full of drawing materials and decamped to the nearby school. Kohen wasn’t fazed.

“We are camping,” Kohen shrugged, as the design labs hummed all around her. “That is our situation right now, we are camping.”

The students banded together by design lab, with one in a stairwell, another gathered around a cluster of tables, another spread out on a landing, the architects and architecture professors moving among them. The students were oblivious to the conditions: working, chatting and munching snacks, focused on their work.

20 Fall 2018

Leaving for dinner one evening, Kohen admonished them not to stay up all night, something architecture students are known for, but she acknowledged that her advice might not be heeded. The students were on a roll.

The problems they were trying to address – urban redevelopment, revisioning communities, making housing more resilient and less flood-prone, using natural systems to manage flood water – were a tall order for a 10-day workshop and they were determined to use every minute.

Some of the ideas, such as using shipping containers to meet a variety of needs in an emergency, were used by all the labs. Stephen Bender of CityLab Orlando, showed how the modest containers, generally 8 feet wide and 8.5 feet high, by either 20 or 40 feet long, could be transformed depending on needs: communications centers, sanitation stations, laundry facilities, camp showers, even impromptu dormitories (see sidebar).

For various at-risk towns, that lab proposed green infrastructure combined with new public amenities, using strategies designed to promote self-sufficiency and protect the vulnerable communities against future storms.

Another lab addressed the problem of abandoned buildings, partly due to the exodus of Puerto Ricans before the storm, but also after.

“People just lock their house and drive to the airport, park the car, leave the keys, take the plane and say good-bye,” Kohen says. “We saw abandoned cars, abandoned buildings, and there is not a policy for how to reuse the buildings.”

Georas notes that 44,000 buildings may be abandoned, and some could be reconfigured as housing units, potentially repopulating the urban core.

“Redensify and fortify, abandon certain areas back to nature. Reconcentrate. Become stronger and safer. It may be safer to huddle together as these storms become stronger.

“Puerto Rico needs a paradigm shift from typical urban plans. We can draw beautiful walkways and parks. That’s a wonderful way to approach urbanism, under the presumption you’re always going to have citizens,” Georas says. “But we’re emptying, so who are we going to make the park for?”

Kaitlin Hall

Old San Juan

Rebuilding with Resilience Lucio Barbera, the chair for sustainable urban quality and urban culture for UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, led one design lab and offered comments as the students presented their ideas during their final day on the island. The jury had pelted the students with questions, and the students had to defend their work. Barbera, an architect himself, asked them not to be discouraged.

“Design is an interdisciplinary activity,” Barbera said. “It is the typical duty of we architects to synthesize and present the first ideas that must be understood by everybody. I hope these young architects, who worked so hard, are not discouraged.”

The mission of Clark’s design lab grew this fall, as she co-teaches a graduate seminar called Scaling Landscapes with Kohen. Her design lab in March took a holistic approach to address water management from the mountain town of Cubuy to the coastal town of Loiza, and in Scaling Landscapes, students are taking a comprehensive look at the La Plata River Basin.

“Instead of a 10-day charrette, we are using a 16-week effort to look at the entire river basin and come up with a master plan that could serve as a model for all the other river basins on the island,” Clark says.

When the class visited Puerto Rico in the fall, it exchanged ideas with students and professors from PennDesign, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and Georas’ students from UPR, who are working with other river basins.

The idea of green infrastructure, using natural resources to channel water as opposed to building dams, is gaining momentum, Clark says, and that largescale, sustainable infrastructure approach is important to the Center for Hydrogenerated Urbanism, which she and Kohen direct. The big picture approach is also something Puerto Rican officials seem to be ready to embrace.

“I’m really optimistic because there is an understanding that something different has to take place,” Clark says. “There has been a shift in attitude about what the future can be for Puerto Rico. They don’t want to just build back the same way. Puerto Rico can become the model for other vulnerable, at-risk places.”

Barbera, of UNESCO, agreed.

“Puerto Rico is like a laboratory of things that happen other places on the planet,” Barbera said in March. “Looking into this, we are learning for a much wider audience than Puerto Rico.”

Rodriguez, who floated between all the labs in March, answering questions about Puerto Rican culture and customs to help the labs develop ideas with realworld applications, said he hopes the labs’ ideas are followed up.

“I hope our politicians realize we need these projects,” Rodriguez said. “I hope these projects are not placed in a box in a corner of an office.”

For her part, Kohen would not let that happen. She is getting ready for her third trip to Puerto Rico in less than a year this fall, and the second Puerto Rico Re_Start workshop is already on the calendar for March 21-30. The workshop will grow, and FEMA will participate this time.

UF may be a plane ride away, but Kohen says it is positioned to do research and offer assistance, even for the next 10 or 20 years; however long it takes to restart Puerto Rico.

“At UF, we know tropical communities, we know climate, we know immigration and Hispanic traditions, we have established hurricane research and much more that could be put to good use in rebuilding,” Kohen says. “We have a long history of Puerto Rican culture in Florida.”

Martha Kohen Professor of Architecture mkohen@dcp.ufl.edu Nancy Clark Associate Professor of Architecture nmclark@ufl.edu Related websites: https://chu.dcp.ufl.edu http://puertoricorestart.org

Additional UF supporters of work in Puerto Rico include the Center for Latin American Studies, the International Center, the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies, the Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism and the Office of Research.

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104 Puerto Rico Re_Start Group

STUDENTS

Rendering of Logistic Unit

35 Professors

U.S. and European universities

PUERTO RICO

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UNESCO Lab 1: From Mountain to Coast

10 Days 24/7

EMERGENCY CORES

LOCATIONS Loiza, Cubuy, San Isidro

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Lab 2: Abandoned Buildings

TEAM LEADERS Nancy M. Clark, UF, with Silvia Aloisio, La Sapienza University

Lab 1 proposed community hubs with a new green infrastructure to manage storm risks, foster economic opportunities and enhance quality of life for areas hit with massive flooding during Maria. In Loíza, students designed a plaza that can be used for recreation with shade and energy production via solar panels and in a crisis, can be used for communication, water collection, and storage of supplies and food. They also created new storm water wetlands to treat and reduce flooding, an idea that supports sustainability and resilience. In the mountain town Cubuy, another team proposed retrofitting an abandoned school into a community complex with energy production, water collection and amenities needed during emergencies. To increase self-sufficiency and protect vital infrastructure from landslides, students created terraces that could also be used for agriculture.

