USCTIMES FALL 2018 NO. 1
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
USCTIMES STAFF Editor Craig Brandhorst Assistant editor Megan Sexton Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Dana Woodward Photographer Kim Truett Campus correspondents Patti McGrath, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Printer USC Printing Services USC Times is published twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Aff airs, Wes Hickman, 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.
BE HERE NOW We’ve used this headline before. I’m sure of it. Or at least the same phrase. Sometime in the four years I’ve been editing USC Times the same concise, three-word Zen mantra has appeared somewhere in these pages. Above a feature, in a caption — who knows? It was probably used to introduce a similar letter from the editor last year, or to grace my signature at the bottom of the page the year before that. It may even have made the cover at some point, heralding an entire issue built around this exact same theme. Well, whatever. For all the lingering summer humidity, I’m not sweating it. I’m also not about to dig through all of our back issues to see if I’m repeating myself, and not because I’m lazy from the heat. Rooting around the morgue for yesterday’s headlines would run counter to the entire spirit of this issue, which is about appreciating the headlines of today, and writing better ones for tomorrow. Being here now means appreciating the University of South Carolina in the fall of 2018. Sure, we’ve got a feature about how campus architecture has changed over the past 217 years, complete with black-and-white archival photos — and sure, there’s a rearview mirror featured prominently on our cover — but that’s what’s known as context. Looking back is how we appreciate where we are, and how we figure out where we’re headed. Ask the out-of-state students who come to Carolina every fall, then build lives and careers in South Carolina after they graduate. Ask your students and your colleagues, each one of whom chose to be right here, right now, with everyone else on campus, working toward a better future. Ask yourself as you embark on another academic year at a university unlike any other anyplace else on Earth. Like any good mantra, it bears repeating, especially as we enter a new semester: Be here now, be here now, be here now. Be here now again,
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
On the cover: The bus is here. The gates are open. You have arrived.
CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR
FALL 2018 NO. 1 3
GALLERY
WALK THIS WAY / 4 It doesn’t get much more exciting than the start of a new school year. We have the pictures to prove it.
EVENT HORIZON / 8 Sneak a peek at a few choice events happening on campus this fall. FEATURES
CATCH THE BUS! / 10
p. 4
David Cutler’s yearlong USCreativity initiative went into high gear with the Great Gamecock Design Challenge in May, but going into the fall semester there’s still plenty of gas in the tank.
LIKE NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH / 14 Some research can only be done in South Carolina. Researchers in five different fields explain why USC is the place to be.
WAY BACK WHEN / 20 p. 10
p. 14
Architectural historian Lydia Mattice Brandt gives a tour of USC’s historic campus core that transcends time and space.
HERE TO STAY / 24 They came as out-of-state freshmen and put down roots. Now, these alumni are key players in South Carolina business, politics, medicine and public service. FORWARD THINKING
p. 20
p. 24
FIRE ALARM / A MODEL SUBJECT GUT FEELING / 28
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PHOTO GALLERY
WALK THIS WAY A new academic year is upon us, and USC students know the drill — work hard, play hard, get a worldclass education. Below, students cross Gibbes Green on the first day of class. Opposite, clockwise from top left: Galen Fellow Carolyn Beskid moves in at Patterson Hall; Cocky lends a hand on Move-in Day; the sun sets over the Strom just in time for the Dive-In Movie; Food Network Iron Chef Cat Cora works the line during the grand opening of OLILO, a new healthy-dining eatery at Russell House; student organizations recruit new members at the fall org fair; a self-proclaimed member of the Garnet Army catches the beat at the Association of African-American Students cookout.
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OPPOSITE CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Gamecocks hoist fi rst-year director of player development Marcus Lattimore in celebration after scoring one of many touchdowns in their season-opening win against Coastal Carolina; the Pickens Street pedestrian bridge floods with students during the first week of classes; students play Connect 4 at the first Healthy Carolina Farmers Market of the fall semester; Gamecock basketball great Aja Wilson is honored on the field before the first game of the football season; a student at the org fair on Greene Street beats the heat with a free snow cone. Below: A giant garnet flag against a blue sky at Williams-Brice — Columbia might still be hotter than a frying pan, but the fall semester is finally here, and fall itself is right around the corner.
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EVENT HORIZON
CELLO, JELL-O AND A ROOMFUL OF TEETH SOUTHERN EXPOSURE BRINGS INNOVATIVE MUSIC If you still think of Columbia as a sleepy Southeastern city, you’ve never been to a Southern Exposure concert. Onstage, you might see a musician pulling on the strings of a grand piano, a string quartet playing refreshingly nontraditional repertoire — or a guy making music out of a cactus. Founded in 2001 by John Fitz Rogers, associate professor of composition, and now led by Mike Harley, associate professor of bassoon, Southern Exposure lives up to its vision of exposing audiences to new, challenging music. This season’s series builds on this legacy with innovative duo The Living Earth Show (Sept. 28); the JACK Quartet (Nov. 12), which Harley calls “hands-down the best string quartet in the U.S. that focuses on contemporary music”; two-time Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth (Jan. 17); and Sympatico Percussion (March 29), which is led by percussion professor Scott Herring and will be performing a piece by series founder Rogers. Season-opener The Living Earth Show, a duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, has premiered more than 50 works by contemporary composers. Among the “instruments” audiences can expect to hear during their performance are scraped tiles and Jell-O. “They are really fun, and socially conscious,” Harley says. “They’re working with a lot of composers we have not featured in the series — a lot of younger composers.” At Southern Exposure, the duo — both white men — will perform “Affirmative Action,” a program written by minority composers Zachary Watkins, Raven Chacon, Sharmi Basu, Morgan Craft and Ava Mendoza. While they’re in town, the Living Earth Show will also support an important goal of Southern Exposure, conducting master classes and giving presentations. It’s all part of the School of Music’s commitment to providing a comprehensive and well-rounded student experience. “They get a lot of exposure to what is happening in classical music right now, which includes the breakdown of stylistically distinct genres,” Harley says. “There is so much music being written today that you just can’t pigeonhole, with elements of rock, jazz, minimalism or fusion. Students become aware of possibilities that they might not have been aware of at all.”
COMMON GROUND
FOCUS ON THE POTUS
PUBLIC FORUM ADDRESSES CONTROVERSIAL CAMPUS NAMESAKE
BUCHHEIT LECTURE TO FEATURE FORMER WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPHER A picture may be worth 1,000
The Finding Common Ground series, hosted by USC’s
words, but on Sept. 26, faculty,
Office of Diversity and Inclusion, presents forums on
staff, students and the public
thought-provoking topics each semester and lets the
will get the best of both from
audience join the discussion. This fall’s event features
photographer Pete Souza. The
Deirdre Cooper Owens, assistant professor of history at
author of two books (plus a
Queens College, CUNY, and author of Medical Bondage:
third awaiting release), Souza
Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecol-
served as chief photographer
ogy. The book addresses the history of medicine and
and director of the White House Photo Office for President
enslaved women, including the work of controversial
Barack Obama and as an official photographer for Presi-
19th century gynecologist J. Marion Sims, for whom
dent Ronald Reagan. He will speak about his latest book,
Sims College was named in 1939. Owens will lead a
Obama: An Intimate Portrait, at 7 p.m. on Sept. 26 in the
forum on the subject at 5:30 p.m., Nov. 19, in the
W.W. “Hootie” Johnson Hall at the Darla Moore School of
Capstone Campus Room.
