USC Times Fall 2019, No. 2 by University of South Carolina

TIMES University of South Carolina

ENDNOTES

It’s impossible to say where our covers originate. The process always starts as a conversation with Brandi Lariscy Avant, TIMES designer since 2015. I’m usually pushing for something that will play well with End Notes and she is setting me straight about what will actually look good. At some point, we migrate into the office/studio of Kim Truett, our photographer since forever, who explains what will work and what won’t. Along the way, half a dozen compatriots drop by with feedback and wisecracks. Once we settle on an approach, Kim snaps a few thousand pictures and Brandi designs half as many covers, which we puzzle over until we agree on something that pleases everyone. It might be my favorite part of the job. — C.B.

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Until Brandi mocks up a few covers, it’s difficult to visualize the finished product, even after we’ve discussed it to death.

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The next concern was the white space at the bottom. Designers love white space — except when they don’t.

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But once we have a few samples, the serious discussion begins. This time that included a debate on the value of a yellow Post-It.

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Eventually, we realized that Kim’s photo gallery, though still in flux, would provide a fitting touch of seasonal color.

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Ultimately, Brandi reminded me that we’d had a Post-It on our cover before and I peeled it off. See Fall 2018, no. 1.

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Fall 2019 / No. 2 Fall 2019 / No. 2

At this point, the only things left to discuss were the tools of the trade — my red editor’s pen and Brandi’s black Sharpie.

Fall 2019 / No. 2

GROUP EFFORT Recently, I was cleaning out the bottom desk drawer when I came upon a New Yorker cartoon tucked inside an ancient manual, buried under half a dozen forgotten memoranda, a few coffee loyalty punch cards, an empty tin of breath mints and the January 2014 USC TIMES, my first issue as editor. Pictured: two nearly identical men in shirt-and-tie having an uncomfortable con-

TIMES STAFF

versation over the corner of an office desk. The man behind the desk, hand perched

Editor

on his computer mouse, is breaking the bad news, which is spelled out in the cap-

Craig Brandhorst Assistant editor Megan Sexton Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Chris Horn, Page Ivey

tion: “Sometimes I think the collaborative process would work better without you.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Because, let’s face it, we’ve all been there. It’s also funny. But here’s the thing. For all the headaches and hassles that occasionally accompany teamwork, two heads really are better than one — and a full complement is better still. Trust me. After six years working with four designers, one photographer and I don’t know how many contributing writers, I know what it means to be surrounded by talent. I also know what it would mean to go it alone. Which brings me to another thing, and yes, I’m still talking about that cartoon. I

Photographer

don’t think it’s an accident that the men having that uncomfortable conversation

Kim Truett

look so much alike. Yeah, one is wearing a striped tie and glasses, and the other isn’t,

Campus correspondents

but otherwise they could be the exact same person. Considered in that light, the

James Raby and Leslie Hull-Ryde, Aiken Candace Brasseur, Beaufort

same cartoon presents an opposite interpretation. I’m not suggesting we abandon our egos wholesale. No matter how democratic

Shana Dry, Lancaster

the process, somebody has to pilot the ship. On a grant-funded research project, that

Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie

person is the principal investigator. In the case of a magazine, it’s the editor — and

Erin Duffie, Sumter

in the case of TIMES, that’s me.

Annie Smith, Union

Except when I’m reminded it isn’t — like when one of the writers catches my

Jessica Blais, Upstate

editorial mistakes, or when our photographer fixes my focus, or our designer asks

Jay Darby, Palmetto College

me, ever-so-gently, to kill 200 words so she’ll have room for a picture. In nearly every

WI NTE R 2019

case they are right, and this publication is better for it. University of South Carolina TIMES is published and printed twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, Jeff Stensland, interim director. Questions, comments and story ideas can be submitted via email to Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at 803-777-3681.

My point: I work with an exceptionally bright, dedicated, hard-working team. Looking over the contents of this issue, itself a celebration of the collaborative spirit on campus, it’s safe to say you do as well — no matter how hard you might laugh were I to show you that cartoon. Come together,

The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities on the basis of race, sex, gender, age, color, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, genetics, veteran status, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.

CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR

U N IVE R S IT Y O F SO UTH C ARO LI NA ALU M N I M AGA Z I N E

Front & center President Bob Caslen emphasizes character, looks to the future

COVER TO COVER

When you make the cover of Carolinian, you’ve made it as a Carolinian. This winter, the honor goes to President Bob Caslen, who took office as the university’s 29th president just before the start of the fall semester. But you don’t have to be front and center to rise to the top. The latest issue of the University of South Carolina alumni magazine also features stories about alumna and Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library founder Julia Whitehead, a look inside USC Press’s reissue of a landmark photography book celebrating Jim Crow-era African American photographer Richard Samuel Roberts and a touching tribute to professor of religious studies emeritus James Cutsinger, courtesy of the students whose lives he shaped over a 37-year career.

Carolinian. It’s who we are.

The University of South Carolina alumni magazine is published three times a year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.

PHOTO GALLERY Fall into place / 2 The leaves were slow to change, but when at last they did, campus burst to life with autumnal color.

PROOF POSITIVE Carolina confidential / 18 In October, bestselling crime writer James Ellroy visited campus for the Fall Literary Festival and sat for an exclusive interview with undergraduate Susan Swavely.

FEATURES ASPIRE II greatness / 4 The ASPIRE II grant program provides seed money for collaborative research projects every year, and the investment pays dividends across disciplines. page 2

The more ideas, the better / 12 Having more than one teacher in the same classroom provides added expertise and lowers student-teacher ratios. But first, the partners need to click.

FORWARD THINKING Flight control / 22 page 4

page 12

The U.S. military tallies $75 million in damage every year from nuisance birds that collide with its aircraft. A South Carolina engineering team hopes to combat the problem with drones and . . . vegetable oil?

Burden of caring / 23 Dementia diagnoses are on the rise, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s taking a toll on caregivers. A new Arnold School of Public Health program aims to lighten the load.

Sooner the better / 24 page 18

page 22

An NIH-funded study focused on the essential amino acid tryptophan and its potential role to a new autism screening test for very young children.

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PHOTO GALLERY

FALL INTO PLACE

The leaves took their time changing this year, but when at last they did, campus came to life with color. Below: Melton Observatory offers a window on the cosmos, but as the seasons change thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also plenty to contemplate right here on Earth. Opposite, clockwise from top: Black gums along Greene Street add a garnet touch; autumn finally consents to a close-up; students cross a leaf-strewn plaza behind Welsh Humanities; leaving the Horseshoe for Gibbes Green you might wonder which is prettier, but some questions simply cannot be answered.