LOCATIONS

The exodus of citizens from Puerto Rico since 2008 worsened after Hurricane Maria, to the point that the Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York says more Puerto Ricans live outside Puerto Rico than inside. The effect has been a glut of abandoned buildings – more than 40,000 – both residential and commercial, that drags down the economic life of many neighborhoods. Design lab 2 focused on strategies to stimulate repopulation of key neighborhoods and reuse of these buildings. One proposal was to adapt some of these buildings for public and semi-private events and gatherings, such as educational workshops and street markets.

Reinhabitaiting the Roofs

WHY SHIPPING CONTAINERS? They are readily available building material that is:

• Modular • Adaptable

• Prefab • Expandable

• Available 2018 • Portable 22 Fall

• Affordable

TEAM LEADERS

Avenida Ponce de Mar Loren-Mendez Leon, La Goyco, of the University of 1313 Ponce de Seville, Spain Leon, 306 Condado

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o

PUERTO RICO RE_START DESIGN LABS SAN JUAN SAN JUAN

Lab 5: Untapped Economic Opportunities LOCATIONS

Lab 4: Emergency Cores

Lab 3: Residential Resiliency LOCATIONS

TEAM LEADERS

Playita, Laguna, Luis Llorens Torres, Laguna-Llorens Connector

Albertus Wang, UF/CityLab Orlando, with Maria Estefania Barrios and Farah Akiely, UF

Resilient housing plays a key role in how fast residents can recover after a disaster.

Hurricane Maria damaged about 80 percent of housing, so this design lab focused on how to rebuild these structures (and surrounding infrastructure) to make them more storm resistant. Puerto Rico also has large sectors of informal settlements, and these residents are in need of more durable housing. Opportunities also exist to build in resilience. For example, one public housing community has 800,000 square feet of flat roof, perfect for solar panels.

LOCATIONS

TEAM LEADERS

Islandwide

Stephen Bender, UF/ CityLab Orlando, with Farzana Gandhi, New York Institute of Technology

This lab focused on using shipping containers as structures that could be used as emergency cores as needed, becoming centers of service, both permanent and temporary.

Thousands of emergency cores can be deployed around the island to quickly and effectively provide medical, water, energy and communication services. These modular, prefab units are available, affordable, adaptable, expandable and portable. They can be transported via ship, trailer and helicopter.

Kits of parts can change how they are used.

For example, one kit could be used to create a dormitory-style sleeping center, another could be used to outfit a core as a first-aid station, and others could be used for communications or sanitation. Some could be positioned permanently in areas that are hard to reach, so supplies are readily available following a storm.

TEAM LEADERS

Islandwide

Anna Irene del Monaco, La Sapienza University, with Gentucca Canella, Politecnico di Torino

The challenge of this lab was how to revive Puerto Rico’s economy using facilities that are underutilized. Designers focused on an abandoned railroad line, a military base, ports and a private airport hangar (which could be used for expos or as a welcome center). The goal was to create attractive spaces that tourists and locals would want to visit.

Perspective Views The Hanger

Render of the Reception Center

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Calle Laguna Housing Units Exterior Views

Rendering of the Energy and Communication Unit

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Photo illustration by K. Kinsley-Momberger

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a n h t p ’s C e l

Science is better than fiction for an evolutionary biologist

By Cindy Spence

Photo illustration by K. Kinsley-Momberger

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As a child in the Rift Valley of Kenya, surrounded by creatures that are bedtime stories or stuffed animals for most children, Gavin Naylor had questions.

Much like the Elephant’s Child in Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” Naylor had an insatiable curiosity about the lions and wildebeests, zebras and giraffes around him.

For the Elephant’s Child, curiosity leads to a question too many when he asks a crocodile where he gets his dinner. The crocodile bites the baby elephant on the nose, and in the ensuing tug of war, voilà, the elephant gets his trunk. For Naylor, curiosity has led to three decades of research in evolutionary biology. The Elephant’s Child is spanked for his curiosity, and Naylor says he has run across a professor or two annoyed by his curiosity and need for answers to questions about life’s diversity.

“We know mutations are correlated with variation, but we don’t know the nuts and bolts,” says Naylor, the director of the University of Florida Program for Shark Research. “This has bothered me since I was a teenager. I would ask ‘How,’ and teachers would tell me ‘There are millions of mutations, Gavin, evolution just happens.’

“But how?

“We need more than Just So Stories and the notion that somehow you pull a rabbit out of a hat and something happens – the elephant gets its trunk,” Naylor says. “That is not very satisfying.

“I want the theory that makes evolution inevitable,” he says, “not unlikely.”

Primed by biodiversity for a life in science, Naylor got a Ph.D. in zoology and began his own research in molecular genetics and phylogenetics.

But as a scientist, it wasn’t the animals of the East African bush that caught his attention. For the fossil record he needed

to tell an evolutionary story, he had to turn to a watery world: How did the hammerhead shark get its hammer? The sawfish its serrated snout? The ray its water wings?

Natural Fit Naylor arrived at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History in 2017 to direct the Florida Program for Shark Research and the International Shark Attack File, built up and made famous

by Director Emeritus George Burgess.

A year after his arrival he still has a kid-in-the-candy-store demeanor about the resources available to him at UF. He has connected with computer scientists, statisticians, biochemists and others whose specialties he can tap into to develop his own work. In his previous positions, he found collaborators off campus to help with facets of his research. Those collaborations were fruitful, but time-consuming.

“Here, I can just go knock on somebody’s door and say ‘Hey, I’ve got this problem.’ Usually, they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s easy.’ So, coming to a big research university, I can find people with unimaginable skills, and I can find them just down the corridor.”

By their nature, evolutionary questions are multidisciplinary, and he says that means he constantly bumps up against areas where, without collaborators, he would lack the expertise to forge ahead. He says he is fortunate that his colleagues at UF seem to be interested in the same evolutionary and biodiversity questions that drive him.

“I’m cursed by being interested in problems that I don’t have the skills to solve,” Naylor says. “But in this environment, there are people who will help.”

He understands the public’s fascination with the charismatic animals he studies but would like to see that thirst for knowledge last long after Discovery Channel’s hugely popular Explore 25

Kristen Grace

“We are lucky organisms to have been born as human beings and to see the amazingness all around us. How can you not be completely dazzled by the life we see around us? If all of this diversity arises from a single source, then obviously, acquiring novel traits must be something that is fairly easy to do.”

— Gavin Naylor

26 Fall 2018

Shark Week, which runs every summer and sprinkles science in with sensational footage. He admits, almost reluctantly, that he has never seen an episode of Shark Week – “maybe I shouldn’t say that” – but a week of sharks would not satisfy his curiosity anyway.

