UWM Research 2021

2021

SANDRA McLELLAN’S RESEARCH USES WASTEWATER AS A COVID-19 WARNING SYSTEM

Chancellor’s Welcome Chancellor: Mark A. Mone Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: Johannes Britz Vice Provost for Research: Mark Harris Vice Chancellor for University Relations & Communications: Tom Luljak (’95) Senior Director of Integrated Marketing & Communications: Michelle Johnson Editor/Publications Manager: Howie Magner Staff Writers: Genaro C. Armas, Laura L. Otto, Kathy Quirk and John Schumacher Contributing Writers: Silvia Acevedo, Elizabeth Hoover, Matt Hrodey, Tom Kertscher, Becky Lang, David Lewellen, Tony Rehagen, Sarah Vickery and LaBreea Watson Lead Designer: Kelly Grulkowski Designers: Kendell Hafner (‘14), Lesley Kelling and Allie Kilmer Photography: Pete Amland, Troye Fox and Elora Hennessey (‘17) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee P.O. Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413

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One year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic began changing lives across the United States and around the globe. We have all faced incredibly challenging times, and many have endured difficult losses. At UWM, we’ve met these trying times with resiliency and resolve, and by serving our communities through research, education and engagement. I’m honored to share some of these efforts with you in this latest edition of UWM Research magazine.

UWM researchers, like so many of their colleagues around the world, went right to work on pandemic-related issues in the areas of prevention, treatment, education, information, communication and more. In our Spotlight on COVID-19, you’ll get a closer look at their progress, including the promising research explored in our cover story about Sandra McLellan.

Professor McLellan is a driving force behind an innovative effort to use community wastewater treatment facilities as early-warning systems in the fight against COVID-19. Her work is already providing vital information about how to track COVID-19 trends and laying the foundation to implement similar systems nationwide for this pandemic and future ones.

UWM’s world-class research has continued in other areas as well. You’ll learn about how Black communities rallied for fair housing and how engineers are on the leading edge of water purification methods. You’ll see how our scientists are exploring better ways to harness light for data transmission and see the Connected Systems Institute’s fully functional nextgeneration factory that recently opened on UWM’s Milwaukee campus. You’ll also read about important research being done by our undergraduate and graduate students.

Knowing how UWM’s faculty members, staff and students are positively impacting their world every day gives me immense pride. I encourage you to learn more in this magazine and online at uwm.edu/ uwmresearch, and I thank you for your continued support.

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Best regards,

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Mark A. Mone, PhD Chancellor

On The Cover uwm.edu/uwmresearch

School of Freshwater Sciences Professor Sandra McLellan at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s Jones Island wastewater treatment plant.

Table of Contents CHANCELLOR’S WELCOME

22 When Gender Matters in American Politics Investigating gender’s impact on elections and opinions.

UWM’s research impact

BY THE NUMBERS 2 3

Researchers are opening a window into basic information about the root causes of the neurological and developmental disorder.

World-class, public-impact research The 10 largest federal grants at UWM

SPOTLIGHT ON COVID -19 RESEARCH 4

24 A Genetic Look at Autism

The Sewage Sleuth COVID-19 infection rates vary from location to location, which complicates health responses. But Sandra McLellan knows how to get sewage to talk about it.

8 Spraying away the COVID-19 virus 9 Easing isolation through the power of imagination 9 Seeing a way toward better health decisions 10 Seeking antiviral drugs to fight COVID-19 10 A social approach to fighting COVID-19 misinformation 11 Improving connections for better online education 12 Flying under ominous economic skies

FEATURES 13 Fair Housing Now! A UWM English professor explores how rhetoric shaped resistance to urban renewal.

16 A Bright Idea A physics and engineering collaboration seeks breakthroughs for using light to transmit data, which has vast implications for technology.

18 Making a Splash UWM researchers are developing innovative ways to filter contaminants from water, including insidious “forever pollutants.”

21 Cultural Care A team is working to provide better help for Native American women after the trauma of experiencing sexual violence.

GRADUATE RESEARCH 25 26 26 27

Using big data to make bats a bit less mysterious Closing health care gaps for African immigrants Taking a long-term look at income inequality An algorithm for the heart

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH 28 Starting down the path to discovery

FRONTIERS 30 31 31 32 32

33 34 35 35

Next-generation factory opens on UWM’s campus Purposeful movements Alternatives to arresting people with mental illness Having a choice boosts voluntary giving Learning why some hurricanes are more dangerous inland A thread tying ancient Peru to modern Chicago How Photovoice helps veterans gain new insights A design solution for vacant storefronts Exploring a nesting ground for antibiotic resistance

BOOKS FROM UWM 36 Recent releases from UWM authors

Q&A 37 The joy of astronomy’s new toy

World-class, public-impact research When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many UWM researchers quickly pivoted to exploring the disease’s spread and its impact as well as potential treatments. This quick response exemplifies the world-class, public-impact research that has made UWM one of America’s top research universities, as recognized by the prestigious Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The honor is bestowed on only 131 institutions nationwide.

In a year marked by protests against racial injustice, UWM also launched the Toward an Anti-Racist Campus initiative, awarding grants to faculty and staff for researching racial

inequities on campus and devising solutions, with a mandate that programs be implemented by the Fall 2021 semester.

Academic, governmental and industry leaders know they can count on UWM for cutting-edge, life-changing work across a broad spectrum of fields, including health care, freshwater sciences, entrepreneurship and energy. In fiscal year 2020, the university had $62.7 million in research awards. Nearly three-quarters of that amount – $45.7 million – came from federal agencies. Here is a breakdown of UWM’s research awards for fiscal year 2020, as well as a look at the 10 largest federal grants that were active that year.

2020 Total Awards Non-Federal Total $17 million

Federal Government Total $45.7 million National Science Foundation $14.3 million

Higher Education Institutions $3 million

Foundations and Gifts $5.7 million

National Institutes of Health $9.1 million

62 MILLION

$

Other Government $2.9 million

Department of Education $5.6 million

+

Department of Energy $4.8 million Department of Health and Human Services $4 million Other Federal Agencies $2.7 million

Business and Industry $3.56 million Nonprofit Organizations $1.85 million

Department of Justice $2.1 million Office of National Drug Control Policy $1.6 million NOAA $1.5 million Source: UWM Office of Research

UWM Research Foundation

20 48 108 2

Startup businesses associated with UWM's Research Foundation Active licenses and option agreements Patents issued

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Entrepreneurial Training

4,482 416 146

Participants in Fresh Ideas workshops (2020) Ideas submitted through Student Startup Challenge (since 2012) I-Corps teams trained Source: Lubar Entrepreneurship Center

The 10 largest federal grants at UWM GPS for gravitational waves Xavier Siemens & David Kaplan, physics $14.6 million over five years, National Science Foundation

This funding establishes a multi-institutional research center called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves. Scientists follow millisecond pulsars with radio telescopes in an effort to detect low-frequency gravitational waves and learn more about how galaxies are formed and evolve.

Gravitational wave data analysis Patrick Brady & Warren Anderson, physics

$7.2 million over four years, National Science Foundation The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an international partnership that first detected gravitational waves in 2015 and is now using them to learn more about the universe. This grant sustains and enhances LIGO’s massive computational data analysis infrastructure.

Ocean farming a biofuel source Filipe Alberto, biological sciences $5.2 million over four years, U.S. Department of Energy

Giant kelp, the fastest growing organism on Earth, could be a valuable biofuel source. UWM researchers are creating a seed bank and using genomic selection to improve traits. This will allow others to not only breed the crop and farm it in the ocean, but also protect it from environmental threats.

Environment and children’s brains Krista Lisdahl, psychology $3.8 million over three years, National Institutes of Health A partner in the largest long-term study of brain development and child health, UWM is tracking biological and behavioral factors in 384 Wisconsin children to identify how environment and biology interact to affect brain development.

The children are being followed from ages 9 or 10 through young adulthood.

A better way to weigh Michele Polfuss, nursing $3.6 million over five years, National Institutes of Health Children with spina bifida, a developmental disability, have higher rates of obesity than typically developing peers.

Inherent characteristics of the diagnosis make it difficult to accurately measure height, identify obesity and monitor trends. This project aims to develop an accurate method of measuring body composition in a clinical setting.

Easing pain for manual wheelchair users Brooke Slavens, health sciences $3.1 million over four years, National Institutes of Health This research aims to establish clinical guidelines that will alleviate shoulder injury and pain in children and adults who have spinal cord injuries and use manual wheelchairs.

Researchers are testing whether early use of a wider variety of propulsive movements can prevent pain.

Cosmic big data management Patrick Brady, physics $2.8 million over two years, National Science Foundation This project supports planning for scalable cyberinfrastructure to support multimessenger astrophysics, which combines observations of light, gravitational waves and particles to understand some of the most extreme events in the universe. This cyberinfrastructure investment will increase new discoveries by allowing quick analysis of large-scale data from all types of astronomical measurements.

Interpreting gravitational wave signals Jolien Creighton, physics $1.35 million over three years, National Science Foundation Rapidly identifying and interpreting signals from the global gravitational wave detector network is essential to multimessenger astronomy. UWM scientists are developing data analysis tools to facilitate the online search for signals from collisions of neutron stars and/or black holes as well as a classification system of gravitational wave source events.

Better battery protection Deyang Qu, mechanical engineering $1 million for one year, U.S. Department of Energy Boosting energy density in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries is key to broadening their commercial use. One obstacle is the formation of microscopic fibers on the lithium’s surface during charging and discharging, which can lead to fires or explosions. UWM researchers are creating a dynamic protection layer that will prevent this.

Using light and force to study proteins Ionel Popa & Valerica Raicu, physics $983,000 over three years, National Science Foundation Researchers will design and construct a tool for threedimensional study of interactions among proteins performing vital functions inside the body. The tool will use fluorescent tags to examine the mechanical response of proteins working together, which is important for investigating drugs or detecting antibodies.

* Inclusion in the list is determined by aggregated funding actions in fiscal year 2020 on federal research grants led by UWM employees.

The grants are ordered by total amount over the life of the grant.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

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The sewage sleuth COVID-19 infection rates vary from location to location, which complicates health responses. But Sandra McLellan knows how to get sewage to talk about it.

BY LAURA L. OTTO

As the COVID-19 pandemic rolled across the United States, Sandra McLellan’s team of researchers began receiving weekly samples of wastewater from treatment plants in Wisconsin’s most populous areas. Using methods they spent months tirelessly fine-tuning, they are extracting genetic traces of a disease that, by the end of 2020, was the leading cause of death in America.

People infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, shed particles of the virus that end up in sewage.

