UWM Research 2019

2019

DECODING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR Purush Papatla deciphers the data and psychology behind buyersĘź decisions

ESEARCH

9

19

inside 22

56

CHANCELLOR’S WELCOME 2

22

As nanoparticles grow ever more common, Rebecca Klaper plays a key role in exploring ways to keep them from harming our freshwater ecosystems

UWM’s research impact

BY THE NUMBERS 3 4

One of America’s top research universities UWM’s top 10 research grants

26

FRONTIERS 30

FEATURES String theory Rene Izquierdo has built a world-renowned guitar program at UWM and saved some bygone music of his Cuban homeland from being lost to history

From trauma to healing How tools developed by UWM researchers are helping families and communities

34

Decoding consumer behavior In a world flooded with customer data, Purush Papatla looks to psychology to interpret what it all means

38

Why women leave engineering After learning the reasons behind this steady exodus, UWM researchers are exploring how diversity can impact innovation in engineering work teams

40

Fatherly love The important role fathers can play in reducing infant mortality rates and improving maternal and child health

43

Rehab with robots How patients can use exoskeletons and artificial intelligence to help restore movement

SPOTLIGHT ON PUBLIC HEALTH

19

Food for thought on sustainable agriculture A UWM microbiologist is exploring how farmers could use less chemical fertilizer and still produce more food

5 Setting the table 6 Protecting children using data science 6 Cataloging the aquarium 7 A fountain of ideas 8 Planting some roots in the neighborhood 8 Telling the histories of local churches 9 Harvesting a garden from the past 10 Spiders weave a web of memories 11 Adventures in computer literature 11 The battle against fake news 12 A patented method for better protein

research 12 Examining overlooked costs of outsourcing decisions 13 Public perceptions of the Supreme Court 13 Improving the detection of brain

aneurysms 14 Mining DNA and data for a better biopsy 15 T he data behind earlier diagnoses 15 M arijuana impairs young brains, but fitness may help 16 The next generation of nicotine marketing 16 Seeing help for mothers through the Periscope Project 18 H ealthier air for children at day care 18 How persistent pathogens can affect

mental health

Tiny changes, big impact

BOOKS FROM UWM 46

Recent releases from UWM authors

GRADUATE RESEARCH 48

A promising search for relief without addiction 49 Getting computers to know your face 50 The growing pervasiveness of demagogic rhetoric 50 Shining a new light on MS treatment 51 A personal path to preserving Oneida culture 52 Studying Great Lakes half a world apart

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH 53

Award-winning undergraduate research

Q&A 56

Inside the new Lubar Entrepreneurship Center

Chancellor: Mark A. Mone Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: Johannes Britz Interim Vice Provost for Research: Mark Harris Vice Chancellor for University Relations and Communications: Tom Luljak (’95) Senior Director of Integrated Marketing & Communications: Michelle Johnson Editor/Publications Manager: Howie Magner Copy Editor: John Schumacher Staff Writers: Sue Bausch, Angela McManaman (’00, ’08), Laura L. Otto, Kathy Quirk and Kaitlin Stainbrook Contributing Writers: Silvia Acevedo, Gene Armas, Matthew Cade, Claire Hackett, Adam Hinterthuer, Matt Hrodey, David Lewellen, Tony Rehagen, Rich Rovito, Silke Schmidt, Dan Simmons and Matthew Wamser Lead Designer: Kelly Grulkowski Designers: Kendell Hafner (‘14), Lesley Kelling, Allie Kilmer and Hannah Jablonski ('06) Photography: Pete Amland, Troye Fox and Elora Hennessey ('17) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee P.O. Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413

Chancellor’s Welcome The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has once again joined the ranks of the top doctoral research universities in the country.

Every three years, the prestigious Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education designates which universities have the highest research activity. In 2018, only 130 of the 4,338 universities and colleges evaluated achieved this designation. I’m extremely proud that UWM, for the second consecutive time, was one of the institutions so honored.

Being recognized alongside the likes of Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota and Stanford University reflects the commitment and expertise of our world-renowned faculty, staff and students. Their work is making a difference for our friends, families, industry, businesses and nonprofits while also giving students exceptional learning experiences and the critical problem-solving skills that our state and nation so urgently need. In this latest issue of UWM Research magazine, and in its online version at uwm.edu/uwmresearch, you’ll get a deeper look into some of the important work they’re doing.

Our cover story shows how Purush Papatla, interim co-director of the new Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, combines data science and psychological principles to delve into consumer decision-making. You’ll learn how Rebecca Klaper is helping protect our freshwater ecosystems by exploring how to make nanomaterials safer. Other stories detail how UWM researchers are helping people and communities better cope with trauma, and how engineers are developing exoskeletons that help with physical therapy and rehabilitation.

Our Spotlight on Public Health section showcases how faculty members are working to battle diseases and improve our overall wellness. And our Undergraduate Research and Graduate Research sections emphasize that it’s never too early to embark on research that makes a difference.

I’ve only touched on some of the many fascinating stories inside. As you explore this magazine, you will see the incredible impact of our research and why UWM remains one of America’s top research universities.

Best regards,

Like us: Facebook.com/uwmilwaukee Follow us: twitter.com/uwm Watch our videos: youtube.com/uwmnews Check out our photos: instagram.com/uwmilwaukee

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

Mark A. Mone Chancellor

One of America’s

Top Research Universities UWM was honored with two prestigious national research awards in 2018. The university retained its Research 1 designation for highest research activity in the latest rankings from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Only 130 of the 4,338 universities and colleges considered for 2018 achieved the designation, which is awarded every three years and was first earned by UWM in 2015. Also in 2018, UWM was one of only two universities to receive the Campus-Wide Award for Undergraduate Research Accomplishments from the Council on Undergraduate Research. It recognizes the depth and breadth of a school’s undergraduate research. The awards reflect UWM’s excellence in research, particularly in the areas of health care, energy, entrepreneurship and freshwater science.

2018 Total Awards NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

$3.9 million

BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

$3.5 million

$29.6 million

Agriculture $145,349

HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

$6.1 million

NOAA $199,527 CDC $283,643

$58

Health and Human Services $1.1 million Office of National Drug Control Policy $1.2 million

MILLION

FOUNDATIONS AND GIFTS

Other federal agencies $1.3 million Energy $4.1 million

$6.6 million

Education $4.7 million National Institutes of Health $6.2 million National Science Foundation $10.4 million

OTHER GOVERNMENT

$8.4 million

UWM Research Foundation

15 | 42 | 82 |

STARTUP BUSINESSES ASSOCIATED WITH UWM RESEARCH FOUNDATION LICENSES AND OPTION AGREEMENTS PATENTS ISSUED Founded: 2006

Source: UWM Office of Research

Entrepreneurial Training

2,150 | 360 | 95 |

PARTICIPANTS IN FRESH IDEAS WORKSHOPS (FALL 2018) IDEAS SUBMITTED THROUGH STUDENT STARTUP CHALLENGE SINCE 2012 I-CORPS TEAMS TRAINED Source: Lubar Entrepreneurship Center

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

3

UWM’s top 10 research grants

2018

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had $58 million in research awards in the 2018 fiscal year. More than half of that amount – $29.6 million – came from federal agencies. Here is a look at the 10 largest active grants from 2018, including their primary investigators and funding sources.

GPS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

THE PATH TO PTSD

Xavier Siemens, physics

Christine Larson, psychology

This funding supports 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 to learn more about how galaxies are formed and evolve.

Larson is exploring neurobiological factors that predict risk for long-term post-traumatic stress disorder. The goal is to facilitate earlier intervention to improve mental health, and the study focuses on people who have just experienced trauma.

$14.6 million over five years, National Science Foundation

GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DATA ANALYSIS

$7.2 million over four years, National Science Foundation Patrick Brady and Warren Anderson, physics The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) is an international partnership that first detected gravitational waves in 2015 and is now studying them as a means of learning more about the universe.

This grant sustains and enhances aLIGO’s data analysis infrastructure.

$3.1 million over five years, National Institutes of Health

GETTING MORE SENIORS TO EXERCISE

$2.9 million over three years, National Institutes of Health Scott Strath, kinesiology In this study, people with movement limitations wear sensors as they go about their usual routines. It gathers previously unavailable information, allowing researchers to develop precise models to predict and encourage physical activity.

SEAWEED AS AN ENERGY SOURCE

$2.8 million, U.S. Department of Energy Filipe Alberto, biological sciences

CHILDHOOD BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

$3.8 million over three years, National Institutes of Health Krista Lisdahl, psychology A partner in the largest long-term study of brain development and child health, UWM is tracking biological and behavioral factors in nearly 400 Wisconsin children to identify how experiences, environment and biology interact to affect brain development. The children will be followed from ages 9 or 10 through young adulthood.

BETTER CATALYSTS FOR DRUG MANUFACTURING

$3.6 million over six years, U.S. Department of Energy Wilfred Tysoe, chemistry

Many molecules have a chemical structure that is chiral, meaning they come in two forms – a right-handed and a left-handed version. Pharmaceuticals must be synthesized with a handedness compatible with the human body. This project aims to understand how to modify catalysts to exclusively yield products with only one desired handedness.

IMAGING BIOLOGY WITH X-RAY LASERS

$3.1 million over five years, National Science Foundation and SUNY-Buffalo Abbas Ourmazd, Marius Schmidt and Peter Schwander, physics UWM scientists are using intense, ultrashort pulses from X-ray free electron lasers to compile atomic-level movies that show proteins and viruses in action for the first time.

4

Giant kelp is the fastest-growing organism on Earth.

Alberto is researching how to breed it with genetic traits best suited for mass farming in the ocean, which would make it a contender as a biofuel source.

THE LINK BETWEEN AIR POLLUTION, AUTISM AND ADHD

$2.4 million over five years, National Institutes of Health Amy Kalkbrenner, public health The project aims to uncover whether exposure to pollutants during certain periods of pregnancy is more harmful to a developing brain than exposure in early childhood. It also looks at whether some genes can be protective or increase susceptibility to harm from pollution.

TREATING ASTHMA WITHOUT AN INHALER

$2 million over four years, National Institutes of Health James Cook, Alexander “Leggy” Arnold and Doug Stafford, chemistry By developing a new drug for asthma that’s taken as a pill, researchers could make steroid inhalers obsolete and reduce the potential side effects of long-term use of steroid medication.

FRONTIERS

Setting the the table table This is not a scene from the next Avengers movie. It’s the Virtual Reality Infrastructure Laboratory in the College of Engineering & Applied Science.

UWM is the first nonmilitary user of this Euclideon hologram table in the United States. It’s unique in allowing multiple people to simultaneously view 3D digital objects from different perspectives, and do so without bulky VR headgear. It takes group planning, design and research collaborations to a new level.

Lab director Jian Zhao, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says these factors are particularly useful when evaluating structural designs for problems. Beyond

design applications, the holotable can be used for close-up, detailed examinations of existing environments – from buildings to entire cities – which are recorded using laser scanners.

In addition to incorporating the holotable into his research, Zhao is working with engineering students who are already using it in their coursework. Doing so, he says, means they’ll graduate better prepared for the workforce. Plans call for the lab to be available for faculty and students in other areas of study, too.

The lab is funded by gifts from the Associated General Contractors of Greater Milwaukee Education & Research Foundation, as well as GRAEF and the Graef, Anhalt, Schloemer Foundation.

Zhao (far right) and his Virtual Reality Infrastructure Laboratory’s new hologram table (with an illustrated hologram).

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

5

FRONTIERS

Protecting children using data science

Janczewski

Colleen Janczewski gets monthly data deliveries that contain some of the most sensitive information being archived in Wisconsin: records of 7,000 children who have been referred to the state’s Child Protective Services, or CPS. Janczewski systematically analyzes the data in search of red flags, taking a view that’s broader than those of individual caseworkers. Doing so helps identify families at risk for child neglect or maltreatment, including some to whom CPS can offer early services and support before a formal CPS investigation is opened.

“Improved child safety is our ultimate goal,” says Janczewski, an assistant professor of social work in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.

CPS began this work in 2010 under its Alternative Response pilot program.

It serves at-risk families in cases that are less severe and less likely to require involving law enforcement or the courts.

Examples include habitual truancy or unsafe housing situations. Caseworkers can offer preventive resources, such as a parenting class or a housing referral.

In Alternative Response cases, CPS workers use approaches designed to improve family engagement, allowing for better child safety assessments and discussions about available services.

“It’s more likely,” Janczewski says of the families, “that they will have good relationships with their caseworkers and benefit from support services.”

In addition to analyzing anonymous CPS records, Janczewski designed a 30-minute telephone survey for families who have been through Alternative Response. More than 1,000 caregivers completed it, and their responses, along with CPS records, show signs of success.

“Moving forward,” Janczewski says, “we can serve families safely while still doing good social work by engaging families in the process.”

Cataloging the aquarium Ever since middle school, Mike Pauers has been fascinated by a popular ornamental and colorful aquarium fish called Labeotropheus. Now, the assistant professor of zoology at UWM at Waukesha researches the freshwater fish in one of the world’s largest aquariums – Lake Malawi in Africa.

As a UWM graduate student, Pauers studied how these fish use colors in sexual selection and how males use color patterns in aggressive encounters. As a professor, his academic curiosity focused on why there were so many “morphs,” or geographically isolated color variants, available for his hobby.

Collaborating with the Malawi Department of Fisheries, he intends to fully document

and describe the diversity of genus Labeotropheus, which features fish in shades of red, blue and gold that grow up to 15 centimeters long. After years of studying body shapes and unique breeding colors, Pauers has already described three new species, and he continues to explore the evolutionary interrelationships among the different species.

He obtained new specimens on a trip to Lake Malawi in the summer of 2018, and initial examinations have found more variants among them. Additional painstaking measurements and DNA sampling will determine if they, too, represent distinct species.

Pauers’ research has long been supported by the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Orth Family Ichthyology Research Fund.

Pauers regularly travels to Lake Malawi to study species of the aquarium fish Labeotropheus (inset).

6

A fountain of ideas Professor James Wasley’s architectural work focuses not on designing buildings, but on how structures interface with the natural world.

“I want to reintegrate natural processes into cities,” says Wasley, co-director of the Institute for Ecological Design in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning. Doing so, he says, brings nature’s proven psychological benefits to urban residents who may not see much of it. Methods could be as basic as creating green roofs or rain gardens.

Or they could involve more conspicuous projects, such as a block-long fountain that runs on rainwater in Milwaukee’s Harbor District.

Wasley designed a series of pools adjoining Freshwater Plaza, a mixed-use building on the northeast corner of First Street and Greenfield Avenue, just across the road from Rockwell Automation. The fountain recirculates rain runoff, cleaning it in the process with planters full of sand and wetland plants. During a drought, the fountain can be topped off with city water, and during a downpour, it can drain into the storm sewer.

The result: More water stays out of the sewer system, the city gets a new green spot, and the area’s employees, shoppers and residents get a place to sit and relax.

The project is an example of the architecture school’s intense engagement with the community. Plans call for a companion fountain a quarter-mile east in front of UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences. There, water discharged from aquaculture tanks inside the school will spill into a reflecting pool filled with native aquatic plants and then drain into Lake Michigan. The matching fountains, bracketing a railroad trestle, will help tie the area together and integrate the Harbor District into Walker’s Point.

Wasley and the Milwaukee Harbor District fountain he designed to recirculate rainwater and clean it in the process.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

7

FRONTIERS

Planting some roots in the neighborhood On a rainy, windy afternoon in November, several UWM students huddled under umbrellas near a double lot of gardeny green space in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. Local residents joined them in dedicating decorative benches and planters, designed and built by the students. It marked a milestone in a partnership between the neighborhood and the students, brought together through the Buildings-LandscapesCultures Field School.