Since his arrival, he has become acquainted with the huge popularity of UF’s shark attack file and is now the go-to source for help in identifying the shark in a shark-human interaction.

In 2018, as of Oct. 1, there were 40 attacks listed in the shark attack file database, and Naylor says documenting the attacks involves about 200 variables, from the temperature of the water to the spacing of the teeth in a wound.

One encounter yielded an opportunity for more than an educated guess.

After attacks in the summer off Fire Island, New York, Naylor was asked to help identify the species. The shark left behind a rare clue – a tooth fragment – so he was glad to help. Postdocs in his lab sequenced the mitochondrial genome and identified the attacker as a sand tiger shark, likely following a school of fish, and not the great white shark the community had feared. The ID yielded a short item in the journal Nature.

“I don’t know why it is better to be eaten by one species than another,” Naylor says. “But it seemed to calm them down.”

Naylor says the shark attack files are an important avenue for outreach, extending even to his work in evolutionary biology.

“If I can lure people in with a shark attack files carrot and they leave out the exit door being interested in evolutionary biology,” Naylor says, “that’s great.”

Evolutionary Detour Naylor stumbled into the world of chondrichthyans – sharks, skates and rays – in graduate school. To examine

the evolutionary questions he had in mind, he knew he needed a living creature with a long fossil record. Mammals are well studied, Kipling’s explanations for how the leopard got its spots or the elephant its trunk or the camel its hump notwithstanding. Naylor’s adviser suggested snails, but snails were taken; someone already deep into snail evolution.

“So he said, ‘What about sharks?

They have a huge fossil record and we don’t know how the hell to interpret it.

See if anyone is doing sharks,’” Naylor recalls.

“Nobody was doing sharks,” Naylor says, “so that’s what I did.”

About 425 million years ago, sharks, skates and rays took a detour on the tree of life, branching off on their own.

The branch they left behind gave rise to bony fishes, amphibians, snakes, birds and mammals, 64,000 or more species.

Sand tiger shark

The chondrichthyan branch, however, evolved independently and gave rise to just 1,200 species.

But the chondrichthyan branch has been resilient.

About 250 million years ago, more than half the planet’s living creatures died out along with 90 to 96 percent of the planet’s marine species in the Permian extinction. About 60 million years ago, the Cretaceous extinction wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. Sharks, skates and rays survived both, and that makes

Naylor think they have a few tricks up their sleeve.

One of those tricks may be epigenetic regulation, turning genes on or off quickly, so they can adapt without a need for evolution.

“When they go to cold temperatures, a suite of genes switches on. They don’t have to wait until the genome responds,” Naylor says. “If they can put on an overcoat when it gets cold, and their bikini when it gets warm, then they’re equipped to deal with a changing environment.”

Diversity is a strong suit, too.

While most people know the great white shark, the star of “Jaws,” no one has made a movie about the lantern shark, which can glow in the dark and use camouflage. By controlling how much light it emits, it creates a cloaking device that makes it invisible to anything swimming above it or below it.

“The only time you can really see them is from the side, and if you see them from the side, it’s probably too late,” Naylor says.

Others, like the Greenland shark, are estimated to live 400 years.

“There are probably Greenland sharks swimming around that were alive at the time of George Washington,” Naylor says.

Sharks’ reproductive methods are as diverse as the rest of vertebrates combined, Naylor says. Some lay eggs that hatch outside the body, others lay eggs that hatch inside the body. Some have a placental connection to the mother. The sand tiger shark nourishes its developing young by letting the siblings fight it out in utero. As eggs hatch and develop, the tiny sharks swim around the uterus attacking each other. It’s a winner-take-all strategy,

with each of the sand tiger’s uteri producing one offspring.

Some sharks, like bonnetheads, can use cloning – or parthenogenesis – to reproduce when a mate is not available.

Scientists speculate that when mates show up, they return to reproducing sexually. Some great white sharks roam the ocean but, like sea turtles, return to a specific location to breed and give birth. And great whites are as different from blacktips as humans are from dogs, Naylor says.

There are sharks that can solve cognition problems that some mammals cannot solve and some that can recognize shapes, an ability they share with small children.

“Sharks are smarter than people might have thought,” Naylor says.

“They’re not just the eating machines they were believed to be in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Diversity Today, about 8.7 million species of eukaryotes inhabit the Earth. This doesn’t count bacteria or thousands of extinct species that have already disappeared and taken their evolutionary secrets with them. The diversity is tantalizing, Naylor says: blue whales, redwood trees, shrimps, spiders, starfish.

“We are lucky organisms to have been born as human beings and to see the amazingness all around us,” Naylor says. “How can you not be completely dazzled by the life we see around us?

“If all of this diversity arises from a single source, then obviously, acquiring novel traits must be something that is fairly easy to do,” Naylor says.

And if it is easy, Naylor reasons, there must be a mechanism at work. The likelihood that evolutionary diversity is random, as in the infinite monkey theorem – give enough monkeys typewriters and eventually, randomly, they will

Explore 27

28 Fall 2018

Lindsay Marshall

generate the works of Shakespeare – is deeply unsatisfying, he says.

“How did the hammerhead acquire its hammer from ancestors that didn’t have these hammers? There has to be something that is intrinsic that predisposes an organism to diversify and acquire traits. What is it?”

Growing up in the Rift Valley of East Africa, Naylor was struck by the variety of cichlids, which have evolved in the last 20,000 years into thousands of species. By contrast, the coelacanth has not changed in tens of millions of years, Naylor says. Why has one creature shown spectacular speciation and the other barely any speciation at all?

Ideally, he would compare the genome of the creature with a trait to its immediate ancestor without the trait, but with a creature that has a 425-million-year history, he would need a time machine. The next best thing, Naylor says, is an evolutionary tree to organize and interpret patterns and the order of transformations. If one animal has scales and another has hair, the clues to the scale-to-hair transition lie in between the two animals on the tree of life.

But first, you need a tree of life.

With National Science Foundation funding, Naylor compared the same gene across all chondrichthyan species and assembled a tree of life for sharks, rays and skates. The latest version is just about ready to go up on his website https://sharksrays.org, but when he revealed an early version at a conference in 2014, one member of the audience tweeted: “Shark Porn!!” Another tweeted that Naylor’s online database of chondrichthyans made other databases look like an abacus.

Naylor’s lab created the tree of life by using DNA sequencing data matched to fossils to reconstruct the patterns and timeline for diversification of chondrichthyans.

Naylor compared the same gene across all chondrichthyan species and assembled a tree of life for sharks, rays and skates.