Taking recurring samples from a city’s wastewater treatment plants offers a cost-effective, comprehensive picture of the virus’ spread in an entire community. Consistent sampling – what McLellan calls sewage surveillance – doesn’t show how many people in the community have the infection, but it reveals trends that testing alone can’t provide.

McLellan, a professor at the School of Freshwater Sciences, says this type of wastewater-based epidemiology testing can signal when infections are increasing in a city, even though many infected people show no symptoms. As vaccinations roll out, wastewater surveillance can show decreasing virus trends as immunity increases in a community.

In early November 2020, the researchers saw Wisconsin’s COVID-19 surge play out in the wastewater data. “We could just see the concentrations climbing,” McLellan says. “The data is a great complement to clinical testing.”

UWM researchers were among the first scientists in the country to investigate using wastewater monitoring to assist public health efforts around COVID-19. Members of McLellan’s lab began collecting samples from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District before the state’s lockdown closed schools and sparked droves of people to start working from home.

Now, McLellan is helping lead two efforts: one to establish statewide SARS-CoV-2 virus monitoring in Wisconsin and another that creates a blueprint others can use to implement such a program.

McLellan, a Milwaukee native who earned her bachelor’s degree at UWM, returned to the city after completing her graduate work at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Her lab has established relationships that go back more than 20 years with stakeholders, such as local and state public health entities, wastewater agencies, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“I was attracted back to Milwaukee by the prospect of conducting research on the Great Lakes,” says McLellan, who lives only three blocks from the shore. “But I’ve stayed because of the strong partnerships I’ve found.”

As an environmental toxicologist, she has focused on identifying environmental pollutants and chemicals that can harm human health. But she has more recently become

 S andra McLellan at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s Jones Island treatment facility.

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SPOTLIGHT ON COVID-19 RESEARCH

She is leading a project to create a replicable model for launching wastewater surveillance systems, enabling more cities to use this method of managing public health crises.

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recognized for her research on the health  A fter wastewater samples are collected from implications of pathogens found in sewage. treatment plants, virus particles are filtered from In a 2015 study of wastewater from samples in a biosecure lab, making them safe to 71 U.S. cities, McLellan and School of handle. Then (from left to right) McLellan and lab Freshwater Sciences Assistant Professor members Adelaide Roguet, Shuchen Feng and Elexius Passante can continue the analysis.

Ryan Newton used markers of human gut bacteria in wastewater to predict a city’s obesity rate with about 90% accuracy. The study gained national exposure because it suggested that largescale sewage testing could help uncover health issues in a city’s population.

“Sandra’s been one of the world’s experts in understanding not only what’s going on with pathogens in a treatment plant, but also in the pipes beneath our cities,” says Erin Lipp, a professor of environmental health science at the University of Georgia. “She’s been at the forefront of identifying novel markers in sewage, bringing context and understanding to this work. To know what is normally present in sewage is fundamental to understanding what unusual viral loads look like.”

The idea of gauging the prevalence of a viral disease through sewage analysis isn’t new. Public health officials have used wastewater sampling to track outbreaks of diseases that commonly spread through contact with fecal matter, such as polio and, more recently, norovirus.

But there isn’t a standard method for detecting SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater. In fact, it wasn’t even clear that a virus spread through the respiratory tract could be detected in human waste. Traces of the coronavirus shed in sewage are only remnants of the genetic material from the virus, which is likely not viable in the samples.

But McLellan and a group of other academic researchers across the U.S. believed it could be done.

“Different types of viruses behave differently in how we isolate them and extract them from samples, and we know very little about how to do this with SARS-CoV-2,” says McLellan, whose lab members worked for months to hammer out technical aspects.

“There are many methods to accomplish each step in sample

preparation. So we had to go about it systematically to narrow down the best methods.”

In the summer of 2020, McLellan partnered with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) to launch a COVID-19 surveillance program that generates weekly data from treatment plants in all but five of the state’s 72 counties.

While McLellan’s lab analyzes samples from the Milwaukee, Waukesha, Green Bay and Racine areas, the WSLH handles samples from the rest of the state. Together, their efforts cover 60% of Wisconsin’s population. It’s the country’s largest program in terms of the number of facilities sampled. Because of that, Wisconsin is one of seven states participating in a nationwide pilot program conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

McLellan’s second wastewater project is centered nearly 900 miles away from Milwaukee. Working with treatment plant operators in New York City and other institutions, she is leading a project to build capacity and help connect public health practitioners to wastewater surveillance system efforts, enabling more cities to use this method to help manage public health crises.

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the team’s goal is preparedness for “next time.” Using new COVID-19 surveillance programs at 14 New York City treatment plants, the

team is identifying best practices for tracking pathogens in wastewater. In addition to honing technical protocols, the project will work with public health departments to provide information on interpreting results, making it easier for them to transform surveillance data into actionable health policies.

That aspect falls to Dominique Brossard, a UW-Madison professor who examines the intersection of science, media and policy, including how to communicate risk assessment.

Other team members come from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, Stanford University and the University of Notre Dame.

Lipp believes COVID-19 surveillance has shown scientists that wastewater-based epidemiology is a promising method to track a broad spectrum of viruses in the future, including those that cause anything from Zika to the seasonal flu.

The CDC operates a portal for state, local and territorial health departments to submit wastewater testing data into a national database. The portal may eventually grow into a nationwide effort for pathogen monitoring that would ensure the data could be compared across jurisdictions for use in the next pandemic.

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons,” McLellan says.

“Communication and research networks are now in place.

Long-term, this is developing into a national program.”

 R esearchers use extracted RNA in a process called RT-PCR to identify genes that signal the presence of the virus and determine the virus concentrations for each sample.  McLellan hopes that wastewater-based epidemiology could become a valuable tool to help in the fight against future pandemics.

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SPOTLIGHT ON COVID-19 RESEARCH

Konstantin Sobolev

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

Spraying away the COVID-19 virus Konstantin Sobolev hatched the idea in a Milwaukee-area gym in spring 2020, just before pandemic containment measures closed public spaces. He saw how anxious patrons were, how much more time they spent swabbing down equipment with disinfectant wipes. They knew COVID-19 could be transmitted by touching contaminated surfaces and then touching their own faces.

Those surfaces are contaminated when people with COVID-19 speak, cough or sneeze and expel virus-laden droplets. But what if there was a longlasting spray coating that could be applied to a variety of surfaces, and it could both repel and sterilize those droplets? Sobolev, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering & Applied Science, and his team started designing and testing such a spray. The concept is based on research into how buildings and public spaces can keep themselves clean.

The researchers envision a coating that prevents the virus from attaching to a surface in the first place and destroys microscopic pathogens through a chemical reaction initiated by sunlight – or, potentially, artificial light.

“There is no single product that accomplishes both,” says Sobolev, who was awarded a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation in 2020 to develop and test the spray. “There is so much potential when you think about the objects you touch constantly throughout the day, like doorknobs, keyboards, phones and even currency.”

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For years, Sobolev’s lab members have worked on protective coatings for concrete and structural steel, with goals similar to the proposed protective spray – to make them water-resistant and enable photocatalysis, a process that could help buildings combat air pollution.

“Through photocatalysis, ultraviolet rays in sunlight react with the chemicals in the coating, breaking down greenhouse gases from vehicle exhaust into harmless elements,” says research team member and doctoral student Filip Zemajtis. The process also could sterilize pathogens, he says.

UV light by itself kills microbes, including viruses, when a surface is exposed to a high concentration for a certain duration. But public spaces can only be doused with UV rays when people aren’t around because human exposure can be harmful.

The group is trying to answer a list of questions, such as whether a one-step application will work, whether the photocatalytic effect will work with artificial or indoor lighting, and how long the effect will last. The team includes doctoral student Reed Heintzkill; Nikolai Kouklin, professor of electrical engineering; Michael Nosonovsky, associate professor of mechanical engineering; and David Frick, professor of chemistry.

When those issues are resolved, Sobolev says, surfaces treated with the coating would require less frequent cleaning, and the resulting technology could improve preparedness for future outbreaks of airborne pathogens. – Laura L. Otto

ENGLISH

Easing isolation through the power of imagination When COVID-19 sparked lockdowns, care homes for the elderly became secluded places, barring visitors and even group activities. No family members ANNE Basting were allowed, no volunteers and no group dining. “Lockdown was so thorough and cruel,” says Anne Basting, an English professor in the College of Letters & Science, whose research often involves working with care facilities. “An intense isolation was happening.”

To respond, Basting’s TimeSlips organization mobilized people to send 150,000 postcards to scores of care homes.

TimeSlips grew from Basting’s research into using participatory arts to help older people, particularly those with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The work earned her a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.

Written on each postcard was one of many thought-provoking “Beautiful Questions,” such as, “What is the most beautiful sound in the world?” To reply,

people called a phone number and left a message. TimeSlips also provided the public with a do-it-yourself method for mailing cards to care facilities all over the world. It posted a global map and a list of addresses on its website, timeslips.org/ postcard-challenge, with examples of the types of cards to send.

By engaging people with memory loss in creative activities and storytelling, their focus shifts to invention and spontaneity instead of memory and their limitations.

The benefits extend to people without memory loss, too, by fostering more humane and interactive ways to care for older adults. The approach is detailed in Basting’s new book, “Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care.”

The pandemic has frustrated Basting and TimeSlips. They’ve trained almost 1,000 facilitators in the professor’s

Creative Care techniques, and many now can’t get into facilities to serve elders. So to reach elders at home, Basting organized the Milwaukee Tele-Stories Project, which paired 10 local artists with 10 local seniors each, people recruited by Eras, a local senior-serving nonprofit. TimeSlips trained the artists in storytelling techniques and doing Creative Care over the phone, and they started calling the 100 seniors on a regular basis, using Beautiful Questions to start conversations.

Visual and multimedia artists, poets, performance artists and a dancer joined the project to find meaningful work forging connections benefiting both elders and facilitators. It ran until November 2020, when the artists shared legacy projects inspired by the interactions. The expanded pilot evaluation is promising, showing a reduction in loneliness of 41% for participating elders. – Matt Hrodey

INFORMATION STUDIES

Seeing a way toward better health decisions Visual aids generally help people grasp science concepts, but research suggests many struggle with translating data from charts and graphs into personal health decisions. Such concerns take on added importance with so much COVID-19 data being presented graphically in the media.

Min Sook Park, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies, is researching this issue with a team of scientists from other universities. They’re investigating whether the public understands these COVID-19 data representations and whether their level of understanding influences perceptions of the pandemic’s severity.

The insights will go beyond mitigating COVID-19. “This will help citizens be better prepared for other, similar health issues,” Park says.

As part of the project, Park and her colleagues will publish advice and suggestions on improving data representations to a website, which will be available to educators and media outlets.