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ASPIRE II Greatness Working across disciplines, university researchers pursue fresh perspectives by Craig Brandhorst, Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Megan Sexton

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and two heads are better than one. The clichés apply in a lot of arenas, but they ring particularly true in research, which is seldom a solo endeavor. Perhaps no one on campus knows that better than Prakash Nagarkatti, the university’s vice president for research. But Nagarkatti doesn’t simply believe in collaboration. He is also a longtime proponent of transdisciplinary research and, as an example, points back to his time as a biology professor at Virginia Tech. When the EPA and NSF jointly issued a call for proposals to establish research centers focused on contaminated rivers, he saw firsthand what can emerge when experts from different disciplines join forces. “We put together a really comprehensive working group to study the Roanoke River that included faculty from our department, engineering, the business school and other disciplines,” Nagarkatti says. “There were 140 proposals submitted from around the country, but ours got funded. “That made me a believer in interdisciplinary research. When scientists work together across disciplines, their research can lead to the emergence of new fields like immunotoxicology, which was my area of expertise.” When Nagarkatti arrived at the University of South Carolina in 2005, he saw the same ingredients in place here — several schools and colleges doing first-rate health sciences research and a business school and law school poised to join in. In 2011, when he became vice president for research, he encouraged faculty members to focus on challenges unique to the Palmetto State and assemble university-wide teams to solve the problems. To incentivize a transdisciplinary approach, Nagarkatti’s office established the ASPIRE II grant program, which offers internal grant funding of up to $100,000 for research proposals that include faculty members from three or more disciplines. In the eight years since the program launched, it has become quite popular, with some 50 proposals submitted every year, each one listing about five faculty members who want to collaborate. Together, the proposals represent about one-fourth of the university’s tenured and tenure-track faculty, Nagarkatti notes. “We’ve looked at data from six years before the ASPIRE program and six years after. In that time, the number of scholarly publications by our faculty has risen by 40 percent and the number of citations of those publications has increased from about 30,000 to 100,000 per year,” he says. “Our faculty’s work is cited at a higher rate than many of the nation’s leading research-intensive universities.” Since 2012, the Office of the Vice President for Research has invested $16.1 million in ASPIRE awards for faculty and postdoctoral scholars. In the same time period, ASPIRE recipients have garnered more than $171.2 million in subsequent extramural funding, including $71.8 million directly attributable to groundwork laid with an ASPIRE award.

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“We’ve looked at data from six years before the ASPIRE program and six years after . . . Our faculty’s work is cited at a higher rate than many of the nation’s leading research-intensive universities.” PRAKASH NAGARKATTI Vice President for Research

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A vast, multidisciplinary data mining project aims to survey three centuries of book publishing.

Nagarkatti also credits the ASPIRE internal grant program with aiding in the creation of many of the university’s large interdisciplinary centers that have collectively brought in more than $250 million in external research funding over several years. “It’s a huge success story,” he says.

Bookworms and broad questions GRANT TEAM

Colin Wilder, Matthew Brashears, John Rose Colin Wilder admits the idea probably sounded audacious when he first conceived it — combing through millions of digital library records to explore three centuries of European book publishing. But with an $85,000 ASPIRE II grant and a team that includes faculty from two other departments, plus students from three disciplines, Wilder’s audacious idea seems doable. “The thing I most want to do is undertake a broad survey,” says Wilder, an assistant professor of history and associate director of the university’s Center for Digital Humanities. “[I want] to ask very broad questions — 300-year questions — like where were the centers of book publishing from 1500 to 1800? Where did they move from and to and at what times?

“I’d like to create a view of the mountains, a topography of book publishing in its first three centuries.” John Rose, a computer science professor who specializes in data analytics, joined the project “since it looked like there would be some scope for interesting approaches to storing and efficiently querying the data.” “As it turns out,” says Rose, “our target data source changed to an even richer data set than we had hoped to work with. From my data analytics perspective, having access to a larger data set than you’d planned on is fantastic.” The data logistics are daunting, but the team has partnered with the Online Computer Library Center of Dublin, Ohio, one of the leading library and information science foundations in the world and creator of WorldCat. Wilder’s group has just received delivery of some 10 million files, each file representing a book published during the 16th to the beginning of the 19th centuries. Three computer science undergraduates are also part of the research team, focused on decluttering the dataset, eliminating duplicate files and preparing it for the data mining envisioned by Wilder and Matthew Brashears, a sociology associate professor and third faculty partner. “The main payoff of working on this project is the challenge of working with data on this scale, the sheer number of books published over this long span of time,” says Brashears, a quantitative social scientist. “Because we have such a long longitudinal sweep of data, we’re hoping to develop, down the road,

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an ability to predict when intellectual movements are dying and when circumstances are ripe for a new intellectual movement to arise. “It’s possible we can detect patterns in all this data that would allow us to predict future shift s. If we can develop this technique with books, then those same techniques could be applied not just to historical data, retrospectively, but to things we can apply to data in a contemporaneous sense.” If that sounds a little like social media analytics, which sorts through billions of tweets, Facebook entries and other social media posts to detect present trends, well, it is — sort of. “What we’re proposing to do is like doing social media extraction backwards,” says Victoria Money, a graduate student in sociology who serves on the research team. “Instead of searching for certain terms, this will be like letting it come to us and seeing what emerges from the data. It will be a little bit more inductive than deductive.” Brashears says mining the centuries-old data also has a distinct advantage over mining today’s social media. “One advantage we have going back and looking at this older data relative to a social media approach is that there are no bots generating false data, no elaborate botnets sock puppeting,” he says. “What you see in social media is not what you get. So, with our dataset, we won’t be tricked by that background noise.” For Samyu Comandur, a computer science and statistics junior, the interdisciplinary aspect of the research team is crucial. “When we look at a record of library data, we could probably handle it on our own, but in some cases we have no idea of the context,” Comandur says. “I’m very grateful for the interdisciplinary nature of this work and to be at the Center for Digital Humanities.”

As a result, MIRC has been storing the collection off-site for years in World War II-era bunkers at Fort Jackson. That was the case when Heather Heckman was director of MIRC, and it’s still the case now that she is associate dean for technology at University Libraries. “This was actually kind of common. Many archives had similar arrangements at one time,” says Heckman. “Today, I think we may be the only archive still storing this kind of material on a military base.” But while MIRC enjoys a good relationship with the local U.S. Army base, technically, according to the lease agreement, they could be asked to relocate the materials at any time, without advance notice. And even if they were able to keep the materials on-base indefinitely, it’s not an ideal arrangement. “The munitions bunkers are in a relatively remote location, they are designed to hold volatile material, and the risk to human life should something happen to one of those bunkers is very small,” Heckman explains. “The risk, really, is to the collections.” That’s due not just to the volatility of cellulose nitrate film, which can auto-combust at temperatures as low as 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but because the facility wasn’t constructed to contain the spread of fire. “For one thing, our vaults do not have cubbies,” says Heckman. “If we had a fire, we could lose half the collection — and that’s if the fire didn’t also spread to the adjacent vault.”

Other students involved in the project include computer science junior Vasco Madrid and Clay Norris, a computer science senior.