Arijit Sen, an associate professor in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning and in UWM’s Urban Studies Program, leads the BLC field school. Its goal: learn about the people, culture, heritage and history in some of Milwaukee’s oldest and often overlooked areas.

Graduate students in architecture, history and other subjects immerse themselves in urban neighborhoods. They interview the people who live there and document architectural treasures, corner businesses and parks over a three-year period. “You can’t just waltz in with an idea and then

Field school students working in the Sherman Park neighborhood.

leave,” Sen says. “You have to leave behind blood, sweat and tears.”

Undergraduate students – some funded by the Office of Undergraduate Research – also help during five-week summer sessions by interviewing people, taking photos and conducting archival research about neighborhood sites. The grad students take these conversations and findings into the Citizen Architects Studio, where they incorporate feedback into crafting a thankyou gift to the community, such as those benches and planters.

“Architects and architecture have this stereotype where you sit in your tower and design things for people down below,” says Jess Sherlock, who’s pursuing a master’s degree in architecture. “This studio breaks that stereotype, because you’re designing

with the people who use what we leave behind. They might not use your design the way you intended, and that’s a good thing.”

The field school’s inclusive approach welcomes a diverse cast of researchers.

Sen coordinates with UWM’s Peck School of the Arts, UW-Madison and the Library of Congress. Historians, artists and architects participate as observers, researchers and interpreters. Results include the 2016 play titled “This is Washington Park. This is Milwaukee.”

“What matters most is that we produce good citizens,” Sen says. “To sustain urban life, we need to have different ways to tell stories about each other. Everything we have done in the field school has come from the knowledge we’ve gained working with neighbors.”

Telling the histories of local churches Every day, Christopher Cantwell walks to his UWM classroom from his neighborhood home, appreciating the rich tapestry the area provides for someone in his line of work. He’s an assistant professor of history who specializes in religious history, and his daily commute sparked an idea.

The UWM neighborhood houses no fewer than five churches and religious facilities serving congregations that aren’t the buildings’ original tenants. Cantwell teaches a class on research methods in local history, and he wanted to explore the stories of such congregations as part of his course.

His students jumped at the idea. “Once you tell them you’re doing something real,” Cantwell says, “they get really engaged.”

Students paired off and started researching churches near UWM and farther afield, and the congregations were excited to participate.

Students interviewed St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church 8

current or former church members, dug through archival records and made field recordings evocative of the churches. For one congregation, St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church, students chronicled a fun gathering at a nearby bowling alley. “Finding such unity at a bowling league was unexpected,” Cantwell says.

In addition to St. Casimir, histories were created for Plymouth Church to the east of campus, Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, Epikos Church, the Chinese Christian Church, and Calvary Presbyterian. The project also included histories of two churches that dissolved: the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Catholic Church, which was demolished in 1967 to make way for I-794 in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, and Westminster Presbyterian, which sold its building to Epikos in 2009.

So far, two classes have contributed to the research, which is being compiled at the webpage uwm.edu/gatheringplaces. It features an interactive map, church timelines, photos and other multimedia materials.

Cantwell plans to continue the project, and for the next wave, he’s trying to find churches in smaller or more marginal neighborhoods.

He hopes to add to the webpage year after year and make it a living archive of Milwaukee’s religious diversity.

Harvesting a garden from the past On a steamy afternoon in August 2018, about 40 visitors gathered between two vegetable patches and a small cabin at Lynden Sculpture Garden, sharing the ground with green tomatoes, okra and other growing edibles. Then performance artist Portia Cobb turned it into a portal to the past.

Cobb, an associate film professor in the Peck School of the Arts, transported visitors to Yonges Island, circa 1900, one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands that became home to freed slaves after the Civil War. Cobb’s ancestors settled there, her mother was born there, and Cobb spent memorable childhood summers there. She also made multiple trips there between 2016 and 2018 to research her Lynden artist-inresidency project.

Titled “Rooted: The Storied Land, Memory, and Belonging,” it’s a multimedia endeavor that weaves together genealogy, culinary anthropology, history and the visual and performing arts. As the audience watched, Cobb rode in on horseback, wearing a moss-lined sun hat, cotton overalls and white lines and dots across her face.

She dismounted, sat on a platform attached to the cabin, which was constructed by fellow artist Fo Wilson, and watched dancers in jewel-colored gowns sway in the grass. Then she spoke in the Gullah dialect of the Sea Islands. She’d taken on the role of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smashum, whom Cobb had conjured up as her own great-aunt and honorary matriarch of a sprawling Gullah Geechee family.

“I been born in 1887. I lived to 1974, so my story gets told over and over again.” Lizzie’s storytelling included many references to the growing gardens, food that sustained an isolated but growing community seeking safety in the Reconstruction era.

The garden was central to Cobb’s project.

She researched Yonges Island recipes through archival accounts and family folklore. She partnered with Scott Alves Barton, a New York-based chef and African diaspora food scholar, to get the plantings and garden size as authentic as possible.

In September 2018, Cobb and Barton cooked and hosted a meal prepared with ingredients from Lizzie’s Garden. Cobb also wants to produce a documentary film about the entire project.

“The open-air, site-specific work, for me, expands cinema beyond the frame,” Cobb says, “adding to my research and experiential practice as an artist and professor.”

Cobb’s performance at Lynden Sculpture Garden was based on her research of South Carolina’s Sea Islands.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

9

Spiders weave a web of memories Arachnophobes might want to skip this story. Because spiders might be more intelligent than you think.

To compensate for not seeing very well, spiders usually manage their world by detecting vibrations in their webs. They even strike a specific pose to do it, spreading their two front legs apart and remaining still.

But Rafael Rodríguez Sevilla, an associate professor of biological sciences who researches the cognitive abilities of miniature brains, has evidence that black widow spiders make mental maps of their webs. And about 50 percent of the time, they rely on memory before vibrations.

“We’re trying to describe components of active consciousness,” he says. “Are they aware of their memories with such a small brain? We think the answer is yes.”

In one experiment, Rodríguez Sevilla and his lab members swapped the current webs of hungry spiders with older webs containing no

10

food. Half of the spiders conducted a fruitless search for up to a full minute when confronted with their new location. So single-minded was their persistence that not even live prey inserted elsewhere on the web distracted them.

“They are attending to the mismatch between their environment and their memory,” Rodríguez Sevilla says. “You can see the same behavior in humans. That confusion is a sign of higher intelligence.”

The researchers tested for memory of the web’s contents across several spider families. They found that not only did the spiders remember they caught something, but they also remembered features of the prey and the quantity of it.

Memory in tiny creatures was long thought to be a hardwired behavior that didn’t require much mental capacity. “Our results,” Rodríguez Sevilla says, “suggest that the ability to make mental maps is a common feature of animal brains, even relatively small and simple ones.”

Adventures in computer literature In the early 1980s, a 20-something Stuart Moulthrop had a Commodore VIC-20, the legendary 8-bit home computer that preceded the alsolegendary Commodore 64. He experimented with creating an early form of electronic-based literature, collectively known as hypertext works.

They were like computerized versions of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books that flourished in the ’80s. Rather than going straight through a story on a single plotline, readers were given choices that sent them down branching paths. In hypertext works, they navigated the stories by clicking hyperlinked phrases, which brought up the next part of the story on their computer screen.

Moulthrop, now a professor of English, was among a small group of pioneers in this electronic form of literature and released one of its canonical works in 1994, the novellength “Victory Garden.” Some of those early pieces of literature are still available online, or on modern computers, in updated forms. But many are only accessible using their original platforms, such as an Apple IIe. To help preserve and document these early forms of electronic literature, both for the public and for scholarly pursuits, Moulthrop helped create the Pathfinders project with startup support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Maintaining the literature also means preserving those early computers. In some cases, that means never turning them off.

“Because,” Moulthrop says, “we’re afraid we won’t be able to turn them back on.”

Moulthrop has also explored how reading the literature on its original platform or in its updated, often-web-based version, changes a user’s experience. With research partner Dene Grigar of the Washington State University-Vancouver Electronic Literature Lab, Moulthrop found that the platform differences mattered. “Important cultural and artistic features were lost in the migration to the web,” he says, ranging from how stories were loaded into the computer to how they were displayed on the screen.

The interactive fiction genre has enjoyed a recent rebirth, thanks to mobile technology.

This has been helped by a program called Twine, which arrived in 2009 and streamlined the hypertext literature creative process.

Moulthrop is researching Twine’s impact on electronic literature, interviewing creators and surveying their works. Says Moulthrop, “Another generation has arrived.”

The battle against fake news Maria Haigh, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies, types into thin air, mimicking news trolls. “They’re working in shifts nonstop,” says Haigh, who studies internet trust and fake news.

“It’s a machine.”

Haigh’s campaign for truth is personal. Her family lived through the 2013-14 unrest in Ukraine and the subsequent revolution that was widely acknowledged as having been sparked by Russian political interference. “The same,” she says, “has happened in the United States.”

She recently collaborated on a project with Wonchan Choi, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies who specializes in the credibility of online information. Their focus: improving how to spot and expose bogus news by exploring factchecking methods in the United States, Korea and Ukraine.

Haigh researched the history, work practices and reach of the Ukrainian online fact-checking organization StopFake.org, which she uses as a test case for journalistic responses to state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. That includes partisan messaging of dubious origin meant to influence elections, stir hostility and undermine faith in institutions like the media. She interviewed fact-checkers and

investigated how they countered fastmoving propaganda.

“Western journalism is just not ready for this,” she says of the tsunami of online fake news. She says the most common counterattack – thorough fact-checking of stories – isn’t working. “You read the factchecking article’s results; it’s detailed, it’s nuanced, it’s boring,” she says. Moreover, the corrective articles reach far fewer readers than the original erroneous ones that went viral.

Choi (left) and Haigh

“The people who are making things up, they know how to get the audience because they know what works on the emotional side,” Haigh says. “It’s monetized. It’s ideology and profit together.”

Such practices aren’t limited to politics.

Choi’s research also focuses on web-based health information. He says it’s fraught with myth, along the lines of, “If you eat it, then you will be healthy, or you can cure cancer if you eat it.”

The professors identified several credibility markers to look for in online news, including identifiable sources, expert analysis and commercial intent.

Further, they suggest legislators could help future voters by implementing school standards.

“If it’s part of a child’s education,” Choi says, “it becomes a habit, a way of life.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

11

FRONTIERS

A patented method for better protein research David Petering, a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has patented a technique that will unlock new avenues in protein-related research.

For biochemists, proteins are crucial to examining a cell’s structure and function. “We are trying to understand the functions that take place in the cell, what the cell is doing and what reactions are taking place in the cell,” Petering says. “Those are all basically carried out by proteins.”

So biochemists need to isolate proteins to study their activities and structure, whether for fundamental research, the development of medicines or finding a cure for a disease. “We can spend a lifetime working on pretty small areas of what’s going on in a cell,” Petering says, “because it’s just so complicated to get structure and function information.”

In traditional procedures, proteins could be separated, but the structure and function weren’t adequately maintained for carrying out further testing. A current commercial alternative enables researchers to maintain a protein’s function and structure, but it leads to poor separation and a smearing of proteins.

However, Petering’s laboratory has devised a new method of separating proteins while maintaining their three-dimensional structure and functional activity. “This allows you to do functional

studies along with just separating and identifying the fact that a protein is present,” Petering explains. “We did something very simple and found this sweet spot where we kept the native features of the protein without losing the ability to separate it.”

This allows for important new experiments to be conducted and provides Petering a better understanding of proteins. Petering has been awarded a patent for the method, which he developed along with graduate students Drew Nowakowski and William Wobig.

With patent in hand, Petering, who has been at UWM since 1971, is working with the UWM Research Foundation to commercialize the method.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” Petering says, “but it gives us another powerful tool to use in trying to gather information.”

Examining overlooked costs of outsourcing decisions In a move to reduce costs, a Milwaukee clinical diagnostics laboratory outsourced work to two assistants in the Philippines, which eliminated two full-time positions at home. Initially, the contracted workers handled basic administrative tasks by computer and, over time, took on more complex duties, making the outsourcing decision appear worthwhile.

But then, one of the contracted workers incorrectly answered a question concerning one of the lab’s providers, a mistake that

12

would’ve been highly unlikely from an on-site employee. Complicating matters, the person asking the question happened to be a regulator. Consequently, the lab stopped outsourcing.

Avik Chakrabarti, an associate professor of economics, researches the costs of such unforeseen outcomes triggered by outsourcing decisions. He’s done so for nearly two decades, involving students in the work of gathering data and identifying patterns related to outsourcing.

“Proactive analysis of ‘big data’ is crucial in outsourcing decisions,” Chakrabarti says. Doing so meaningfully, he adds, “requires identifying patterns from stories beyond numbers that people can picture, rather than

running old-style statistical or econometric programs.”

Chakrabarti says it’s common for a company to focus on direct costs during its outsourcing decision process, only to later discover that indirect costs – such as fallout from the mistake of the lab’s contracted assistant – make a big difference.

“That local lab’s experiences are strikingly similar to those of multinational corporations,” Chakrabarti says. “They go for cost savings, which is perfectly rational.

Oftentimes, however, the net savings falls far short of expectations.”

Chakrabarti’s students have gone directly to local companies and researched what drives outsourcing decisions, extracting information from big data related to production and costs. Maren Orlowski is one of his students doing this work with funding from a Support for Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

“We are getting mixed messages in terms of outsourcing being good or outsourcing being bad,” says Orlowski, who’s majoring in economics as well as journalism, advertising and media studies. “There is so much more that goes into it. It’s important to really examine how outsourcing has affected these firms and put that into context.”

“Companies consider costs,” Chakrabarti says, “but later realize, whether it’s cultural or work ethic, that workers in other countries operate differently than employees in the United States. This catches employers by surprise, sometimes a little late.”

Public perceptions of the Supreme Court Sometime after 2010, United States Supreme Court justices began doing something that, in comparison to 200-plus years of precedent, was out of the ordinary: They started inching further into the public spotlight.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared on “Sesame Street” in 2012. Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a high school commencement address months before his 2016 death. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a 2018 documentary about her life.

UWM political scientist Sara Benesh, an associate professor and an analyst for the Supreme Court Database, noticed those examples and more. She wanted to know what was behind the trend and what it meant for public perceptions of the court.

“There was a time when you couldn’t pick a Supreme Court justice out of a small crowd,” Benesh says.

“Part of my hypothesis is that they’re using these public appearances as opportunities to connect to the public.

If they engage more in public life, people will have more knowledge of

the court as an institution. When you know more, you like the court more.”

And likability matters when you’re an unelected body establishing legal precedents that affect generations of Americans.

So Benesh and research partner Wendy Martinek, a political scientist at Binghamton University in New York, are analyzing extrajudicial appearances of justices past and present. In addition to web searches, they review disclosure reports, reimbursement requests and personal papers of the justices.

The researchers are also thoroughly reviewing public opinion polls about the Supreme Court and its decisions from 1935 through present day.

They’re evaluating how extrajudicial appearances that occurred around the time a poll was commissioned might have affected these opinions.

“We really want to know whether the public notices and considers these appearances in evaluating the Supreme Court,” says Benesh, who expects to have results in 2020.

D’Souza

Improving the detection of brain aneurysms A weak blood vessel in the brain is a dangerous thing. Six million Americans have one that bulges out like a bubble and fills with blood, creating a brain aneurysm. If it ruptures – as it does in about 30,000 people annually – it can result in a coma, permanent brain damage, paralysis or death.