Plans call for incorporating the improved data display approaches

into undergraduate STEM courses to increase scientific and mathematical literacy.

Researchers will interview a wide range of participants and develop models of their understanding of key concepts.

Then they’ll develop researchbased modifications to graphics and evaluate how the changes boost understanding.

They’ve already found evidence that building animation into still Min Sook Park graphs makes it easier for people to digest them.

The team, backed by funding from the National Science Foundation, includes members from the University of Georgia and Arizona State University. – Laura L. Otto

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SPOTLIGHT ON COVID-19 RESEARCH CHEMISTRY

Seeking antiviral drugs to fight COVID-19 In January that causes COVID-19, to those in the 2020, as the first coronavirus that caused the less-severe COVID-19 cases SARS outbreak in 2003. Frick and his lab were appearing colleagues identified the protein most in the United distinct from its earlier cousin, as well as States, David Frick the protein most similar. He then started and his students testing hundreds of druglike compounds – already had begun some of which he developed – to see if any investigating the interfered with those proteins.

DAVID Frick virus behind them.

The team found that the protein most They studied the group of proteins that different from the 2003 coronavirus can allows the virus to multiply inside a cell. add or remove a component in human Frick, a chemistry professor in the College of Letters & Science, has devoted most of Original his research career to creating DNA Chromosome antiviral drugs. He’s also one of thousands of researchers who spent the past year exploring drug compounds with the potential to halt the pandemic. Several compounds that Frick developed six or Helicases are proteins that “unzip” genes so that their codes can seven years ago to test on other be read and copied. Many viruses, like the one causing COVID-19, cannot survive without a functioning helicase. viruses are showing promise.

“This work began years ago when we were testing our compounds on proteins called ADP ribose, which is often the hepatitis C virus,” Frick says. “Whether how pathogens cause disease. These are any existing drugs will work, however, called “epigenetic” modifications, and really just depends on how they fit the some of Frick’s compounds seek to disrupt structure of the COVID-19 proteins.” that process.

He began by comparing the replication Frick is taking a different approach proteins in SARS-CoV-2, the virus with the protein that’s most similar. That

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protein, called a helicase, is necessary for most viruses to read instructions encoded in genes. Frick has years of experience developing helicase blockers – compounds that can stop a virus from accessing its genetic command center.

For this research, he is receiving help from Wilfred Tysoe, distinguished professor of chemistry, and Nicholas Silvaggi, associate professor of chemistry.

Tysoe’s lab members are using computer models to simulate how compounds interact with the COVID-19 proteins on the molecular level. Silvaggi’s lab is mapping the proteins’ atomic structure using X-rays so researchers Helicase can visualize and simulate how some compounds might bind to the helicase.

As of early 2021, remdesivir was the lone drug approved to treat COVID-19. But previous research suggests that more successful viral therapies consist of a “cocktail” of antivirals that’s less likely to produce drug resistance. It underscores the need for more antiviral candidates. Frick’s team has identified several compounds with potential, but more work is needed to fully understand how they act on infected cells.

– Laura L. Otto

EPIDEMIOLOGY

A social approach to fighting COVID-19 misinformation " Growing up, Amanda Simanek saw how friends and family sought out her father, an automotive mechanic, for trusted advice on car repairs. Years later, she’s tapping into trust as a way to fight misinformation in the midst a global pandemic.

Simanek is an associate professor of epidemiology in the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined an allfemale interdisciplinary team of scientists who launched a social media-based science 10

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communication campaign to answer questions about this new disease.

The initiative, called Dear Pandemic, provides comprehensive and unbiased information about COVID-19, delivered in easily digestible question-and-answer servings through posts on the social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Launched in March 2020 to help people navigate the onslaught of COVID-19 information, some factual and some not, the campaign now has more than 80,000 followers. “One of the

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EDUCATION

Improving connections for better online education Simone C.O. Conceição has devoted nearly three decades of her career to researching and advancing online education and virtual learning. It’s work that became more relevant than ever when the pandemic transformed schooling routines in 2020.

“Online education is the thing right now,” says Conceição, a professor of adult and continuing education. In the summer of 2020, she and School of Education colleagues held workshops for K-12 teachers, sharing methods and tools she helped devise that could keep students engaged in the online environment.

Her latest book, “Designing the Online Learning Experience: Evidence-Based Principles and Strategies,” was published in 2021.

Conceição’s research examines aspects of online learning that are particularly critical right now, such as methods and tools for creating a sense of presence online. It’s important because when students have a sense of being there, as well as of being with others, it enhances their relationships with teachers and

key things we’ve learned is how fundamental trust is to successful spreading of science-based information,” Simanek says.

Those with AMANDA Simanek COVID-19-related questions can submit them via the campaign website, dearpandemic.org, where previously answered questions are archived. The group uses a just-the-facts approach to provide practical, actionable information, and their followers often share and boost the messages.

“By communicating on these channels, we’re beating the spread of misinformation on social media at its own game,” she says. “Some of our posts reach upward of 100,000 people.” Those metrics

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leads to a fuller learning experience. When students feel isolated and disconnected, it can lead to problems with retention and persistence.

Conceição has also looked at how teachers can manage their online workload. She’s collaborated with researchers and teachers in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Turkey and China, which reflects her preferred approach to research and development.

“I’m a collaborator. I don’t like to do things alone,” Conceição says. “The final product is much more creative and unique when several minds work together.”

The Brazil native initially came to UWM for a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then earned her master’s degree in adult and continuing education leadership. Nearly 30 years later, she remains at UWM as an international authority in her field.

“It’s the American dream,” Conceição says. – Kathy Quirk

give Simanek and her colleagues a good start in the natural next step: assessing how effective this intervention has been at stopping the spread of misinformation and affecting pandemic-related health behaviors. The questions submitted by followers also provide additional data on potential holes in public understanding of the pandemic.

Through this effort, Simanek and her colleagues are not only helping people know how best to protect themselves and others, but they are also laying the groundwork for researchers to understand best practices for science communication in the context of a global pandemic.

The team plans to continue its science communication efforts through Dear Pandemic as long as needed and may eventually transition the campaign into a permanent science education endeavor.

– Laura L. Otto

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ECONOMICS

Flying under ominous economic skies Air carriers typically have weathered economic downturns in part by making their operations more JAMES Peoples efficient. This could mean using smaller aircraft that burn less fuel, with cabins that are smaller but filled to capacity.

But research by James Peoples found that even the most efficient operations may not help airlines overcome the unprecedented upheaval triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peoples, a professor of economics in the College of Letters & Science, focused his study on the efficiency and productivity of airlines in the Asia-Pacific region. It’s the global

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airline industry’s biggest region, and it also had experience in responding to a health situation with the SARS outbreak in 2003.

He compared how airlines weathered the Great Recession to the current predicament caused by COVID-19. During the 2007-09 Great Recession, efficiency increased and continued to increase in the two to three years afterward.

Also, productivity declined during the recession before rebounding.

He then applied the pandemic’s decrease in air travel to his Great Recession analysis to simulate what might happen in the wake of COVID-19. He found that there would have been declines in efficiency and productivity both during and after the recession.

The implication: Airlines might lose money no matter how much they try streamlining operations

to become more efficient. A contributing factor is that COVID-19 social-distancing guidelines required airlines to fly with a significant percentage of unfilled seats, which reduced revenue.

Peoples notes that this can be applied to U.S. airlines that also have taken financial hits. But what’s unclear is how the public will respond after wide distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine. Will travelers still be wary about flying?

“Some airlines may not make it through the pandemic, and the ones that make it through may merge and create a more concentrated industry,” says Peoples, whose study was published on the Emerald Open Research website. “If it’s more concentrated, will they have more pricing power and will fares go up?

That’s the concern that I have.”

– Genaro C. Armas

FAIR HOUSING NOW!

A row of Milwaukee’s Bronzeville businesses near 12th and Walnut streets in 1958.

A UWM English professor explores how rhetoric shaped resistance to urban renewal.

BY SARAH VICKERY

Derek Handley’s parents were part of the Great Migration, leaving homes in Alabama and North Carolina to head north, where they settled in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the Hill District was a thriving neighborhood, home to Black families that enjoyed the community’s markets and jazz clubs. The downside was that conditions were overcrowded – sometimes you found three families packed into a one-family home, for instance, as more African Americans moved northward to escape persecution and Jim Crow laws in the South, and shady landlords took advantage.

And then the city started to tear it down.

At first, the residents were excited. Urban renewal seemed like a lively era of change in which overcrowded conditions would be abated and the city would construct more and better housing. The reality was much different: Pittsburgh began cutting into the Hill District to build a new arena, and city officials had no intention of accommodating the thousands of people they displaced.

“That’s when things kind of flip,” says Handley, an assistant professor of English in the College of Letters & Science. “Residents claimed this one corner just above where the arena was built. It was renamed, over a period of time, Freedom Corner. It was a site for gatherings, to begin marches into downtown. They actually put a billboard on this corner saying you will not build past this point.”

Top photo courtesy of Milwaukee Public Library. Bottom photo by Teenie Harris, courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Hill Family Fund.

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Handley studies rhetorical strategies that African American communities used in response to urban renewal in the ’50s and ’60s, focusing on Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and St. Paul, Minnesota.

He’s collecting his work into a forthcoming book about the history of urban renewal and the Black Freedom Movement.

URBAN RENEWAL MEANT UPHEAVAL Urban renewal swept the nation after World War II. City officials wanted to combat white flight by building new attractions and highways that would connect cities to their suburbs and draw people in. But overwhelmingly, the areas they deemed blighted were in minority communities. And while cities razed homes, they weren’t building new dwellings for the people they displaced.

To compound the situation, there were housing policies like covenants in the Milwaukee suburbs of Shorewood and Wauwatosa that forbade homeowners from selling their homes to Black buyers. This meant African Americans were restricted in where they could live. In Milwaukee, for example, most Black residents were funneled into the city’s north side.

“You take away available housing, and you’re not building enough replacement housing,” Handley says. “So what happens?

They pile on into where they could live, which creates some of the same conditions that were problematic before.”

To help tell that part of Milwaukee’s story, Handley is working with Anne Bonds, associate professor of geography, to create a

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visual depiction of racial housing covenants and resistance to them in Milwaukee County. The project is titled Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County.

Faced with discrimination and loss of their homes and businesses, and inspired by the Civil Rights movement sweeping the United States, African Americans began to organize. In Milwaukee, residents marched to protest housing practices, while in Pittsburgh, the sign went up in Freedom Corner.

THE RHETORIC OF CIVIL RIGHTS Two core concepts were at the heart of this resistance to urban renewal. First, Handley says, were demands that African Americans be treated as full-class citizens: “We want equal rights.