Up from the bunker GRANT TEAM

Heather Heckman, Beth Bilderback, Fabio Matta, Paul Ziehl At more than 20,000 reels, the Fox Movietone News film archive is the crown jewel of the university’s Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC). But the roughly 7 million linear feet of film is both a priceless asset and a potentially expensive liability — because much of the archive consists of highly combustible cellulose nitrate film.

Combustible cellulose nitrate film is both an asset and a liability.

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MIRC’s Fox Movietone News film archive is currently housed in a World War II-era munitions bunker at Fort Jackson.

But building a new vault that meets NFPA 40 (the National Fire and Protection Association’s standard for storage and handling of cellulose nitrate motion picture film) can be costly. In 2016, for example, philanthropist David W. Packard financed an impressive, state-of-the-art film archive at UCLA — at a price tag of roughly $180 million. MIRC needs something considerably less expensive. Enter Fabio Matta, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Paul Ziehl, a professor in the same department. In 2017, when Heckman was still director of MIRC, she reached out to see if they could help figure out a creative and affordable solution. “I literally went to the civil engineering website and started reading what people there specialize in and cold emailed them,” she says. Like any good civil engineers, they were intrigued by the problem, which built on research they were already doing but which posed a distinct set of challenges. “Paul and I have a good knowledge of cutting edge materials and more traditional materials, and of structural systems. We wanted to put this experience to work,” says Matta. “We are engineers. We get excited about the idea of building something, or figuring out something that can be built and that can serve a real purpose.”

Heckman also reached out to Beth Bilderback, a visual materials archivist at South Caroliniana Library, which houses cellulose nitrate photography negatives. South Caroliniana’s holdings are smaller and the stakes are a bit lower than at MIRC, but there is still risk. “It’s still volatile,” says Bilderback. “Standard practice is to separate the negatives from the photographs, but if the negatives do catch fire, it’s going to burn everything.” Heckman and Bilderback, in collaboration with Matta and Ziehl, applied for and received an ASPIRE II grant in 2017. Current MIRC director Lydia Pappas and MIRC newsfilm curator Greg Wilsbacher, while not officially on the grant as co-investigators, also have an interest in the project. On their end, Matta and Ziehl recruited a student, David Bianco, to conduct the preliminary research. “The more David looked into this problem, the more passionate he became,” says Matta. “To understand that what you do could have real implications, could have a real impact — that’s exciting. He really worked hard nailing down this set of criteria, looking through the literature: What is the state of the art? Where are we in terms of materials? As far as technical practice?” The next step, according to Matta, is to prioritize the criteria identified by Bianco, develop a potential engineering solution

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catered to the specific needs of MIRC and South Caroliniana but that could potentially benefit other archives as well. “These conversations we’re having are quite hopeful — to see through this process that there might be a possibility of building something that can be scaled to whatever the need is,” says Bilderback. “I know from talking to my colleagues at other institutions, there are a lot of archives with a need but without a huge budget.”

Let’s get digital GRANT TEAM 1

Bobby Donaldson, Ron Cox, Graham Duncan GRANT TEAM 2

Graham Duncan, Megan Oliver, Bobby Donaldson

The 1961 James T. McCain day planner

Graham Duncan and Bobby Donaldson have known one another for years. Duncan, head of collections and curator of manuscripts at South Caroliniana Library, came to the university as an undergraduate in 1999, the same year Donaldson, an

Bobby Donaldson discusses the legacy of James T. McCain with Jennifer Melton and Graham Duncan.

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associate professor of history and director of the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, first joined the faculty. “Graham was one of my students,” says Donaldson. “But that was 20 years ago.” Now, the two are collaborators on a pair of projects funded through the ASPIRE II grant program. The first, which will lead to the production of an interactive digital exhibit on the 1951 Briggs v. Elliott school desegregation court case, was launched in 2018. The second involves the digitization and annotation of a 1961 day planner kept by James T. McCain, a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). That project began in earnest this summer. But Donaldson and Graham aren’t the only researchers working on the two grants. Palmetto College Columbia Dean Ron Cox joined the Briggs v. Elliott project while still a professor of history at USC Lancaster and will provide additional editorial oversight in the project’s latter stages. Megan Oliver, a digital collections librarian for University Libraries, will oversee technical aspects of the McCain project. Critically, Graham and Donaldson also recruited a pair of graduate students, Jennifer Melton and Constance Caddell, to assist with the research. “When I came here one of the draws was the collections — and using them for teaching,” says Donaldson. “So, it’s exciting to have Graham and some other former students who now work for Libraries as go-to points of reference. And now part of the excitement for both projects is that the funding allows us to hire talented students to bring these things to life and better position them for research and for teaching.” Melton, who defended her public history master’s thesis in November, has been wading through photographs, letters and newspaper articles relating to the Briggs v. Elliott case, which was later folded into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in Kansas. She also is conducting oral history interviews in Clarendon County, where the South Carolina case originated. “Dr. Donaldson and I worked together to develop an outline of what should be shown,” says Melton. “I pitch certain things, and we develop key themes to focus on. At this point I have thousands of images on my computer, and from those I pick some that I think are the best for our purposes, and I talk to Dr. Donaldson to pare that down.” Caddell, a doctoral candidate in library and information science, is working on the McCain project, which will shine a

light not only on McCain’s field work but more generally on the civil rights movement in South Carolina. In all, South Caroliniana Library possesses 18 of McCain’s day planners from the tumultuous period, and while the individual entries are brief — sometimes frustratingly so, says Duncan — taken together, they provide an invaluable timeline and playbook for the movement. “It’s fascinating to see the process and the work that went into planning demonstrations, meeting with students at the HBCUs, meeting with FBI agents,” says Caddell. “You see the detail, and you see that their efforts were nonstop.” For Duncan, digitizing McCain offers an opportunity to dust off an important document and reimagine its public use. Once the 1961 day planner has been digitized and annotated using the ASPIRE II seed money, the hope is to pursue additional funding to do similar work with the other 17 volumes. “The McCain collection has been here since 1974,” Duncan explains. “Tom Johnson (former field archivist for South Caroliniana Library) brought that in, and it’s been used a bit. Ray Arsenault used it a bit for the Freedom Riders book. It’s known. Our idea now is, how can we use it differently?” Of course, the two projects also provide an excellent opportunity for the students involved, who get hands-on experience with primary source material. “Before coming to the university, I was trained as an archivist, and if I had the time I could spend all my time digging through boxes, but I can’t,” says Donaldson. “So, bringing in people who are skilled at that, and competent in that, is great. It also enables us to train the next generation of scholars. We see that as we go through this process.”

Go home, stay home GRANT TEAM

Ronda Hughes, John Brooks, Neset Hikmet, Stacey Mumbower, Ben Schooley When patients are discharged from the hospital, they should go home and recuperate — and not quickly end up back in the emergency room. Nursing professor Ronda Hughes, working with faculty members from disciplines around the university, is helping Prisma Health figure out ways to cut the number of patients readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged.