Business.
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THE THINGS WE’RE READING FALL LITERARY FESTIVAL BOOKS ANOTHER IMPRESSIVE LINEUP November may seem a long way off, but don’t dally if you plan to attend this year’s Fall Literary Festival. There’s a lot to read between now and then. The series kicks off Nov. 1 with poet Solmaz Sharif, whose first collection, Look, won the 2017 PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry and the 2017 American Book Award. On Nov. 8, the university welcomes memoirist Kerry Egan.. A hospice chaplain, Egan wrote On Living about her experiences with hospice care, and Fumbling,, an account of her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrim route through Northern Spain. She has also appeared on CNN, PBS NewsHour and NPR’s Fresh Air. Gene Luen Yang, the U.S. Library of Congress Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, appears on Nov. 15. He is the author of American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Printz Award. His two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints was nominated for a National Book Award and won the L.A. Times Book Prize. Yang is also a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient. The series wraps up Nov. 30 with an event co-hosted by the Richland Library and the One Book, One Community Reading Initiative, featuring National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, O’Brien is the author of nine works of fiction, including The Things They Carried. He will offer a master class for graduate students on campus, followed by his appearance at Richland Library. Each author will read from his or her works and be available to sign books. The annual festival is hosted by the Department of English and University Libraries and is supported by a generous anonymous donor. All readings begin at 6 p.m. and with the exception of Tim O’Brien will be held in the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, which is accessible through USC’s Thomas Cooper Library. The series is free and open to the public.
YES, LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT ARTS AND SCIENCES LECTURES ADDRESS RACE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Check out the breadth of offerings from the largest college on campus, whose subjects range from anthropology to gender studies. The College of Arts and Sciences will host events all year long, of course, but two of its major lectures are happening this fall. The Adrenee Glover Freeman Lecture in African American Women’s Studies on Oct. 11 features Ijeoma Oluo, author and editor-at-large of The Establishment, a multimedia website run and funded by women. Oluo’s book, So You Want to Talk About Race, offers a contemporary take on the racial landscape in America. Later this fall, the Robert Smalls Lecture in African-American Studies will present Phillip Agnew, activist and cofounder of Dream Defenders, a human rights organization that supports social justice initiatives. Agnew will speak on campus on Nov. 14. Time and venue for both the Freeman Lecture and the Smalls Lecture are TBA.
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CATCH BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
CREATIVITY INITIATIVE KICKS INTO GEAR
The University of South Carolina is home to a lot of creative people — and not only in the arts. Just ask David Cutler. In addition to his role as associate professor and director of music entrepreneurship at USC’s School of Music, Cutler has been tasked by the Office of the Provost with overseeing a yearlong, university-wide effort to promote innovation and embolden the creative spirit at every level of the campus community. In the process, Cutler is also highlighting what’s already here, bringing USC’s creative class on board one member at a time. The initiative, dubbed USCreativity, kicked off in May with the Great Gamecock Design Challenge. The weeklong competition brought together 10 teams composed of faculty, staff and students to reimagine an old Coast Guard bus for a new life as an innovative mobile outreach space. USCreativity will continue with additional events throughout the 2018-19 academic year. “While most of us surround ourselves with others who look and think a lot like we do, innovation is more likely when we work across disciplines to solve problems,” says Cutler. “The design challenge was a different kind of experience for participants. At each phase, the purpose of the bus is to facilitate conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen, bringing together communities that wouldn’t otherwise meet, to address important challenges or opportunities facing our state.” THE CREATIVE COOP
On the final day of the Great Gamecock Challenge, when the judges selected the Creative Coop as the winner, faculty facilitators Tony Dillon, Christy Friend and Sharon Verba were visibly psyched, and why not? The announcement capped a full week of training, orchestrated brainstorming, focus group interviews, consultant meetings and a three-minute Shark Tank-style pitch in front of a live audience. It also came with a $52,000 pledge from the judges, on top of $20,000 in seed money from the Office of the Provost, to help make the bus proposal a reality. “There were some serious moments where we thought, ‘We’re not going to get this finished!’” says Friend, professor of English. “In that way it was exciting but also very intense. It was that kind of experience where you have to be on top of your game every single moment because there’s not a moment to lose.” In the end, the hard work paid off in a proposal that featured video screens on the sides of the bus, a stage on its roof and a production studio inside. Per design challenge
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THE BUS! rules, the proposal was inspired by the hypothetical needs of a persona — for this team, a new tenuretrack professor — but ultimately the bus needed to be something usable by different stakeholders from across the university community and beyond. As an example of how it could be used, team members suggested that study abroad students could give live presentations about their experiences overseas to audiences on campus or around the state. A speaker or emcee might address an audience from the roof. “What made it tricky was the bigger charge to make this bus idea something that would appeal to all stakeholder groups,” says Friend. “The persona was just the starting point.” Of course, the winning team members admit that the entire design challenge was a starting point — and not just for the bus. The process inspired Friend to think about redesigning the conference room outside her office. It inspired Verba, head of research and instruction for Thomas Cooper Library, to consider new possibilities for the redesign of computer classrooms at Thomas Cooper. “The bus in itself is a project, but what if you can create a culture where we think of different things as projects, and not necessarily just classrooms?” Verba posits. “What if we redesign the way we do a program or the curriculum, and we use some of these same approaches? We now have 30 trained facilitators. Go from there and add some more. Start with some little projects, then do some bigger projects.” Friend is equally excited about the prospects for future collaboration. “It was such a great reminder to me of how much I have to learn from all of my colleagues at the university, people I would never otherwise have crossed paths with,” says Friend. “To be able to learn from watching Tony manage a project or how Sharon keeps everything on track was really a gift.” And the Creative Coop itself? The proposed external video screens might not be street legal, according to engineers, but that obstacle is just another design challenge waiting to happen. Dillon is already working with his colleagues in the College of
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Engineering and Computer Science to firm up a realizable plan going forward. “At the end, they said let’s look at all the ideas and take what’s good from each of them,” says Dillon, internship director for integrated information technology at the College of Engineering and Computing. “We’re now creating a bus for all of the stakeholders. The Judges’ Choice and People’s Choice are the primary ones, but we’re incorporating elements from the other eight as well.” STUDIO 1801
The people’s choice award went to Studio 1801, a bus design that would draw inspiration from the university’s history (thus the name, inspired by the date of USC’s charter) but also look to the future. The facilitators in this case were English professor Ed Madden, business professor Hildy Teegen and nursing assistant professor Tisha Felder, though as with every team, the faculty members were joined by six teammates representing staff and students. And apart from the name, what set Studio 1801 apart from the competition? Among other proposed features, a geodesic dome dubbed “the Pavilion of Possibilities” and customizable “pods” that can be kitted out for different functions depending on how the bus is to be used on a given day. “The idea was to create a studio space where different things could happen, whether it be a speaker or a group coming together to discuss an important issue,” says Madden. “Our design was more about creating a functional space for use away from the university, for outreach to and through alumni.” The focus on alumni wasn’t arbitrary. Rather, it derived from the hypothetical needs of the team’s assigned persona (a fictional law school alumna named Donna) and the perspective offered by the very real alumni who served as the team’s focus group. But the vision itself derived from the process, which brought together people of different ages, from different disciplines, at different phases of their lives. “We all have the potential to be creative, it just comes out in different ways,” says Felder. “These types of processes help us see that. People can be intimidated — ‘Well, I don’t sing, I don’t dance’ — but there are so many ways to be creative.” During the design challenge, however, creativity was channeled in very specific ways. Among other things, participants were expected at different points to wear pairs of color-coded
paper eyeglasses, with different colored glasses representing different feedback roles. Blue, for example, was for “boost,” meaning that the person wearing blue glasses was only supposed to offer encouragement at that moment. Red glasses allowed the same team member to be critical. “As faculty, we just don’t do things that way,” says Felder. “So people might think, ‘Is this a waste of time? Couldn’t we reach the same result doing things the way we have always done them?’ I would say no.” Teegen agrees, and says there was a method to Cutler’s madness. She calls the process “enjoyable but not play.” “The idea was to be very systematic with the engagement feedback we were providing each other,” she explains. “For me, at least, it gave me greater license to provide feedback that I might have been more reticent to give on the negative side. That was a very helpful new process point that I could see applying in any classroom.” Unlike most participants, Teegen had done some training in design thinking previously and had even taught a pilot course through the Honors College that was based on similar principles, but she says the Great Gamecock Design Challenge was different. “I wasn’t coming in cold, but David and his colleagues did a really great job in terms of introducing the concept compared to what I had done before,” Teegen says. “I learned a ton, and part of that was because we were collaborating across disciplines. One of the appeals for me was using this as a mechanism for identifying members of the campus community with whom I can share ideas.” ROLLING FORWARD
Cutler has laid out several phases for the project going forward. This year, engineering and art students are working to redesign and repurpose the space. Communications students will capture much of the work on video. Later, a follow-up design challenge to determine how the bus should be used to serve the university and the state. “The goal is to elevate creative capacity across the university and the state, while addressing critical challenges facing our community.” Whatever shape the bus ultimately assumes — whatever its ultimate purpose — the project is already a success, as Cutler sees it, because conversations are already happening across
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During the Great Gamecock Design Challenge, an artist used markers and butcher paper to inspire participants. The combination of words and images were meant to help them visualize the process as they raced toward the final pitch.