“People say sharks haven’t changed in millions of years, but they’ve changed a lot,” Naylor says. “On the outside they look like a torpedo that goes really fast in the water. Inside, they’re very different.”

Darwin, too, was interested in the origin of the variation he saw in nature and theorized about underlying factors that generated variation, but without the benefit of modern genomics. Even modern DNA sequencing, however, doesn’t explain all the variation in nature. Naylor refers to the variation as sprouting, and he says spatially coherent, highly organized structures seem to sprout out of nowhere in the course of evolution.

The mechanism that underlies this evolutionary novelty is what drives him.

He has a hunch shared by many that the answers may lie in the decades-old work of computer science pioneer Alan Turing.

Patterns and Mutations Mutations, Naylor says, perturb a biological system and that perturbation gets translated into variation in a way that doesn’t work in nonbiological systems.

“If you’ve got a toaster and you take some element out or you drop a fork in, the toaster doesn’t change into a vacuum cleaner, it changes into a broken toaster,” Naylor says. “But there’s something about life’s architecture that when you kick it or flick something into it, perturb it in some way, it embraces the perturbation and turns it into something with a physical variant. We want to know what that mechanism is.”

Naylor thinks these variations that some view as accidents have underlying algorithms. And that’s where Turing comes in.

Turing was a mathematician famous for inventing a machine during World War II that broke “unbreakable”

Lindsay Marshall

Patterns in nature that might seem to be random actually have a mathematical foundation.

Turing patterns in biology

German codes. His work laid the foundation for computer science, but Naylor found lesser-known and largely ignored work by Turing more interesting.

Instead of the infinite monkey theorem – random evolutionary success – there is the precision of math and chemistry at work in evolutionary novelty, he believes.

In 1952, Turing theorized that patterns in nature – the zebra’s stripes, the whorls of a shell – could be explained by chemical reactions between molecules. In his theory, a system of reactants generates spatial patterns that diffuse and then generate their own inhibitor to stop the process, creating a self-organizing pattern. By tweaking the inputs to this reactiondiffusion equation, the patterns change.

So, the spots on an animal or the patterns on a shell that might seem to be random actually have a mathematical foundation. Naylor points to the spotted diversity of the freshwater stingrays of South America – “this is one of my animals” – as an example of Turing models in action.

Recent work by colleagues suggests a minor change in the parameters of a reaction-diffusion equation can also explain morphological variation – the

vertebrate fin-to-limb transition. The equation predicts the gene expression that is observed in a shark fin and a mouse limb.

“This excites me because it reconciles my 12-year-old curiosity about how this stuff arises. These guys explain the finto-limb transition,” Naylor says.

So, the next question: Where do fins come from?

“So, we can go from these Just So Stories to these reaction-diffusion models based on Turing’s ideas,” Naylor says. “We think that these self-assembly ideas can explain morphological sprouting.

“With these models, we’ve got organization coming out of chaos. There is nothing random about it.”

Survival of the Fittest If sharks lived on a planet without humans to overfish them, Naylor would laugh at people who suggest they might be harmed by climate change, with its warming seas. The apex predators are apex survivors, not the lucky winners of an evolutionary lottery.

“I’m not worried in the least that these creatures will go extinct from climate change,” Naylor says. “They’ve

weathered two mass extinction events.

They are capable of adjusting.”

Although he was born in East Africa and grew up surrounded by peculiar, basically Pleistocene animals, he once said if someone gave him a submarine he would spend all his time looking around under water, exploring the biodiversity of the ocean.

“As an elementary school child, I was fascinated with Just So Stories – how the elephant got its trunk, how the leopard got its spots – and it’s somewhat ironic that as a practicing scientist I’m still interested in those exact same questions. I’d like to know how all these organisms acquire the features they have,” Naylor says.

“I think we can move beyond these magical, beautifully written stories by Rudyard Kipling that inspired many of us as children to a mechanistic understanding of how these features have evolved from cell biology.”

It’s a real-world evolutionary story, full of wonder nevertheless. Just so.

Gavin Naylor Director, Florida Program for Shark Research gnaylor@flmnh.ufl.edu Related websites: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/sharks/ https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/

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Don Davis

30  Fall 2018

ASTEROID New theory could help protect Earth

By Stephenie Livingston

D

uring Florida’s brief winters and fall in his native England, astrophysicist Stanley Dermott likes to take walks. One might assume these happen at night with telescope in hand. Astrophysicists love the stars, right? No, he’s more interested in the materials that shaped our own rocky planet — and others like it.

“I honestly can’t say I know much about star-gazing,” says Dermott, a professor emeritus in UF’s astronomy department. “I don’t look at the sky the way astronomers do.”

It’s not that he’s indifferent to the beauty of space. Most of what interests Dermott is too far away to be spotted by anything less than the world’s largest telescopes, or deep-space probes like NASA’s Voyager and Cassini. So, when Dermott takes walks, it’s to find time to think.

His mind is filled with theoretical questions that haven’t been answered yet, usually about places that haven’t been seen.

As a theoretical astrophysicist, some of his discoveries were predictions long before space missions confirmed them, others were based on baffling observations by spacecraft that took years to unravel.

Often found working equations in a sparsely decorated office on the second floor of UF’s Bryant Space Science Center, the soft-spoken Dermott is obsessed with structure. The orbits, shapes and evolutionary changes of planets and moons, and asteroids, which characterize our solar system’s function within a spiral galaxy, have drawn his attention for the last 50 years. He wants to know how the solar system moves and has changed through time.

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An expert on solar system dynamics, he co-wrote the textbook on the subject. He reformulated the structure of the solar system in terms of orbital periods, rather than distances, now called Dermott’s Law. He’s studied everything from the origin of the circumsolar ring of dust that circles the Sun to the shapes of icy satellites and the composition of the lakes on Saturn’s largest moon.

Now he’s focused on the asteroid belt: thousands of icy rocks coasting between Mars and Jupiter.

In April 2018, an asteroid more powerful than 100 atomic bombs came closer to Earth than our moon. Thousands of tons of rock fall to Earth each year. Most are the size of peas.

We make wishes on them, and movies about them. Our government even has a plan to protect us from them. But what happens if a big one, a really big one, slips through the net?

The dinosaurs aren’t here to tell us.

Building a more robust understanding of the evolutionary history of asteroids and the materials that form them, Dermott says, could prove essential to protecting Earth and ourselves from asteroids the size of the Statue of Liberty and more powerful than atomic bombs.