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Hughes previously worked on a 33-hospital study that looked at the instruments used to assess whether a patient was ready to be discharged. Her work at Prisma Health in the Midlands adds another mechanism to the survey — asking patients about their discharge needs. “We ask patients a series of eight questions about their perception of their readiness to be discharged home. ‘Is someone there to help them if they need it? Do they know what they need to do once they go home? Do they feel they are ready to be discharged?’” she says. “What’s nice is that we get patients’ input. We’ve found that the screening that nurses do with patients is very helpful. It gives us a glimpse into what the patient will encounter when they go home.” Along with collaborating with Prisma, Hughes recruited faculty members from other university departments to work on the study, including John Brooks in health services policy and management in the Arnold School of Public Health; Neset Hikmet and Ben Schooley, both in integrated information technology in the College of Engineering and Computing; and Stacey Mumbower, director of the Center for Applied Business Analytics in the Darla Moore School of Business.

Involving faculty from a range of disciplines qualified them for an ASPIRE II grant. It also adds complementary and different perspectives and skill sets. “My background is in public health, even though I’m in the College of Nursing,” Hughes says. “I apply my knowledge from my education in public health to collaborate with nurses in the clinical setting.” For example, Hikmet and Schooley have used their data expertise to handle the technical aspects of transferring large volumes of data from Prisma onto a secure server at the university so it can be analyzed. Mumbower, who has expertise in machine learning, allows the team to look at predictive modeling so it can see a patient’s risk for readmission. Brooks and Hughes are applying their understanding of health services research to identify opportunities for health care systems. “It will eventually get us to the point where we can help inform the clinical team what that patient’s risk for readmission is, and offer them ways to best mitigate those risks,” Hughes says. T

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FEATURES

THE MORE IDEAS THE BETTER

Students who are taught by more than one teacher in the same classroom benefit from the differing teaching styles, added expertise and lower student-teacher ratios. But the first step is making sure the partners click. by Craig Brandhorst, Page Ivey, Megan Sexton

rom craft ing eﬀective lesson plans to properly managing the classroom, communication is the key ingredient in a successful team-teaching environment. Just ask Kristin Harbour, an assistant professor of mathematics education who has researched the subject. “The beginning step, what I think is the most critical step, is establishing that relationship between the two educators, going over the strengths and weaknesses and building upon those in the relationship,” says Harbour. “Be sure to set clear expectations for the working relationship from the beginning.” In the College of Education, Harbour teaches future math teachers and studies inclusive teaching practices in

elementary school classes. While her research on co-teaching focuses on grades K-12, the emphasis on structure and relationship-building would be similar for college classrooms. “You’re still setting a common vision and focusing on students. If we make our decisions based on what’s best for students, we’ll be great. Whether that’s with college students or fourth grade students, it’s still going to be the same goal,” she says. And while co-teaching doesn’t lessen a teacher’s workload, it does provide teachers with backup and support. “It provides you someone you can rely on, that you can share ideas with,” she says. “It isn’t just this one person working alone, you’re both working together for common goal. The more ideas the better.”

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BERT ELY // CHRISTINE LOTTER Biology professor Bert Ely and education professor Christine Lotter have teamed up over the years to teach continuing education courses for biology teachers in South Carolina schools, but it’s really their chemistry that makes them effective. “When we work with teachers, they want something they can take back to their classrooms,” says Lotter. “So, I help translate his knowledge into something they can use with their high school or middle school students and make it engaging.”

How did you get into co-teaching?

LOTTER: We have to have both College of Arts & Sciences

faculty and College of Education faculty on our grants together. The purpose of those grants is to improve teacher content knowledge as well as their pedagogy. They require us to collaborate. Now, how we choose to do that — we work that out.

Why do you like collaborating in the classroom?

ELY: My colleagues from the College of Education bring something to the table, and I bring something to the table. Together we do more than any of us could do alone. LOTTER: Dr. Ely and the other College of Arts & Sciences faculty that we work with bring the depth of content knowledge. My strengths are more with context with teachers — I used to be a high school teacher, and I am trained in pedagogy and scientific inquiry. How do you think that affects the students?

ELY: Most of this work involves practicing teachers, anywhere from kindergarten to high school. We want to build their content knowledge so they’re more comfortable teaching whatever subject matter they’re teaching, and we want to show more interactive ways to engage the students and help them really learn the material. We all contribute to modeling that and answering questions. Tell us about the experience.

LOTTER: I like working with Dr. Ely. He often has a diﬀerent way of looking at the content than I do. He’ll just get up and start talking about things, and it ends up being this question-and-answer between him and the teachers. They’re just asking everything about the topic because they don’t have that chance a lot of times to get all their questions answered.

Christine Lotter and Bert Ely

ego aside and just work as a team, focus on delivering the best product you can to the students. It turns out, Dr. Lotter and I have great respect for each other.

LOTTER: I think working with teachers, specifically, is challenging because you have to balance making them feel like it’s a worthwhile use of their time, which means that they can have something they can walk out and use in their classroom, versus just improving their content, which may be a goal of ours. I think the most challenging thing is making sure that the way we are delivering the content is engaging them.

LEE PEARSON // MEGAN WEIS Lee Pearson, a clinical associate professor in the department of health promotion, education and behavior at the Arnold School of Public Health, and Megan Weis, senior director for strategic engagement at the South Carolina Institute of Medicine and Public Health, have worked together in some capacity since 2007, the year Weis began the school’s doctoral program. Each spring they co-teach Health Program Planning, which recently became a core course in the master’s of public health program. “We both bring different experiences and different approaches to problem solving,” says Pearson. “And we have, I hope, set a good model for what we’re doing in our MPH program, because all of our core courses are now team taught.”

How long has each of you been teaching this particular course? Or maybe we should start by asking how long you’ve been at the Arnold School.

What are some of the challenges of collaborating in the classroom?

PEARSON: I’ve been here 23 years — as a student, then staﬀ, faculty and administrator. I think this spring will be my 10th time teaching the course.

ELY: It has to be a true collaboration. Everybody has to have the same goals and objectives. You have to put your

WEIS: This will be my fifth year teaching the course. Lee and I both took it as students, and then Lee was teaching

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we stay with that group the entire semester. But what they quickly realize is that Lee and I are in constant communication. We compare notes, and we adjust accordingly to make sure we’re on the same page.

How much time do you spend outside of class taking about the class — pregame or postgame?

Megan Weis and Lee Pearson

it and I was his TA. I graduated with a master’s in 2002, worked at DHEC, then came back for my doctorate.

PEARSON: But we were really co-instructors at the time. She had such great experience working for DHEC. That really planted the seed for us to co-teach. This spring will be our third time as oﬃcial co-instructors of that course. In broad strokes, describe the syllabus.

PEARSON: Students are taught to plan a comprehensive community-based public health program. They’re also guided in how to write a grant for funding. WEIS: It’s everything from, “What are the needs of the com-

munity?” to “What do the data say, and how you would use the funds to address that?” And it’s interesting that your publication’s theme is collaboration because that’s also very much the theme of our class. One, it would be an immense assignment for one person to write one of these grants, and two, that’s not how it works in the real world. So, our students work in small groups and they have to use the best of everyone’s skills to put together the final product.