campus. And that all started in May, with 300 creative people from across the Columbia campus all wrestling with a single problem. “It’s amazing what happens when a diverse group of 150 people are unified around a single creative problem. We had participation from every college across campus,” Cutler says. “I don’t know that that’s ever happened for a voluntary event with faculty, staff, graduate students and undergraduate students. By every metric we were delighted.”
The bus is also just one aspect of USCreativity, which will announce more events as the year progresses, and which reflects the same philosophy as other campus projects, including this year’s First-Year Reading Experience book, A More Interesting Question, by Warren Berger, and October’s sold-out TEDxUofSC event, which was likewise built around the theme of creativity. T
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LIKE NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH BY MEGAN SEXTON
USC PROVIDES DISTINCT OPPORTUNITIES FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH
As South Carolina’s fl agship public university and a Carnegie Foundation top-tier research institution, USC attracts talent from around the globe. But it’s not just our reputation that draws so many researchers to the Palmetto State. The university’s location is a draw in itself, providing opportunities for scholarship and collaboration unavailable anyplace else. This compass marks the pathway outside the Melton Observatory.
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TELLING THE UNTOLD
Bobby Donaldson, left, with Simon Bouie
Research center recovers South Carolina’s civil rights past As he conducted research for Columbia SC 63, a project that commemorated the 50th anniversary of the height of the American civil rights movement, history professor Bobby Donaldson started discovering largely untold stories about the struggle as it played out in Columbia. The material he and his students unearthed and the people he met helped guide the formation of the South Carolina Center for Civil Rights History and Research, now housed at USC’s Ernest F. Hollings Library. The center is dedicated to documenting South Carolina’s civil rights story, and was founded in November 2015 with the receipt of the congressional papers of Rep. James E. Clyburn, the state’s first African-American member of Congress since Reconstruction. “One of the things that makes the state a great classroom or laboratory is that many of the people who were young leaders and activists in the 1950s and 60s are still with us,” says Donaldson, the center’s director and an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. “In the past three years, we’ve been able to travel the state to visit sites where events occurred to provide some contextual basis for our research. Additionally, we’ve been able to talk to people, record interviews and add these reflections to our oral history collection.” Among the people Donaldson has interviewed is Simon Bouie. As a 20-year-old Allen University student 1960, Bouie led a sit-in at the Eckerd’s drug store on Columbia’s Main Street and was arrested and convicted of trespassing, a typical charge for African-Americans who attempted to be served at lunch counters in the 1960s. His appeal was argued by attorney Matthew J. Perry, who later became the first African-American U.S. district judge in South Carolina. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Bouie’s conviction in what became a landmark ruling that was later used in other sit-in cases around the country. The center’s collection includes a copy of Bouie’s trial transcript and a photo of a previously unknown student at a local sit-in that has now been identified as Bouie. Bouie has also been identified in a 30-second film clip housed at USC’s Moving Image Research Collection that shows the arrest of two young men in downtown Columbia. The original film canister identified Bouie simply as “Negro demonstrator.” Bouie, who attended Booker T. Washington School before enrolling at Allen, moved home to Columbia a couple years ago and has been shown the film footage. He has also been interviewed by Donaldson and his students.
“Our location in the center of the state and in the heart of downtown Columbia has expanded my teaching and research efforts,” Donaldson says. “We have a great partnership with the Booker T. Washington Foundation, and our students have opportunities to conduct or listen to first-hand interview accounts.” The collections also include documents that show the strategy used by the Freedom Riders, who traveled across the South in 1961; photos of marches and protests in downtown Columbia; and interviews with key players in the civil rights struggle in South Carolina. The center and the library will showcase some of that material in a major exhibit next spring. “Within the Caroliniana and the Hollings Library, there are boxes of materials about the state’s history. In those boxes there’s a wealth of information on civil rights, much of which I did not know,” Donaldson says. “Through the research that we’re doing and with the students in classes, we have more eyes and hands on this material. We’re able to expand our study and documentation of what occurred in South Carolina during the past century.”
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TESTING THE WATERS Coastal estuary provides near-pristine marine science laboratory Along the coast of South Carolina, in Georgetown County, USC researchers have been methodically testing the waters for 40 years – learning the workings of a salt marsh estuary and the impacts humans have on the environment. Researchers at USC’s Marine Field Laboratory, the coastal research facility of the Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences, sample the wide range of physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the relatively pristine North Inlet estuary and compare them to other more developed coastal waterways. Bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and the south by Winyah Bay, North Inlet has been probably the most continuously and comprehensively monitored estuary of its kind, certainly in the United States. Regular measurements have been made for the past 40 years. The long-term study started with National Science Foundation funding and has continued with NOAA’s support for the North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. “As we analyze the trends and the relationships among these ecosystem variables, we’ve been able to put together a rather clear indication of sea level rise, increasing air and water temperatures and changes in rain patterns that have had an impact on the North Inlet estuary,” says Dennis Allen, who retired this summer as research professor in the School of the Earth, Ocean and the Environment and as director of the Baruch Marine Field Laboratory. Dennis Allen
It takes the perspective of a decades-long study to really be able to detect changes in things like vegetation, water chemistry and growth rates, reproduction, and migration habits of animals in the water, says Allen, who continues to conduct research even after retirement. “By taking measurements in North Inlet — and up and down the coast in more developed landscapes — Baruch scientists have generated information that’s helpful to understanding what’s going on,” he says. The technical analysis of work done at Baruch, home to one of the few long-term estuarine data sets available anywhere in the world, is communicated widely in scientific journals and at national and international conferences. It also is shared through educational activities at various levels, including the NOAAfunded estuarine research reserve program, in language that is more useful to non-scientific audiences. Baruch staff members run workshops attended by “coastal decision makers,” including state agency health and wildlife officials, city and county council and staff members, homeowner associations and others who work with coastal permitting and development. “People on the front line are generally hungry for information that will help them make good decisions for striking that balance between the needs of society and the need to maintain the ecological integrity of these systems,” Allen says. “It’s really fun to see people put to work the things we’ve learned about. For instance, the impacts of runoff from the landscape on the salt marsh and its animals and its chemistry can be significant. Storm water management is a big topic and many improvements have been made.” For Allen, who has worked at Baruch for 40 years, it’s not an easy job to leave. “Once a scientist, you can’t walk away from it,” says Allen, now a distinguished research professor emeritus. “The nature of my work has been to generate these long-term information series. There are still samples to be processed on the microscope and analyses of the data to do before the complete 40-year story can be published. I expect to be busy for some years to come.”