We want to live like the people in Wauwatosa, or wherever. We have the money. We can afford it. Why can’t we live here?”

The second idea was even more basic: humanity. African Americans argued for their humanity and that these discriminatory practices were fundamentally inhumane.

Organizers used a variety of rhetorical strategies to spread their message. Although Handley certainly respects leaders of the broader Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, he’s fascinated how local leaders rallied citizens and taught them to advocate for their neighborhoods.

In Milwaukee, local chapters of the NAACP and Urban League worked with faculty from the UW-Milwaukee extension

At left, Derek Handley stands on the Walnut Street Bridge in Milwaukee, where plaques commemorate the Bronzeville neighborhood, which was waylaid by freeway construction and urban renewal.

Below, Milwaukee’s Black community rallies to demand open housing during a late-1960s gathering at St. Boniface Catholic Church.

A PERSONAL HISTORY, A LASTING HISTORY

and Marquette University to host leadership seminars teaching protesters how to speak with landlords or at public hearings.

Handley calls this “circulation of agency.” “Part of leadership is empowering other people to become leaders in their neighborhoods and communities, and that’s what I’m seeing by studying these rhetorical strategies,” he says. “Some of the participants in these classes went on to create another organization called WAICO, the Walnut Avenue Improvement Committee Organization. Through their interactions with the city and with the people, they rehabbed houses to get rid of blight.”

In Pittsburgh, another strategy: the use of place, along the lines of the you-will-not-build billboard erected at Freedom Corner. “It was meant to unify the community around this one central part in the city,” Handley says. “In the case of Pittsburgh, they proved to be successful. Officials didn’t do any building past that point.”

The legacy continues today. Freedom Corner is still a meeting place for the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements.

Right photo courtesy of Milwaukee Public Library.

Handley’s personal connection to the Hill District and neighborhoods like it is part of what drew him toward his research focus. Although his older siblings grew up in the Hill District, he did not. In 1968, a few years before Handley was born, the country passed the Fair Housing Act, and his parents moved the family to the Pittsburgh suburbs.

“Which meant, for me, my life was completely different. By the ’80s, if I was growing up in the Hill District, where the crack epidemic ravaged similar communities, who knows what my life would have been like?”

Handley wonders. “I’m not disparaging anyone who grew up in urban environments, but it shows one particular effect that the Housing Act had. Members of my family were affected by urban renewal.”

Urban renewal is still going on today, but this time, it’s in the form of gentrification. Younger, usually white and more affluent professionals are moving to cities and buying up housing in areas that have traditionally been minority communities. That, in turn, increases housing costs, often pricing out longtime residents.

And now, just like then, people are beginning to resist. Handley recounts the story of a neighborhood record store in Washington, D.C., that had played music outdoors each day for more than 20 years. People new to the area with predominantly Black residents complained about the noise.

“Their rhetorical strategy of resistance was: Not only are we going to play this music, we’re going to play it louder, and we’re going to turn this block into a block party,” Handley says.

“And they rallied around this location as the resistance point of gentrification.

“They said: You will not quiet us. If you want to live here with us, you’re going to accept our cultural norms instead of trying to impose yours. You will not build past.”

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A BRIGHT S

maller, lighter, faster. That has long been the guiding physics, are teaming with two physicists at West Virginia University principle for creators of personal communication devices, to address this problem. Their collective goal is to develop new from the earliest computers to today’s hottest smartphones. materials that can do the same job as the big magnets while But at this point, how much smaller and lighter do we need making communications infrastructure smaller, lighter and less our Apple Watches to be? expensive. Perhaps one day, it could make our devices faster and Although developers are straining to pack their tech into more efficient. ever-tinier, still-practical packages, opportunities remain “Creating optical nonreciprocity isn’t so easy,” Hanson says. for gaining useful speed in our communications. Two UWM “Magnets are big and heavy, and they’re not compatible with all researchers believe one long-term possibility to boost speed, devices. If you want devices that are small and lightweight, we bandwidth and efficiency is replacing some of the electronics need some other way to create nonreciprocity.” with optical devices. This is the same kind of light-based tech The most promising approach Hanson and Weinert have that already constitutes much of devised is to create two new the larger telecommunications materials. The first acts as a better, infrastructure, like fiber-optic longsmaller magnet, while the other distance voice and data networks. is a two-dimensional conductive The challenge centers around material. When working together, something called reciprocity, they can achieve nonreciprocity which refers to light’s natural without the bulky magnets. state of bouncing around in many “We’re basically changing directions. But in order to harness materials at the atomic level,” light for data transmission, it must Weinert says, “and we’re producing Researchers are studying many material combinations that be made to go in one direction, new materials that are tailor-made might carry light in one direction. Here, a yellow superconductor and this nonreciprocity can be to have these properties.” (graphene) is layered atop a two-dimensional magnetic insulator implemented using magnetic Hanson and Weinert form a (Crl3), made up of blue chromium atoms and purple iodine atoms. fields created by strong external perfect research marriage between magnets. These magnets are the College of Letters & Science relatively large, heavy and expensive. and the College of Engineering & Applied Science. Weinert, Now, UWM’s George Hanson, a professor of electrical along with the West Virginia physicists, knows the theory and engineering, and Michael Weinert, a distinguished professor of materials physics, and can postulate different compositions of

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IDEA

A physics and engineering collaboration seeks breakthroughs for using light to transmit data, which has vast implications for technology.

BY TONY REHAGEN

materials that could achieve the necessary nonreciprocity. Hanson, with his practical knowledge of electronics, can then tell them whether these new materials will be compatible with the devices.

Through this method of interdisciplinary teamwork, trial and error, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, the group has made significant strides in the realm of the thinnest possible materials, made from a single layer of atoms.

One such class of these materials, known as Dirac materials, has extremely high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as impressive durability and tensile strength.

The team “grows” their material in the lab and on the computer by sandwiching a thin layer of magnetically doped material – essentially atoms with a slight magnetic force – between an underlying layer and a gapped Dirac material. The next step is testing these materials to see if they’ll facilitate using light to transmit data.

For example, the researchers tried using graphene, which is composed of flat sheets of carbon using a hexagonal GEORGE Hanson lattice. It’s very conductive and very strong, making it a promising material for things like batteries and supercapacitors, and there was optimism that it might meet the needs of Hanson’s and Weinert’s team. Although tests showed graphene to be impractical, it was another step down the path of finding the proper solution.

Meanwhile, Hanson and Weinert have proven that the magnetic fields created by some of their other materials are

strong enough to control optical signals. But even then, Hanson says, it’s not that easy. Once they find materials that work in theory, they then have to fabricate them.

“A material might sound good at first,” Weinert says. “But even if we think we find the answer, sometimes nature just doesn’t cooperate. Every time we do something, we find other questions.

Something might sound good at first but then might not turn out as promising as we had hoped.”

Besides, even if they find the ideal two-dimensional magnet, they have to find a conductive 2D material that works with it.

“We’re trying to do two things at once,” Hanson says. “It just makes it that much harder.”

The UWM researchers say that they hope that within the next year, they’ll settle on the most promising materials for both magnet and conductor, and then be ready to pass the results to other researchers and manufacturers. Because while the team possesses plenty of physics and engineering know-how, they aren’t full-fledged fabricators.

MICHAEL Weinert But they have cleared a path through the wilderness, pointing out promising turns and crossing off dead ends on the map so that one day, a manufacturer might put the newest, smallest, cheapest and most efficient devices possible in people’s hands.

“If we identify that these things work in both theory and experiment, that would be a tremendous outcome,” Hanson says.

“I’m not sure we’re going to get there – but we might get close.”

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Making a UWM researchers are developing innovative ways to filter contaminants from water, including insidious “forever pollutants.”

BY TONY REHAGEN No life, as we know it, exists without water. And though more than 70% of Earth’s surface is covered in the stuff, only about 3% of it is fresh, and less than 1% is drinkable. Humanity has pursued a constant quest to find this water and – as our technology has progressed – purify it so that it’s free of harmful bacteria and toxins.

UWM College of Engineering & Applied Science researchers Junjie Niu, Yin Wang and Xiaoli Ma have taken up that quest.

They’re working with local, state and federal agencies to develop cutting-edge technologies that will ensure safe and clean water.

Although about 90% of Americans get tap water from community systems subject to safe drinking standards, many contaminants like lead or mercury still seep into the supply.

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As our ability to detect nanoscopic particles progresses, scientists and researchers are finding more all the time.

Among the most prevalent are perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – man-made chemicals such as PFOA, PFOS, GenX and others. PFAS come from things like household cleaning products, food packaging, nonstick cookware and water-repellent clothing. These chemicals persist in the environment because they don’t break down. Instead, they accumulate over time, both in pipes and in the body. This has earned them the nickname “forever pollutants.”

But just as our capacity to spot pollutants is accelerating, so, too, is our ingenuity in developing ways to combat them. Here’s how research by Wang, Ma and Niu is helping the cause.

Yin Wang (left) and Xiaoli Ma

Yin Wang associate professor ,

of civil and environmental engineering

Xiaoli Ma assistant professor ,

of materials science and engineering

In 12 years of researching water and dozens of different water contaminants, Wang has faced a persistent problem with testing.

Typically, scientists measure the level of pollutants and bacteria in a reservoir or water supply by drawing active samples, then testing those vials on site or back at the lab. The drawback is that what they’re seeing under the microscope is really just a snapshot – a literal drop in the bucket.

“An active sample works if you want to know the concentration of a particular contaminant at one point in time,” Wang says.

“But if you can get a passive sample, where water flows through for a month or so, it gives you a better idea of how much PFAS is in the water.”

Now, Wang and Ma are developing a passive sampler that can monitor the presence of PFAS in water flow over time. The project is backed by a one-year, $200,000 grant

from the U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program.

The breakthrough was finding materials that can pull PFAS from the passing water and be cost-effective for government agencies to deploy. The group focuses on nanoporous materials for efficient PFAS capture and ceramic membranes as a robust barrier.

“The ceramic membrane barrier can control the PFAS transfer,” Ma says. “It can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different monitoring activities. And the membranes we’re going to make in my lab are very robust and strong and resistant to fouling.”

Wang is part of a team that was recently awarded $420,000 by the National Science Foundation Environmental Engineering program to look into new bioinspired catalysts for water and wastewater treatment. These catalysts will destroy pollutants like perchlorate, nitrate and bromate from groundwater. Wang is also working closer to home with UWM’s Department of Geosciences to survey the presence and concentration of arsenic and pesticides in well water in southeastern Wisconsin. And he’s developing several new adsorbent materials for PFAS removal.