How do you break down the duties?

PEARSON: It’s much more than simply sharing a syllabus or alternating lectures. It’s really working hand-in-glove to ensure that you have a seamless story for the students, that the curriculum comes to life in a way that is meaningful and that you draw on each other’s talents. There’s a reason that we’re both there. WEIS: We take turns being on point. We barely even talk

about it anymore. But we’re always both in the room. We interject and add to each other’s lecture. And then, in terms of grading, we each adopt a group of students, and

PEARSON: A lot. Team-teaching is not dividing the work. It actually multiplies because there is an expectation of constant dialogue. Even when Megan is lecturing, I’m watching the class — Are they absorbing this? Or are there some stumbling blocks? If there are, I can say, “Megan, can you clarify that part?” I call attention to it. And she does the same with me. It’s important to know what you don’t know. WEIS: You can do that sort of temperature taking part of teaching in a more nuanced way. PEARSON: I’ve always felt blessed to co-instruct with Megan. We have worked together so much that it’s easy to fall into that groove. We always meet before class, but we also always get back together after class to debrief. Maybe it’s right after class, maybe it’s as we’re walking to our cars, maybe it’s texts when we get home, maybe it’s the next morning. But we are good at reflecting, and we don’t let our egos get in the way. I might say, “You know, that class could have gone better.” WEIS: Or I’ll say, “I think we need to revisit this one con-

cept. It didn’t go quite the way I thought it would.”

PEARSON: But we also celebrate our successes — “I wasn’t sure how this would go, but it actually worked really well.” Is it also more satisfying professionally?

WEIS: Absolutely. I don’t think I would want to teach it on my own. Not this course. Other courses, sure, but not this course. PEARSON: For this particular class it’s vital. But there’s an added benefit to having co-instructors. I see it in the students. They benefit from the synergy that we bring. It’s also just more enjoyable to not navigate the journey on your own. There’s a certain eﬃciency to teaching a course on your own — teach the class, grade the papers and move on — but when you are trying to foster professional development in future practitioners you want to apply the very best judgment and bring in more than one perspective. WEIS: We’re also modeling what we want them to do as professionals. As Lee was saying, we have a great amount of trust. The students see that. They see us working together and respecting each other. Hopefully, they’re internalizing that.

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PEARSON: And collaboration is a fundamental tenant of

up a little bit?” One way was to bring in an instructor who they know and who they like. Bridget had taught the same students for science methods; I had taught them for social studies methods. So, both of us knew all 50 students.

BRIDGET MILLER // CATHY BRANT

Did you take turns leading the class?

public health. Being able to show that collaborative model at the front of the classroom, and fostering collaboration as a part of the course, is extremely important.

Associate professor of science education Bridget Miller and assistant professor of early childhood education Cathy Brant were teaching separate sections of EDEC 591, the College of Education’s senior seminar on teaching in early childhood, when they remembered that two heads are better than one. “We were doing a lot of unofficial collaboration teaching two sections of the same course at the same time,” says Brant. “Last year we said, ‘Hey, why don’t we put our two sections together as one mega-section and co-teach?’ There’s a lot of benefits to that.”

First, tell us a little about Senior Seminar.

BRANT: Our students are in their last semester. They’re student teaching all day, every day. And they’re tired — and I don’t blame them. They’re in the schools with kids from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., then they come back to the university and sit with me for a few hours. I thought, “How can we spice it

Cathy Brant and Bridget Miller

MILLER: It was kind of a tag team. It’s not like one of us is more dominant than the other. Cathy might start oﬀ with one thing because she has more background in that subject, but then I chime in. We both have our own experiences and perspectives, and we bounce oﬀ each other. BRANT: Some of those things we plan— MILLER: And some of those things just happen. BRANT: Organically. MILLER: It’s not like, “You go,” “No, you go.” We both just

sort of go.

Do you also think in terms of modeling classroom strategies? Your students will one day have their own classrooms.

MILLER: We do. More so in one of our other courses — EDEC 347, which is classroom management. Kate Ascetta (assistant professor of early childhood special education) and

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I have co-taught that. Kate is special education. My background is special ed., but I’m really more general ed. So we’ve tried to model that co-teaching approach there and then carry it on to senior seminar.

BRANT: That’s important because in many districts special

ed. teachers do co-teach. My second year of teaching, in New Jersey, I had a special ed. teacher with me all day. We were expected to have that seamless relationship, but no one ever modeled that for me. It’s nice to see that here.

What has the response been from your students since you began co-teaching Senior Seminar?

MILLER: I think they love it. Even if they are assigned to me as their instructor, I have students reaching out to Dr. Brant. And Dr. Brant’s students reach out to me. It’s OK for them to go to either one of us. BRANT: We’re not crying in the corner, “Oh, my student went to Bridgett instead of me!” It’s important for students to have options because they respond to different faculty members differently. If they don’t connect with me, I’m glad that they have someone else that they can go to for answers, and that it’s sanctioned. MILLER: It’s also about modeling a good environment. Since we know each other really well, and we bounce off of each other really well, we can throw in little jokes and stories about our own experiences. That makes them feel more comfortable — “Oh, she just shared this awful experience that she had in the classroom. I feel OK sharing mine.” It’s about creating more of a community instead of an instructor-student dynamic. There’s what happens in the classroom, but there’s also prep and grading, the other stuff that comes with the job. How do you manage that part?

MILLER: We often have coﬀee and decide who will take the lead that next week. With grading, it’s easy because she has her 25 students in her Blackboard and I have my 25. She grades hers, I grade mine.

— “Hey, have you seen this?” It’s like, “Oh my gosh, no I haven’t! I thought I’d seen everything!” It keeps it fresh.

JOAN CREED // APRIL CONE This semester, nursing professors Joan Creed and April Cone are team teaching Population Health Nursing, an online nursing class for undergraduates. Creed is a clinical assistant professor who teaches online courses from the Columbia campus, while Cone is based at USC Salkehatchie, where she teaches and manages the nursing partnership program. It’s their first time teaching together, but their relationship predates their faculty roles. “We actually were students in the DNP (doctor of nursing practice) program together, so we have not only worked together as faculty, we worked together as students,” says Cone. “When there were group projects, we often ended up in the same group, so that gave us a good idea of each other’s work ethic and how well we work as a team.”

How does co-teaching work in your class?