To better diagnose and treat brain aneurysms, Roshan D’Souza, a UWM associate professor of mechanical engineering, is developing new methods of analysis for a special kind of magnetic resonance imaging technology: 4D Flow MRI. Unlike traditional organ scans, 4D Flow MRI provides spatial 3D measurements of blood flow velocity and tracks its variation over time – the fourth dimension. D’Souza wants to use the shear stress that the flowing blood imposes upon a vessel’s wall as a biomarker for the potential growth of an aneurysm. This would indicate if and when treatment is needed to prevent rupture.

Because the resolution and raw data from the MRI scans aren’t of a high enough quality to be clinically useful, D’Souza is developing a new approach that merges two pieces of complementary information: flow physics simulations and actual data from the scan.

“It’s similar to how meteorologists produce storm warnings,” D’Souza says. “A highresolution storm simulation based on a physics model receives updates from sensors that track an ongoing storm to generate improved predictions.” In this case, the MRI data update the parameters of the physics model to generate a higher-resolution image.

D’Souza and his collaborators at the Medical College of Wisconsin hope to eventually design clinical trials to quantify the new method’s benefits. And the brain is only the beginning.

“We can expand our research to 4D Flow MRI studies of the liver, heart and kidneys,” D’Souza says. “I think this method has the potential to make a real difference for many patients.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

13

SPOTLIGHT ON PUBLIC HEALTH

Mining DNA and data

for a better biopsy

Liquid biopsies offer a way to search for cancer cells in the blood and other bodily fluids, perhaps before symptoms appear. They hold the promise of a less-intrusive alternative to traditional surgical biopsies that also provides better cancer detection and treatment.

Chiang-Ching (Spencer) Huang, an associate professor of biostatistics in the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, uses big data to study the potential of liquid biopsies. “We want to know how accurate tests are in detecting cancer cells in the blood,” he says.

Scientists already know that fragments of tumor DNA are released into the blood. With DNA extracted from the blood of cancer patients and of people who are healthy, Huang is using statistical analysis to sort through humongous amounts of genomic data.

This involves leveraging modern genomic technologies, as well as bioinformatics and biostatistical techniques. He wants to identify robust biomarkers, such as tumor-specific chromosome alterations, that are linked to certain types of cancerous cells.

14

Traditional surgical biopsies offer only a snapshot of a tumor, Huang explains. Liquid biopsies could paint a broader picture, not only giving doctors an earlier heads up about potential cancers, but also helping to understand the complex genetic profile of a tumor and contributing to better treatment.

That, in turn, would make it easier to predict risk and assess a treatment’s effectiveness. “Development of more sensitive and specific tests to monitor the treatment response is clearly needed,” Huang says.

The research’s ultimate goal: discovering how to accurately use these techniques in everyday health care to detect tumor cells and genetic mutations in bodily fluids.

“We are able to measure glucose and cholesterol in routine screenings,” Huang says.

“When we are able to find cancers in a routine check in the very early stages, they are much easier to treat.”

The data behind earlier diagnoses They sound like the equivalent of medical crystal balls: computer programs that predict whether you’re at risk for a disease well before the first symptoms show up. But in the College of Health Sciences, Associate Professor Rohit Kate and Assistant Professor Jake Luo are researching and developing just such programs.

The secret lies in data science – especially the enormous pool of data contained in digital medical records. Kate and Luo, who specialize in health informatics and administration, use mathematical models that enable machine learning – a process in which computers spot patterns, make associations and fill in missing information.

Kate’s work focuses on acute kidney injury, a sudden episode of kidney failure or damage. It’s a potentially fatal condition that can be treated if detected early, but it often occurs without symptoms or warning. For that reason, it’s most commonly detected in people who are already hospitalized.

In a partnership with Aurora Health Care, Kate’s model incorporates data variables found in hospital records, such as a patient’s demographics, medications, laboratory tests and comorbid conditions. This builds a risk profile, and the model’s goal is predicting which patients admitted for an unrelated health concern are also likely to suffer from acute kidney injury.

The beauty of this, Kate says, is that most diseases respond to treatment successfully if caught early, so his model could be useful in predicting other threatening conditions. Already, he’s adjusted the model to continually revise its predictions as a patient’s health changes during a hospital stay.

Luo, too, is leveraging data science for multiple health-related applications.

One focuses on people who participate in clinical drug studies. He’s created an algorithm that identifies their risk of experiencing severe adverse effects, including death. Moreover, by linking, extracting and structuring complex data, he can deliver intelligent analysis, which can help identify targets for potential new drugs.

Other models he’s created identify risk in people who experience bouts of dizziness. This could benefit, for example, people with vestibular disorder, an often-misdiagnosed dysfunction of the system in the ear and brain that controls balance.

Marijuana impairs young brains, but fitness may help Neuropsychologist Krista Lisdahl recently completed a six-year study of brain functioning in teens and young adults who regularly smoke marijuana.

It showed that smoking pot at least once a week changes a teenager’s thinking abilities.

Moreover, the research confirmed findings of previous Lisdahl studies showing an association between chronic pot-smoking and poorer working memory and slower processing speed.

“The more joints they smoked in the past year, the worse they did on the cognitive performance,” says Lisdahl, an associate professor of psychology.

“These areas of cognition were still worse in the marijuana users compared to controls, even after they stopped using for three weeks.”

The study stopped short of answering definitively whether people who smoked pot in their teens and early 20s permanently harmed their cognitive abilities. But it did show that aerobic fitness may protect against some of the cognitive damage that young marijuana users are inflicting on their still-developing brains.

Lisdahl separated the study’s marijuana smokers by their levels of fitness and then compared their performance on neuropsychological tests. Participants abstained from marijuana smoking for three weeks before taking a test called VO2 max, which measured how efficiently they use oxygen during intense exercise.

Lisdahl found that high aerobic fitness, indicated by the VO2 score, was related to better performance of visual memory, verbal fluency and sequencing abilities.

Most interestingly, aerobically fit marijuana users did better on the cognitive tasks such as processing speed, visual memory and sequencing ability compared to users who weren’t fit.

Lisdahl notes that the study offers some health intervention possibilities. “We could take people who are trying to quit and offer a method to improve brain function while they are scaling back use,” she says. “It would be an inexpensive treatment option.

“This could boost several other areas besides cognition,” Lisdahl continues, “because brain receptors for cannabis, called CB1 receptors, are involved in a lot of other functions besides enabling pot smokers to experience that high. These include emotional control, mood, cognition and pain tolerance.”

Because most research on exercise involves older adults, Lisdahl says, the study also adds insight into the health effects of aerobic fitness in young people. That’s important when you consider that activity levels of teens and young adults drop dramatically after high school.

SPOTLIGHT ON PUBLIC HEALTH

The next generation of

E-cigarette marketers are targeting young users by promoting sweet e-cigarette flavors, including baked goods and other desserts.

Seeing help for mothers through the Periscope Project Pregnancy and the postnatal period can be challenging times for a mother’s mental health. In fact, the top complication for women after childbirth is depression.

“It’s the time when you have incredible change, incredible sleep deprivation,” says Jennifer Doering, an associate professor at UWM’s College of Nursing and its associate dean for academic affairs. “You’re re-creating a family or adding to a family. You have changing roles and relations. That is a time to experience profound emotional adjustments.”

To better care for new and expectant mothers, UWM has partnered with the Medical College of Wisconsin on the Periscope Project.

Begun in 2017, it’s a free mental health consultation program for health care providers of pregnant and perinatal women. Doering is lead analyst of the program’s reach and effectiveness.

16

If a physician or midwife has a patient experiencing mental, behavioral or substance abuse issues, the provider can seek treatment advice or referrals by calling Periscope. “It’s like calling poison control for mental health,” says Doering, who serves on both Milwaukee’s Fetal Infant Mortality review board and the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Team.

After collecting data from the project’s first 15 months, Doering found it has exceeded expectations. More than 450 providers enrolled, eclipsing the target number by 100, and Periscope assisted people from a wide geographical range. The project fielded calls from seven states, 19 health systems and 45 cities.

When providers phone in for a consultation, on average, triage takes less than five minutes, and the psychiatrist calls the provider back within nine minutes.

nicotine marketing E-cigarettes are often touted as a path for older smokers to quit traditional cigarettes. But the appeal of vaping culture is also leading to high numbers of teens experimenting with e-cigarettes. Linnea Laestadius, an assistant professor in the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, believes social media is a big reason why.

“Social media marketing allows e-cigarette companies to target the next generation of tobacco users, who can become addicted to nicotine early through vaping,” Laestadius says.

It’s part of a pattern of tobacco marketing that targets vulnerable populations.

Youth-targeted promotional campaigns live in the social media realms where that audience digitally congregates. And marketers are capitalizing on teens’ attraction to sweet e-cigarette flavors.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Laestadius and Zilber School Associate Professor Young Cho scrutinized more than 1,000 Instagram posts promoting the flavored nicotine e-liquids used to refill e-cigarettes.

They found that the posts overwhelmingly emphasized positive experiences, personalization and aspirational identities. Warnings about health risks were exceptionally rare.

Moreover, almost a third of the content they examined featured e-liquids that tasted like baked goods, ice cream and other desserts, often using visual designs to make e-liquids look cool or cute.

Still, government-imposed marketing restrictions on vaping

products are very limited. And though Laestadius it’s illegal to sell the products to children under age 18, minors have found ways to buy e-cigarettes. In a separate study, Laestadius found evidence that the popular e-cigarettes called JUUL are frequently sold on eBay with no age verification.

In another recent study, Laestadius found evidence that tobacco companies target other susceptible populations.

Working with multiple stakeholders, including Zilber School biostatistics Associate Professor Paul Auer, Laestadius analyzed advertising practices at stores in three demographically distinct Milwaukee-area ZIP code clusters, with a random sample of tobacco retailers drawn from each.

The audit showed tobacco products in Milwaukee are more aggressively marketed at stores in African-American and Latino neighborhoods than in white ones. Stores in the AfricanAmerican and Hispanic areas were more likely to place tobacco next to candy, place ads in the line of sight of children and use outdoor advertising.

The results mirror other studies that found communities with lower incomes, lower educational attainment and more minority residents are subjected to significantly larger amounts of tobacco promotion.

That holds true for children in those communities, too, and such tactics matter. “The evidence is increasingly clear,” Laestadius says, “that children who are exposed to tobacco marketing in stores are more likely to start smoking.”

And because the patient stays in the care of her provider during the call, she walks out with a concrete treatment plan.

“When you’re talking about pregnancy, reducing delays in care is so critical,” Doering says. “There’s a finite amount of time that you have to create health in this woman before the baby is here.”

Doering believes the providers calling will become increasingly skilled and confident in managing psychiatric and substance use conditions in their practices.

The Periscope Project (the-periscope-project.org) is funded through 2019 by a $1.275 million grant from the United Health Foundation.

Doering hopes the initial positive results will secure funding to extend the program.

“If you change a woman’s life when she’s pregnant,” Doering says, “you change a child’s life forever.”

Doering

SPOTLIGHT ON PUBLIC HEALTH

Healthier air for children at day care Asthma ranks third among the reasons why children younger than 15 are hospitalized, and it accounts for millions of missed school days every year. Although the disease has no cure, it’s manageable with proper treatment and preventive measures.

Those measures include educating caregivers about common airborne triggers for allergic asthma. Anne Dressel, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing, is studying how such efforts can lead to improved air quality at places where many young children spend much of their time – day care centers.

The study – a collaboration between the College of Nursing, the nonprofit organization Fight Asthma Milwaukee Allies, and the Medical College of Wisconsin – focuses on care centers used primarily by low-income AfricanAmerican and Latino families. Education on airborne asthma triggers is especially important in economically distressed urban communities, as they bear much of the burden of childhood asthma. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County has the state’s highest rate of emergency room visits for

pediatric asthma. And the city of Milwaukee’s rate is 50 percent higher than the county’s.

The researchers want to reduce two groups of airborne allergens that can trigger asthma: residues of aggressive cleaning products and those of insecticides. So nursing students on Dressel’s team help train caregivers in green cleaning practices and pest management approaches that reduce the prevalence of airborne allergens. For example, state regulations require the use of bleach at day care centers, but caregivers learn how a diluted solution can achieve the necessary disinfection.

Using affordable, consumer-grade air quality monitors installed at the day care centers, researchers compare air quality before and after the training. The monitors cost about $200, and through a smartphone app, air quality information is displayed on-site and stored remotely on a computer server. The team expects to have early results in the spring.

“I’m excited that some of our nursing students are delivering the education as part of their practicum,” Dressel says. “It’s so important for them to see that helping people make behavioral changes can have a much bigger impact on a child’s health than treating that child at the clinic.”

The pilot study is part of the Westlawn Partnership for a Healthier Environment, which the UWM College of Nursing founded in 2008. The Westlawn neighborhood in northwest Milwaukee includes Wisconsin’s largest public housing project. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health via the Clinical and Translational Science Institute of Southeast Wisconsin.

How persistent pathogens can affect mental health Amanda Simanek, an assistant professor of epidemiology in the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, recently led a series of studies examining the links between infection and mood disorders.

Simanek’s three studies zeroed in on persistent pathogens – the kind that, once acquired, can result in chronic infections, some of which stay with a person for life. Examples include the herpes family of viruses and Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers. She found an association between such infections and a greater likelihood of depression. In some cases, the effects were stronger among women.

Broader research in the area has looked at such connections, but Simanek’s research plowed new ground and added important context to prior studies. Hers were the first longitudinal studies of these relationships and the first to explore whether gender differences played a role. Moreover, while much of the existing studies included older populations, Simanek was among the first to examine these associations in younger people.

Also, previous researchers have hypothesized that inflammation is a key biological mechanism by which a persistent infection helps trigger depression. Simanek’s studies were among the few to test this hypothesis. “We did not find support for the role of inflammation,” Simanek says, “which suggests additional pathways linking persistent pathogens to mood disorders should be investigated.”

Data sources for her studies included the publicly available National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted

18

Simanek

by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Simanek also used data from studies of middle-aged and older adults in Detroit and Sacramento, California, that were previously conducted by research colleagues.

Across two of the studies, Simanek found a consistent association between adults infected with cytomegalovirus – a type of herpes virus – and the new onset of depression among middle-aged and older adults. A third study also revealed that women ages 15 to 39 who’d been exposed to Helicobacter pylori had 2.5 times higher odds of a history of low-grade depressive symptoms when compared to women who hadn’t been exposed. The opposite association was observed in young men.

Simanek wants to build on this work by continuing a broader examination of the relationship between health and socioeconomic status. People who live in poverty acquire persistent pathogens earlier in life and at a higher rate, which, Simanek hypothesizes, could help explain social disparities in mental health. Funded by a $450,000 grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, she’ll explore how socioeconomic status helps shape immune function at birth.

STRING THEORY

Rene Izquierdo has built a world-renowned guitar program at UWM and saved some bygone music of his Cuban homeland from being lost to history

BY TONY REHAGEN

G

rowing up in Cuba, Rene Izquierdo never cared much for music. He was more into sports, like soccer and basketball. His mother worked for Cuba’s national gymnastics team, but she wanted her son to follow his talent for physics into a stable career in science. That maternal dream took a hit when Izquierdo’s father, a biology major who dabbled in music, treated him to a guitar concert in Havana at age 9.

At first, Izquierdo remembers being bored with the guitarist’s performance – until he broke into “El Decameron Negro,” a sweeping piece written by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer. “I got goosebumps when he played,” Izquierdo says. “I wanted to be able to do to other people what that guitarist did to me.”