“These large bodies whiz by the Earth, so of course we’re very concerned about how many of these there are and what types of material are in them,” Dermott says. “If ever one of these comes toward Earth, and we want to deflect it, we need to know what its nature is.”

Although large asteroid impacts are rare, they played a major role in shaping Earth’s terrain. Some evidence even suggests they brought the first primordial life to our planet in the form of amino acids. But asteroids have ended life, too.

Research has shown the Chicxulub impact off the modern-day coast of Mexico likely caused the dinosaurs’ extinction, leading to the takeover of mammals and eventually humans.

Orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt contains hundreds of thousands of mile-wide asteroids. These asteroids fly through space in various orbits that form an intersecting web, Dermott says. In 1918, at a time when scientists had discovered only 790 asteroids in the belt, the Japanese astronomer Hirayama Kiyotsugu suggested that some of these asteroids, later known as family asteroids, had identical orbits.

This argument suggested that they originated from an asteroid collision. After shattering, Hirayama thought the surviving fragments would have remained in the orbit of the original body, Dermott says.

“If ever one of these comes towards Earth, and we want to deflect it, we need to know what its nature is.”

– Stanley Dermott

John Jernigan

The origins of asteroids remained a debated mystery until Dermott’s team found that most, if not all, asteroids and meteorites originate from the splintering of a handful of minor planets formed during the infancy of our solar system.

Their study, which appeared in the July 2018 issue of Nature Astronomy, showed at least 85 percent of the 200,000 asteroids in the inner asteroid belt — the main source of Earth’s meteorites — originate from just five or six ancient minor planets.

The other 15 percent may also trace their origins to the same group of primordial bodies.

Today, scientists have data on more than 600,000 asteroids in the belt. After analyzing 200,000 of these, Dermott’s team demonstrated that the type of orbit actually depends on the size of the asteroid, showing for the first time that all asteroids, not just those belonging to a few specific families as previously thought, originate from the splintering of a few large parent asteroids.

“This transforms our understanding of the origin of the meteorites that have crashed to Earth,” Dermott says. “These meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids that land on Earth, allow scientists to study the composition of the known source bodies in the asteroid belt, and there are intriguing differences in their makeup.”

32 Fall 2018

The discovery suggests that differences in meteorites found on Earth appear because of the evolutionary changes that occurred inside a few large, precursor bodies that existed more than 4 billion years ago.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually trace the origins of all asteroids in the main asteroid belt, not just those in the inner belt, to a small number of known parent bodies,” he says.

Dermott plans to further investigate the structure of the asteroid belt, as he did years ago for the ring of dust around the sun and the mysterious cloud that stalks Earth.

Dust Ring

A STEROID BELT

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D

T L BE

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This is not the first major discovery of Dermott’s career. In 1994, Dermott’s team showed that Earth is embedded in a ring of circumsolar dust. His team traced the origins of the ring to the asteroid belt, where collisions sent dust flying into space, following planets’ gravitational pull. But they didn’t expect to also find a colossal cloud of dust stuck permanently in Earth’s wake. When the team used NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite — the first space-based telescope to survey the universe in infrared — to look behind the Earth, they always got a brighter signal than when it looked in front. Dermott and colleagues found a gravitational interaction between the dust cloud, part of the larger ring, and Earth. The cloud of dust exists because it is gravitationally trapped in Earth’s orbit.

When scientists first began looking for planets in distant systems around other stars, they couldn’t see them because the planets are comparatively small objects next to enormous stars. “It’s like looking for a firefly in the head of a searchlight,” Dermott says.

The trailing blob of dust is huge.

He realized that it’s easier to spot these hot, colossal dust clouds with infrared technology than planets themselves, a finding that changed the way scientists search for planets in other planetary systems.

Channeling Sagan Years earlier, while a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in the late 1970s, Dermott worked with Carl Sagan, one of the most popular astrophysicists of all time, to study the possible presence of seas or lakes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is a hazy, fatter version of Earth. A thick nitrogen smog and methane clouds hid its polar lakes. Unlike Earth, Dermott and Sagan argued Titan’s lakes would be full of oil.

Dermott developed a tidal flow chart for the hydrocarbon lakes and determined how the lakes’ tides would affect the moon’s orbit. In 2004, the Cassini mission proved their prediction, eight years after Sagan’s death.

“The lakes were not as big as we thought, but at least we knew they were there. That was exciting,” Dermott says.

For each of his major discoveries, Dermott values communicating the findings with the public, a trait of Sagan’s he admired.

“Carl Sagan, at that time, had a mixed reputation. His standing as a scientist was not as high as his standing with the public and I think that was totally unjustified,” says Dermott. “Since he died, his standing with the public is even higher. He’s recognized as one of the great communicators in science.”

During his 16 years as chair of UF’s astronomy department, Dermott helped to raise its international reputation as a world-class center for astronomy. Under his lead, UF became a partner with Spain and institutes in Mexico in building the 34-foot diameter Gran Telescopio Canarias, now the world's largest optical telescope. But he’s most proud of the success students graduating from UF have had getting jobs in the field.

His former student Mark Wyatt is now a full professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge. He’s carried on the work to develop models of the evolution of circumstellar disk material, including linking clumps seen in the dust disk belonging to Vega,

34 Fall 2018

Gran Telescopio Canarias – Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain

the fifth brightest star in the night sky, to gravitational trapping by an unseen Neptune-like planet. Another of Dermott’s students of cosmic dust and debris, J.C. Liou, is now the NASA Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris and serves as the program manager for the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center.

When Dermott was a student himself, he remembered the first time he saw Saturn’s rings through a telescope. Back then, there was nothing like seeing for the first time what you’d previously only known from textbooks.

It was often that initial moment of awe that hooked new students.

Today, Dermott says teachers of planetary science face a new challenge: Hollywood.

“The students are more impressed by these video effects that they see in any sort of movie about space,” he says, pointing out the asteroid belt is one of the more often seen inaccurate depictions in movies.

“They’re always in the asteroid belt and there are all these rocks crashing here and there. The thing is, that’s almost impossible.”

When spacecraft have gone looking for asteroids, they always have had a tough, if not near-impossible, time finding one. Space is, well, space — it’s big

and mostly empty. And asteroids are distances apart that would take months or years to travel. But, it’s been done a few times.

Eros, the first near-Earth asteroid discovered, was also the first asteroid on which a spacecraft landed. In 2001, the robotic probe Shoemaker landed on the asteroid’s surface. Dermott says he’d love to go on a space mission, but probably not to an asteroid. The closest one is a six-year round trip. Our moon is the most reasonable space vacation, he says.

For now, he’s content with pouring over data from 600,000 asteroids.