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Edward Blessing
A MAJOR DRAW South Caroliniana continues to attract researchers from around the world South Caroliniana Library is home to one of the country’s greatest collections of Southern history and manuscripts, a treasure trove for researchers that includes everything from Civil War diaries to textile-mill business records to historic South Carolina books and newspapers, photographs and architectural drawings. For researchers writing about American history, it is the place — often the only place — to find some of those documents. And while its home on the Horseshoe is currently closed for renovations, it continues to draw historians and writers from around the world to the Graniteville Room at the Thomas Cooper Library, which is serving as its temporary reading room. Each year, USC sponsors a number of summer fellowships that allow scholars to come to Columbia to work with the collections. This summer, that included a researcher from the University of Idaho who was looking at how social behavior influenced the development of the public sphere in Charleston before the Civil War. He used records available in the Caroliniana on inns and taverns in business at the time, early newspapers that showed goods coming in aboard ships, architectural drawings and some early views of Charleston. “Our manuscript holdings and our visual material holdings would not be available elsewhere,” says Edward Blessing, the interim head of user services and curator of published materials at South Caroliniana. “That’s specifically because the things
we have are not replicated elsewhere. There are some digital collections online, but we don’t have everything digitized. So, people do still need to come here.” Other 2018 summer scholars included a doctoral student from Italy and a faculty member from Cardiff University in Wales, along with a doctoral student from Claremont Graduate University in California who was researching federalism in the South in the early days of the republic. A professor from Wallace Community College in Alabama was looking at an agricultural papers collection from plantation owner David James McCord for connections between McCord and the author William Gilmore Simms. The professor is McCord’s fourth great granddaughter. “It became very personal for her,” Blessing says. “We have the McCords’ collection. They are falling-apart old documents and old books that her ancestor collected. She’s now re-interpreting what her ancestors collected.” Blessing says the library staff members develop strong relationships with many of the patrons and researchers, using their expertise to direct them to additional resources and helping them follow more leads. “The people of South Carolina are our stakeholders,” he says. “We’re really serving them by serving our patrons and by making things as accessible as possible.”
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Andy White
THE FINE SCALE OF TIME Pre-history emerges along the Broad River Soon after he arrived at Carolina four years ago, archaeologist Andy White and a few colleagues stumbled onto a fascinating site. Located along the Broad River in Fairfield County, the site offers a glimpse into the lives of people who camped along the same riverbank thousands of years ago. “It’s a site we can learn a lot from,” White says. “It’s great for educating the public, learning really interesting things about North American pre-history and South Carolina pre-history, and teaching students.” Over the centuries, as the river overflowed its banks, long sand formations were created, preserving artifacts that were buried within layer upon layer of soil, with some pieces 10 feet below the surface. The site allows archaeologists to see things, including pieces of pottery and projectile points, that were left at the site during numerous visits over the course of at least 7,000 years. “It’s a record of human behavior of small groups using the same spot over the millennia. And it’s going to help us learn about what they were doing there, which didn’t stay the same,” White says. “It’s like reading a book — you go through and try to figure out the story. It’s a painstaking process, but it’s a great way to teach students to do it. We’re learning a lot and will learn a lot more in the future with a sustained effort.”
White, a research assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, has run field schools for two years with students at the site. He says the first couple years have been spent trying to get a handle on the chronology, learning the age and types of the deposits they are finding. They have found artifacts that were used in families’ everyday lives, including intact deposits, known as “features,” like pits for processing food and posts for shelters. “These are great time capsules. They can tell us what people did on a fine scale of time — maybe an afternoon or an hour,” White says. “It’s those details that will let us fill in a part of the story we don’t know yet because these kinds of sites are so rare in this part of the country.” The dig site, located on private property, was discovered when White and his colleagues examined a bank where some sand had been removed with a backhoe. Artifacts were exposed deep in the layers of earth. The potential of the land as an archaeological site was clear. “Archaeology is very place-oriented,” White explains. “There are general patterns that we try to understand through time and across place, but each site is unique. Part of the challenge is to work in one very small location and try to figure out how that fits into the bigger picture.”
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RECOVERY STARTS HERE Stroke Belt research pays off for patients South Carolina’s high stroke rate is not good news for the state, but it makes researcher Julius Fridriksson’s work particularly relevant. A SmartState endowed chair and professor in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders in the Arnold School of Public Health, Fridriksson studies how a person’s brain recovers from a stroke, paying particular attention to how stroke affects communication. In 2016, he was awarded an $11.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to research stroke recovery and work to improve the lives and communication skills of patients after they suffer strokes. More than one-third of people who have strokes suffer from aphasia, a condition caused by a brain injury that affects a person’s ability to speak, write, read and understand language. Fridriksson’s grant created the Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery at Carolina. “The reason why South Carolina is important with regard to location is that the stroke rate here is very high. This gives us access to patients more than other places where stroke rates are lower,” Fridriksson says. “And the benefit of a large lab like ours in a place like this is that we serve a lot of these patients. We include them in our studies and they receive free treatment and rehabilitation.” South Carolina is part of the “Stroke Belt,” a group of Southeastern states with high stroke death rates, while the Midlands area has one of the highest stroke rates in the country. In addition, half of all strokes in South Carolina occur in people under age 60. The average age for patients in Fridriksson’s study is mid-50s. “For a while, we’ve been seeing a stroke decrease in the older population, but the overall stroke rate is not going down. The stroke rate in younger people is going up,” he says, adding that while many of the causes of stroke are the same regardless of the patient’s age, younger people have a greater chance of recovering from stroke. Fridriksson’s work relies heavily on detailed pictures of the brains of stroke patients made at the McCausland Center for Brain Imaging at Carolina. Those pictures show blood flow and functional activity of the brain, helping researchers understand changes in brain function related to stroke and recovery. Fridriksson and his team work with stroke patients who have
Julius Fridriksson
aphasia in both the first days and weeks after a stroke, and in long-term recovery. About 100 patients a year get full diagnostic and rehabilitation treatment in the aphasia center, says Fridriksson, who came to Carolina in 2001. “The stroke rate here was a huge factor in me coming here,” he explains. “The department was a good department on the upswing, but the location and access to stroke patients was a huge reason.” T
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WAY BACK WHEN
BY CRAIG BRANDHORST AND CHRIS HORN
CAMPUS CHANGES, HISTORY REMAINS As an urban campus with a 217-year history, the University of South Carolina has undergone its share of architectural changes. Buildings have been demolished, remodeled, renamed — and once, in the case of Flinn Hall, picked up and moved. Streets have been closed to accommodate construction; streets have been extended, altering campus boundaries. The landscape has changed and changed again. Don’t believe it? Stroll through the heart of campus. Start at the Horseshoe, amble onto Gibbes Green. Wander down Sumter Street, cross Davis Field. There’s history at every turn. You may need an expert to help you see it all, but it’s all still there — even its absence. To open our eyes to the invisible, USC Times enlisted Lydia Mattice Brandt, associate professor in the School of Visual Arts and Design, who has used campus as an “architectural lab” in her graduate-level American architecture class every spring since 2015. We checked our facts with university archivist Elizabeth West, who also steered us to the worst campus dining of the past 200 years — and helped us appreciate just how far we’ve come.