Today, Izquierdo is a world-renowned classical guitarist and recording artist who has played hundreds of concerts around the globe, averaging 70 to 90 each year.

The Peck School of the Arts professor joined UWM in 2004 and created the classical guitar department, then built it into one of the country’s top guitar programs. He also honors his parents and homeland in his research by unearthing, cataloging and often recording works from classical Cuban composers that might have otherwise been lost to time.

“Because he is from Cuba, he has access to a lot of pieces and some of the best recordings of these pieces,” says Scott Emmons, professor of music

Izquierdo strums the strings not with a guitar pick, but with his fingers and long nails, which he says better suits the classical guitar style.

20

Florida education and dean of the Peck School.

“He’s making it so other people from around the world get to hear them.”

Izquierdo’s father bought him his first guitar after that watershed concert in Havana, but his mother remained uneasy about her son pursuing it seriously.

She knew how hard a musician’s life could be.

Cayman Islands Still, young Izquierdo carried (U.K.) the guitar around his home village of Cojímar, an enclave on the east side of Havana where Ernest Hemingway used to fish.

Jamaica Local guitarists gathered around a statue honoring the American author and played traditional Cuban songs.

That’s where Izquierdo learned chords In the United States, he was exposed and started absorbing the rich history to a variety of guitar repertoires while of guitar music in his native country. earning his Master of Music degree “My mother wasn’t pleased,” he recalls. and Artist Diploma at the Yale School “But at least I wasn’t drinking.” of Music. Later, while Izquierdo was Izquierdo steeped himself in the pursuing a music education master’s Cuban guitar tradition on those Havana degree at Lehman College in New streets. After primary school, he York City, Argentinian composer Jorge enrolled at the capital city’s Guillermo Morel suggested it might be wise for Tomás Bouffartigue Conservatory, the young Cuban to travel a lesserAmadeo Roldán Conservatory and known path by finding, researching Superior Institute of Art. At Superior, and performing music that’s not widely he learned from renowned Cuban known. “He told me there are already guitarist Jesús Ortega and even took thousands of recordings of these occasional lessons from Brouwer standards,” Izquierdo says. “Then he himself. At age 20, Izquierdo fled his asked me, ‘What do you have that home country and the communism that is unique?’” stifled his creativity.

The answer was plain in his past, and Izquierdo began researching the music of his homeland. He started with the foundation of his own education, as much from the streets as his music history classes from the conservatories

Havana

Cuba

and Superior Institute of Art. He knew Cuba was a cauldron of Spanish melodic and instrumental music, influenced by French colonists fleeing the Haitian slave revolution of 1791. It all mixed in Cuba, given Havana’s status as a main port between the Americas and Europe.

Prior to 1931, when the Cuban School of Guitar was founded, there was no organized entity that cataloged music for the Cuban guitar repertoire.

Still, Izquierdo’s research reached back into the 1600s and 1700s and latched on to familiar composers, seeking their more obscure compositions and later recordings. Then he worked his way through the decades and centuries, all the way to the 1920s and 1930s.

He followed the thread to lesserknown musicians who had influenced those better-known guitarists. He scoured archives and interviewed musicians, historians and civilians who remembered the songs from their own childhoods. Along the way, he found music written for piano, strings and other instruments. Where possible, Izquierdo translated the works for the six-string.

By the time Izquierdo was ready to record his collection of the Cuban works he’d uncovered, he had arrived at UWM, which provided grant money to fund that album. He repaid the university by making UWM more than just a top repository for Cuban classical guitar music. He laid the groundwork for a world-class classical guitar program that attracts the most talented and promising students, including young artists from Vietnam, Uruguay, Chile and Belgium.

“He performs in Thailand and Spain and Italy and France, and students hear him at these concerts,” says Emmons.

“And wherever he performs, in his

limited free time, he helps potential students with his teaching. They improve, and then they want to come and study with him.”

As a young guitarist, Leonela Alejandro saw Izquierdo at a recital in her homeland of Puerto Rico and knew his reputation well. She’d begun pursuing a bachelor’s degree in guitar performance, but when Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, it became difficult to continue her studies there.

“When I first started considering transferring, I’d listen to other professors’ opinions. One of the first names that always came up was Rene Izquierdo,” she recalls. “I heard so many good things about his teaching, and I was such a big fan of how he performs.”

UWM became her transfer destination, and Alejandro says Izquierdo has been crucial to her growth as a musician.

“The clarity of his teaching, he tells you exactly what’s wrong and exactly how to fix it,” she says. “But at the same time, he really values your opinion.

It makes the teaching and learning process two-sided instead of a professor just telling you what to do.”

Drawing enthusiastic recruits like Alejandro to UWM is just one way Izquierdo has built the program’s profile. Since 2012, UWM classical guitar students have won more than 65 international prizes and competitions, and many have gone on to become respected teachers and performers in their own right. And Emmons is effusive in his praise for Izquierdo’s impact on the program. “Easily the best between the coasts,” Emmons says.

“That’s all a credit to him.”

Beyond UWM, Izquierdo has contributed to the local music scene by founding the Classical Guitar Society in Milwaukee and leading the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra that’s existed for more than a century. He’s also created an internship program with the Latino Arts Strings Program and started a concert series that brings the world’s finest musicians to play for Milwaukee residents.

And of course, Izquierdo himself performs in Milwaukee, frequently playing the music of his Cuban homeland. Audiences watch his fingers pluck and dance over the strings, often producing melodies and rhythms that, but for his research, might have otherwise been lost to the ages.

“I heard so many good things about his teaching, and I was such a big fan of how he performs.”

Guitar student Leonela Alejandro, who came to UWM from Puerto Rico

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

21

Tiny changes, big impact

Part of Klaper's research involves studying how daphnia – the very small zooplankton shown in these magnified images – are affected when they ingest the even smaller nanomaterials that inevitably end up in the environment.

As nanoparticles grow ever more common, Rebecca Klaper plays a key role in exploring ways to keep them from harming our freshwater ecosystems

BY ADAM HINTERTHUER 22

O

n the shores of Lake Michigan, one the largest sources of fresh water in the world, Rebecca Klaper is busy pouring the tiniest materials humans have ever made into tanks containing some of the smallest members of the Great Lakes food web.

Klaper is a professor in UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences and a researcher at the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration of scientists across the country.

And nanomaterials – which she’s pouring into the tanks of a tiny zooplankton called daphnia – are almost indescribably small.

A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

That’s the length your fingernail grows in one second, or 100,000 times smaller than the edge of a piece of paper, or any number of other impossible-sounding comparisons. To qualify as a nanoparticle, a material has to measure between one and 100 nanometers. Forget invisible to the naked eye – a nanoparticle is only visible using an electron microscope.

But don’t let their size fool you.

Nanomaterials are a big deal, currently used all over the world to help with everything from building better batteries to improving cancer treatments to fighting foot odor. They’re also constantly shed into our environment, including our freshwater systems, just as surely as nanoparticle-enhanced sunscreen eventually washes off a swimmer in Lake Michigan.

The problem is, no one’s quite sure what happens when these more-micro-thanmicroscopic bits of human industry get there.

And that gets at the heart of Klaper’s research.

She wants to understand the fundamental science of how nanomaterials interact with freshwater organisms. And if those interactions prove harmful, she wants to understand why and how it happens so that safer, better nanomaterials can be crafted to replace the problematic ones.

“Part of my research is basically preventing something from happening to the Great Lakes,” says Klaper, who’s also director of UWM’s Great Lakes Genomics Center. “We’re trying to create a technology that is beneficial but environmentally safe at the same time.”

Making Things Safer

Klaper didn’t set out to study nanotechnology.

Her PhD in ecology is from the University of Georgia, where she worked to understand how natural chemicals in plants interacted with insect populations. But in 2001, she moved to Washington, D.C., to serve two years as an environmental science and technology policy fellow at the Environmental Protection Agency.

During the fellowship, as Klaper explored how chemicals can alter gene expression and an organism’s DNA, she met researchers

working on something even smaller – nanomaterials. That’s when she began to realize the power of working with manmade materials. Unlike naturally occurring chemicals, manmade materials could be regulated and engineered, potentially leading to better results for both the environment and human health.

Focusing on nanomaterials kept her asking “the same kinds of questions,” Klaper says, “just with different outcomes.” It also put her at the forefront of scientists doing ecological studies of nanomaterials in the environment. After she arrived at the School of Freshwater Sciences in 2003, the impact of nanomaterials became a focal point for her research.

Now, Klaper is essentially exploring the idea of building safer chemicals. If scientists can better understand the structure, chemistry and impact of nanomaterials, they can continue finding uses for them in industry, medicine and agriculture. But beyond that, scientists can also make sure that, when nanomaterials inevitably end up outside of their intended uses, they do the least amount of harm.

In explaining this intention, Klaper alludes to a cautionary tale about a once-popular material.

In the second half of the 19th century, the industrialized world fell in love with a set of naturally occurring silicate minerals known for their thin, fibrous crystals. Mining of the minerals took off in the United States, Canada, Italy and South Africa, as the substance’s heat-resistant powers led to widespread use as coatings and insulation, especially in the construction industry.

There was only one problem – asbestos ended up showing a propensity to cause cancer and kill people.

It turns out that what we couldn’t see could hurt us. The tiny, sharp crystals were prone to becoming airborne during mining and manufacturing. By the early 1900s, studies began linking exposure to asbestos to scarring of the lungs and, in the worst cases, death.

As the health risks of asbestos became known, countries regulated and, in many cases, banned its use.

The desire to avoid a repeat of all that, Klaper says, drives her work with the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology.

“One of the exciting things about our initiative,” she says, “is that the federal government decided to make investments in research on the environmental health and safety of nanomaterials along with investing in the growth of the technology.” It’s a proactive approach to developing new technologies that is far different from the business-as-usual story of many past technologies.

So Klaper hopes to help write a new narrative – one about working proactively to identify the

dangers of a new technology, and then use that knowledge to build more harmless materials.

For her, that means designing experiments that closely approximate what real-life interactions between nanomaterials and aquatic organisms are likely to be.

A Growing Concern

Since scientists first unlocked the vast potential of very tiny things in the early 1980s, nanotechnology has grown tremendously. Over the last decade or so, nanomaterials have popped up in products worldwide.

Some applications don’t exactly address pressing needs of gravitas. For example, sometimes nanoparticles of titanium dioxide are added to the sugar that is sprinkled on powdered doughnuts to give them a dense, snowwhite coating. And many brands of athletic socks contain synthetic yarn embedded with nanosilver to discourage the growth of bacteria that cause foot odor.

But other nanomaterials have the potential to powerfully impact human health. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanomaterials increase the effectiveness of sunscreens.

And gold nanoparticles show promising signs as a cancertargeting tool. They can be injected into the bloodstream, where they are carried to cancerous cell growth and begin accumulating inside tumors. When that “nanogold” is then hit with light waves from the edge of the infrared spectrum, it heats up and kills the cancer cells.

And on the green technology front, nanomaterials derived from complex metal oxides like cobalt or manganese are providing important advances in next-generation batteries and energy storage devices. Such

an application holds the promise of making renewable energy and electric cars more efficient, which could push them into widespread use.

But these metal oxides are highly reactive and known to be toxic in their larger forms, which gives some people pause. The truth is that scientists simply don’t know what a lot of the nanomaterials we’re currently manufacturing are going to do.

Yes, you can understand why people would wear nanomaterial-enhanced socks to fight their foot odor. But substantial amounts of these nanoparticles wash out during laundering and pass through the wastewater treatment process, raising concerns about how this antibacterial material will impact freshwater organisms.

That’s why, back in Klaper’s lab, she introduces a minuscule amount of nanomaterial into the aquariums of daphnia zooplankton. Daphnia are tiny, free-floating crustaceans that serve as a foundation for many aquatic food webs. Big fish eat little fish. Little fish eat daphnia.

Daphnia eat algae and, it turns out, nanomaterials.

In traditional studies of safe levels of exposure for a chemical, an organism in a lab is given a dose of a potentially toxic substance, and the amount is increased until obvious impacts occur, like deformities or death. But, Klaper says, those “dose ’em and kill ’em” experiments only provide information on the most toxic compounds. “What we’re more interested in is the realistic environmental scenario,” she says. “What kinds of changes happen in the organism as a result of very low exposure over a long period of time?”

For Klaper’s lab, this “long period of time” is often

Products Containing Nanomaterials These are just some of the products and technologies in which nanomaterials are used. The purposes behind their inclusions range from creating a better coating on powdered doughnuts to discouraging bacterial growth in athletic socks to improving the efficiency of next-generation batteries.

24

SUNSCREEN

SOLAR PANELS

SOY MILK

BATTERIES

only a month or so – but it is a lifetime for daphnia. “Our goal is to look from development all the way through reproduction, and sometimes we even follow their offspring to reproduction, to see if there are any multigenerational impacts,” Klaper says.

Time Will Tell

Klaper has found that most of the organisms she studies end up with nanomaterials in their bodies, either by ingesting them or absorbing them through gill tissue.

Often, there are no immediate impacts from nanoparticle exposure, but tiny changes to an animal’s inner workings can lead to big repercussions over time.

For example, in previous studies, Klaper has documented gene expression changes related to stress in daphnia exposed to titanium dioxide. Other times, nanomaterials altered daphnia movement and behavior, which, in the wild, would make them more susceptible to predation and reproductive decline.

Chironomids, or bloodworms, are another example.

These small, aquatic invertebrates live in the sediment of a lake before eventually swimming to the surface where, much like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, they emerge as swarms of midges. The flying insects serve a purpose beyond annoying beachgoers, however. Midges are important to the food webs of fish in the water and birds near the shore.

“Nanomaterials can impact the emergence of those midges,” Klaper says. “They can cause them to be smaller or change the amount of eggs they are able to produce, and

TOOTHPASTE

POWDERED SUGAR

CHEESE

ATHLETIC SOCKS

even their ability to survive and emerge from the water.”

But, Klaper is quick to note, harm to an organism isn’t the only, nor perhaps even the most common, story.

Different organisms respond in different ways to different nanomaterials, which leaves Klaper’s lab with the job of understanding why.

Although they are currently surrounded by more questions than answers, Klaper says, “the good news is that there are quite a few nanoparticles where we don’t find a lot of toxicity. Not all nanoparticles are created equal.” Many nanomaterials are derived from naturally occurring materials, and they appear to be harmless to living organisms.

As scientists in industry work to find new, exciting uses for nanoparticles, Klaper and her colleagues partner with them to ensure the particles are also engineered with the environment in mind. If what we don’t know could hurt us, what Klaper and her colleagues have learned can be used to make us safer.

For example, scientists with the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology are already changing the chemical structure and physical properties of some metal oxide nanoparticles used in batteries, and they’re also tweaking the delivery method of gold nanoparticles to make those nanomaterials less toxic.

These are small but promising steps, Klaper says, toward the ultimate goal of guiding the development of nanotechnology.

“We want to create materials so that, if they are released, they just don’t have an impact,” she says. “They just sit out there – safe by design.”

SUNSCREEN

SOLAR PANELS

TOOTHPASTE

POWDERED SUGAR

SOY MILK

BATTERIES

CHEESE

ATHLETIC SOCKS

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

25

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

BY LAURA L. OTTO

A UWM microbiologist is exploring how farmers could use less chemical fertilizer and still produce more food

26

P

roducing enough food is a national priority in populous countries like India. So much so that the government provides subsidies to offset the cost of chemical fertilizers. Farmers rely on the fertilizers to maximize crop production and keep food prices affordable.

But UWM microbiologist Gyaneshwar Prasad, who is from India, worries.