CONE: We’re not on the same campus so that makes it a little more challenging, but I think we do a good job of communicating and making it work. CREED: April and I work very collaboratively. If there’s a student issue or question, we talk about it — whether on the phone, through emails, whatever — and make a joint decision. We respect each other’s background, knowledge, practice, everything, and all that plays into what we try to do in the course. CONE: When we learned we were going to be working together, we created a schedule of what my role would be in the course; what her role would be; which weeks am I going to record video; which weeks is she going to record; who will grade this; who will grade that. We talked about how exactly is this going to look. CREED: We share the grading load. Since I was hired to be an online professor, I’m on computer all day long. I’ll

BRANT: The most important thing is the level of trust and the appreciation for each other’s differences. If you don’t have that, this model doesn’t work. We like each other, we’re friends; we also respect each other’s differences and areas of expertise. If I had to sit in an office and plan a course with someone I don’t trust and respect, that would be much harder than having coffee with your friend and colleague and figuring out the best approach. MILLER: Also, sometimes I get so into my own zone teach-

ing the same class every year — my assignments, my readings — that I get tunnel vision. And then someone else comes along with new ideas and a diﬀerent approach

Joan Creed and April Cone

FALL 2019 NO. 2 17

check emails, the discussion board and the grade book at least twice a day, Monday through Friday.

CONE: A really important aspect of co-teaching is organization and knowing beforehand what each other’s roles will be throughout the course. It makes everything flow better, and we’re able to be more eﬃcient with our time. How does team teaching improve the student experience?

CREED: Even if we’re talking about the same topic, more than one viewpoint is always better. It helps to provide more background and information. It gives students a broader perspective of what’s out there, what’s available, what they can do, why it is important for them to know this information. I bring a perspective of many years working in community health — I’ve been a nurse for 45 years, mainly in the practice area, working with patients. April lives in a rural area, so she adds that perspective. Any advice for other co-instructors?

CONE: Get to know whoever you are co-teaching with. Spend some time with them. It’s important for you to know what each other’s strengths and weaknesses are so you can formulate a plan.

JIM HUSSEY // MYRIAM TORRES The Arnold School of Public Health has created a new class, Public Health 725, to accommodate new requirements of the Council for Education in Public Health, the school’s accrediting body. Led by epidemiologist Myriam Torres and biostatistician Jim Hussey, the class combines what previously was covered in three separate classes — epidemiology, biostatistics and environmental health. Environmental science professor Geoff Scott also teaches a portion of the course but was not interviewed.

What was the genesis of your co-teaching?

TORRES: All the accredited schools of public health had to do this, but not everybody did what we did. We chose to have environmental health in our class because we didn’t want for environmental health to be out of the whole MPH — Master’s in Public Health. These are the core classes for the MPH that we go through in the first year. So will there be fewer silos?

HUSSEY: The whole idea is that when students get out and start working, they’re going to be working on a team. And there was some resistance at first to the change, but I can see, imperfect as it is, students are getting a better understanding of how our disciplines interact. I think that will make them much better public health professionals when they get out.

Myriam Torres and Jim Hussey

What’s different about this new approach in terms of instruction?

TORRES: The thing that we are doing diﬀerently is the online class. We decided to tape every single lesson. But we had to do it with certain requirements — that the video should be 20 minutes or shorter, so it is easier for the students; the font has to be a certain size. HUSSEY: Obviously, there are classes where I do most of the talking, and there are classes where Myriam does most of the talking, but we try to give the other discipline’s perspective as much as we can. How do you mesh your teaching styles?

HUSSEY: We learn from each other’s teaching style a little bit. We have somewhat diﬀerent styles; we’ve kind of evolved into a style that we use for the class. I used to not use PowerPoint for live classes, but now that they are there, I tend to use them. TORRES: We both have been teaching for a long, long time, but putting this class together has been a challenge — in the sense that we both want to give that integrated perspective. We have 39 students — 27 face-to-face and 12 online — and this is our first time. We are putting all our souls in this. We both come every day and say, “I woke up at 3 a.m. thinking about this.” We try as much as we can to complement what the other is saying. How much more time went into prepping for this than for normal, single-instructor classes?

HUSSEY: If we were doing this class face-to-face, the prep would be about 20 percent more. The new prep is: “I’m going to talk about this, what do you want to say about it?” There’s a lot of that conversation going on. I joked with our department chair that at the end of this semester, they are going to have to replace the carpet between our oﬃces because we are constantly back and forth. We try to play to our strengths, but we also help each other out. T

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PROOF POSITIVE

A N I L O R CA IDENTIAL F N CO dir

by C e c te d

raig B

ra nd h

or s t

UNDERGRAD SUSAN SWAVELY INTERVIEWS JAMES ELLROY

n October, crime novelist James Ellroy visited the University of South Carolina for the 2019 Fall Literary Festival, sponsored by University Libraries and the Department of English. It wasn’t Ellroy’s first time in Columbia, though, and it wasn’t a quick turnaround.

The author of such blockbuster novels as L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia, and the bestselling memoir My Dark Places, committed his papers to the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library in 1999 and has been to town several times since. This year, he spent more than a week on campus visiting fiction workshops, a creative nonfiction workshop and a South Carolina Honors College class, where he fielded questions about writing, reading and his latest novel, This Storm. On his last day on campus, Ellroy also sat down with junior English and theater major Susan Swavely for an

interview at the university’s Kennedy Greenhouse Studio. Swavely’s interview marks the first installment of “Proof Positive,” a new section highlighting the student experience, and was arranged by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs in cooperation with University Libraries and the Department of English. Swavely, who is in two of the classes Ellroy visited this semester, was approached about the opportunity through creative nonfiction professor James Barilla. “First of all, I love that he came to our classes because we got to pick his brain and meet a very successful writer, someone who’s doing what I want to do and what most of the people in class with me want to do,” says Swavely. “And then I just felt completely honored that I got to sit down and talk to him one-on-one for an extended period of time.”

FALL 2019 NO. 2 19

Q&A

by Susan Swavely

I know you call all of your novels masterpieces that precede the masterpieces you have yet to write. Is there one that sticks out as your ultimate masterpiece? Well, the books that I love the most, that I think are the most accomplished, the deepest in their humanity, the most stylistically accomplished, the broadest, that show the greatest diversity of character and motive are the two new books, Perfidia and This Storm. They are the first two novels in my second L.A. Quartet.

What gives them that humanity? The inclusion of women as point-of-view characters. Kay Lake in Perfidia and This Storm. Joan Conville in This Storm. The tortured, brilliant closeted homosexual, Japanese-American forensic chemist Hideo Ashida in these two books. The inclusion of a real-life character, William H. Parker, the greatest American policeman of the 20th century, who has a bad rap historically. He made some intemperate racial comments after the first Watts Riot, 1965, and here I grant him the humanity that I think he deserves.

You write about some pretty tough things. I asked about this in class, but I’ll ask it again. How do you manage writing such dark material without it aﬀecting your personal life? I’m a professional. This is what I do for a living. It’s also my great passion. So, great injustices, like the Japanese internment, like World War II itself, like the Spanish Civil War — they make me happy. I’m happy to write about them. I didn’t create them. I wasn’t over there bombing Bilboa and Guernica and imprisoning innocent Japanese-Americans back in 1942. It happened. And now I’m happy because I can exploit it — and I don’t think exploit is too strong a word — for my books.

What, to you, are the components of a good story? History. The secret infrastructure of large public events.