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Gibbes Green in the early 1940s was defined by the bold architecture of new classroom buildings and a wide lawn rather than the lush canopy that characterizes the area today. Opposite: the original president’s house stood near where McKissick stands today and capped a less grand Horseshoe, one with utility poles right down the middle.
THE HORSESHOE
Brick sidewalks, a leafy canopy, antebellum structures, stucco facades — a range of visual elements to make the historic Horseshoe feel both timeless and intentional, as though USC’s founders actually envisioned it gracing the cover of an admissions viewbook or hosting ESPN College Gameday. But today’s Horseshoe isn’t the Horseshoe students and faculty walked in the 19th century — and it wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th that anyone truly experienced it as unified architectural space, according to Brandt, who credits her students’ extensive research with informing her conclusions. “Before the renovations of the 1970s, the Horseshoe wasn’t considered as coherent a composition as we think about it today,” says Brandt. “Now, the trees tie it together and help mask the architectural differences, but the buildings are actually different quality brick. The stucco also helps unify the appearance and makes everything feel connected visually.” The architectural variety shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the buildings that define the Horseshoe weren’t constructed all at once. The oldest, Rutledge College, went up in 1805 and was rebuilt with different fenestration after a fire in 1855. The last, McKissick, wasn’t completed until 1940. That’s right. The Ionic columns, classical entablature, stately dome and other ornament of the present-day museum and Visitor Center (originally the main library) might
have been lifted from antiquity, but it took federal funding through the New Deal to set them in stone. Previously, the Horseshoe was crowned by something considerably smaller, the original president’s house, which was demolished in 1939. Situated closer to the Horseshoe’s curve, and with a footprint barely as wide as the front steps that now lead to McKissick’s front door, the old president’s house served as the terminus to a shorter Horseshoe than the one we enjoy today. “The scale of the old president’s house was never going to work as the head of that composition,” says Brandt. “The other thing that most people don’t realize is that Bull Street used to go straight through, right behind the campus wall.” GIBBES GREEN
If the Horseshoe was the campus cradle, the development of Gibbes Green marked the institution’s transformation into a modern university. South Carolina College became the University of South Carolina in 1906, and the first building on Gibbes Green, Davis College, was completed three years later, in 1909. The original LeConte (now Barnwell College) opened at the other end of the block in 1910. But Gibbes Green circa 1910 had a different relationship to its surroundings. For its first two decades as part of campus, getting there from the Horseshoe meant crossing Bull Street, which wasn’t closed between Pendleton and Greene
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Street until 1927. Prior to 1910, when Pickens Street was extended south of Pendleton, houses stood along its eastern edge. And before that? The original Gibbes Green consisted of three separate parcels and stretched from Pendleton Street to a now-nonexistent stretch of Devine Street between the present-day sites of Sims College and Patterson Hall. Though the university had purchased the property in the 1830s, neighborhood residents used it as a park, complete with baseball diamond and playground, until President Benjamin Sloan put down golf links in 1904, partly to fend off claims that the property was abandoned. You’d never know it now. The current Gibbes Green is smaller and better maintained. It’s also differently oriented, bleeding into the Horseshoe as if by design, though close inspection reveals a different aesthetic than what sits on the other side of McKissick. “If you took away all the trees, the buildings on Gibbes Green actually talk to each other architecturally pretty well, they’re in conversation,” says Brandt. There’s also an aspirational quality to the architecture, which she puts in the same tradition as Ivy League campuses like Harvard and Yale, and, before that, the English quads of Oxford and Cambridge. “That space was intended to give the university a campus feel according to what people in the early 20th century thought a campus should be, and that was a quad,” says Brandt, who plans to teach a class on Gibbes Green in the future. “They really wanted to build up USC in the guise of a northern university — ‘Let’s look like a college’ — because at that time the Horseshoe was looking pretty rough.” And the university wasted little time. Compared to the Horseshoe, which took roughly 135 years to complete, Gibbes Green came together in just over 40, with the final structure (the present-day LeConte) opening in 1952. The area also benefited from a more focused vision, as half its structures (Petigru, Sloan, Melton Observatory, the second LeConte) were designed by a single person, J. Carroll Johnson, USC’s first resident architect. SUMTER STREET CORRIDOR
If Gibbes Green was the center of growth in the first half of the 20th century, Sumter and Greene streets experienced the most dramatic transformation in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Sumter Street redevelopment that began in 1952 with Sumwalt gave rise to nearly a dozen new buildings over a quarter century, including the six now-demolished Honeycomb dormitories (where the Honors College Residence and John M. Palms Center for Graduate Science now stand), McBryde Quadrangle, Jones Physical Sciences, Coker Life
Sciences and Coker College (renamed the Health Sciences Building in 1976; more recently renovated for the School of Journalism and Mass Communications). Completed quickly as USC raced to keep up with a burgeoning student body after WWII, the concrete, steel and modern brick structures between Sumter and Main streets reflect a different aesthetic than anything that came before. Prior to 1952, faculty houses lined either side of Sumter Street, from Lieber College to Greene Street. The land now occupied by Coker Life Sciences was home to the Field House, where the Gamecocks played basketball until backto-back fires necessitated its demolition in 1968. The adjacent parcel, home to the 185,000 square foot Jones Physical Sciences Building since 1967, was a parking lot. But the Sumter Street site that most fascinates Brandt is on the south side of Greene Street between Sumter and Main, where Sumwalt (or some version of it) has stood since 1952. “The university was buying little lots here and there,” says Brandt. “If you look at Sumwalt, you expect it to be symmetrical, but if you stand at Wardlaw and look across Greene, it’s not. That’s because it was built in three different phases over 10 years. It took that long for USC to buy that whole block.” So, what previously stood on this end of the block? More homes, a fire station repurposed to house chemistry labs, and, at the corner of Sumter and Greene, the third location of Steward’s Hall, USC’s dining facility from 1902 until its demolition in the mid-1950s. “The most interesting aspect of that part of campus, from my perspective as an architectural historian, is Steward’s Hall,” says Brandt. “It was a pretty dumpy building, and it wasn’t nearly big enough to serve the entire campus population once it started to expand post-GI Bill. It was also known for having terrible food.” Steward’s Hall’s reputation began at its prior address — at the northeast corner of Greene and Main, on the block now dominated by Wardlaw. The converted house at that corner, where students were required to dine from 1848 to 1902, was roundly criticized for serving subpar victuals and, in 1852, was the site of the infamous “Biscuit Rebellion,” a protest so serious that roughly half of USC’s 199 students pledged to withdraw from school if the dining situation didn’t improve — and many followed through. But the maligned mess hall hung on, moving across the street and down the block while the university debated investing in a dedicated student center. Eventually, USC joined the national trend, constructing the first phase of Russell House in 1955 and ushering in a new mindset with regards to student experience.