Wang and Ma recently earned a Catalyst Grant from the UWM Research Foundation and are continuing to work with

membranes and adsorbents to remove heavy metals, organics, pharmaceuticals and PFAS from drinking water and wastewater.

The research has made tremendous progress in using membrane technology for chemical separation and the removal of salt from water flow, a low-cost solution to desalinating seawater, which could make it suitable for drinking and have tremendous impact around the world.

Using membrane technology offers several advantages over other purification options. “It can run continuously without need for maintenance,” Ma says, “and it is cleaner and more energy-efficient than other separation technology.”

Junjie Niu

Junjie Niu associate professor ,

of materials science and engineering

Niu’s research is traveling down another promising path to water purification. He’s working with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to develop hybrid materials that can chemically degrade PFAS. Popular water treatment approaches can involve anything from boiling, filtration or sedimentation to remove pollutants. But Niu has found a way to remove short-chain fluorinated molecules and other harmful organic molecules by creating porous materials that cover a relatively large surface area. These materials absorb almost all of the PFAS, which are then passed through a photocatalytic ultraviolet light that degrades the molecule to nontoxic levels.

“If you do incineration, you can destroy the molecules.

But it needs energy consumption,” Niu says. “Using the photocatalytic degradation at room temperature, we don’t waste the energy to destroy the PFAS.” Niu is also working with local companies to research biocides that can suppress waterborne strains of harmful bacteria like E. coli. These biocides contain biodegradable polymers that prevent bacterial growth on metal, plastic and glass. They could be used to coat everything from camera lenses to fish tanks to prevent biofilm. More importantly, they could be used on filters and pipes to protect the water supply.

In other research, Niu is looking into hybrid materials that can remove heavy metals – such as lead, copper, iron, cadmium, arsenic and mercury – from water. Some of the materials Niu is researching can also filter out earth metals like calcium, gases and even some viruses.

He’s also filed two patents on coatings that are selfcleaning and improve the sensitivity for underwater devices. These are activated when wet and could be applied to everything from car windshields to toilets, decreasing the need for cleaning while saving water.

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Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu

Jeneile Luebke

CULTURAL CARE

A team is working to provide better help for Native American women after the trauma of experiencing sexual violence. BY SILVIA ACEVEDO

T

he goal is as important as it is UW-Madison who began work on the straightforward: Ensure Native project while completing her doctorate Americans who have experienced at UWM in 2020. The Electa Quinney sexual violence get the help they Institute for American Indian Education need. So researchers are focused has been part of the work to ensure on training culturally sensitive advocates Indigenous women are at the center for Wisconsin’s Indigenous populations of the project. and improving access to medical care Mkandawire-Valhmu explains for survivors. that women of color are generally Native Americans experience sexual uncomfortable going to a health care violence more than any other ethnic facility, and this is particularly true for group. The Centers for Disease Control Indigenous women. Having someone and Prevention reports that 55% have with them, especially someone who experienced sexual identifies as Native American, violence. Yet Native survivors become more The most important helps American populations are comfortable accessing health thing is, it has to historically less likely to care. That can affect whether report crimes and receive be survivor-led and they seek medical help and the forensic medical report a crime.

Indigenous-led. examinations used to “They access a mainstream collect evidence against health care establishment their assailants. that’s predominantly run by white Many victims often live too far from a health care providers who have a lot of clinic. But a more ominous reason is fear history of engaging in and participating and distrust of the system. in the oppression of Native peoples,” Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu, a UWM Mkandawire-Valhmu says. “It’s not a associate professor of nursing in the secret that in health care, it’s been College of Nursing, and her team are demonstrated, that there is racism. working closely with Native American The racism that’s experienced at the tribes to facilitate change. Jeneile Luebke, community level extends to the health a survivor of intimate partner violence, is care system.” a key part of the team and a member of In racially segregated Milwaukee Wisconsin’s Bad River Band of the Lake County, where the team has already hired Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians. an advocate for sexual assault victims, Researchers are discussing the issues with Mkandawire-Valhmu says tribal women women and survivors while discerning also ask about police: “Will they support what approaches might work for different me as I need it? Or will they look into my tribes with different needs and concerns. history? Or harm the perpetrator?”

“The most important thing is, it has to The team received a $2 million grant be survivor-led and Indigenous-led,” from the U.S. Department of Justice in says Luebke, a postdoctoral fellow at April 2020. “We started working right

away, remotely,” Mkandawire-Valhmu says, “because we heard from our partners that violence against women was increasing during the pandemic.”

The three-year project, titled Tracking Our Truth, partners with several of Wisconsin’s sovereign nations. Plans call for extending it to eventually place advocates across Wisconsin. Their training could include demonstrating knowledge of Native American practices that contribute to healing, recognizing Native identity, or simply being a buffer in a moment of anguish.

The work builds on foundational efforts in Native American communities, including those with a focus on cultural connections. Luebke sees an increasing number of younger Native Americans joining older ones in beadwork gatherings, ribbon skirt-making classes and healing circles. Coming together around these centuries-old traditions facilitates supportive environments for frank discussions, including those about sexual violence.

“It’s beautiful. When I grew up, we didn’t talk about that stuff,” says Luebke, whose own research found that nearly 70% of Native American women didn’t seek care after experiencing violence.

“Now, everybody is just trying to be open and more supportive, not trying to hide or avoid complicated topics. It’s coming out into the open, and we’re taking about it. People are realizing it’s a way bigger problem than anyone thought it was.”

Mkandawire-Valhmu says she intends to apply for more federal funding. She hopes to broaden her work to advocate for Black women, including refugees.

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BY BECKY LANG

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The first woman elected vice

president of the United States. A record number of women in Congress. The highest percentage of women in the Wisconsin Legislature.

Women are increasingly visible in American politics, a slow but steady climb that kicked off some 30 years ago and has increased incrementally every year since. Women represent 26% of congressional officeholders, while women make up 31% of Wisconsin’s Legislature, which is the average representation in state legislatures across the country.

Nobody understands the factors behind these developments better than Kathleen Dolan, distinguished professor of political science in the College of Letters & Science. She’s spent much of her career researching issues at the intersection of gender and politics.

“Since the beginning,” Dolan says, “I have been intrigued by questions of whether and how and when gender matters to politics.”

Dolan’s research has followed two distinct lines of inquiry.

The first focuses on women candidates, including the rates at which they run for office, the rates at which they win elections and whether gender matters in determining their success. The second aspect of Dolan’s research focuses on how gender matters when it comes to public opinion surrounding political issues.

People had long assumed that the reason there were so few women in office is because voters wouldn’t vote for women.

But Dolan’s research disproved that notion.

Backed by funding from the National Science Foundation, she conducted a groundbreaking survey in 2010 of 3,000 people across the United States. She asked them about specific candidates in gubernatorial races as well as races for the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

As part of the study, Dolan focused on two categories of elections – one in which women ran against men and one in which two men were running. This allowed her to directly compare races that included women with races that only included men.

The results showed that people were just as likely to vote for women candidates as they were for male candidates. In the end, the research found that people voted for the candidate of their preferred party, regardless of whether they were a woman or a man. Dolan found no evidence that voters crossed party lines to vote for a male candidate.

“The main reason why there are so few women in office in the U.S. is because there are so few women who run,” Dolan says.

“When they run, their rates of winning are at least as high as men, and often higher.”

Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether a woman candidate runs as a Democrat or a Republican. Yes, there are many more Democratic women in public office than Republican women, but that’s only because there are many

more women on Democratic tickets.

“If the goal is to increase the overall number of women in elected office, you have to have more women running in both parties,” Dolan says. “What has to change is that the number of women candidates needs to be more equally represented in both parties.”

There are some signs this may be happening. In the last 20 years, Dolan notes, about 70% of the women who ran for office ran as Democrats. In the 2020 election, a historic number of women ran for office, from Congress down to state-level seats.

The increase in Republican women candidates outpaced the increase for Democratic ones, partly because the numbers among Republicans were smaller to begin with.

“In all of my work on women candidates and the public,” Dolan says, “what it shows is, overwhelmingly, people will vote for the candidate of their political party, regardless of whether it’s a woman or a man.”

Dolan’s research has also examined the public’s attitudes toward political issues, including the perceived reasons behind those attitudes. One of the most recent examples of this type of work is a paper published in summer 2020 in the journal American Politics Research.

Dolan and Michael A. Hansen, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, examined data from a survey called the American National Election Study. They looked at the attitudes of 2,500 people about a confluence of issues – Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, sexual harassment and voting in the 2018 midterm elections.

Dolan and Hansen found that the gender-salient issue of sexual harassment wasn’t necessarily a driver in the opinions of women in the study. Kavanaugh was accused of sexual harassment, and many women have experienced sexual harassment, leading to assumptions that it would color their views of Kavanaugh.

Research showed that it did, but not as much as partisanship.

One key distinction was whether women identified as being sexually harassed. The survey asked women whether they’d been sexually harassed, and several said no, but that doesn’t mean they hadn’t been. They just didn’t identify it.

“What that shows us is that there are some number of women who have been harassed and who identify having been harassed,” Dolan says, “and those are the women for whom that piece of their identity is going to come out in their politics.”

But the overarching factor in people’s views came down to partisanship. Simply put: Republican women liked Kavanaugh, and Democratic women didn’t.

This shows that women as a demographic group don’t share much of a consciousness about gender issues. “If you can’t get women to stand together around sexual violence,” Dolan says, “how are you going to get them to stand around child care and women’s rights in the workplace, or whatever it is?”

Dolan continues to work toward a fuller understanding of issues at the intersection of gender and politics. Her research has provided definitive answers to plenty of questions, but there are plenty more questions to come, especially as women increasingly seek – and gain – public office.

Kathleen Dolan

A genetic look at autism Researchers are opening a window into basic information about the root causes of the neurological and developmental disorder.

BY BECKY LANG A rare disorder called Timothy syndrome causes severe heart malfunction, and most people diagnosed with it don’t survive beyond childhood.

It is caused by a single gene variant that can also cause autism, so it provides a unique window into autism at the genetic level.

Autism is a neurological and developmental disorder associated Timothy syndrome is caused by a with variants in at least 1,000 genes. single gene variant that can also But scientists still don’t know how cause autism in children with these variants contribute to the the syndrome, which makes development of autism in people. it useful in studying the It would help if scientists genetics behind autism. could peer into the developing human brain, watch its cells form connections and see how autism affects that process. In lieu of that, Christopher Quinn, an associate professor of biological sciences in the College of Letters & Science, has found an effective way to study what happens when brain connections go awry.

Quinn and his lab team are getting help from a worm called C. elegans. It has about 1,000 cells and 300 neurons – relatively few compared with other animals or with humans – so the team knows exactly how the neurons should connect to one another.