What do you mean? The human stories at the heart of history. The obscure people rubbing shoulders, and frankly, other body parts,

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and all of their crazy, magnificent, multifaceted dilemmas. And I have written bigger and bigger books, and, I think, deeper and deeper books, and I think more stylistically evolved books. And the emotional content of my books has become enhanced with these last two books, Perfidia and This Storm. If Perfidia and This Storm do not rip your heart out — and Blood’s A Rover, the concluding book of the Underworld USA Trilogy — if they don’t rip your heart out, then you have no heart.

You spoke in my class about how being a novelist can isolate you — from family, from loved ones. In your own experience, how have you felt isolated as a novelist. Susan Swavely interviews James Ellroy

with the celebrated of history. Dudley Smith, my fictional Irish cop — his fictional love aﬀair with the screen legend Bette Davis in Perfidia. The kind of early-wartime egalitarianism. The merging of the classes in the common cause of winning World War II — that’s big stuﬀ right there. Big themes. Big drama.

All of your stories need those big themes? It’s the only way that I’m going to work. Big. Anti-minimalist. Anti-ironic. Big lives. Big duress. Big conflict. Big lies. Big hate. Big events. Yeah!

When you first started writing did you think, “Of course I’m going to make it”? I was very confident. But I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know who would publish me. I didn’t know what kind of readership I would be able to establish around the world. And so, to be here — and frankly, at 71, the latter stage of my life — I’m having a blast. And I’m very, very grateful. Grateful for [University Libraries dean] Tom McNally and [publisher] Rick Layman and all the people here at USC for putting me in the library, where I have been told — Tom McNally told me — there are over a million pages of my manuscripts. And that’s a lot, because I write by hand.

What have you found out about yourself writing these novels — over the entire course of your career, which is a fairly long one? I’ve been doing this 40 years. I’ve changed in that I’ve grown somewhat. I have surmounted things like stylistic excess in the name of a greater portrayal of human beings

I’m a solitary person. I’m very, very happy that I never had kids. Because I would have been a [bad] father. The kind of dad who comes around at Christmas time and pats the kids on their heads, hands them a couple of presents and then goes back to work. That’s me. That’s me.

So you prefer being by yourself? Yeah, by and large. I mean, I have a girlfriend [Helen Knode]. She’s my second ex-wife. We don’t live together. We didn’t get remarried. We live down the hall from each other. Monogamy, that doesn’t bother me so much. Cohabitation? No. Helen’s in 200. I’m in 208.

You prefer that arrangement? It’s something that I couldn’t have conceived of before it actually happened. Helen was the one who suggested it. And I’m not a family guy. If you look through the books, you’ll notice that there is not . . . much . . . family . . . drama. I don’t like that stupid s**t in crime TV shows, motion pictures, or in crime novels. I don’t like the whole idea of crime as the deus ex machina of a human being’s life, the thing that explicates everything about an individual. You’ve got a lot of disenfranchised people who are oﬀ on their own in the world. And that’s me.

How many hours a day do you write? Eight. Six, seven, eight. Something like that. Five. Four. [Laughter] Three, two, one — blast oﬀ ! Hiroshima! Nagasaki! Yeah! Yeah! But you know, when I’m ending up a book, or when I’m going over typed pages, I can go 12 to 14 hours a day.

What’s your work space like? I have a two-bedroom pad in a nice building. Downtown Denver. And it’s done up midcentury modern. Very, very

FALL 2019 NO. 2 21

stylish pad. The walls of the living room are indigo blue. I have no white walls because I hate white walls. A lot of diﬀerent shades of gray. Everything is perfectly neat. Squared up. Neat stacks of paper. I am fastidiously neat. There’s no disarray. There’s not a crumb on the floor. I eat over the sink so I don’t make a mess. [Feigns devouring a sandwich.]

Does that help you write? The neatness? Yeah! I like order. I’m very orderly. I’m very deliberate.

Has there ever been a moment as a writer when you thought you might give up? You wanna know my ethos? I love to fight, I hate to lose, I don’t care if I get hurt, and I never give up.

When did you feel that you had made it? I’ve never felt like I’ve made it. I continue to feel like I have to get better and better and better. I never rest on my laurels. The great moment was going to Alfred A. Knopf for a three-book deal and knowing that they would publish my next three novels, which turned out to be White Jazz, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. Those came out with Alfred A. Knopf, who publishes the most beautiful books in the world, the most beautifully designed. But I’ve never felt like I had it made. I’ve always felt like I had to prove myself one more time, one more time, one more time.

Who are you proving yourself to? God. I am glorifying God and this astonishing gift that He has given me and given to the world. T

A selection of James Ellroy’s books, including two of his novels and his 1996 memoir, My Dark Places.

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FORWARD THINKING

Stories by Chris Horn

FLIGHT CONTROL

Engineering team assisting in drone project to reduce nuisance bird populations near airports Not everything that flies is welcome around airports. Just ask the U.S. military, which tallies $75 million in damage every year from nuisance birds that collide with its aircraft on takeoffs and landings, endangering flight crews and equipment.

and completed his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at South Carolina. “The company has two teams of scientists who are tackling the oiling and bird egg identification systems, and we’re focused solely on the navigational challenges.”

To deal with the challenge, the Department of Defense wants a specialized drone that can help control nuisance bird populations near its facilities. Ideally, the drone will be able to spot bird nests, identify the eggs as those of a nuisance species and spray them with vegetable oil to prevent hatching. Egg oiling has proven to be an effective measure, but it’s dangerous for the crews that must climb trees, bushes and outbuildings in search of the nests.

Those navigational challenges are steep — even thorny. Dauchert says the drone’s navigational sensors will have to maintain constant vigilance for branches and leaves, which can shift suddenly in the breeze.

A private company in the Midwest, supported by federal small business innovation grants, is leading the drone project, and they have contracted with a South Carolina faculty member for assistance. Xiaofeng Wang, an electrical engineering professor in the College of Engineering and Computing, and doctoral candidate Sam Dauchert are developing a navigational control system that would allow a drone to maneuver among tree branches and vines with minimal human interaction. “Overall, the project is very challenging. But something we teach here in engineering is that you can divide and conquer a technical challenge,” says Dauchert, who specializes in robotics

“It can be very difficult to monitor and respond to that in real time,” Dauchert says. “But figuring out a way to navigate without hitting a branch is crucial because when one of the rotors hits something, it shuts down and the drone can’t maintain stability.” Dauchert is working with undergraduate students from computer science and engineering and electrical engineering to develop the navigation system, which is now past the proof-ofconcept stage and moving toward a working prototype. Once completed and successfully tested, the egg-oiling drone could be commercially produced for military facilities across the country. The automated search-and-find navigation could also be deployed on drones used for inspecting industrial equipment, bridges or other hard-to-reach locations.