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In 1960, before the reflecting pool was installed in front of Thomas Cooper Library, Davis Field (above) was a wide and uninterrupted lawn used primarily for athletics.
“There was a big controversy about whether or not USC should spend all this money on a building just for students to hang out,” says Brandt. “If you want to find the beginnings of the ‘country club-ization’ of the American college campus, it happens in the ’50s with student centers, when students start seeing themselves as customers.” DAVIS FIELD
Before Russell House was built in the 1950s, Davis Field was a venue for outdoor athletics and recreation and stretched east along Greene Street from Longstreet Theatre to Melton Field (near the current location of the Russell House), where Carolina played football. By the 1930s, games were played at Carolina Stadium, which was later expanded and rechristened as Williams-Brice. Davis Field remained a recreational field and marching ground for ROTC into the 1950s. “When USC was trying to expand in the 1950s after WWII, there was a big problem because the university didn’t have the money or the infrastructure to purchase large quantities of land,” Brandt says. “They had to use land they already had, and that’s how they ended up building on the ball field.” Construction of the Russell House took away the east end of Davis Field, and the field’s midsection was replaced by the reflecting pool during the second construction phase of Thomas Cooper Library. On either side of the pool, new coin-metered parking lots were added, mainly for student use.
“It’s crazy to think of all of those cars on what is now green space, but cars as an eyesore on campus is a very recent concept,” Brandt says. “When you look at the old pictures of Bates and Cliff Apartments, that giant expanse of parking lot that we see today as hideous — that was a point of pride in the ’70s. It showed that the university was modern, that there was an opportunity for parking.” Since the mid-90s, of course, universities have marketed the college experience differently, promoting “pretty campuses” and green space over surface parking. That’s how Davis Field, or part of it, was ultimately resurrected. “When those parking lots disappeared, that fit in with national trends by trying to make USC look less like an urban campus and more like a traditional college campus,” says Brandt. “Making Greene Street pedestrian friendly was a big part of that, too, and that’s actually something USC students have called for since the ’60s. All the palmetto trees that were planted this summer — those kinds of things have been discussed for a really long time.” And while the old meter lots are now a distant memory — they disappeared some 20 years ago, along with the traffic snarl they created — the reflecting pool that once separated them is more visible than ever, an elegant centerpiece to one of the most prominent green spaces on campus. T
Daniel Hollis’ University of South Carolina Volume II: College to University (USC Press, 1952) was consulted for this piece.
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HERE TO STAY Each fall, thousands of new students come to USC from out of state, and a lot of them later make a permanent home here, improving our communities and benefiting our economy. It’s the exact opposite of brain drain, and one of many reasons the Carolina family is so vibrant and diverse. USC Times reached out to a handful of successful alumni who themselves came here from someplace else — then fell in love with their adopted home. Q&A BY PAGE IVEY
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ADRIANNE BEASLEY WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA ’05 finance / Director of aerospace initiatives, South Carolina Council on Competitiveness
I WAS A DAY STUDENT AT SALEM ACADEMY, an allgirls boarding school in Winston-Salem — a class of 50, where everyone knew everyone, and all the teachers knew everything about you. So my priorities looking for a school, first and foremost, were “co-ed” and “a school large enough that I could kind of fly under the radar.” I was looking for a big state school where I could figure out what I wanted to do instead of having it so clearly laid out. I knew I wanted to go into business and study finance. The Darla Moore School of Business had an incredibly good reputation — still does — and it seemed like the perfect fit. It was just far enough away from home and had a really strong business program and a big enough campus that I could try out different things. I WAS A COMPETITIVE HORSEBACK RIDER GROWING UP, so I knew I wanted to find a barn where I could ride, help out and maybe teach some lessons. I ended up at Three Fox Farm, which was a really great side job because I got to do what I loved, and I got to meet many interesting parents, like Russ Meekins (executive director of the USC University Foundations until his death in 2017). His daughter rode at Three Fox, and he was there often, taking pictures and cheering her on. When years later I moved back to Columbia and began working at USC in the McNAIR Center for Aerospace Research, I got back in touch with Russ and he became one of my mentors. It’s funny that one of the reasons that I wanted to go to a big school was the anonymity, but I ended up finding my own little tribe. I also got really involved with Delta Sigma Pi — the business fraternity — which really paid off when I went for my first “real job” interview at HEICO Parts Group in Hollywood, Florida. The president of the company, who of course was quite a few rungs of the ladder above me, sat down and said, “I had to come in to meet you because I saw Delta Sig on your resume and I was in
Delta Sigma Pi at the University of Utah.” It’s one of those networking stories people tell when they’re trying to recruit you, but you never meet somebody that it actually happens to. So I broke into this very male-dominated industry of aerospace, doing financial analysis in mergers and acquisitions for an after-market parts supplier, HEICO. A couple of years after we moved back to Columbia, the university opened the McNAIR Center, and I saw the opportunity to combine my love for USC, my experience in business development and my experience in the aerospace industry. SEEING THE LACK OF DIVERSITY in aerospace and
engineering, one of my biggest passions is talking to underserved communities and female students about opportunities available in aerospace. I help with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) development projects and talk to students about what it means to be in this career. It’s hard when you don’t see someone at the head of the table who looks like you automatically get the message that’s not the place for you. But some companies, like Boeing, are working hard to make diversity and inclusion part of their culture throughout the company. Joan Robinson-Berry, vice president of engineering, modifications and maintenance for Boeing Global Services and former vice president and general manager of Boeing South Carolina, is an example of that — she was named among Women’s Enterprise magazine’s 2017 Top 100 leaders in corporate supplier diversity as well as one of the Most Powerful Women in Business by Black Enterprise. She is incredibly inspirational to so many students, and I think as we see more of those ceilings being broken, we will see more diversity in the pipeline.
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STEVE BENJAMIN
TODD CRUMP
QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY
GREW UP IN SOUTH FLORIDA
’91 political science, ’94 law / Mayor of Columbia
’92 Master of Education; ’98 M.D.
MY FAMILY’S ROOTS are in Orangeburg and we spent every summer there. I was accepted to USC, The Citadel, Auburn and Purdue. Having family in Columbia and Orangeburg made a big difference and so I chose Carolina and moved here as a 17-year-old college student. I HAD A VERY PROFOUND EXPERIENCE on Sept. 11,
1987. Growing up in New York City, we lived in a tough neighborhood, but I had two awesome parents. And in New York City, Catholicism is really large and the presence of the pope is very real. And here I was a 17-yearold, relatively clueless freshman on a college campus for the first time, hearing Pope John Paul II address students on the Horseshoe: “It’s good to be young. It’s good to be young and a student. It’s good to be young and a student at the University of South Carolina.” That was really a life-changing experience for me. It made me realize that just a few months earlier, I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing with my life and now I’m here on this college campus — this wonderful microcosm of society — a stone’s throw from one of the most influential men in the world, telling me that I have been blessed. I left the Horseshoe that day and went immediately over to student government and student affairs and got involved in student life. I got involved in the Minority Assistance Peer Program, got involved in the NAACP. The next year, I was a student senator and eventually became the student body president. COLUMBIA AND THE UNIVERSITY REALLY HAVE GIVEN ME SO MUCH , my life story has been, how do
I pay that back? How do I use the opportunities that I have, the blessings I’ve received to make sure other little boys and girls, similarly situated, have the same opportunities that I have been given.