Early in his career, he studied bioremediation – natural ways of cleaning up pollution – and he could see the problems that came with such a reliance on chemical fertilizers.

Making artificial fertilizers requires a disproportionately large amount of fossil fuel, and fertilizers become less effective once a certain saturation point is reached. Moreover, an estimated 20 percent of those chemicals end up in agricultural runoff that pollutes water supplies.

“There’s got to be a way to feed the world in a more sustainable fashion,” says Prasad, an associate professor of biological sciences.

Prasad’s research centers on finding such a solution.

To do so, he’s following a path that nature has already laid out, and it has tantalizing possibilities.

For most plants, growth is limited by the amount of nitrogen available in soil, which is depleted over time.

But legume crops – such as beans, peas, lentils and alfalfa – have a partnership with certain soil microbes.

These microbes provide the plants with an unlimited supply of nitrogen in exchange for nutrients that the plant makes from photosynthesis. This mutual backscratching, known as nitrogen-fixing, creates a natural fertilizer for the plant, but it mainly happens with one kind of bacteria – rhizobia.

Discovering how to transfer rhizobia’s nitrogen-fixing ability in legumes to other staple crops has become something of an agricultural holy grail. Half of the world’s food energy comes from varieties of three cereal crops: wheat, rice and corn.

“If we were able to reduce the amount of chemical fertilizer needed to grow cereal crops even just a little,” Prasad says, “the impact would be huge, especially in developing countries where individual farmers with small yields would benefit the most.”

Prasad with a soybean plant

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

27

A LONG QUEST

The idea of transferring rhizobia’s nitrogenfixing abilities to other crops is not new.

Agronomists recognized the potential more than a century ago, and still, nobody has unlocked the mechanism behind it.

When the soybean genome was sequenced about a decade ago, scientists expected they would find the fixation mechanism linked to a gene that other plants don’t possess. But that’s not what researchers discovered. In fact,

Root nodule

Roots

28

the genes that legumes use for their symbiotic relationship with rhizobia also are found in the genomes of other crops.

“So, the mechanism could be a matter of how the legumes regulate those genes,” Prasad says.

“What are they doing with their genes that other plants do not?”

In 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation championed the problem, allocating $10 million for research at several universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. Prasad initiated a collaboration with UW-Madison agronomist Jean-Michel Ané, who received part of that funding, to investigate rhizobia behavior in rice. Although Ané has since moved his focus to corn, Prasad continues investigations into rice, specifically with how the microbe and plant talk to each other.

Prasad created a biological model that allows him to probe deeper into the communication pathways that rhizobia might use in rice. With his model, he can manipulate changes in the genes of the bacteria and rice and compare the findings to gene behavior in soybeans.

Just as bacteria in the human gut support a healthy immune system, the microbial communities in soil help promote Earth’s nitrogen cycle, which boosts crop yields. But they are extremely complex systems.

“We only know about 1 percent of the bacteria in any system, not just in the soil microbiome,” Prasad says.

One thing that scientists have known for some time: Legumes recognize the rhizobia as friends, and they both communicate as such. Bacteria from the soil invade the root hairs of legumes. As the microbe touches a root hair, the hair begins to curl, and the microbe

HOW LEGUMES AND RHIZOBIA HELP EACH OTHER A symbiotic relationship exists between the legume and rhizobia bacteria in the soil, which results in natural fertilization. Rhizobia take nitrogen (N2) that penetrates the soil from the air and supply it to the plant. The bacteria do this by colonizing the plant’s roots and forming nodules, where they convert the N2 into a form of nitrogen the plant can use. In return, the plant makes food (carbohydrates) from photosynthesis and provides it to the bacteria.

The roots of a simple soybean plant could hold the key to significant advancements in sustainable agriculture.

enters its cells. From this brief interplay, the plant builds a nodule on the root to house the bacteria.

The atmosphere is loaded with a gaseous nitrogen, called N2, that also permeates the soil. Rhizobia draw N2 into the nodules, where it turns the gas into a form of nitrogen the plant can use to make proteins, which is the first step in boosting growth. One plant can produce hundreds of nodules. Inside each one, up to a billion bacteria generate an enzyme responsible for the conversion.

The missing piece, Prasad says, is how communication unfolds between plants and microbes: The plant would need a way of summoning bacteria from the soil and “telling” them to form nodules.

FINDING THE PATH

Scientists thought that communication mechanism would be imprinted on a dedicated nitrogen-fixation gene within legumes or rhizobia. Once that proved incorrect, they figured the mechanism must happen through an existing gene-enabled pathway, such as one used by a fungus called mycorrhiza.

The fungus has a symbiotic relationship with nearly every plant and uses a plant’s “fungal interaction” genes to infiltrate and help

them expand their root networks by ramping up hormones.

Prasad inoculated rice with rhizobia and found that the bacteria can, indeed, get into the rice plant using the same pathway that mycorrhizae do. And once inside the rice plant, rhizobia enhanced hormone growth in the same way these bacteria do in legumes.

But some obstacles remained: The rhizobia microbes didn’t get inside the root cells in rice, as they do with legumes, and they didn’t stimulate the rice plant to make root nodules.

“If we can get them inside the cell in rice,” Prasad says, “that will be the breakthrough. But it’s tricky. We’re trying to accomplish something that evolution has not.”

His work toward that continues, encouraged by more clues from the ricerhizobia interactions.

When rhizobia use the mycorrhizae pathway, changes occur in the instructions delivered by the fungal interaction genes that are involved in messaging. These changes signal that activity is happening that wouldn’t without the bacteria’s presence.

Prasad wonders if this could reveal the communication process between legumes and microbes.

Prasad knows there are many approaches with potential to solve the nitrogen-fixing mystery.

Other scientists are trying strategies like gene editing, which could bypass the need to figure out rhizobia’s secrets.

Still, he believes that understanding the actual biology is important because of what else it might tell you.

“There are many steps that need to happen before it can fix nitrogen,” Prasad says, “So, to find the answer, you follow where the basic science takes you.”

“ If we can get them inside the cell in rice, that will be the breakthrough. But it’s tricky. We’re trying to accomplish something that evolution has not.”

– Gyaneshwar Prasad

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

29

Trauma How tools developed by UWM researchers are helping families and communities

BY ANGELA McMANAMAN

E

nilda Burgos is a caseworker at UMOS, a social services agency tucked into a south side Milwaukee neighborhood. She assists and supports chronically unemployed adults as they attend mandatory employment counseling sessions, which are designed to help them find steady work.

Life complicates employment prospects for these adults, each a parent receiving government assistance. Many have experienced significant trauma that’s had lasting effects, and Burgos gets only a brief glimpse into their lives outside her cubicle walls. This can make it hard to provide the important help people need, as was the case with one longtime client who struggled to attend her monthly UMOS appointments.

Burgos knew the woman had a history of anxiety, but she didn’t feel comfortable asking many questions about it during their brief and sporadic meetings. Then Burgos and her team met Dimitri Topitzes, an associate professor of social work in UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. A former licensed clinical social worker himself, Topitzes trained UMOS caseworkers to better assess the mental health needs of their clients and helped streamline referrals for those needing more urgent psychological support.

Topitzes and Josh Mersky, a Helen Bader School professor of social work, are experts in building relationships and working with social welfare agencies to implement practices

30

that better serve clients. They’re co-founders of the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being, a collaboration with Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin that has the mission of improving the lives of children and families.

Topitzes and Mersky want their work and research to have an impact on individuals and the broader policies and systems that exist to help them. “So that vulnerable families have access to the best experiences and services available to them,” Topitzes says, “based on the science.”

Part of their research involves creating tools, such as screening surveys, and embedding them at UMOS and more than a dozen other Wisconsin health and social service agencies to assess and improve their effectiveness. One such tool is a screening protocol called T-SBIRT, short for Trauma Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment. For folks on the receiving end, it feels like a guided conversation that introduces the concept of trauma, seeks permission to ask about their personal history of trauma and then asks how they deal with stressful life events.

Eventually, Burgos’ client met with Topitzes, who helped Burgos administer T-SBIRT. In a 15-minute motivational interview, T-SBIRT can nudge people closer to healing by acknowledging their innate coping skills. It also enhances trust with a caseworker or mental health professional, who then makes referrals for long-term mental health care.

to

Healing

“It wasn’t until we administered T-SBIRT that I knew this woman had suffered beatings and sexual assault,” Burgos says.

“Until that moment, we weren’t able to connect all the pieces and understand why these things – absences and anxiety – kept happening to her.”

Trust is a barrier for people who have survived complex trauma. Time is a barrier for caseworkers who have 30 or more clients. Tools like T-SBIRT can help overcome both obstacles simultaneously. “For our clients,” says Lisa Ortiz, who oversees Burgos and four other caseworkers, “it changes their focus from ‘What’s wrong with me?’ to ‘Here’s what’s happened to me, and how can I heal from this?’”

A Duo in Dialogue

Trauma can take many forms, and it can stem from sudden events or accumulate over many years. Sometimes, poverty creates trauma. A childhood lived in poverty – wondering where the next meal comes from – can interrupt a child’s growth and development.

Other times, poverty is a symptom of trauma. Left untreated, traumatic episodes accumulate like a pile of bricks.

Researchers call this complex trauma. It can make things in life much more difficult, from raising a child to finding a job.

Moving conversation to the forefront of publicly funded, trauma-responsive practices is a hill Mersky and Topitzes have

been climbing for years. They met in 2001 at UW-Madison, and both earned their doctorates in social work there. About a decade ago, their paths merged again at UWM, where their shared research interests led to establishing the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being in 2016. The institute focuses on designing and implementing effective programs, conducting cutting-edge research and program evaluations, and promoting change through policy and advocacy.

Mersky and Topitzes work largely as a team. They provide training to health and human services personnel, and they interact with the clients of partner agencies, as Topitzes did in administering the T-SBIRT. They also handle administrative duties. This includes having meetings and phone calls with research partners, recruiting new partners, and collecting data from agencies using T-SBIRT and other survey tools.

Their partnerships and working relationships with organizations such as UMOS, the Central Racine County Health Department and others is a testament to how far their work has come.

“When we first started down this road,” Mersky says, “I can tell you that many practitioners we interacted with –” “Most of them,” Topitzes quietly interjects.

“Were squeamish,” Mersky continues, “about asking their clients these kinds of questions. The concern is always: ‘What happens if I ask?’ But you have to be able to counter that

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

31

Topitzes sometimes administers the surveys he and Mersky created, such as the Lifetime Experiences Survey.

32

with: ‘OK, what happens if I don’t ask?’ Is the trauma not there? Have they not had these experiences?”

For Topitzes and Mersky, the answer has long been clear.

Even before Topitzes developed the T-SBIRT protocol, he and Mersky adapted other trauma-screening surveys and completed evaluations of trauma exposure at the individual and community level. Doing so offered a wide-angle view that was missing from older screening tools, which were largely based on the experiences and needs of more affluent, less diverse populations.

The results were three new screening tools: a Childhood Experiences Survey, an Adult Experiences Survey, and a Lifetime Experiences Survey that measures exposure to childhood and adult trauma. The surveys were designed to promote respectful conversations rooted in trust and consent, an approach that serves as the foundation for their work.

These tools addressed the challenges of growing up in less-affluent urban communities, including generations of unemployment, gun violence, and a lack of affordable health and mental health care. “Bad things don’t just happen to you in your household. They can happen in your community,” Mersky explains. “Our surveys ask nine new questions about poverty, homelessness, exposure to neighborhood violence, exposure to bullying or peer victimization.”

The surveys are used to assess people’s experiences with complex trauma in order to better address its aftereffects.

Portions were later incorporated into T-SBIRT. “One thing that you can do about trauma,” Mersky says, “is ask people questions about it.”

Before the program’s implementation, Topitzes traveled to Durham, North Carolina, with Jeffrey Langlieb, Central Racine County Health Department’s community health director, to study the original Family Connects program as a model. Durham’s Family Connects has led to significantly fewer child abuse cases in its coverage area, and it follows the standard home-visit pattern, with a twist. Instead of visiting only moms who live at or below the federal poverty line, it reaches out to all moms, regardless of income.

“If you want to move a needle like child maltreatment,” Topitzes explains, “this requires us to reach as much of the population as possible.”

Topitzes and Langlieb interviewed the Durham program’s founders and participated in recruitment activities. Research continued in Racine. “Instead of coming in and telling our nurses what to do,” Langlieb explains, “Dimitri went through three or four meetings to really learn about how our nurses do their work.”

Racine home visits include an interview protocol that Topitzes and Mersky have developed. It incorporates questions from T-SBIRT and the Lifetime Experiences Survey. Topitzes says the approach is effective and subtle: Ask about a mom’s positive stress-management techniques, seek permission to ask about harmful coping strategies, then offer any necessary referrals to treatment.

Meeting the Challenges

In cities like Milwaukee and Racine, officials have realized they can’t afford to not ask difficult questions about poverty, neighborhood violence and sexual abuse.

No single approach or initiative can address these social issues entirely. But Mersky and Topitzes believe their work can help. “Milwaukee does have significant challenges,” Mersky says, “but that’s part of what motivates us to do work here.”

It also motivates them to take a long-term view when implementing their work. “We’re not just interested in developing a one-off intervention and testing it in a clinical controlled setting in a university and then publishing our findings,” Mersky says.

“We’re funded by county and state government,” Topitzes adds. “Hence, the programs, practices, interventions we’re investigating are ones our funders are interested in sustaining over the long haul.”

One example is the Family Connects pilot home-visiting program, a partnership between the institute and the Central Racine County Health Department.

Since July 2017, every woman who delivers a baby at Ascension All Saints Hospital in Racine has been asked the same question one day after her baby’s birth, and always by a nurse: “Would you like a follow-up home visit from one of our staff nurses?” About 75 percent of new moms say yes. By three weeks postpartum, about two-thirds of them have completed their home visit through Family Connects.

The program attempts to reach families, determine who needs the most support and then refer mothers to resources they need, such as a crib, job training, mental health care or housing referrals, all aligned by public health nurses.

Mersky

He describes it as building trust and softening resistance to referrals. Family Connects is embedded within Racine’s network of social service and medical providers, so whether a mom needs child care, a car seat or a new family doctor, the visiting public health nurse can make the right referrals.

If Family Connects works in Racine – and data shows about 50 percent of new moms act on their referrals – Mersky and Topitzes plan to scale up the program in Milwaukee. Their goal is to see universal family home-visiting become the standard of care statewide. They hope it will be one more way to help people move down the path from trauma to healing.

“Resilience is not special to one person over another,” Mersky says. “We all have the capacity to recover or heal.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

33

34

In the early

DECODING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR In a world flooded with customer data, Purush Papatla looks to psychology to interpret what it all means

BY TONY REHAGEN

2000s, Purush Papatla hit what seemed like a dead end.

He had been a professor of marketing in UWM’s Lubar School of Business since 1987, and in that time, he had distinguished himself as one of the world’s foremost authorities on analyzing data to interpret and predict consumer behavior.

The bulk of his research back then had been built on statistics pulled and compiled from bar code scanners at the checkout counters of retail stores and supermarkets. The problem was that by the turn of the 21st century, after more than a decade of poring over those numbers, there wasn’t much left to glean from that source.

“I came to a point where I felt like there was only so much I could extract from scanner data,” Papatla says. “If I’m going to do research, I’m going to do something groundbreaking. I was not really excited about what I was doing.” But before he could decide on a different focus for his research, or an altogether different career path, something huge happened.

Online social media exploded – a digital Big Bang that forever changed the consumer landscape.

Suddenly, researchers could track every mouse click, every link shared, every Facebook “like” and every promoted ad retweeted. Big Data was born. And almost overnight, consumer scientists who’d lamented the drought of information were practically drowning in it.