FALL 2019 NO. 2 23

Burden of caring

Program coaches caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer’s and related dementia It’s been called the Silver Tsunami — the coming wave of older adults — and it’s already leading to an increase in Alzheimer’s and related dementia diagnoses. Naturally, there is also an increase in the associated burden on caregivers. Already 11 percent of South Carolinians 65 and older have been diagnosed — nearly 96,000 men and women — and about three-fourths of them are cared for by family members or close friends. Maggi Miller, a research assistant professor and epidemiologist in the Arnold School of Public Health, is participating in a partnership with Prisma Health to provide coaching to caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia in the Greenville area. “A lot of times people with Alzheimer’s have really challenging behavior, and caregivers don’t get much of a break,” says Miller, who also manages the state’s Alzheimer’s disease registry at the Arnold School’s Office for the Study of Aging. “At the later stages of the disease, many individuals need 24-hour care, and it is often very hands-on care.” Miller is conducting an evaluation of the Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer’s Caregiver Health coaching program to determine the effectiveness of the person-centered, six-month, 12-session program. Coaches share tips on safety, understanding dementia and creating a dementiafriendly lifestyle. They also learn how to assess each home environment to determine if improvements can be made or additional resources are needed. “They get into specific problem solving with the caregivers and help them brainstorm solutions for handling difficult behaviors and planning for the future, among other issues,” Miller says. “They also talk about the caregiver’s emotional health and the importance of taking care of themselves.” Surveys are conducted with caregivers before and after the coaching to determine their feelings of competency, emotional health and disposition toward institutionalizing their loved one affected by dementia. The program is expanding to train hundreds of adults who volunteer for Meals on Wheels in the Upstate, teaching them to spot signs of dementia among the homebound seniors they serve and what to do if they think a Meals on Wheels client needs assistance. “We’re going to raise up an army of people who have a better understanding of Alzheimer’s and make the agency more dementia-capable so they can make sure that people are getting the assistance they need,” Miller says.

photo by rawpixel

24 TIMES

Sooner the better Development of early autism screening test focus of NIH study The causes of autism and possible cures for the disorder remain elusive research goals, but the holy grail of an autism screening test for very young children might be found sooner. University of South Carolina psychology professor Jane Roberts is an investigator on an NIH-funded study focused on the metabolism of an essential amino acid called tryptophan. The principal investigator for the award is Kevin Champaigne, founder and CEO of Circa Bioscience, who has partnered with the Greenwood Genetic Center to conduct this research. In a small earlier study, Champaigne and colleagues at the Greenwood Genetic Center identified 92 percent of individuals with autism spectrum disorder also exhibited reduced metabolism of tryptophan. This finding was the basis for the recent NIH award aimed at increased understanding of the biochemical changes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder to facilitate effective treatment. “The premise is that identification of a biomarker that accurately predicts autism will enable us to more accurately detect the risk or presence of autism in the first years of life, when our treatment efforts have the greatest effect,” says Roberts, whose research projects focus on multiple neurodevelopmental disorders that overlap with autism spectrum disorder, including fragile X syndrome and Down syndrome. Tryptophan is found in meats, dairy, fruits and seeds and plays a key role in synthesizing serotonin, an important brain chemical. It also helps synthesize kynurenine, which is possibly linked to behavioral and cognitive symptoms of neurological disease. Roberts is collaborating with Champaigne, Greenwood Genetic Center and the Medical University of South Carolina to provide blood samples and behavioral data for the study through her own independent NIH studies focused on early detection of

autism spectrum disorder in preschoolers. As such, this collaboration represents an opportunity to leverage detailed behavioral and diagnostic data from Roberts’ studies and add the biochemi cal blood test from Circa Bioscience and Greenwood Genetic Center to accelerate discovery. Autism spectrum disorder is currently diagnosed by experts like Roberts who conduct standardized assessments of behavior. Such assessments are difficult to conduct with accuracy before age 3, so the lag time between onset of autism and diagnosis can be significant and problematic. “It’s been shown that autism spectrum disorder-specific therapy early on can make a big difference for those with autism in ways that we don’t see in other disorders,” Roberts says. “Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms that emerge during infancy and intensify over time. Treatments have shown that very early intervention for infants at high-risk for autism can improve learning and affect underlying brain development.” Screening tests for autism are also important because the disorder is a highly heritable condition, according to Roberts. “If there’s one child with autism in a family, the likelihood of a second child having it more than doubles,” she says. “If you have two kids with autism in a family, the odds of that third child having autism is even higher with as much as three times the risk. Being able to apply a screening test to baby siblings of children already diagnosed with autism would be a huge advance to detect autism early and provide treatment to reduce impairment.” T

TIMES STAFF

versation over the corner of an office desk. The man behind the desk, hand perched

Editor

on his computer mouse, is breaking the bad news, which is spelled out in the cap-

Craig Brandhorst Assistant editor Megan Sexton Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Chris Horn, Page Ivey

Photographer

don’t think it’s an accident that the men having that uncomfortable conversation

Kim Truett

look so much alike. Yeah, one is wearing a striped tie and glasses, and the other isn’t,

Campus correspondents

but otherwise they could be the exact same person. Considered in that light, the

James Raby and Leslie Hull-Ryde, Aiken Candace Brasseur, Beaufort

same cartoon presents an opposite interpretation. I’m not suggesting we abandon our egos wholesale. No matter how democratic

Shana Dry, Lancaster

the process, somebody has to pilot the ship. On a grant-funded research project, that

Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie

person is the principal investigator. In the case of a magazine, it’s the editor — and

Erin Duffie, Sumter

in the case of TIMES, that’s me.

Annie Smith, Union

Except when I’m reminded it isn’t — like when one of the writers catches my

Jessica Blais, Upstate

editorial mistakes, or when our photographer fixes my focus, or our designer asks

Jay Darby, Palmetto College

me, ever-so-gently, to kill 200 words so she’ll have room for a picture. In nearly every

WI NTE R 2019

CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR

U N IVE R S IT Y O F SO UTH C ARO LI NA ALU M N I M AGA Z I N E

Front & center President Bob Caslen emphasizes character, looks to the future

COVER TO COVER

Carolinian. It’s who we are.

The University of South Carolina alumni magazine is published three times a year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.

TIMES University of South Carolina

ENDNOTES

TIMES University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2

Until Brandi mocks up a few covers, it’s difficult to visualize the finished product, even after we’ve discussed it to death.

TIMES University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2

The next concern was the white space at the bottom. Designers love white space — except when they don’t.

TIMES University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2

But once we have a few samples, the serious discussion begins. This time that included a debate on the value of a yellow Post-It.

TIMES University of South Carolina University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2 Fall 2019 / No. 2

Eventually, we realized that Kim’s photo gallery, though still in flux, would provide a fitting touch of seasonal color.

TIMES University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2

Ultimately, Brandi reminded me that we’d had a Post-It on our cover before and I peeled it off. See Fall 2018, no. 1.

TIMES University of South Carolina University of South Carolina

Fall 2019 / No. 2 Fall 2019 / No. 2

At this point, the only things left to discuss were the tools of the trade — my red editor’s pen and Brandi’s black Sharpie.

Fall 2019 / No. 2