Understanding the evolutionary history of the bodies that formed our early solar system helps theoretical astrophysicists answer questions related to where other planets like our own might exist. But, first, he says we have to understand the processes that produced our home planet.

Stanley Dermott Professor Emeritus of Astronomy sdermott@astro.ufl.edu

“Star Trek” Planet Vulcan Found?

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, along with Sallie Baliunas, Robert Donahue, and George Nassiopoulos, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed the identification of 40 Eridani A as Vulcan’s host star.

The 40 Eridani star system is composed of three stars. Vulcan orbits the primary star, and the two companion stars “would gleam brilliantly in the Vulcan sky,” they wrote in their 1991 letter.

“Vulcan is the home planet of Science Officer Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek sci-fi series,” says Henry.

“Spock served on the starship Enterprise, whose mission was to seek out strange new worlds, a mission shared by the Dharma Planet Survey.”

“This star can be seen with the naked eye, unlike the host stars of most of the known planets discovered to date. Now anyone can see 40 Eridani on a clear night and be proud to point out Spock’s

home,” says Bo Ma, a UF postdoc on the team and the first author of the paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“This discovery demonstrates that fully dedicated telescopes conducting high-cadence, high-precision radial velocity observations in the near future will continue to play a key role in the discovery of more super Earths and even Earth-like planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars,” says Ge. “I am very grateful to the donor of our Dharma Planet Survey, Mr. Mickey Singer, who recognized the importance of this project and has continuously provided support to make this and future discoveries possible.”

Jian Ge Professor of Astronomy jge@astro.ufl.edu

Don Davis

Among the TV series Star Trek’s many charms are its rich universe of characters and planets. Now, the Dharma Planet Survey, in a new study led by UF astronomer Jian Ge and a team including Tennessee State University astronomers Matthew Muterspaugh and Gregory Henry, has shown that science fiction may be truer than it seems. The Dharma project has discovered what may be Star Trek’s famed planet Vulcan.

“The new planet is a ‘super Earth’ orbiting the star HD 26965, which is only 16 light years from Earth, making it the closest super Earth orbiting another Sun-like star,” says Ge. “The planet is roughly twice the size of Earth and orbits its star with a 42-day period just inside the star’s optimal habitable zone.” The discovery was made using the Dharma Endowment Foundation Telescope (DEFT), a 50-inch telescope located atop Mount Lemmon in southern Arizona. The planet is the first “super Earth” detected by the Dharma Survey.

“The orange-tinted HD 26965 is only slightly cooler and slightly less massive than our Sun, is approximately the same age as our Sun, and has a 10.1-year magnetic cycle nearly identical to the Sun’s 11.6-year sunspot cycle,” explains Muterspaugh, who helped to commission the Dharma spectrograph on the TSU 2-meter automatic spectroscopic telescope. “Therefore, HD 26965 may be an ideal host star for an advanced civilization.”

“Star Trek fans may know the star HD 26965 by its alternative moniker, 40 Eridani A,” says Henry, who collected precise brightness measurements of the star needed to confirm the presence of the planet. “Vulcan was connected to 40 Eridani A in the publications ‘Star Trek 2’ by James Blish and ‘Star Trek Maps’ by Jeff Maynard,” explains Henry.

In a letter published in the periodical “Sky and Telescope” in July 1991,

A “super Earth” orbiting the star HD 26965 fits the description of the planet Vulcan in the Star Trek series.

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COMMUNICATING SCIENCEFORGOOD Pioneering tactics for creating change

By Joseph K ays

36 Fall 2018

John Jernigan

F

rank Karel was an enthusiastic science communicator whose early newspaper reporting at the Miami Herald included John Glenn’s historic flight. He went on to develop ways for philanthropies like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to share stories about the work their grant recipients were doing in health care and many other fields.

To carry on that work after he was gone, the 1961 graduate of UF’s College of Journalism and Communications set up an endowed chair at his alma mater to professionalize and promote the field.

Karel died in 2009, and while he couldn’t have known that someone he had trained and mentored at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation would become the first Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications, he certainly would have approved.

Over the last eight years, Ann Christiano has taken Frank Karel’s vision and grown it into a movement at UF and beyond, promoting the science behind effective communications to university researchers, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, policy makers at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and leaders at dozens of other institutes and agencies around the world.

John Jernigan

Ann Christiano

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Earlier this year, the college launched the Center for Public Interest Communications, the nation’s first center dedicated to developing, translating and applying the science of strategic communication to drive social change.

“Educating students who want to make a difference in their world is a cornerstone of our college,” says Dean Diane McFarlin. “The center is the culmination of many years of curriculum development and community building in this nascent discipline.”

Among the center’s many initiatives: •

A conference on social change communications aptly named “frank” that has become a go-to event every February for change-makers from across the political and social spectrum around the world.

•

The Strategic Communications Academy developed with UF Human Resources that is giving UF scholars and leaders the tools they need to communicate their work with a wide variety of audiences, from the media to Congress.

•

New courses that are not available at any other university that have introduced hundreds of students to a field they likely didn’t even know existed when they arrived at UF. Many have gone on to work in the field at social change organizations like Net Impact and Campaign for Tobacco Free Florida, and at leading public interest communications PR agencies.

UF psychology Associate Professor Lisa Scott has seen firsthand how the strategies the center’s team teaches can be leveraged to achieve goals.

Scott has been making groundbreaking discoveries in her lab about how babies learn, but the only people who knew about them were her colleagues who read the scientific journals in which she published.

So she signed up for the Strategic Communications Academy, where her final project was to develop an article for The Conversation, a news site that provides opportunities for academics to share their research with the general public.

Nearly 350,000 people have read the article in dozens of publications, online and in print, including the Washington Post, Scientific American and, most importantly for her goals, Parents magazine.

“Ann and her colleagues taught us the importance of storytelling and connecting with your audience,” Scott says. “They gave me valuable insights about communication strategies and techniques that I now use in my own teaching and mentoring.”

Civil engineering Associate Professor David Prevatt shared Scott’s frustration about getting his message out.

Prevatt is a structural engineer who studies how to make buildings more resilient in the face of major wind events like hurricanes and tornadoes.

In a recent talk, he showed an image of a neighborhood surrounding a school in Moore, Oklahoma, taken from the air days before a tornado hit. Then he showed a second photo taken after the tornado, when 40 percent of the buildings in the tornado’s path were leveled.

“What’s so frustrating to me about this is that I had published a paper just a few years earlier that – had it been applied – would have saved many of those houses,” he says.