Fortunately, Papatla was ready to swim.

“I saw it as a golden time for marketing and for those, like me, who use data,” he says. “Now there’s so much data you can use to understand what goes on through people’s minds. It’s the best time in my career.”

That’s quite a statement, considering Papatla’s long and distinguished resume.

He is a rarity among marketing PhDs, incorporating a mechanical engineering background and a deep interest in psychology and anthropology into his work, which studies why and how people engage with online advertising and, more importantly, why they buy things.

The best measure of his success may be

how companies and organizations from across the globe give Papatla access to their top-secret data so that he might decipher the meaning behind it all.

In August 2018, he was appointed UWM’s interim co-director of the new Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, a $35 million collaboration between Northwestern Mutual, UWM and Marquette University. Its goals: bolster Milwaukee’s tech talent pipeline, promote the region as a tech hub and provide research to the field.

Papatla came to

Papatla was among the first to use the information collected by bar code scanners to examine and illustrate consumer decision-making.

36

marketing from an industrial and systems engineering background – he was always fascinated by computers. After getting his master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he’d lined up a job in California designing compilers – essentially, the brains of computers – but deep down, he felt the field wasn’t tapping into his creativity. When Northwestern University offered him a full ride to enroll in their marketing doctoral program, Papatla quit the West Coast gig before he’d even started it.

That was 1983, when checkout scanners were just coming into vogue at supermarkets and retail stores. Suddenly, a researcher like Papatla had a link between computers and consumer behavior. “I always found it psychologically stimulating to merge traditionally nonquantitative fields with data to understand what drives people,” he says.

Papatla was among the first to use the information collected by bar code scanners to examine and illustrate consumer decision-making, exploring things like consumers’ loyalty to certain brands and their interest in coupons, discounts and lower prices.

Although today these connections seem almost self-evident, in the late 1980s, Papatla was one of only a handful of researchers doing this work, which was cutting-edge at the time.

Now, with a World Wide Web of resources at his disposal, Papatla is still at the forefront of his field. He knows – as was the case with bar code scanners – that it isn’t very helpful having online data

and the number of likes and clicks alone.

The key to Papatla’s work is taking raw numbers and interpreting them with wellestablished psychological principles and theories of consumer behavior.

For instance, one of his recent studies involved looking at Facebook and Twitter and assessing why users decided to “like” or retweet certain ads while they scrolled quickly past others. With thendoctoral student Nima Jalali, Papatla incorporated the psychological principle of social influence – which holds that people are swayed by the decisions of people they know. Users were more likely to share content if they believed it would make them look good to their friends and followers. The same held true if they thought it could be an online conversation-starter.

Because the power of online advertising is now almost completely in the hands of individual users who disseminate messages by sharing with friends and followers, companies from all over the world have

partnered with Papatla, who offers his expertise free of charge in exchange for access to their online data. “I don’t take money from them,” he says. “I protect my intellectual integrity. They share their numbers. I get my research. They get my findings.”

Papatla worked with several companies on a study that used Instagram data to determine which company-sponsored photos, taken by consumers and featuring brands, were most successful in selling products.

He tracked how long users engaged with each photo, how many followed the link to learn more, and how many ended up making an online purchase. He even looked at what colors tended to grab attention. What would grab consumers in that microsecond as they thumbed through their feed? In the end, Papatla turned to anthropology for the answer.

“As humans, we’re wired to survive,”

he says. “The way we’ve survived is to focus on the things that happen around us. One thing that grabs our attention is other people. Ancient humans had to understand whether they could protect themselves and, more importantly, judge what the other person’s attitude was.

They looked at the face.”

Papatla thus surmised that because we’re hardwired to look at another person’s face first, that left no time to look at the coat or backpack or soda they were holding in the ad photo.

“Pictures with people’s faces would be counterproductive,” he says. “Pictures with faces receive 11 percent fewer clicks than photos without faces. And smiles, to which we react more positively, are even more counterproductive.”

Of course, people use the

internet for more than just liking photos and sharing ads. And the proliferation of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones adds the element of location with gobs of GPS data. Every new online service provides an opportunity for Papatla.

For instance, one of Papatla’s most recent studies revolved around why riders chose taxis over ride-share services like Uber and Lyft. He and then-doctoral student Prashanth Ravula received data collected by the city of New York, which keeps tabs on every taxi ride taken in the city.

That includes where the ride started, how long it lasted, where it ended, how much was charged, how payment was processed and even how much the tip was. The city also provided six months of Uber data, totaling 3 billion rides.

Papatla looked to the psychological principle of least effort and found that with short rides, for which Uber doesn’t provide a lot of money savings over a taxi, riders were more likely to hail a random yellow cab on the street rather than wait for a specific Uber driver to arrive. Therefore, to increase profits, Uber should increase its cars’ availability to get everywhere sooner.

Similarly, Papatla and Ravula weighed in on how consumers decide between using

Airbnb and staying at traditional hotels.

After analyzing nearly 625,000 Airbnb searches, and as he’d done in previous work, Papatla relied on the psychological principle of social influence.

”Pictures with faces receive 11 percent fewer clicks than photos without faces. And smiles, to which we react more positively, are even more counterproductive.“ – Purush Papatla

The primary inhibition among prospective Airbnb clients is the stress of not knowing the space and its owner, their host. Clients, he surmised, were more likely to choose Airbnb lodging where there was credible third-party verification.

Essentially, if a friend or someone trustworthy had already stayed there, they were more comfortable doing so as well.

More and more, people are turning to the web to do everything from ordering a pizza to checking whether they closed their garage door, and then closing it if they didn’t. So Papatla is unlikely to get bored anytime soon. In fact, one of the dangers he sees on the horizon is too much data, allowing companies to mislead consumers by cherry-picking favorable data while burying other results. Another is the increasingly invasive nature of this data extraction, prying deeper and deeper into people’s privacy.

But Papatla has faith. He believes the key that will keep his research salient is the incorporation of psychological and anthropological principles. And he believes in the enduring notion that successful companies are the ones that sell things people genuinely need or find useful.

“Don’t use data to pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes,” Papatla says. “I truly believe that brands that use data to improve consumer experience, the brands that help consumer awareness, are the ones that will last.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

37

Why women leave engineering After learning the reasons behind this steady exodus, UWM researchers are exploring how diversity can impact innovation in engineering work teams B Y K AT H Y Q U I R K

Nadya Fouad has dedicated her career to exploring how individuals decide on their careers, as well as the broader impact those decisions have.

She is a UWM distinguished professor of educational psychology, and in 2016, she was named the inaugural Mary and Ted Kellner endowed chair of educational psychology in the School of Education. Her research and expertise have drawn top recognition in her field, including a prestigious lifetime award.

Much of Fouad’s work has centered on those who are underrepresented in different areas of the workforce, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). That includes examining why so many women leave the engineering field.

Fouad’s most recent project, however, expands her focus from individual career paths to look at professional engineering teams. Specifically, she’s partnered with UWM faculty members Romila Singh and Ed Levitas to see how diversity in those teams affects their innovation and effectiveness.

38

“We decided to find out,” Fouad says, “if you have more diverse teams, will it be related to the bottom line?” And although the project is in its early stages, it’s built upon previous research conducted by Fouad and her colleagues.

In 2007, Fouad published a study looking at the barriers that steered high school and middle school girls away from science Fouad and math while also examining ways to encourage their interest.

A vital factor, Fouad found, involved parents and teachers helping to instill selfconfidence in girls. Then, a few years later, a conversation with a doctoral student raised additional

Singh

questions about women in the STEM fields, particularly engineering. Mary Fitzpatrick had left engineering to pursue a doctorate under Fouad in counseling psychology.

“Did you know that half of women leave Schlitz engineering?” Fitzpatrick asked Fouad.

The question prompted Fouad to join with Singh – an associate professor in the Lubar School of Business who focuses on organizational behavior and human resources – for a groundbreaking study. Published in 2012, their National Science Foundation-funded work explored why women with engineering degrees leave the field. Although women had earned 20 percent of the engineering degrees awarded over the previous 20 years, they made up only 11 percent of the engineering workforce.

“The women in engineering study hit a nerve,” Fouad says.

“We were hoping for 800 respondents, and we got over 5,500.

More than 500 women who responded to the survey link had graduated in engineering, but they never became engineers.

That’s huge.”

Common wisdom had held that women left for childrearing or family reasons. The study found, however, that most who left were not staying home. An uncomfortable work climate topped the reasons women decided to leave the field.

Many of the women surveyed said the lack of other female engineers and women mentors made engineering a lonely field for them.

Nearly half of the women surveyed said they were discouraged by working conditions, such as too much travel, lack of advancement, low salary, or inflexible or nonsupportive climates. On the other hand, women who had stayed in engineering did so for the same reasons as men – their companies invested in their training and professional development, recognized their contributions, and offered them opportunities and clear paths to advancement.

In the wake of that study, Fouad has served on a committee on engineering preparation for the National Academy of Engineering. In 2017, she received the Leona Tyler Award for Lifetime Achievement in Counseling Psychology from the American Psychological Association. It’s given for distinguished contributions in research or professional achievement in counseling psychology.

Along the way, a reporter asked Fouad a simple question with a complex answer: Why did it matter that a workforce was diverse? And much like the question from her doctoral student, this one sparked an expanded line of research.

Fouad, Singh and Levitas – a professor of business in the Lubar School who studies learning, innovation and creativity – are exploring the chemistry of engineering work teams. To shed light on the question of why diverse work teams are important, their NSF-funded study will look at it from different angles, including how diversity Levitas relates to innovation and effectiveness.

“Generally speaking in the innovation literature,” Levitas says, “innovation results from a diversity of ideas being refined into new ideas.”

This concept has a foothold in the professional world.

Lei Zhang Schlitz, an executive vice president at Illinois Tool Works and a 2018 UWM Distinguished Alumni award-winner, offers an example.

“If you look at what companies are looking for, they are trying to innovate to stay relevant and to stay on the leading edge,” says Schlitz, who holds UWM master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering.

“If they don’t draw ideas from people of all kinds, not just women, but people from different cultures, functions and backgrounds, it’s going to be very hard to be innovators. That’s really the ultimate business reason to be inclusive.”

Now, Fouad, Singh and Levitas want to pin down the value of that diversity and inclusiveness. For the study’s first phase, the UWM research team laid the groundwork, designing a survey to get at the factors that make teams successful.

They’re developing a database of 200 diverse teams and reaching out to organizations like the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the National Society of Black Engineers to create a list of survey participants. They’ll also include engineers from the 2012 study on their survey list.

A key part of the research is determining how to measure team success. The researchers plan to use indicators like new products, patents and patents pending, the publishing of papers, as well as other measures of innovation and productivity. “We are looking at things we can document,” Fouad says.

The ultimate goal is to determine not only what factors make teams successful, but also how those traits can be replicated in other teams.

Although the project is challenging, team members see their own diverse perspectives and disciplines as an advantage. “It’s stretching us all,” Singh says, “because we’re all learning different areas of research.”

“That’s the value of interdisciplinary work,” Fouad says.

“We’re arguing that teams do better work, and not one of us could do this by ourselves.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

39

40

Fatherl

OVE

The important role fathers can play in reducing infant mortality rates and improving maternal and child health B Y K AT H Y Q U I R K

Review, published in 2017, which examined the causes of African-American babies in Milwaukee are three times premature deaths and made recommendations on ways to more likely to die before their first birthday than white reduce them. babies. It’s a fact that’s remained stubbornly resistant to Kowalik praises Ngui for building a bridge between change despite widespread community efforts. his university research and his community involvement.

The average infant mortality rate for black babies in “Oftentimes, you’ll see someone that is really, really good at Milwaukee from 2015-17 was 15.4, meaning that for every community engagement, but they’re not a practitioner or 1,000 live births, an average of 15.4 died before their first researcher,” she says. “To find someone like Dr. Ngui that birthday. For white babies, the average rate for the same has both is very rare.” period was 5.1. Those numbers, provided by the City As a father himself, Ngui is acutely aware of men’s of Milwaukee Health Department, represent a slight evolving roles as parents. “Looking back at my life and my worsening of the situation from the previous three-year own parents,” he says, “the mother had the traditional role rolling average. From 2014-16, the average Africanof taking care of the kids, and the father was very much American infant mortality rate was 13.7, and it stood the economic provider. But getting home and seeing how at 5.0 for whites. tired my wife was, I knew I was a father, and I had to play “All of the resources and all of the energy that a supportive role rather than assume the traditional roles have been invested in infant mortality, we should see held by my parents.” those rates changing,” says City of Milwaukee Health So personally, he worked to become a more engaged Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik, a UWM alum. father. Professionally, he has worked on a pilot project Emmanuel Ngui, an associate professor in seeking to get fathers more community and behavioral involved in prenatal care by health promotion in the "They welcomed the opportunity partnering with the Wheaton Joseph J. Zilber School of Franciscan-St. Joseph Women’s Public Health, is working to to talk with and learn from other Outpatient Center and improve those numbers. He has focused his research on health fathers. They liked being part of the The Parenting Network’s CenteringPregnancy. The inequalities and the role that pregnancy and delivery process."

“Expecting Mom, Expecting social determinants of health, Dads” project works with such as income and literacy, -‑ Emmanuel Ngui African-American couples to play in birth outcomes and enhance the role of fathers child health and well-being. during prenatal care and throughout pregnancy while also Ngui says those social determinants – poverty, lack of jobs, examining barriers to paternal engagement. discrimination/segregation, lack of access to health care – “I wanted to pilot a small study to try to address some of are underlying factors making it hard to move the needle the issues that I expected fathers would face,” Ngui says. on infant mortality rates. Within that context, though, Among the issues: whether fathers were willing to take time he’s focused much of his work on one particular piece to participate in prenatal care, and if so, whether they’d be of the effort – looking at the impact of Africanable to get time off work for it.

American fathers on maternal and child health.

Fathers involved in the project attended prenatal classes Ngui’s recent work has involved three major and doctor’s appointments with the mothers and received a studies. They include a pilot project on the list of educational resources on pregnancy. “They welcomed involvement of African-American fathers in the opportunity to talk with and learn from other fathers,” prenatal care as well as focus groups with AfricanNgui says. “They liked being part of the pregnancy and American men exploring how to improve their delivery process.” pre- and postnatal family engagement. Also, Although the pilot project eventually involved only four Ngui was the principal investigator on the city’s couples, Ngui says the birth outcomes were positive, with most recent comprehensive Fetal Infant Mortality

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

41

all babies born full-term weighing between 7 and 9 pounds.

Premature babies are defined as those born before 37 weeks, and the World Health Organization defines low birth weight as 5.5 pounds or lower.

Increasing healthy African-American birth results, like those achieved in his pilot project, is Ngui’s ultimate goal. And yet, as the principal investigator for Milwaukee’s Fetal and Infant Mortality Review, Ngui knows the complex factors that contribute to the city’s infant mortality rate.

The review, a collaborative project with the Milwaukee Health Department, compiled and examined information on stillbirths and infant deaths from 2012-15, then made recommendations to address the causes.

“Statistics are people with the tears washed away,” Ngui and the health department’s Karen Michalski wrote in the report’s introduction, paraphrasing the proverbial saying. “It is easy to talk about ‘mortality’ or ‘rates,’ and lose sight that behind each statistic, each number, is a life and a family’s story.”

Results showed that major factors in African-American infant mortality rates were premature births and unsafe sleeping conditions. “The underlying reason for the increased rates of preterm births remain unclear,” the report states.