Moreover, they can look through a microscope and get a glimpse of the worms’ communication pathways. When those pathways are altered, they can see it right in front of them on a microscope slide. That’s where the unique features of Timothy syndrome take on added importance.

Because the syndrome is caused by a variant in a single gene related to autism – called CACNA1C – and C. elegans has so few neurons, scientists can get a clear cause-and-effect picture when the gene variant is introduced to the worm.

Brain cells have axons, which send signals, and dendrites, which receive signals. Quinn’s team found that the gene variant in the worms disrupted axon targeting – and thus affected where neurons were connecting.

“An axon is a long structure that makes connections with other neurons,” Quinn says. “What we found is that in the worms carrying the genetic variant, axons connect

C

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O HR

M O S O ME

to the same neurons that they normally do, but in the wrong location.”

Their research, published in PLoS Genetics, found that the Timothy syndrome variant also changed the worms’ behavior, and it was measurable.

Quinn’s team, which is funded by a $1.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, is also working on how other variants in the CACNA1C gene affect the risk of autism. As many as a third of people have one of the autism-associated variants of this gene, but most don’t develop autism. It’s the interactions of a whole group of genetic variants that determine if a person develops autism.

“That’s why we want to understand the genetic interactions,” Quinn says. “If we understand all these interactions, then through whole genome sequencing, you might be able to predict who is most likely to develop autism and provide earlier treatment that will lead to better outcomes for these children.”

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GRADUATE Research

DATA SCIENCE

Using big data to make bats a bit less mysterious Bats may not have the best public reputation, but they play an important role in the ecosystem. For example, most bats in the United States feed on insects, which means fewer bats would lead to more bugs. And some bat populations are indeed in decline.

Doctoral candidate Xueling Yi uses data science to research bats under the guidance of Emily Latch, a professor of biological sciences. Latch’s lab is devoted to studying animal genetics and evolution to improve conservation and management.

“There are more than 1,400 bat species in the world,” Yi says.

“In that lineage, that group, there are so many things that we do not know.”

Among the problems to be solved: the little brown bat’s losing battle against a disease called white-nose syndrome. A fungus interferes with their hibernation cycle, so they wake up a lot during the winter. It’s a life-threatening situation, because the strain to cope eventually becomes too much, and Latch says their population is being decimated.

Studying bats’ history and geographical tendencies can help better understand their susceptibility to disease. Yi’s research focuses on those aspects for the big brown bat, which is less susceptible to white-nose syndrome than its smaller cousin and may be growing in population.

The big brown bat is commonly found from southern Canada to northern South America. Yi has analyzed the species and created genetic, genomic and environmental databases about it.

“Using modeling approaches, you can estimate in which type of environment a bat will be found,” she says. That allows her to predict population spread and allows local authorities to manage public health.

Yi’s work earned her a 2019-20 Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute scholarship, and it could provide answers that help bats of all types, big and small.

– Silvia Acevedo

Xueling Yi

The big brown bat (inset), and the Neda Mine (below) in Neda, Wisconsin, which is home to one of the largest bat hibernacula in the Midwest.

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GRADUATE Research

NURSING

Closing health care gaps for African immigrants Twenty years ago, Sisay Mersha was a community health nurse practitioner working on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia.

SISAY Mersha There, even though health care was paid for by the government, it was still difficult to get people to go to the hospital if it wasn’t an emergency. “The concept of preventive care is very much unknown,” Mersha says.

Two decades later, Mersha is a doctoral student in the UWM College of Nursing and working as a cardiovascular nurse practitioner at University of Illinois Health in Chicago, where he is observing the same problem, particularly in fellow immigrants from East Africa. He is currently conducting a mixed-method study using survey questions and focus groups to explore this.

Although the health care debate

across the United States has generally centered on access to facilities and health insurance, Mersha thinks part of the issue among this African population is a lingering passivity toward seeking health care. “I hear a lot of patients, colleagues and friends from the community saying they have a hard time going to doctors even when they have insurance,” he says.

“They only come when they are sick or infected or something affects their daily lives. Even if they’ve lived here for several years, they still haven’t changed.”

Mersha acknowledges that, for immigrants, access remains a huge factor because they often don’t have jobs that provide insurance.

Their immigration status might be another barrier to seeking help, as is an unfamiliarity with the system itself.

Mersha’s research is

looking at all of these factors to see how they affect health behavior. He collected survey questions from 210 Ethiopian immigrants living in the Chicago area and conducted seven focus groups of faith and community leaders, gleaning their understanding of the challenges.

COVID-19 has exacerbated existing attitudes and behaviors by keeping people inside and providing another reason to delay addressing their pains, aches and ailments, Mersha says. He believes these issues can be addressed by increasing awareness and health care literacy among immigrants. “We already have access issues whether we are native-born or not,” he says. “Then add the behaviors and beliefs from back home; it complicates the health service issues.

We have to engage and integrate our teaching to encompass physical and mental health of the community.” – Tony Rehagen

ECONOMICS

Taking a long-term look at income inequality John Schwendel took an extraordinarily long view Schwendel found that middle-class incomes while researching income inequality in the United certainly rose from 1946-74, which meshes with the States. He explored some 70 years of data, a time general idea of a strong middle class in the postwar frame from 1946-2015, and studied the central range period. “But that’s also when the 90th percentile of earners, which offered new insights into how earners were running away the fastest,” he says. inequality continued to grow throughout the period.

And after 1974, inflation-adjusted wages for the Schwendel, who recently earned his doctorate in middle class have barely budged while the top group economics under Professor Hamid Mohtadi, sourced continues to rise. The end result is greater inequality. geographically precise income data from the Internal Schwendel’s research suggests that in 1946, the JOHN Schwendel Revenue Service. He found that high-earners have 50th percentile of households made approximately steadily pulled ahead of all other earners in the U.S., $26,000 in annual adjusted gross income in 2020 even during the prosperous post-World War II years of shared dollars, while the 90th percentile made about $56,000. Those economic growth. adjusted approximations for 2015: the 50th percentile made Schwendel’s research also allowed him to divide income $38,000; the 90th percentile made $170,000. earners into smaller groupings than had been available before.

From 1946 on, factors such as the GI Bill, unionization and Previously published IRS data presented only large brackets of women in the labor force helped boost mid-range incomes. Of income, without breaking down how incomes were distributed particular note was how working women boosted income for twowithin bands of varying size. “It’s both a major methodological earner couples, even in the ’40s and ’50s, which helped the 90th contribution and a contribution in terms of expanding the data percentile of households pull away from lower groups. So did set,” says Mohtadi, noting the new and surprising discovery that unionization, given the position of skilled workers in the income there was a rise in inequality even in the 1950s. distribution in the past. – David Lewellen 26

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MATHEMATICS

An algorithm for the heart A doctoral student in applied mathematics has developed an algorithm that will allow heart cell researchers to get their results in minutes, rather JOHN Jurkiewicz than hours.

John Jurkiewicz is involved in a partnership between UWM’s Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Advocate Aurora Research Institute. His algorithm can isolate valuable experiment data in a fraction of the time that scientists previously needed to do the work manually.

The Advocate Aurora lab studies heart cells, using them to measure cardiac cell function, aid in developmental studies and, eventually, help conduct drug testing. Their work involves giving the cells an electric shock and recording what happens. But that’s when things get tricky.

It’s difficult to separate the electrical signal of activity across some tissue (called field potential, or FP) from the activity of each individual cell (called action potential, or AP). The frequencies connected to action potential are the valuable ones – a heart cell’s AP can say quite a bit about its activity and health.

Before Jurkiewicz created his algorithm, Advocate Aurora lab members had to weed out those valuable signals by hand. It would take an afternoon to parse out one day’s experiment, and they were faced with 1 terabyte of data. “They came to us and said, ‘Can you help?’” says Jurkiewicz, whose faculty advisor is Peter Hinow, mathematics professor in the College of Letters & Science. “So we came up with an algorithm that can segment this data stream automatically.

“It turns out the AP versus FP classification is ‘easy’ for mathematicians to do,” says Jurkiewicz, whose paper on the work was accepted for publication in Journal of Electrocardiology. And he made a point to run the algorithm on his consumer-grade laptop so researchers wouldn’t need a supercomputer to use the tool. He also wrote the program in the open source language Python.

“We would like to make this as accessible as possible,” Hinow says. – Becky Lang

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UNDERGRADUATE Research

Starting down the path to discovery UWM offers more than 1,000 undergraduate research opportunities annually, and more than 500 of them involve paid positions. In fact, research is woven so tightly into UWM’s academic culture that over half of our students have undergraduate research experience by the time they graduate. Here’s just a glimpse of some of the projects our students have worked on.

VOCAL PERFORMANCE AND COMPOSITION & TECHNOLOGY

Xai Osa Osa took a movement and turned it into an opera. The senior double music major is working toward her BA in vocal performance and her BFA in composition/technology.

Under the guidance of Amanda Schoofs, a senior lecturer in composition & technology at the Peck School of the Arts, Osa researched the #MeToo movement. She wove screenshots of online messages into fictional characters for a micro-opera, “Echo Ascension: Her Voice is Heard,” which was performed once before the pandemic hit.

The opera, Osa says, is about the power of sharing your story, how that affects other people and how it can help them take the next step in their healing.

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Photo illustration

GEOSCIENCES & GEOLOGY

Rene Chavez & Mikayla Walker Lake Michigan’s present-day shoreline looked quite different between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, its geography mostly featuring marshes and bogs. Juniors Walker and Chavez are studying fossils deposited during that time to learn more about its ecosystems. They say their work in a Cudahy-area lakeshore park with geosciences lecturer Scott Schaefer is like stepping back in time. Both are also involved in GO FoRWARD, a program to encourage more people of color to go into the geosciences. And Chavez, who is bilingual, has translated booklets and field guides into Spanish for Milwaukee Public Schools students who visit the site with their teachers.

BIOLOGY

Emma Kraco Yellow perch are a staple of aquaculture and coveted by the dining public in the Great Lakes region. Kraco, a senior and a UW System water fellow, has researched different ways of raising the perch, particularly how they’re affected by water temperature and salinity as they grow from the embryo and larval stages.

This is important, Kraco says, because climate change is making the Great Lakes warmer and saltier. Under mentor Dong Fang Deng, a senior scientist in the School of Freshwater Sciences, she’s also looking at how microplastics in the water may affect yellow perch.

BIOCHEMISTRY

Seresa McDowell As a senior in biochemistry, McDowell worked in the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery. She helped design and construct molecules that are sufficiently water soluble so they can be studied in organisms.