Physician and assistant director of the emergency department, Lexington Medical Center; volunteer medical director, The Free Medical Clinic, Columbia
I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A DOCTOR , but neither
of my parents went to college so I thought there’s no way I could get into med school. I got accepted to the University of Miami on a scholarship and got my business degree. I was super-involved in student life, and everybody said, “Why don’t you go into student life? You clearly have a passion for it.” USC has a top-notch higher-ed program, so I flew up here for recruitment weekend and they said, “We’ll pay for your master’s degree if you’ll be a graduate assistant here.” I got my master’s, but that passion to be a doctor was still in me. USC didn’t have a hall director for Preston, so I stayed and took all my core science classes with the freshmen living on my hall. Then I applied to medical school and was accepted. I felt at home at the School of Medicine with the smaller size. WHEN I WAS A MED STUDENT, I STARTED VOLUNTEERING at The Free Medical Clinic. In 2002, they asked if I would take over as the volunteer medical director. I said, “I’ll do it for two years.” I’m still doing it. I went into medicine to help people, and there’s no greater need than The Free Medical Clinic and the emergency department at Lexington Medical Center. In the emergency department, you see people who are very vulnerable — sometimes, it’s their darkest hour, and I’ve got about two minutes to develop a trusting relationship and ease their pain or, at worst, tell a family member that their loved one died. At The Free Medical Clinic, there are folks with no health insurance, no Medicaid, no Medicare, but they still have diabetes or hypertension or asthma. I MOVED HERE IN 1990 and was told, “Be careful,
people who come here never leave.” Twenty-eight years later, I’m still here and loving it. My church is here, my home is here, my friends are here. This is the place where I’ve lived the longest in my life.
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SHANNON PALM
CHRIS ZIMMER
GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT
LEVITTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
’17 Master of Social Work, Master of Public Health
’06 finance and human resources management
Violence Against Women Act program coordinator for the S.C. Attorney General
Commercial credit leader, BB&T South Carolina
THE EASY ANSWER IS I HAD SOME FAMILY in the I WAS LIVING IN COLORADO, seeing youth go through
some terrible situations as an art therapy counselor. I realized that I needed further education to make an impact on a larger scale, so I started preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs. Along the way, mentors suggested that dual degree programs of social work and public health would allow me to achieve the same goals in less time. I did some digging and spoke to Michael Byrd in the Arnold School of Public Health and Katherine Leith in the College of Social Work. It helped that I have a good friend living in Summerville, so it all lined up. THE PROGRAMS WERE CHALLENGING because I maintained full-time employment, working for the Brain Injury Association of South Carolina, as well as part-time jobs with the Children’s Trust of South Carolina and the Child Fatality Advisory Committee. The public health program gave me a framework for deliberate action and very clear steps to make sustainable decisions for victims and survivors of crime. The social work program filled that framework with a rich background in social policy. ALSO, I BECAME INVESTED IN SODA CITY. Throughout
graduate school, I would bike or walk to the farmers market and participate in community events. In the winter, I appreciate the ice-skating rink on Main Street. I’m a foodie, so I love trying all the staple and new restaurants, coffee shops and sweet shops. Once I found Nonnah’s for cake and coffee, I was all set. CURRENTLY, I CONDUCT TRAINING on domestic vio-
lence, sexual assault, stalking and harassment across the state for law enforcement, victim advocates, educators, hospital professionals, prosecutors and judges. I work with amazing partners to combat violence against women and similarly situated men. Our state is making incremental progress in terms of serving justice in criminal prosecution, but there is still so much to do.
state. I was looking for a bigger university feel. I went to a small Catholic high school, and I wanted to prove it to myself that I could survive not only as the son of Jim and Connie, and the brother of Mike and Steve, but on my own. I looked at the University of Pittsburgh, University of West Virginia and South Carolina. Pittsburgh was a little too urban; West Virginia was a little too rural. And South Carolina — it’s in a city, so it’s got all the hustle and bustle, it’s got the state capitol, it’s got Main Street, but it’s also got the Horseshoe, it’s got that good campus feel. To me, it’s the best of both worlds. Then you sprinkle on the ranked business school and the hospitality of the people and the weather, I felt at home here. VERY EARLY IN MY TIME HERE , I saw someone with a tattoo of the South Carolina state flag. I’m not saying anything bad about Pennsylvania, but at the time, I didn’t even know what that state flag looked like, and here this person was passionate enough about their state to permanently mark that on their body. Then I found out about South Carolina vs. Clemson, the debate around barbecue sauce — people are passionate about stuff here. And that’s something I can get behind. I think if you can focus that passion to productive purpose, you can do something meaningful. I HAVE SERVED MY COMMUNITY IN MANY DIFFERENT FACETS over the last 10 years. From the board of the Family Shelter, to young talent development boards of Columbia Opportunity Recourse and the Moore School’s Young Alumni Council, to, most recently, economic development initiatives as part of the committees for the Columbia Chamber of Commerce. I feel like I’m adding value to the community while I’m learning what my community needs. It is also helping me round out my leadership style, so it’s
a win-win.
T
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FORWARD THINKING
ARTICLES BY CHRIS HORN
ARNOLD SCHOOL RESEARCHERS QUANTIFY LINKS BETWEEN CHRONIC INFLAMMATION AND DIET Over time, which is more likely to increase inflammation in your body — habañero peppers or macaroni and cheese? Yes, it’s a trick question. Hot peppers can start a three-alarm blaze on your tongue — and mac and cheese goes down like, well, cheesy pasta — but it’s actually colorful, flavorful foods like peppers that do the most to reduce or prevent chronic inflammation in your body. And that’s important because chronic inflammation is associated with a raft of diseases, from adult-onset diabetes and heart disease to several types of cancer. “The most pro-inflammatory diet on Earth is the American fast food diet,” says James Hébert, a cancer epidemiologist in the Arnold School of Public Health and director of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program. “And there are some crappy diets in northern Europe and the Middle East, as well. The simple rule of thumb is foods that are colorless, calorically dense and nutrient sparse are going to be pro-inflammatory.” Conversely, foods that are colorful, flavorful and aromatic — tomatoes, green leafy vegetables, fish, strawberries, blueberries, cherries and oranges, for example — tend to be anti-inflammatory, Hébert says. For centuries, medical traditions in China and India have noted the link between chronic inflammation and disease. And in the past three decades, Western medicine has focused on inflammation as a cause of cancer and a host of other chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.