“However, research suggests that a combination of economic, social and environmental factors, including higher levels of chronic, toxic stress play a role.”

Ngui says his work with fathers is an attempt to address that stress, and previous research has shown that fathers’ involvement can often help ease mothers’ stress.

He’s conducted focus groups with almost 50 AfricanAmerican fathers and fathers-to-be about the challenges they face in engaging with their children. Many said they never had the opportunity to participate in prenatal care because, even when they accompanied mothers to clinics and doctor’s offices, they were excluded from the conversations.

Ngui believes interested fathers must be included from the beginning. That allows them to become a resource for their partner during pregnancy and help care for their children, especially in the case of a premature birth.

"My desire is to see whether we can scale it up.

There's a growing interest in engaging fathers ..." ­-‑ Emmanuel Ngui

42

“For some men, especially with a preterm baby, they just don’t even know how to hold it,” Ngui says. “Some of them are big guys, but they have this very tiny baby who fits in the palm of their hand. They don’t know how to parent such a small, premature baby, and also what to do to support a partner with such a small baby.”

The focus groups also highlighted the challenges that many African-American fathers can face, such as a lack of jobs that pay enough to support their families or provide good housing.

Other challenges include negative stereotypes about absentee or deadbeat fathers as well as high incarceration rates that can make it difficult to just stay in touch with their children.

“What struck me a little bit were the fathers who said they’d been incarcerated, and the only thing that kept them going was the picture of their children,” Ngui says. “They perceived that as engagement. At first, I thought, ‘That’s not really engagement,’ but that constant thinking of children is what fathers do. It’s just a tiny connection, but it’s engagement at a different level.”

Ngui says that funders of maternal and child programs are paying more attention to the role of fathers. It offers hope for expanding his work on prenatal care and fatherhood to include more locations and more fathers.

“My desire is to see whether we can scale it up,” Ngui says.

“There’s growing interest in engaging fathers but very limited research out there showing the contribution of fathers to good outcomes.”

How patients can use exoskeletons and artificial intelligence to help restore movement

BY LAURA L. OTTO

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

43

It takes 38 muscles to send a text message on your phone, 94 muscles to walk the dog and about 60 to put on a shirt. But in every case, the most important body part contributing to these actions is your brain.

Movement is possible because the brain and muscles exchange information through an electrical signal that’s unique to each muscle.

Injury or stroke interferes with those electrical impulses, leading to a feeble response in the corresponding muscles.

Now, a new generation of robotics is helping debilitated patients regain much of their former abilities by using technology that essentially communicates with muscles when the brain cannot.

Islam with a prototype of the exoskeleton for the whole arm. It incorporates artificial intelligence to assist rehabilitation patients.

44

Exoskeleton robotics, a relatively new kind of assistive technology, involve wearable frameworks that cover the surface of limbs and boost injured muscles’ electrical impulses. You’ve seen fantastical examples of them in

Because every muscle contraction is different, these devices must adjust constantly. movies, conferring Herculean strength on ordinary people. But perhaps the greatest potential of this technology is restoring everyday abilities – a heroic

achievement for those who need it.

Mohammad “Habib” Rahman, an assistant professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering, designs exoskeletons and a variety of other biomedical robots, some of which are used for rehabilitation and surgery.

Two of his most promising devices are a glove that’s used in hand and finger rehab, and a customizable exoskeleton designed to fit the entire arm from shoulder to wrist.

Unlike most assistive tools for physical therapy, Rahman’s exoskeletons include sensors and motors, and they use artificial intelligence. The combination informs the exoskeleton how much motion the patient is capable of, and it allows the device to automatically amplify a muscle’s weakened electrical impulse to make up the difference.

Because every muscle contraction is different, these devices must adjust constantly. “It will not be the same electrical signal for the same person moving the same muscle, because each time, there will be different circumstances,” Rahman says.

“For example, if the user is tired, the signal will be different than if they aren’t. The robot’s algorithms are based on dynamic signals, so they compensate for gravity more exactly.”

Robotic assistive devices must be able to handle passive rehabilitation – instances where the

patient isn’t contributing any effort to movement – and also the shared efforts between the patient and the device.

The controller, which is basically the robot’s artificial brain, calculates necessary forces like torque and provides that to the motor.

THE ARM

Rahman noticed that physical therapists often use many assistive devices intended for specific motions.

So he and doctoral student Md Rasedul Islam have created one robot that can do the job of several.

It’s a multitasking exoskeleton that can be used for any of an entire arm’s eight movements that originate from the shoulder, elbow or wrist joints.

Detachable parts allow the therapist to focus on a single joint or all of them at once.

"I am also really passionate about design and about adding intelligence to the devices. There are so many needs they could address."

-- Habib Rahman The prototype offers features that are unavailable in current devices, Rahman says. Its modules are quickly assembled and customizable, meaning the device can be used for a wide variety of injuries or debilitation.

Sensors provide therapists with rangeof-motion information, and a session’s results are recorded so that PTs can monitor progress.

Interested in marketing this wholearm exoskeleton, Rahman and Islam formed a team with senior scientist Rathindra DasGupta, doctoral student Md Assad-Uz-Zaman and undergraduate Fidel Sierra-Flores Jr., and they enrolled in the I-Corps program based at UWM. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the I-Corps program helps academic researchers turn their discoveries into commercial products.

In Wisconsin, the program is hosted by the UWM Research Foundation.

The versatility of the robot so impressed Scott Johannes, a UWM alum and physical therapist at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, that he became the team’s mentor.

“As physical therapists, we treat our patients by observing what’s not working,” Johannes says. “So, to have a modular tool that allows us to look for solutions a la carte is really valuable. As a clinician, I would want to work with one tool to get a complete assessment of the arm.”

More than 40 interviews with physical therapists, patients and caregivers helped the team identify a demand for a versatile device for upper-arm rehabilitation. The I-Corps program considered the demand substantial enough to award the team $50,000 for additional market research.

Rahman, who grew up in Bangladesh, fell in love with robots at a young age, and there was never a question about what he would study in college.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in Bangladesh, he chose Saga University in Japan for his master’s degree because researchers there were pioneers in exoskeleton robotics.

In Japan, he discovered a more specific interest in building exoskeleton robots to help people reclaim their lives after illness or injury. While earning his doctorate at Université du Québec in Montreal, he began working with patients and observed that health care and disaster relief could benefit from assistive systems with artificial intelligence.

“The fact that we can program autonomous robots is fascinating to me,” he says. “I am also really passionate about design and about adding intelligence to the devices.

There are so many needs they could address.”

THE GLOVE

One of those needs, Rahman says, is more time for therapy. The recovery process for patients is directly related to when and how often they engage in physical therapy. And yet, most patients only get it a few times a week in a medical facility.

“If you haven’t gained back your full range of motion within 12 months, it’s

Rahman

less likely that you will,” Rahman says.

Devices that could be used at home would help solve this problem. Rahman believes that if he can make robots that are affordable, covered by insurance, portable and lightweight, patients will do their physical therapy regimens more often and fewer will give up.

So he and his lab members are building these features into a second device – a glove that helps users significantly improve strength and agility in their fingers.

Tasks such as feeding yourself, taking medication, opening doors and dressing all require finger movement, Assad-Uz-Zaman says.

The prototype is still rough, but the idea is clear: The glove includes a series of wired pulleys to help the fingertips curl and knuckles bend, which assists in grasping movements.

“If the finger is rigid, any force pulling it forward will cause the finger to move only at the bottom joint, near your palm. So that’s why this device is a like a skeleton,” Assad-Uz-Zaman says.

“It can lock the bottom joint so that only the top or middle joints of the finger are activated.”

The pulleys work in both directions, helping to constrict the weakened finger muscle and relax it as it returns to its original position, the way a healthy brain would.

Rahman sees such biomedical robotics as providing people the opportunity to maintain or regain their autonomy.

“It’s important that physically disabled individuals have the chance to take care of themselves,” he says.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

45

BOOKS FROM UWM

The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era: Women’s Life Stories in Contemporary China Xin Huang; SUNY Press, 2018 China’s Mao era lasted from 1949 to 1976, and its reverberations are felt to this day. Huang – an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies – takes a closer look at how the Maoist model for women as socialist laborers still affects Chinese women. Huang traces the lives of four women as they experience, perform or challenge the Maoist and prerevolutionary gender ideals of the past, as well as the new gender expectations of the present.

Savanna Monkeys: The Genus Chlorocebus Trudy R. Turner, Christopher A. Schmitt and Jennifer Danzy Cramer; Cambridge University Press, 2019 Savanna monkeys, also known as vervet monkeys, live in a broad range of environments throughout Southern Africa and the Caribbean. Their wide variety of habitats can lead to significant interactions with humans. Turner, a professor of anthropology, researches vervets primarily to better understand the complex relationship between humans and nonhuman primates. In this comprehensive book, Turner and her colleagues examine how savanna monkeys have genetically, behaviorally, physically and hormonally adapted to different climates and habitats.

46

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: The First Sixty Years, 1956-2016 John H. Schroeder; UWM Foundation Inc., 2018 A former UWM chancellor and retired history professor, Schroeder paints a narrative arc that begins with UWM welcoming its first 6,195 students in 1956. The arc continues through 2016, when the prestigious Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education recognized UWM for “highest research activity.” Schroeder chronicles the many obstacles UWM has faced since its establishment as an urban research university. But the coffee table-style book, which features more than 200 photos, also shows how UWM has risen stronger every time.

Fly Until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War Chia Youyee Vang; Oxford University Press, 2019 During the Vietnam War, Hmong men risked their lives in a CIA-supported fighter pilot program led by the U.S. Air Force.

Vang, a professor of history who came to the United States as a 9-year-old Hmong refugee, gives these men their due by sharing their never-before-told stories. They recount their woefully inadequate training and shoddy aircraft, as well as the dangerous topography and high casualty rates from covert missions. Most of the men who survived the war eventually settled in the U.S.

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour; Cambridge University Press, 2017

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece; Oxford University Press, 2018

Although Afro-Brazilians make up 53 percent of Brazil’s population, they're politically underrepresented, holding less than 10 percent of national congressional seats. MitchellWalthour, associate professor of African and African diaspora studies, uses an intersectional approach to explore how racial experiences and discrimination impact Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. She finds the fates of Afro-Brazilians there are linked, and recognizing this makes them more likely to support raceand class-related policies, such as university affirmative action.

From the 1910s through the early 1930s, theater owners believed that audiences had to be surrounded by glittery opulence to feel their ticket prices were worthwhile.

Over time, palace extravagance was replaced by today’s utilitarian, black-box venues. Szczepaniak-Gillece, an assistant professor of English and film studies, credits this aesthetic evolution to architect Ben Schlanger, who introduced functionalism to theater design. Schlanger’s goal: Focus the viewing experience on the film itself rather than the surrounding garnish.

The Dictator Dilemma: The United States and Paraguay in the Cold War

Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York

Kirk Tyvela; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

K.L.H. Wells; Yale University Press, 2019

Dictator Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. He also ensured the United States had a strong ally in Latin America during the Cold War era. In the United Nations, Paraguay routinely voted in line with U.S. interests, though the countries later clashed over democratic reforms and human rights issues. Tyvela, an associate professor of history at UWM at Washington County, traces all of this throughout his book. He also explores wider foreign policy questions regarding dictators who are friendly toward U.S. global interests.

Shortly after World War II, woven tapestries enjoyed a prominent revival, becoming a medium for modern art in France. Wells, an assistant professor of American art and architecture, follows the movement’s evolution, which included expansion across the Atlantic Ocean to New York in search of a profitable market. Her book includes images of tapestries by famous artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. She also places tapestry into a historical context, showing how it ushered in a postwar period of midcentury abstraction and modernism.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

47

GRADUATE RESEARCH

Knutson

A promising search for

relief without addiction 48

Daniel Knutson watched as his wife of nearly 10 years struggled with depression and migraine headaches until, in 2014, an addiction to prescription medications took her life.

Knutson had worked for nearly two decades in the pharmaceutical industry, and about the same time as his wife’s death, he was planning to return to school. The confluence of timing gave him a new calling – help develop nonaddictive drugs to alleviate what so troubled his wife.

“My graduate work is my passion,” says Knutson, a doctoral candidate in chemistry at UWM’s College of Letters & Science, “my heartfelt attempt to prevent anyone else from having to bury a loved one.”

He’s making significant progress. Knutson and his collaborators have discovered a compound with the potential to treat pain and mental illness while sidestepping the destructive problems that can occur when using current popular medications.

Benzodiazepines are prescribed by doctors to treat anxiety, which is frequently associated with depression. Opioids are prescribed to treat migraine pain. These drugs interact with many receptors in the brain, and this “master key” approach unlocks potentially harmful side effects. For example, in addition to pain relief, opioids produce euphoria, opening the door for the misuse that leads to addiction.

Knutson is developing a compound that will interact with a site on the specific receptor in the brain – the α6 GABA A receptor – that’s associated with depression, head and neck pain, migraine and schizophrenia. “It’s like a shot in the dark, trying to find the exact key to unlock a specific receptor,” Knutson says.

His work proceeds under the guidance of James Cook, a distinguished professor of chemistry and one of UWM’s most prolific inventors, and it uses state-of-the-art mass spectrometers at the Shimadzu Laboratory for Advanced and Applied Analytical Chemistry.

Knutson synthesized the world’s first and only α6-specific molecule at Cook’s lab, and the molecule’s design and uses were patented in 2016. Research has shown encouraging results to treat just the disease, with no side effects that might otherwise arise from the “master key” approach. The work, affiliated with UWM’s Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery, was published in February 2018 in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Knutson also found a way to improve the metabolic stability of the drug compound. This essentially means that instead of having to take a large, horse pill-sized tablet, a patient could treat the illness with a much smaller pill.

The next step involves looking for investment partners who can fund the research to carry it forward into clinical trials.

Rostami and her 2-year-old

Getting computers to know your face Reihaneh Rostami’s 2-year-old daughter recognizes her mother instantly, even when Mom is wearing sunglasses. Rostami’s research aims to teach computers to distinguish individual human faces just as accurately.

It’s a tall order, says the computer science doctoral candidate, because computer programs must account for so many variables. Factors such as emotion, gender and race could all foil the outcome.

Despite the proliferation of facial recognition programs, such as the one Facebook uses to tag your photos, none can replace the ability of human detection. “For some applications, you need 100 percent accuracy,” says Rostami, who’s working under the guidance of Zeyun Yu, associate professor of computer science. “So there is a long way to go.”

To move things forward, her research focuses on blending the most successful aspects of two different computer recognition strategies while building a public database that will help future software solutions get it right.

The first recognition strategy involves extracting each facial feature, or landmark, and writing descriptive code for it. Once that’s done, programmers provide that knowledge to the recognition system. The entire process is time-consuming and difficult.

In the second strategy, the computer teaches itself exact facial features by using a machine-learning algorithm, a process of matching a face to an existing pool of images of that same face. As this is happening, Rostami provides samples of correct information and tags poor performance so the computer corrects itself over and over.

In that approach, however, the program is only as good as the database of existing images. Even something as simple as a smile can trip up a computer that’s been trained on faces with neutral expressions.

Another obstacle involves creating large databases of 3D images, which programs use to create a “morphable model” that can account for weight change or aging. “To train the system, it has to be exposed to diverse 3D data,” Rostami says. “And enough databases just don’t exist yet.”

Because Rostami’s current work happens to focus on recognizing the faces of Chinese men, she’s creating a database of 3D faces appropriate to that race and gender. She hopes it will someday serve as a valuable resource for other researchers, in the same vein that databases involving other race and gender variables will advance broader recognition efforts.