Such work aims to find better ways to use the molecules in developing new and rejuvenating older drugs. McDowell worked in the lab of Alan Schwabacher, associate professor of chemistry, and the research was part of a collaboration with Harvard University. That’s where McDowell went after her December 2020 graduation, thanks to a postbaccalaureate research position there.

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CONNECTED SYSTEMS INSTITUTE

Next-generation factory opens on UWM’s campus The Connected Systems Institute (CSI) has launched its first industry testbed and production line, putting a manufacturing facility in the same building that houses UWM’s Golda Meir Library.

The testbed and a companion Digital Twin Laboratory allow researchers and students to virtually simulate solutions to common manufacturing challenges and execute those approaches physically. It makes products that include a wide variety of ingredients.

Connected systems refers to a factory that’s filled with sensors recording continuous data and streaming that data to the industrial internet of things (IIoT). Tracking and manipulating the data gives manufacturers new insights that can increase efficiency and create other opportunities to improve processes.

“The production of these goods relies on the integration of sophisticated tools from today’s leading industrial suppliers,” says Mary Bunzel, CSI executive director. “This is the sandbox that we offer.”

CSI not only focuses on weaving connected technology into manufacturing systems, but also on the risk-benefit analysis necessary for decisions involving automation and the IIoT. To feed testbed activities, a fictional company was set up within UWM’s Lubar School of Business to process customer orders for products made at the factory.

Connected factories are expected to usher in the next wave of automation and reinvigorate U.S. industry. The CSI brings university researchers, manufacturers and students together to solve problems specific to the industry while also jumpstarting the workforce training necessary for the transition.

Building CSI’s testbed was made possible by Rockwell Automation, Microsoft, We Energies, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and other contributing partners, including Cisco, Dell, APT, Haskell, Endress+Hauser, Symbiont, Eaton, Heartland Business Systems, ANSYS, Fortinet and FANUC. – Laura L. Otto 30

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Mary Bunzel, executive director of the Connected Systems Institute, with students at the new testbed facility, which includes a fully functioning production line as well as meeting rooms to analyze the wealth of data it produces.

DANCE

Purposeful movements Simone Ferro and her students take dance out of the formal theater and into cafes, parks, foreclosed houses, lofts and front porches in two of Milwaukee’s central city neighborhoods, Washington Park and Sherman Park.

The community-engaged research project features dance students who create performances on site. They’re based on dancers’ immediate experience of the places as well as what they’ve learned about the people and their community through prior research. As performances continued during the pandemic, dancers donned protective face masks.

Ferro, a professor of dance in the Peck School of the Arts, records the dances and posts videos on the Milwaukee Through Embodied Research website at milwaukeeembodiedresearch.squarespace. com. “It’s about space and memory that comes together in the minds and bodies of the dancers,” Ferro says. “They are not just looking at the architecture, but at the history of the home and who

lives in the home.”

A dance at a home built with Cream City brick used repetitive and angular movements to echo the bricks. At the home of a community activist who lost her son to gun violence, the dancers created a slow, mournful piece. Recent research has focused on environmental and social justice in the communities, and Ferro says the process and connections with community members are transformative for many students.

Dancers have been visiting the

neighborhoods since 2014, and there also have been some surprises along the way. Once at Milwaukee’s Butterfly Park, about a dozen children from a nearby school unexpectedly joined the dancers.

“It changed the dance,” Ferro says, “but it was amazing to have those kids that were visibly looking for ways of externalizing their emotion, working with the dancers, who helped find ways to guide them through these feelings. We find those little jewels of interactions so important.”

– Kathy Quirk

SOCIAL WORK

Alternatives to arresting people with mental illness Research shows that 1 million arrests per year involve people with serious mental illness, often on misdemeanor criminal charges. And, once arrested, people with serious mental illness are upward of 50% more likely to receive jail time than others after being arrested for a misdemeanor.

In jail, their mental health conditions AMY Watson often worsen. Amy Watson, a former probation officer who is a professor of social work in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, is looking for a better way to address the problem by studying misdemeanor arrests of people with serious mental illness in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

“When police arrest somebody for criminal trespass,” Watson says, referring to a misdemeanor charge commonly filed against people with serious mental illness, “they’re trying to solve some type of problem. Unfortunately, they don’t have that many options.”

And, Watson notes, police officers are not mental health providers, who would be a better choice to serve as a first responder in many situations The study’s funding, provided by the National Science Foundation, runs from 2019 to 2021. The researchers used datasets to identify battery, criminal trespass, petty theft and disorderly conduct as the misdemeanor charges that appear most overrepresented among people with serious mental illness.

Researchers are now conducting focus groups in each city with police officers and others to gain an in-depth understanding of how those charges are used.

Backed by this information, the goal is to create an explanatory theory about using misdemeanor charges for people with mental illness. This will lay the foundation for conducting more definitive research and developing policies and programs to help keep people who don’t pose a major criminal threat out of jail.

“The better we understand the context and decision making around these charges, the better prepared we will be to design alternatives that do not pull people further into the criminal legal system.” – Tom Kertscher

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Katherine Du

BUSINESS

Having a choice boosts voluntary giving While purchasing coffee a few years ago, Katherine Du noticed the unusual way the cafe’s baristas were soliciting tips. Instead of using only one jar, two jars sat side by side on the counter. One was labeled “Star Wars” and the other, “Star Trek.”

Soon, she started seeing this method applied to charitable giving, too. Potential donors were asked to choose “chocolate vs. vanilla” or “mountains vs. beach.”

So Du, an assistant professor of

marketing in the Lubar School of Business, partnered with two research colleagues to launch a study about the phenomenon. The researchers discovered that framing the act of giving as a choice between two options was far more successful than traditional attempts at inducing voluntary giving.

The choice-based strategy, which they call “dueling preferences,” not only attracts more givers, but also significantly increases the amounts they give. That’s because it gives consumers the chance to reveal something about themselves through spending.

“Neurological studies have shown that we feel rewarded when we get to share something about who we are,” Du says.

“People love to express their identity so much that they’re actually willing to pay for an opportunity.”

However, Du and her research partners

– Jacqueline Rifkin at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania – also learned that the tactic had to be implemented with some key points in mind.

The duel topic must feel identityexpressive to the group being targeted.

For example, tip jars merely labeled “A” and “B” didn’t produce the effect, whereas topics like sports and pet types usually work well because those interests have broad appeal.

Also, the effect was diminished or erased when the choice involved controversial topics. And the effect waned when consumers previously had a chance to express themselves. In other words, once they’d already shared some of their personal preferences, offering a dueling preference was less likely to prompt giving.

– Laura L. Otto

MATHEMATICS

Learning why some hurricanes are more dangerous inland In almost every region where hurricanes form, their maximum sustained winds are getting stronger, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And NOAA predicts it’s likely that greenhouse warming will cause the most intense hurricanes to be even more intense in the coming century.

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ART HISTORY

A thread tying ancient Peru to modern Chicago For nearly 20 years, David Pacifico has traversed the terrains of Peru. First, helping colleagues interview Spanishspeaking locals as an archeology intern.

Then, excavating areas in the ancient city of El Purgatorio, about 200 miles north of Lima.

Pacifico also has close ties to Chicago, where he did his graduate and postdoc work. Which explains, the assistant professor in the College of Letters & Science says, the inspiration for some of his latest research.

Pacifico juxtaposed neighborhoods in 14th-century El Purgatorio and 20thcentury Chicago – namely, Bronzeville – to explore how diverse communities form. Despite their historical and cultural differences, the origin stories of both neighborhoods share some unexpected commonalities. “Looking at Bronzeville and El Purgatorio was about studying individual houses and seeing how they fit into the broader community,” says Pacifico, who’s also director of the UWM Art Collection and Emile H. Mathis Art Gallery. “That’s where you can start reconstructing these kinds of stories.”

It’s a common misconception, Pacifico says, that neighborhoods evolve because pods of homogenous people naturally come together in a neighborhood.

Instead, migration of various types of people – who often share broad characteristics – into an area is the building block upon which populations grow and neighborhoods form. And the neighborhoods Pacifico examined became

David Pacifico’s research took him to Peru, where he saw modern agricultural efforts nestled against ancient ruins (bottom photo) that held terracotta pottery fragments (top right photo).

nexuses, housing diverse people arriving through several historical processes.

El Purgatorio’s residents, for example, are believed to have arrived from the surrounding countryside due to climate change and to escape the imperial Chimú culture. Migration to Bronzeville, meanwhile, stemmed from people seeking industrial work due to World War I and to escape oppression in the South. Bursts of mass migration to both communities provided access to jobs and resources, so diverse neighborhoods blossomed despite

racial segregation in Chicago and classrelated segregation in El Purgatorio.

There was the inevitable factioning, but those internal divisions also helped create the individual characters of the neighborhoods.

“I was thinking about neighborhoods as special kinds of communities,” Pacifico says, “because neighborhoods are based in places and residences. They speak to the way we really experience our lives with people who, at the very least, seem familiar to us.” – LaBreea Watson

Most of these storms strengthen when over water, then intensity over land. One is that they draw energy from the wet weaken after making landfall. But research by Clark Evans, an ground directly below them. The other is that the energy comes atmospheric science associate professor in the College from the warm, moist oceans hundreds of miles away of Letters & Science, explores how some tropical and is carried by warm winds toward the storm. storms, including hurricanes, threaten inland areas by The research uses factor separation, in which maintaining, or even intensifying, their power once individual physical processes – such as exchanges of they’ve moved inland from the coast. heat and moisture between the ground and air – are Evans hopes the research leads to a better isolated in simplified weather simulations. Doing this understanding of the core physical and helps identify which processes are most important to thermodynamic processes that support such storms tropical storms that don’t weaken over land. maintaining their intensity or increasing it while over “It also considers collections of weather model land. He also wants insight into another important simulations, starting with marginally different CLARK Evans aspect: “How well can we actually predict this?” atmospheric conditions,” Evans says. “They help Evans grew up in Orlando, Florida, and encountered his first determine the importance of these physical processes relative hurricane – Erin – in 1995. His ongoing research uses models to our inability to perfectly forecast the weather.”

– Tom Kertscher to examine two theories on why some tropical storms don’t lose

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e pa st.

"I liv e in th e pre sen t no t thte ran , ve If yo u s ee me as on ly a f th e pa st. " yo u on ly see a ref lec tio n o

Veteran Josh Collier developed new ways of thinking by using a research technique called Photovoice, which involves taking pictures of your everyday life (inset).

REHABILITATION SCIENCES & TECHNOLOGY

How Photovoice helps veterans gain new insights Josh Collier normally breezed past the many “no guns” signs affixed to university buildings. But one day, while finishing up his UWM master’s degree, he paused at one of them. The sign was on a glass door, and upon seeing his reflection, he snapped a photo and considered the many life changes he’d experienced.