“But, that’s not even the thing that frustrates me most.”

And then he showed a paper of his from the 1990s, that said the same thing, and another from a different scholar that had been published in the 1970s on a similar topic, then another published in 1968, and then one published 121 years ago.

“This knowledge isn’t making its way from the journals into the design plans of builders,” he says. “We have known for more than 100 years how to prevent this kind of damage. I can’t just keep turning out more research papers. I have to be an advocate for the truth.”

Based on lessons he learned working with Christiano, Prevatt has begun developing an app to help home buyers better evaluate houses for resiliency and make minor modifications that could save their lives and livelihoods.

Matthew Lester

“Ann and her colleagues taught us the importance of storytelling and connecting with your audience.”

– Lisa Scott Psychology Associate Professor Lisa Scott tracks the brain function of a colleague’s daughter while reading her stories.

38 Fall 2018

Historically, academic training has discouraged scientists from simplifying – critics would say oversimplifying – explanations of their research so that anyone besides other scientists can understand it.

“There is a narrative that scientists are not good communicators. That they’re content to tuck their work away in journals and share it at sparsely attended academic conferences,” Christiano says. “They are counseled not to invest time in working with the news media because they will be misunderstood and misquoted and will never be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. I don’t believe that narrative.”

Christiano argues that in an era where the Pew Research Center has found that just 40 percent of Americans report strong trust in scientists, and researchers at MIT report that fake news on Twitter can travel as much as six times faster than the truth, it’s more important than ever for scientists to effectively communicate their findings.

Through the center’s own Journal for Public Interest Communications and publications like the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Christiano and Research Director Annie Neimand argue for a more scientific approach to advocacy. They have taken the latest insights from cognitive, behavioral and social science and applied them to communications in new and unique ways.

In their article “Stop Raising Awareness Already” – one of the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s most-read pieces ever – the two say “Too many organizations concentrate on raising awareness about an issue … without knowing how to translate that awareness into action.”

“For those working on a cause they care about, the first instinct is often to make sure that as many people as possible are aware of the problem,” they write. “But is it ever enough for people to simply know more about something? If, for example, the goal were to raise awareness among new parents of the importance of immunizing their children, you wouldn’t be satisfied if parents were simply aware. You’d want to be sure that they were also having their children immunized for the right diseases at the right age.”

In a follow-up to that article – “The Science of What Makes People Care” – that appeared on the cover of the Stanford journal in September, Neimand and Christiano laid out a plan for moving from awareness to action.

“The corporate sector has long taken advantage of science to market products from tobacco to alcohol to dish detergent. For the most part, the social sector has not made the same shift,” writes Neimand, who recently completed her doctorate in sociology. “Social service organizations may conduct their own research through focus groups and surveys, but most lack the

John Jernigan

CHANGING NARRATIVES

Center for Public Interest Communications leaders Annie Neimand, Ellen Nodine and Ann Christiano.

“There is a narrative that scientists are not good communicators.

That they’re content to tuck their work away in journals and share it at sparsely attended academic conferences…

I don’t believe that narrative.”

– Ann Christiano

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resources to root their communications strategies in published academic research. When people working on behalf of social causes have rooted their strategy in science, intentionally or not, they have tended to be highly successful.”

The article outlines five principles based on science for communicating more effectively:

Scenes from the 2018 frank conference.

40 Fall 2018

•

Join the Community – People engage and consume information that affirms their identities and aligns with their deeply held values and worldview, and avoid or reject information that challenges or threatens them. This requires advocates to move beyond a focus on building and disseminating a message to stepping into the world of their target community.

•

Communicate in Images – Concrete, visual language engages the visual and emotional areas of our brains.

•

Invoke Emotion with Intention – Research tells us that people are really good at avoiding information for three reasons: It makes them feel bad; it obligates them to do something they do not want to do; or it threatens their identity, values, and worldview. Although people avoid information that makes them feel bad, they are attracted to things associated with pleasant emotions.

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Create Meaningful Calls to Action – Effective calls to action follow three rules: They are specific; the target community sees how the solution will help solve the problem; and they are something the community knows how to do.

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Tell Better Stories – Storytelling is the best tool we have for helping people care about issues. People are more likely to remember information they get in narrative form. Stories have the unique power to convey new perspectives and thereby lower counter-arguing, increase empathy and capture and maintain people’s attention.

“People fail to act not because they do not have enough information, but because they don’t care or they don’t know what to do,” the two conclude. “If you want people to get on board, you have to make them care, and you have to show them how they can make a difference.”

Their approach to advocacy clearly resonates at places like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Christiano, Neimand and Matt Sheehan, the college’s director of stories and emerging platforms, gave a “science of storybuilding” presentation for Gates Foundation staff and a public event at Seattle’s Gates Foundation Discovery Center that drew

145 people on a rainy day in December and had more than 900 views on Facebook Live.

“We love science at the Gates Foundation,” says Senior Communications Officer Anne Martens. “The Science of Story-Building event drew a significant crowd, and Ann and her team enthralled the audience with a scientific approach to communications, giving people evidence-based tools to move hearts and minds for the public good.”

Scientists who embrace their roles as communicators are onto something, Christiano says. Data from a 2017 Pew Research Center study show that while the public’s trust in scientists is complex, public trust in scientists as sources of information is higher than it is for many other groups in society, including industry leaders, the news media and elected officials.

“In a moment when it feels that science and the truth are under siege, no one is better positioned to address the challenge than scientists themselves.”

Ann Christiano Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications achristiano@jou.ufl.edu Related website: https://www.jou.ufl.edu/cpic/

1

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Communicate in Images

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Create Meaningful Calls to Action

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Jesse S. Jones

Dr. Joseph Tyndall, interim dean of the UF College of Medicine, gets his flu vaccine in September.

FLU FIGHTER

BY DR. NICOLE IOVINE

A

century ago, the world was struck by the most severe pandemic in modern history. Over 50 million people worldwide died, making it possibly worse than even the Black Death in the 14th century. The cause of this extraordinary worldwide disaster was not an exotic pathogen like plague or Ebola – it was influenza. The 1918 influenza pandemic had a profound impact in the United States, causing life expectancy to drop precipitously from the norm at that time of about 55 years to 39 years of age in just a year.

Since then, there have been tremendous advances in medical care, but another pandemic could happen again if we don’t protect ourselves. To do that, we should emphasize high compliance with the flu vaccines that are currently available while we pursue the longer-term goal of a better vaccine.

I am a board-certified infectious disease physician as well as an epidemiologist at University of Florida Health. I have seen the ravages of flu firsthand as well as studied and quantified outbreaks. If vaccines had been available in 1918, there is no doubt that the death toll would have been lower.