Hébert and his team at the Arnold School have zeroed in on the diet-inflammation link by indexing the pro- or anti-inflammatory effects of foods and food components, including phytochemicals and micronutrients. Their federally registered Dietary Inflammation Index (DII®) took 10 years to develop. The painstaking review of more than 1,900 scientific journal articles identified 45 food and food components that were found to be associated with six biomarkers of inflammation in studies of humans, laboratory animals and even cells in culture. Besides whole foods, such as onions, garlic and ginger, and herbs like rosemary and thyme, the DII considers the effects of spices, fiber, fat, protein, carbohydrates and alcohol, as well as vitamins, minerals, flavones and flavonols. A score is assigned to each food or food component. These are then summed to create the overall DII score. Across the 100-plus populations in 39 countries that Hébert and team have examined the lowest, most anti-inflammatory, score is around -6 and the highest, most pro-inflammatory, score is around +6. Hébert’s team scored recipes in university first lady Patricia Moore-Pastides’ cookbook, “Greek Revival,” which features Mediterranean diet-inspired dishes. The verdict? Most of them averaged an impressive -4.5 on the DII scale. The team also developed an online dietary questionnaire tool called DII-on-Demand™ that poses about 140 diet
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related questions to help individuals calculate, monitor and improve their dietary inflammation. “Here’s the thing — we know that most people are not going to change their diet to prevent some chronic disease 10 or 15 or 30 years in the future,â€? HĂŠbert says, “but you can feel the effect of an anti-inflammatory diet immediately. “Eating an anti-inflammatory diet lowers your cancer risk, lowers your Type II diabetes risk and lowers the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. But that’s not why I do it — I do it because it makes me feel better now.â€? Mike Wirth, a research faculty member in the Arnold School and a member of HĂŠbert’s team, studies the connection of chronic inflammation with mood, sleep and stress. “A healthy diet decreases pro-inflammatory cytokines, and your mood improves as a result,â€? Wirth says. “The more inflammation in your diet, the worse your sleep, which is often related to being in a bad mood.â€? Five years ago, HĂŠbert founded Connecting Health Innovations as a startup company to develop and promote the DII Screener, the web-based DII-on-Demand, and other DII-related products and services. “Chronic diseases are not restricted to any country, and the DII is not restricted to any population,â€? says
Nitin Shivappa, a USC faculty member and senior scientist at CHI who did most of the reading and scoring of the more than 1,900 journal articles used to create the second version of the DII. “We have shown that just by working on diet, we can reduce cancer and other cardiovascular diseases. In my own country of India, Type II diabetes is rising alarmingly, and it’s clear that is related to an increasing adoption of a Western diet there.â€? HĂŠbert’s next goal is to work with researchers in the university’s McCausland Brain Imaging Center to measure brain responses while consuming certain foods or drinks. “If we can get to the basic issue around motivation and diet, we can win the game that we’re now losing,â€? he says. “The problem we have had in academic nutrition is that we try to sell deprivation. You think about Weight Watchers and all these diets, they’re all about restricting portion size without changing diet in a fundamental way.â€? “My advice? Just eat colorful, flavorful foods – as much of them as you possibly can. I wouldn’t worry about avoiding things — don’t go the deprivation route. Just focus instead on eating bright, colorful and flavorful foods, and that should be enough to put you in a healthier place.â€? T
 “The most pro-inflammatory diet on Earth is the American fast food diet.â€? — James HĂŠbert
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A MODEL SUBJECT BASIC NEUROBIOLOGY RESEARCH HAS IMPORTANT IMPLICATIONS FOR MAJOR DISORDERS AND DISEASES Alzheimer’s, autism and schizophrenia are very different neural disorders but they have this in common — scientists are learning more about each condition by studying the neural development of zebrafish. Barely the size of a small minnow, the zebrafish is the ideal model for such research because its nervous system matures quickly — in five days — and its embryos are transparent, allowing the direct visualization of developing neurons. Fabienne Poulain, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, maintains a colony of some 6,000 zebrafish as part of her basic research on neural development. “We’re studying how the neural system forms in early stages, as neurons extend long processes called axons to communicate with each other,” says Poulain, who joined USC’s faculty in 2015. “If there are errors in that neural wiring process in humans, it can subsequently lead to defects that may contribute to diseases such as autism spectrum disorder.” Poulain is especially keen on understanding how axons grow, connect to their appropriate targets and sometimes are eliminated after making mistakes, a process called pruning. Her latest research, supported in part by the National Institutes for Health, focuses on visual system
development, particularly the retinal axons that form the optic nerve. “During development, some of these retinal axons make mistakes as they elongate and are subsequently pruned,” she says. “Our latest discovery is that the molecules that instruct these misguided axons to degenerate are the same molecules that have been associated with autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. “We might discover new findings about what goes wrong in the nervous system when these molecules are mutated.” The Poulain lab is part of the Center for Childhood Neurotherapeutics led by biological sciences professor Jeff Twiss, and participates in the South Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Consortium. Poulain traces her interest in neural development to her teenage years, when she became fascinated with behavior and the human brain. She became obsessed with understanding how such a complex organ defining who we are forms and matures from conception to adulthood. “That has always been one of the most fascinating questions,” she says, “I came to USC because we have the opportunity to build a strong neuroscience community here, especially in the biology department where many new faculty are being recruited.” T
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GUT FEELING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH TEAM FINDS ‘GROUND ZERO’ OF GULF WAR ILLNESS In the nearly 30 years since the first Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq, medical professionals have struggled to identify the cause for symptoms collectively referred to as Gulf War illness that have persisted among a quarter-million military veterans, long after their return to the U.S. The fatigue, muscle pain, memory and other neurological impairment, rashes and diarrhea that are hallmarks of the illness might stem from exposure to environmental agents, including anti-nerve gas drugs, pesticides, smoke from burning oil wells and depleted uranium munitions. Subsequent studies have been inconclusive, and effective treatment has been elusive. Saurabh Chatterjee can’t identify the cause, but he thinks his research team at USC’s Arnold School of Public Health has found the locus of medical dysfunction. And a landmark study that Chatterjee’s team published this year in Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology points the way to an effective treatment. “About four years ago, we began trying to detect the pathology of Gulf War illness, and we wondered if the root of the problem was in the gut,” says Chatterjee, an associate professor of environmental health sciences and director of the Environmental Health and Disease Laboratory. Experiments using rodent models followed, revealing that the normal bacterial ecosystem in their gut was dramatically altered by the same elements to which Gulf War veterans had been exposed. “What we found is that the altered gut bacteria and their cell wall components seep into the circulatory system and causes neural inflammation,” he says. His team published a paper on their findings last year in PLoS One, which prompted an outpouring of interest from veterans and veteran organizations. “More than 25 years have passed already [since the conflict] so we should be going for a cure, but I didn’t want my research team to try to develop a new drug — that would take too long,” Chatterjee says. Instead, they used the same research model and found that butyric acid — an offthe-shelf, FDA-approved drug commonly used to treat inflammatory bowel disease — helped restore the gut microbiome to a more natural state. After the team’s report was published, the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs funded Chatterjee’s research projects to help facilitate drug discovery in Gulf War illness. “We are extremely close in exactly matching the alterations in gut microbiome of mice with hundreds of veterans — there is no use in doing more mice studies to find the pathology,” says Chatterjee, adding that human trial studies with butyric acid could begin in the next year with help from the Veterans Affairs office in Columbia and research collaborators in Boston and Miami. “It’s been so many years for these veterans — they need relief.”
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ENDNOTES
In May, USCreativity got off to a roaring start as 10 teams composed of faculty, staff and students from every college on campus competed in a Shark Tank-style competition called the Great Gamecock Design Challenge (see “Catch the Bus!” page 10). Their mission? To redesign and repurpose the onetime U.S. Coast Guard bus pictured below. “We want to engage populations from across campus to make this a reality,” says music professor David Cutler, who is orchestrating the yearlong USCreativity initiative. “We want to have an awesome looking bus, of course, but we also want to be able to tell the story, that we brought all this different expertise and all these different people from our community on board for a single project.”