When he’d started working on his GINNY Stoffel master’s, he was fresh off a four-year tour in the Navy. “I was thrown into a new environment with absolutely new rules, and it could be overwhelming,” he says. Now, he was about to graduate, in search of a job and participating in research on the challenges faced by student-veterans.

The study used a research methodology called Photovoice, which asks people to take pictures of their everyday lives and reflect on them in writing and interviews. Participants create something akin to a photo essay, mixing images and writing, which they also discuss with researchers. “It’s sometimes easier to talk about a picture than it is to talk about yourself,” says Virginia “Ginny” Stoffel, an associate professor of rehabilitation sciences & technology in the College of Health Sciences.

Stoffel has used Photovoice since 2005 to study the lives of people who are experiencing difficult transitions or living with disabilities, mental illness or substance use disorders. She also trains graduate students to use the Photovoice methodology.

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She’d trained and advised the team doing the study Collier participated in. It was led by grad student Caitlin Dobson and identified how relationships can be important for studentveterans in easing their transition from military to academic life.

For veterans, moving from the military to college means a change from constantly being around familiar people and routines to a place where it can be hard to make connections.

Veterans also are older than average undergraduates, who sometimes ask inappropriate questions or make uncomfortable remarks about their service. Stoffel remembers one photo a participant took of a parking lot – empty except for a single car.

“Photovoice helps us get into the nitty-gritty of social participation and how that affects veterans’ transitions,” says Stoffel, adding that it helps researchers tackle important questions: “How does this mental health condition affect this person who’s living their everyday life? And how can we help them have a life of meaning?” She emphasizes that Photovoice is a research methodology, not a mental health intervention. But study participants say that using Photovoice can be life-changing.

Collier says the study helped him unlock coping skills that he uses in his daily life as an occupational therapist at the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Milwaukee. “Military life happens so fast,” he says. “During Photovoice, I allowed myself to get lost in the present. By letting your thoughts take a natural path, epiphanies bubble to the surface and give you insight to yourself.” – Elizabeth Hoover

ARCHITECTURE

A design solution for vacant storefronts Alex Timmer will tell you that an architect’s role doesn’t stop at designing buildings but extends into anything that shapes space, from a small piece of ALEX Timmer furniture to the grandest suspension bridge.

“A lot of those design ideas scale,” says Timmer, assistant professor of architecture in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning. “You can take something like a chair and use similar strategies to design a building.”

That’s the philosophy behind Timmer’s new project: designing modular furniture to serve as infrastructure in vacant storefronts. It’s facilitated through the

school’s Mobile Design Box (MDB), an engagement effort that’s been active with community members since 2014, and Marcus Prize Studio, which is cotaught with renowned architect Tatiana Bilbao. MDB and the Marcus Prize Studio, in essence, take UWM’s architectural expertise out into the community.

Refreshing a vacant storefront’s infrastructure improves the location’s chance of being rented, and the furniture’s portability means it can move on to another location. Joining Timmer on the project team are Associate Professor Arijit Sen and Mo Zell, professor and chair of the architecture department, as well as architecture students.

The furniture is versatile enough to transform from seating to platforms to commercial displays. Design will take place in three phases and incorporate feedback

from a community panel. After the first iteration, planned for spring 2021, the design process starts over again, and so on.

The infrastructure system’s first home will be the storefront at 615 W. Historic Mitchell St., the fourth location to be activated by the MDB program. “It’s an incredibly lively part of the town,” Timmer says, “but it does have vacancies. It does have its struggles.” Students have already interviewed local stakeholders to help the team better understand the area.

An Ignite Grant from the UW System will fund the modular pieces, which will be made in the school’s wood shop. Timmer and the other designers plan to make a manual available that other communities can use to craft their own entrepreneurial infrastructure. The ultimate goal is to showcase the space well enough that somebody rents it. – Matt Hrodey

BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES

Exploring a nesting ground for antibiotic resistance Over 2.8 million people in the United States get antibioticresistant infections each year, so understanding how resistance is acquired is a top health concern.

Troy Skwor, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences, is studying whether resistant populations of bacteria can survive the wastewater treatment process and enter into the environment, where they can affect people’s health.

Skwor’s work involves investigating antibiotic resistance within aeromonads – bacteria that live in many environments, including wastewater, and are linked to a wide array of human diseases. “If this organism can adapt to live in so many environments,” Skwor says, “it’s the perfect transfer vehicle for keeping antibioticresistant organisms in circulation.”

Skwor is exploring a second facet of the problem, too: determining whether antibiotic residue in wastewater increases

the likelihood of genetic mutations that cause resistance, as well as which genes are involved. Low levels of antibiotic drugs end up in sewage after passing through the human digestive tract or because of improper waste disposal. In wastewater, they join a brew of substances that can cause genetic mutations in bacteria, which changes how the microbes behave.

Drugs in wastewater are highly diluted, so they aren’t strong enough to kill the bacteria. But that’s the problem, Skwor says. The microbes react to the presence of such low concentrations by mutating at a faster rate. They also exchange genes with nearby microbes, looking for new Troy Skwor traits that give them the upper hand in these stressful environments.

A better sense of what happens to microbial genetic pathways in wastewater could lead to new drugs for bacterial infections that don’t contribute to antibiotic resistance. – Laura L. Otto

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BOOKS from UWM

Mère à Mère Sarah Davies Cordova, translator; Montréal: Éditions Mémoire d’encrier, 2019 Davies Cordova, professor of French, translated Sindiwe Magona’s 1998 South African novel “Mother to Mother” (“Mère à Mère”) into French. It was nominated for the Pierre-François Caillé translation prize, created by the Société française des traducteurs (French Society of Translators). Drawing on the story of Amy Biehl’s murder, the novel takes the form of a letter from the amaXhosa mother of a Black South African boy to the mother of the American girl he killed. It explores the mother’s life under apartheid amid pressures from in-laws, police violence and escalating discontent in the townships. It paints a verbal picture of her son’s world, one she hopes explains her own grief and helps ease the American mother’s pain.

The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism Elizabeth R. Drame, Tara Adams, Veronica R. Nolden & Judy M. Nardi; Peter Lang Inc., 2020 Drame, a UWM education professor, co-wrote this book with three co-authors/ investigators who are parents of children on the autism spectrum. It integrates firsthand parent perspectives with academic literature and insights. Through these methods, the book explores the challenges Black parents face in getting an autism diagnosis, securing resources and information, identifying quality schools, interacting in communities and collaborating with professionals. “The literature is very clear that there are a lot of barriers for caregivers in general,” Drame says, “but for Black families and caregivers in particular, the racial bias and systemic racism makes it even more challenging.”

Gray Matters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life Ellyn A. Lem; Rutgers University Press, 2020 The 65-and-older population is growing rapidly, driven by the aging baby boomer generation. As this demographic grows, so do opportunities to portray older adults in film, literature and other cultural works. Lem, a professor of English in the College of General Studies, investigates how such portrayals have evolved over time, including those by older adults themselves. Lem’s book also draws from gerontology research and interviews with older adults to give readers a detailed picture of the struggles and pleasures of aging that go beyond stereotypical portrayals often found in popular culture.

Hollywood Hates Hitler!: Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures Chris Yogerst; University Press of Mississippi, 2020 Yogerst, assistant professor of communication in the College of General Studies, investigates how a handful of isolationist United States senators tried to prevent Hollywood “anti-Nazi propaganda,” reflected in such movies as “The Great Dictator” and “The Mortal Storm.” This political film history examines the 1941 Senate subcommittee’s investigation of alleged efforts by Jewish studio heads to agitate for war. Yogerst shows how the hearing’s results were an embarrassment for the Senate and a victory for freedom of speech.

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THE JOY OF

astronomy’s new toy

BY JOHN SCHUMACHER

The enormity of the accomplishment didn’t hit Patrick Brady until a couple days after it happened. The physics professor was walking to work and wondering why he was smiling. “And I thought, ‘Whoa: We measured gravitational waves from a pair of black holes that collided with each other a billion years ago,’” says Brady, director of UWM’s Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics. “How cool is that?”

It was 2015 when Brady, several UWM colleagues and a worldwide consortium of scientists made the stunning breakthrough, one that would win a Nobel Prize. They did it using the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory (LIGO). In 2019, Brady was elected spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration; the spokesperson leads the collaboration.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, but they’re so small that he didn’t think they’d ever be found. The movement detected was the equivalent of the width of a human hair spotted a galaxy away. Five years later, detections are almost routine, with dozens of other instances documented. It’s a whole new way to explore the universe.

How have gravitational waves helped scientists better understand the universe?

We use them to study invisible parts of the universe, the things we can’t observe in other ways. They’re a great tool, for example, for examining aspects of black holes. The first detection back in 2015 is a fantastic example of this. While we expected to see pairs of black holes crashing into each other, we had never actually seen pairs of black holes crashing into each other, and so this was right away a change – we suddenly had this confirmation that these things happened in the universe.

What has been discovered so far?

The first detection and the data that we took around that time showed us that merging black holes in the universe are more common than we originally thought.

Then, on Aug. 17, 2017, we observed a pair of neutron stars crashing into each other. We saw within just 1.7 seconds that they emitted a flash of gamma rays, which are the most energetic photons in the universe. We were able to tell that this wasn’t just a fluke but that gamma rays and gravitational waves were associated. This had long been speculated, but literally that day, within minutes, we suddenly had solved this long-standing mystery.

In the past year, we observed two black holes crash into each other, the largest pair that we’ve seen do this. And those black holes pose a mystery. For black holes that size – around a hundred times the mass of the sun – how do they form? Do they come from stars, or are they the result of a pair of black holes crashing into each other before? We don’t know the answer, and this is a new mystery that we now have to study.

What else do you hope to learn in the next couple years?

We hope to better pinpoint the locations for some of these collisions of neutron stars, and with the help of other astronomers, to find the galaxy, the flash of light that goes with it, and further improve our understanding of what happens when these objects collide. Also, seeing the collision of a neutron star and a black hole would be very intriguing. If the black hole is small, it can kind of tear the neutron star apart as the two get closer together. It will tell us more about the internal structure of neutron stars – what they’re made of, what they tend to be like.

What would be your dream discovery?

There’s a concept known as a cosmic string.

Pretty much any modern theory of particle physics or high-energy physics allows for the existence of cosmic strings. They’re very big, long filaments, very thin, very dense, and they distort spacetime in an unusual way. We’ve never seen direct evidence for them. Such things could generate gravitational waves, and we search for those waves. So far, we have not come up with any evidence, but it would be pretty cool if we did.

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