Rostami says the blended strategy is delivering promising results, while reiterating that fully accurate recognition is far down the road.

Still, she finds herself cheering at the algorithm’s successes, much in the way she would at her toddler’s.

“You get so happy about it,” Rostami says, “because it feels like you’re training a human.”

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

49

GRADUATE RESEARCH

The growing pervasiveness of demagogic rhetoric Before arriving at UWM, Marnie Lawler McDonough enjoyed a career as a corporate communications and marketing executive in New York. That led to her research interest as a communication doctoral candidate – the rhetoric of organizational leadership, especially speech that’s manipulative, deceptive or violates norms.

While taking a seminar on the rhetoric of debates in 2016, she noticed that the word “demagogue” was experiencing a resurgence in popular media. Although she typically stays away from politics, her interest was piqued, and she began looking at the rhetoric of demagoguery.

“It hadn’t been written about in the scholarship for a while,” says Lawler McDonough, whose doctoral advisor is Kathryn Olson, a professor of communication.

Lawler McDonough examined transcripts of the three presidential debates held that year and determined that rhetoric fitting the historical definition of demagogues was used consistently, but with contemporary nuances.

It works like this. Leaders posture as common people. They choose words to trigger waves of powerful emotion, manipulating this emotion for personal benefit and threatening or breaking established principles of governance. Modern platforms like social media then help deliver this to a wider audience.

Lawler McDonough says the demagogic approach isn’t limited to politics and is being used in other areas of society. “It has applications in the rhetoric of anyone in power,” she says. “For example, how leaders communicate with their employees or how famous people have responded to accusations of sexual harassment.”

Broad swaths of the American public have accepted this deviation from typical leadership rhetoric. She believes it’s important to understand why, and says that those studying political rhetoric and demagoguery should chart new courses in examining such developments. That includes exploring the role social media plays in amplifying norm-busting speech.

“Rhetorical scholars should work to gain a better recognition and understanding of demagogic rhetoric,” Lawler McDonough says, “especially because it’s becoming even more pervasive as its usage evolves in the 21st century.”

Lawler McDonough

Shining a new light on MS treatment It sounds a bit like a medical treatment straight out of “Star Trek.”

A beam of light runs over a patient’s skin, and that simple process produces relief from a disease.

But Miguel Tolentino doesn’t work on a starship or space station. He’s a health sciences doctoral candidate, with a focus on biomedical sciences, and his research is not science fiction.

Working with Jeri-Anne Lyons, associate dean and professor in the College of Health

50

Sciences, Tolentino is investigating how sustained exposure to visible and infrared light lessens the ravages of multiple sclerosis, or MS. He’s playing an important role in the first such experiments involving human MS patients.

Infrared light can penetrate skin and affect structures lying underneath, and Lyons first thought of applying it to MS after talking to colleague Janis Eells, who had studied its retina-healing powers. Other researchers are exploring infrared treatments to help with diseases such as Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy.

To understand why Lyons thought it a promising approach for MS, it helps to know how MS operates. A person’s immune system – in the form of T-cells, with help from other immune cells – attacks and damages myelin,

the insulating material that covers nerve fibers. This leads to a long list of neurological problems, including loss of vision, pain, countless muscular dysfunctions, problems with mood, feelings of pins and needles, loss of mobility – the list goes on.

MS treatments aim to lessen the damage done by T-cells, which are attracted to specific central nervous system areas by proteins called cytokines. Reducing cytokines should alleviate MS, and properly calibrated infrared light appears do to this, at least in a laboratory setting.

Lyons’ earlier research showed infrared light could protect nerve cells. She says part of infrared’s usefulness lies in how it alters mitochondria, the little power plants in cells. In MS, they can help to turn the tide of oxidative stress and inflammation that plagues sufferers.

A personal path to preserving Oneida culture The Oneida language is struggling to survive. Only a few dozen people grew up with it and still speak it fluently in Wisconsin, New York and Canada. UNESCO classifies the language as critically endangered.

How it got to this point involves a complex entanglement of education policies and cultural loss dating back more than a century.

But preservation efforts continue, and UWM School of Education master’s student Antonio Doxtator is deeply invested in helping.

A member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin himself, Doxtator is studying how educators have revitalized efforts to pass their Oneida cultural heritage to younger generations, with an eye toward improving such efforts and ultimately saving the language.

Doxtator interviewed three generations of Oneida language students to see how teaching has changed over the years.

“In the 1970s, students were learning from elders who were fluent,” Doxtator says. “By the 1990s and 2000s, some of those people had passed away, and students weren’t learning as well because their teachers weren’t as fluent.”

Doxtator took a complicated path to finding his research calling at UWM. It included dropping out of high school when he was in 10th grade.

“I didn’t see a lot of Native Americans in

Now, Tolentino is seeing firsthand how infrared treatments are affecting people with MS. For his project, patients are using the PainAway Post-Op laser made by Multi Radiance Medical, a small hand-held device that combines different wavelengths of light.

Tolentino receives blood taken from MS patients before and after the patients have applied light to themselves. He separates T-cells from the blood for evaluation, then he hits the cells directly with light to see how they’re affected, including what proteins they produce.

While Tolentino is investigating the immune system effects, a third member of the research project – Alexander Ng, an associate professor of exercise science at Marquette University – will follow the light’s effect on muscle function and fatigue.

education,” he says, “so it didn’t seem like the path for me.”

He eventually earned his high school equivalency certificate, then an associate degree in human services from MATC. After working as a gang task force coordinator on the Oneida Reservation west of Green Bay, he completed his undergraduate degree at UWM in community engagement and education.

In 2011, while still working on his undergrad degree, Doxtator co-wrote a book with doctoral student Renee Zakhar, Doxtator “American Indians in Milwaukee.” “I wanted to put that history out there for community members to see,” Doxtator says, “so they could develop a sense of identity and self-worth.”

Now, advised by Associate Professor Marie Sandy, he’s pursuing a master’s degree in cultural foundations of community engagement and education. In doing so, Doxtator is also exploring the legacy of Native American boarding schools.

The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs began

operating off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s with the goal of assimilating Native American children into white, Englishspeaking society. Children were taken from families, given English names and forbidden to speak tribal languages.

In the 20th century, tribes gained sovereignty over their education, and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 established protections for children in danger of being removed from their cultures. A positive step, but so much damage had already been done. “My great-grandfather spoke the Oneida language,” Doxtator says, “but he lost it in boarding school. Because of that, my grandmother didn’t know much about her culture growing up.”

Through his work, Doxtator aims to keep changing education from something that took away Native American culture to something that rejuvenates and preserves it.

“I’m trying to show that there’s a process of putting together all these things we’ve lost,” he says. “We can use our heritage to help us be successful in our schooling, communities and careers. When you have a greater sense of identity, you can succeed.”

Tolentino

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

51

GRADUATE RESEARCH

Studying Great Lakes half a world apart Maxon Ngochera wanted to research Lake Malawi, part of the African Great Lakes system, while working toward his doctorate.

To do so, he enrolled in a graduate school 8,500 miles away.

At UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, located on the shore of Lake Michigan, Ngochera could compare Great Lakes half a world apart. He completed his doctorate in 2018, and it’s served him well in his home country as chief research officer in Malawi’s Department of Fisheries.

“Managing a freshwater Great Lake, whether it happens to be in Africa or the United States, means protecting the public’s drinking water, food source and ecological cornerstone,” Ngochera says. “In Malawi, fisheries are huge, and I wanted to contribute something.”

At UWM, Ngochera found the perfect mentor in Harvey Bootsma.

The associate professor is researching the effects of climate change and other stressors on large freshwater lakes, particularly Lake Michigan. Bootsma also makes frequent trips to study the African Great Lakes.

Lake Malawi is far deeper than Lake Michigan, and in parts of the African lake, the water column never completely mixes. This is because significant temperature differences between the warm top and cool bottom waters isolate those layers.

Without mixing, there is no oxygen in the bottom layer, but there is lots of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is produced by plankton that sink

and decay. Fish can only live in the upper and middle layers of the lake.

Ngochera wanted to know how the cycling of the lake’s CO2 is affected by climate change and how it might impact Lake Malawi’s food web.

To track conditions in Lake Malawi, he borrowed an idea Bootsma has used to gather Lake Michigan data. Ngochera enlisted a ferry that crisscrossed the lake to collect information on water conditions, including CO2 levels and temperatures, at regular intervals over a one-year period.

He discovered Lake Malawi is a “carbon sink” – meaning it takes in more CO2 from the atmosphere than it gives off – and it’s better at doing this than Lake Michigan. This is good news for Lake Malawi’s fisheries.

“If the lake is a sink, there will be more food,” Ngochera says. “Maybe not the entire lake. Some areas are more productive than others.”

He says more research is needed to determine how the increasing temperatures of its surface water will affect Lake Malawi’s stratification issues. But in the meantime, the data is informing policymakers.

“Now we can tell investors where to put resources,” Ngochera says.

Ngochera on Lake Malawi

52

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

Award-winning

Undergraduate Research UWM is one of only two national recipients of the 2018 Campus-Wide Award for Undergraduate Research Accomplishments. Given by the Council for Undergraduate Research, the award recognizes the quality and depth of research opportunities provided to undergraduate students. More than 1,000 UWM undergrads are involved in research projects each year, and many receive funding through grants and awards. Here are some examples of their work.

JENNIFER Wendlick, Senior Jennifer Wendlick, who is studying biological sciences, researches the process of cell development in the brains of embryonic zebrafish. She works in the lab of Jennifer Gutzman, a professor of biological sciences. Altering zebrafish DNA makeup during early growth stages lets Wendlick relate her findings to how human birth defects develop, particularly those in the brain and spinal cord.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

53

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

HUGO Ljungbäck, Senior Hugo Ljungbäck is preserving and reviving the film studies program’s extensive 16 mm collection. His work under the guidance of Tami Williams, associate professor of film studies and English, involves manually inspecting and assessing the projection quality of more than 250 films and doing the necessary splicing or repairs. Two of the collection’s films, by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, were showcased at the inaugural Save the Archives Film Festival.

His work also contributed to the October 2018 dedication of the UWM Patricia Mellencamp Founding Collection.

NANCY Duque, Senior

KARI Berna, Sophomore

A geosciences major, Nancy Duque is analyzing how fluids affect rocks being squeezed deep within the Earth at clashing tectonic plates. The rocks are samples that Dyanna Czeck, associate professor of geosciences, brought back from a research trip to southern Spain.

As a high school student, Kari Berna interned at UWM’s foundry to learn about metal casting processes. Now studying materials science and engineering, she’s working with research associate Benjamin Schultz to invent a new material that could be used to make 3D-print molds for bone scaffolds, which help patients regrow damaged bones. The material would allow doctors to easily customize scaffolds to suit individual patients’ needs.

54

NOAH Wolfe, Junior

AZIA Barner, Junior

Noah Wolfe is involved with the School of Education’s Cognitive Research Group. Working alongside Chris Lawson, a developmental psychologist and educational psychology associate professor, Wolfe administers a fun flash cardbased test to kids ages 3 to 8. The tests are designed to be brief, pleasant and insightful, providing a window into how children learn information in one context and then apply that knowledge to new questions in a different context.

For some, rocket ships and gamma rays are the stuff of science fiction. For Azia Barner, who is studying physics, they’re fodder for a research project. She worked with other students to build a payload for a NASA rocket that carried DNA molecules, called plasmids, into orbit. Back on Earth, she’s working in Professor Carol Hirschmugl’s lab to study how cosmic radiation affects plasmids – knowledge that could help astronauts bound for Mars.

MIRI Yoon, Senior Miri Yoon, a nursing major, is examining the influence of e-cigarette marketing on young adults. Yoon participated in the administration of paper-and-pencil surveys in UWM classrooms. She also helped aggregate the data using a statistical program for the research of Seok Hyun (Joshua) Gwon, an assistant professor of nursing.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

55

INSIDE THE NEW LUBAR ENTREPRENEURSHIP CENTER OPENING IN SPRING OF 2019

Since its formation in 2015, the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center has built on UWM’s existing strengths and programming by providing entrepreneurial resources for UWM’s community and the greater Milwaukee region.

That collaboration will be enhanced by its new two-story campus facility at the corner of Kenwood Boulevard and Maryland Avenue. The 24,000-square-foot center, scheduled to open in the spring of 2019, will feature Thompson classrooms for courses and workshops, gathering spots for speakers, and labs for prototyping products and software.

Center programming will make entrepreneurship an integral part of the UWM experience for all students and faculty members, and it will enhance Milwaukee’s growing entrepreneurial network. The new facility was made possible by an initial $10 million donation from Lubar & Co. founder Sheldon Lubar and his wife, Marianne. The UW System contributed $10 million to cover construction costs. More than $5 million in additional support has come from other donors, including the Kelben Foundation, established

by Mary and Ted Kellner; Milwaukee entrepreneur Jerry Jendusa; Avi Shaked; Babs Waldman; and We Energies. Brian Thompson, director of the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center and president of the UWM Research Foundation, shares more about the center and its new facility in this Q&A.

56

What is the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, and how does it help students?

The center fosters entrepreneurship at UWM and in the community by teaching students how to develop their creative ideas and entrepreneurial skills. They learn to identify opportunities – either commercial or in the nonprofit sector. They test, refine and retest their ideas. They learn to talk to potential customers and adapt to customer needs. These skills will help make them more successful – whether they are studying engineering, art or nursing – and more valuable to the companies where they’ll work.

Sheldon, Marianne and David Lubar tour the center during its construction.

So no need to start a business to benefit from the center’s programs?

Do you only work with UWM students and faculty?

No. I mean, it’s great if you do, but anyone in any field can benefit from this type of training. We’re really teaching people how to think.

No. The Lubar Entrepreneurship Center is growing an entrepreneurial network. Of course, we’re focused on UWM students and faculty, but entrepreneurs help each other, and we believe in that ethos. Everyone benefits from the exchange of ideas.

And UWM is the host for the National Science Foundation’s Milwaukee I-Corps program, which trains research teams from many universities to commercialize their discoveries. Again, we’re building that entrepreneurial network to benefit our region.

How will opening a new facility this year enhance what you do?

We’ve been holding workshops and programs in buildings all over campus – and in the community – for years. That won’t stop. But the new building will provide a focal point for entrepreneurship at UWM and enhance what we’re doing.

How did the center get started?

UWM has been developing innovation and entrepreneurship programs for many years – including strong courses in the Lubar School of Business.

We had the UWM Student Startup Challenge, where students learn by doing – in this case, by trying to turn an idea into a product or service. But the Lubar family – Sheldon, Marianne

and their son, David – really catalyzed our efforts to grow entrepreneurship at UWM. They have a long history of growing businesses and deep connections in Milwaukee. They’ve been instrumental in shaping the direction for this initiative, and they’ve been joined by other supporters who believe in what we’re doing.

Why is there such an emphasis on entrepreneurship at UWM? It’s important for our students. They’re going to work in a rapidly changing world. They need to understand their chosen disciplines, but they also need these other skills to be successful – not just now, but in the decades to come. They need to know how to adapt and change. It’s also important to our state and region. Areas with thriving innovation economies have strong, engaged research universities at their center. In southeastern Wisconsin, that’s UWM.

How do you want to see the center’s mission grow in the next five years?

Our fall programming had thousands of student contacts, but I’d like to see the day when entrepreneurship is part of every UWM student’s experience. With 27,000, that’s no small challenge, but we are aiming high.

The Lubar Entrepreneurship Center will help students hone their entrepreneurial skills in many ways, from hosting courses and workshops to offering prototyping labs and supporting events like the Student Startup Challenge.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

57

uwm.edu/uwmresearch