Flu Past and Present Influenza has been infecting humans for thousands of years. It was described by Hippocrates as early as 412 B.C. While the symptoms of influenza and the common cold overlap – including cough, fever, runny nose, headache and body aches – influenza is more severe.

People whose immune systems are compromised, pregnant women and people aged 65 and older are at particularly high risk for complications from influenza. This includes respiratory failure and death. Usually, the mortality rate is about 0.1 percent.

While this doesn’t sound like much, multiply it by hundreds of thousands of infections every year, and the death toll mounts.

In 1918, the death toll was exceptionally high, at about 2.5 percent. When the 1918 virus was reconstructed from influenza victims buried in the Alaskan 42 Fall 2018

permafrost, we scientists gained some insight into why: The reconstructed virus harbored mutations that enabled it to bind to cells deep in the lungs, causing a viral pneumonia. That is distinct from the less serious upper airway infection that flu usually causes.

However, the 1918 virus was similar to other flu strains with regards to its propensity to cause a well-known complication of influenza called “postinfluenza bacterial pneumonia,” or PIBP. The thinking is that damage to the lining of the respiratory tract caused by influenza renders a person susceptible to secondary infection by bacteria. In fact, most influenza-associated deaths that occur during normal flu seasons are caused by PIBP.

Vaccination Essential Death from PIBP continues to be an important driver of influenza-related mortality. Therefore, prevention is key.

Vaccination is a crucial component of prevention efforts, and is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for all individuals 6 months of age and older.

However, only about half of all eligible people get the flu shot. Two misconceptions contribute to low vaccination rates: that the vaccine causes influenza and that the vaccine doesn’t work.

The first misconception is easy to dispel. The influenza shot contains only a virus that has been killed, or inactivated. There is no live virus in the vaccine that could cause infection. It’s as simple as that. You can’t catch flu from a dead virus.

Some people will still insist that they came down with the flu because of the vaccine. Confusion may occur if you are vaccinated and then develop influenza a few days later. Here’s why.

You can develop flu after you receive the vaccination, but that doesn’t mean the vaccine gave you influenza. Instead,

it means you were already infected with influenza when you were vaccinated.

Typically, your body needs about two weeks for the immune response to develop after a flu shot.

Since a person can transmit influenza 24 hours before symptoms begin, you may not realize from whom you caught it, because that person may have appeared healthy.

Making Effective Vaccines A second misconception about the shot “not working” stems from an overly broad extrapolation of “vaccine efficacy” studies. These are designed to approximate how many influenza infections are prevented by vaccination. However, vaccine efficacy studies don’t tell us how sick a vaccinated person may be.

Many studies show that vaccination decreases the severity of influenza as well as influenza-related complications. This is an enormous benefit.

People also misconstrue concerns in the efficacy studies about the difference among influenza subtypes.

There are four main influenza subtypes that infect humans. Two are dubbed “flu A.” They are defined by key proteins, called hemagglutinin (“H”) and neuraminidase (“N”), found on their surfaces. The influenza A subtypes that cause most infections are subtypes H3N2, the prevalent subtype this year, and H1N1.

There are also two influenza B subtypes. They are called Yamagata and Victoria.

Every spring, scientists and public health officials from around the world meet to determine the vaccine formulation for the coming year, based on what they know about the strains that are circulating at that time.

Each influenza vaccine will contain both influenza A strains and one or both of the influenza B strains. Efficacy can change each year because flu viruses

Dr. Nicole Iovine

are constantly mutating, so that the viruses causing infections might be quite different from the vaccine strains chosen months earlier.

For example, over the past few years, the efficacy for vaccine for H1N1 and the B strains has been 40-60 percent.

Efficacy for H3N2, however, has been lower, probably because it seems more prone to mutation.

People who are eligible for the influenza shot but choose to skip it unnecessarily place themselves at increased risk for acquiring any of the four influenza strains or for a more severe disease if they do contract influenza. They also endanger others around them by potentially transmitting the infection.

Why doesn’t influenza vaccine efficacy exceed 60 percent? The problem with influenza is its propensity to mutate, such that the strains causing disease this year are a bit different from last year’s.

When these changes occur in key viral sites such as in hemagglutinin, our immune system doesn’t recognize the mutated virus as well, and efficacy declines. Significant mutation can occur within a season too, as happened during 2014. Initially, the H3N2 vaccine strain chosen for the vaccine in February 2014 was well-matched to circulating strains, but by October of that year, H3N2 with

mutated hemagglutinin had emerged and was different enough such that H3N2 efficacy declined to 17 percent.

Research into whether getting a flu shot every year could actually decrease one’s response to the flu virus has been inconclusive, so the CDC continues to recommend annual vaccination. And, while some research suggests antibody responses decline over the course of the flu season – such that those who are vaccinated early may have lower antibody levels by the end of the season – the CDC does not recommend delaying vaccination. Already during the 2018-19 season, there have been 14 deaths from influenza reported to the CDC, including one unvaccinated child.

Year-Round Challenge While people tend to think of influenza as a wintertime disease since it usually peaks sometime between December and February in the Northern Hemisphere, flu is around all year. The year-round presence of influenza viruses amplifies the chance that mutations will accumulate. This leads not only to reduced efficacy but also increased potential for a pandemic.

This problem could be solved if we could engineer a vaccine that stimulated an immune response against a region of the virus that was less prone to mutation. It would be even better if this viral target were common to all influenza strains. Such a “universal vaccine” is the Holy Grail of influenza research.

There are early-stage trials going on right now. If we are to prevent another catastrophe like the 1918 influenza pandemic, we must continue to support research efforts aimed at developing a universal influenza vaccine.

Nicole Iovine Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases nicole.iovine@medicine.ufl.edu

To read more articles by UF faculty, visit https://theconversation.com/institutions/ university-of-florida-1392

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The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Harn Museum of Art explores an era of rapid, radical and irrevocable ecological change through works of art by 45 international contemporary artists. The exhibition includes work by Gideon Mendel, who travels to disparate countries in the aftermath of devastating floods to engage with survivors outside of their homes. Mendel’s survivors show a shared experience and vulnerability that crosses geographical and cultural divides. Left to right from the Drowning World series: Mushaq Ahmad Wani and Shafeeqa Mushtaq, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, October 2014; Adlene Pierre, Savanne Desolée, Gonaïves, Haiti, September 2008; and Jeff and Tracy Waters, Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK, February 2014. www.harn.ufl.edu/theworldtocome