Spring 2019 - Archived Newsletter

Faculty Receiving External Awards
October 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019

Faculty Receiving Mini-Grants (Fall 2019 to Spring 2020) and Summer Stipends (Summer 2019)
 

Faculty Receiving ORSP Multidisciplinary Internal Research Grants
July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020

The 2019 National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Award recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

CSULB Student Awardees:
Rhea-Comfort Akuah Addo
Life Sciences - Developmental Biology

Jordan Ngo
Life Sciences - Biochemistry

Patricia S. Pittman
Social Sciences - Human Development and Family Science

 

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Our students successfully competed at the 33rd Annual California State University Student Research Competition on April 26, 2019, held at CSU Fullerton. Of the 13 students competing from our campus, four of them ranked in the top two in their research categories. The system-wide competition showcases the innovative research and creative activities of CSU undergraduate and graduate students in the full range of academic programs offered by the CSU. Student participants make oral presentatons before juries of professional experts from major coporations, foundations, public agencies, college and universites of California. In order to compete at the state level, these students first had to compete at the institutional level to win a spot on the state team. Congratulations to our state competition representatives!

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Pictured are some of the student participants with staff at CSU Fullerton.
Jody Cormack (Vice Provost, Academic Programs), Subramaniam Seshadri, Keelin Dunn, Alexandra Mazza, 
Victoria Cimo, Phillippe Ly, and Bryan Rodriguez (Director, Graduate Studies Resource Center)

Competition Participants from CSULB

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By Professor Paul Weers
Biochemistry Graduate Advisor
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
College of Natural Science and Mathematics

What do Insects and Heart Disease have in Common?

The answer is plenty!

Lipoproteins are the vehicles in our blood that transport lipids, such as fat and cholesterol. They are formed in the intestine after a fatty meal, or synthesized by the liver and released into the blood stream. To make lipids soluble in blood, they are mixed with apolipoproteins, which act as detergents, forming lipoproteins.

Most people are familiar with the good cholesterol carrier called high density lipoproteins (HDL), and the “bad guys” known as low density lipoproteins (LDL). While cholesterol is essential for the viability of cells, high levels in the blood is an established risk factor for cardiovascular disease. High cholesterol leads to formation of plaques in our artery walls, restrict blood flow and supply of sufficient oxygen to the heart, eventually resulting in a heart attack.

And this is where we introduce the role of insects in research about heart disease.

Lipid (fat, cholesterol) transport in humans is a very complex process, with an alphabet soup of apolipoprotein factors (A, B, C, etc.) that work together to distribute lipids between various tissues and organs.

Insect lipid transport is, on the other hand, far less complicated.

Further, in insects that are long distance flyers, a small apolipoprotein (apoLp-III) helps in providing adequate energy supplies needed for prolonged flight. Specifically locusts and sphinx moths rely heavily on fat reserves stored in the fat body, which is the equivalent of liver and adipose tissue in humans.

With the help of apoLp-III, plenty of insect fat is mobilized to fuel the flight muscles of these long distance flyers, making them capable of flying hundreds of miles. 

 

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Biochemistry graduate student Nauruti Patel (with Dr. Weers) is producing a new batch of apoLp-III using our bacterial expression system

Human and insect apolipoproteins look remarkably similar; they contain the same structural elements. Therefore, we use insect lipoproteins as a model system to better understand lipid transport in higher organisms.

The National Institutes of Health has funded my research program since I joined CSULB 15 years ago. We have developed a bacterial expression system to obtain large quantities of apoLp-III (no insects required!).

My students and I have a lot of fun tinkering with the protein structure by making changes at specific sites by protein engineering to understand its behavior at the molecular level.

Further, the protein recognizes the bacterial membrane and I am very interested in its role as an antimicrobial agent. Our recent adventure involves making designer chimera proteins with one part insect apoLp-III and the other part human apolipoprotein to obtain a better understanding of their function.

One of the most fulfilling aspects of my research is the training of our undergraduate and MS graduate students. They are exposed to a wide array of protein biochemistry techniques, develop critical thinking skills, and learn to communicate their research to the scientific community.

Thanks to a small insect protein, we can advance our knowledge of lipoproteins in heart disease and train our future professionals. So next time you see a locust in your yard, remember its contribution to understand heart disease.

Footnote:
Lipoproteins have me fascinated since my time as a PhD student at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, where I was trained in the biochemical physiology of insects. I then obtained a post-doctoral fellowship from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where I specialized in the biochemistry of lipoproteins. This was a great learning environment, where many experts in the field of lipids and lipoproteins work together to understand their role in health and disease.

Images courtesy of Paul Weers

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By Assistant Professor Jeff Bentley
Management/Human Resource Management
College of Business

The Convergence of Identities in the Workplace

Creative workers stand out from the crowd, but can they be tamed?

Creativity is quickly becoming one of the most important sources of competitive advantage in the world of work. Creative workers, however, are notorious for valuing their independence. Feeling smothered by rules and regulations, they often keep their distance. Yet what use is a creative worker if they don’t care enough about your company to stick around?

In this research, we explore creative workers’ sense of self at work. Does being creative simply reinforce one’s own creative identity? Or does the chance to create at work bond creative workers more strongly to their organization? We tested this premise over three studies. This research will be presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the European Academy of Management.

Sample 1: Using a sample of 130 workers drawn from four industries (an industrial bakery, a competitive sailing team, a department of engineers, a corporate Human Resources department), we found that creative workers identified more with their organization if they believed their work environment was ‘psychologically safe’. Psychologically safe environments are those in which risk taking and novel thinking are not mocked or rejected by colleagues.

Sample 2: In this next study, we measured not only creative identity and group identification, but identity integration as well. Among a sample of 384 students in teams over the course of a semester, students with stronger creative identities were more likely to identify with their team than those with weaker creative identities. They did so because they felt a merging of their creative and team identities. Statements like, “I can express my creative self through my role as a member of my Project Team” resonated strongly with such students. This only happened in psychologically safe teams.

Sample 3: Finally, using a sample 114 business students in teams over a semester, we found that identity merging only boosted team identification if the student believed that other member did indeed see them as creative in the team.

RESEARCH RESULTS CHART (figure 1)

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A colleague and I are collecting two more samples this semester from both students and working professionals. This work is part of a larger program of research I am developing that explores the interconnectedness of various work identities (e.g., self as an employee, self as a professional, self as a work friend, etc.). This is one piece of a larger research team exploring what I’m calling the “work-self-expansion” process. I recently presented a poster at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

EXPANDING IDENTITIES AT WORK CHART (figure 2)

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Images courtesy of Jeff Bentley

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By Dr. Hamid Rahai
Associate Dean, Research & Graduate Studies
College of Engineering

Promising Research with the Potential to Improve People's Lives

The Center for Energy and Environmental Research and Services (CEERS) is conducting a wide array of promising research projects that have the potential to greatly improve not only people’s health and wellbeing but also the environment in general.

Two very exciting and challenging projects are researching 1) how to capture transient air from passing vehicles on freeways to generate electricity and 2) how to reduce emissions of natural gas engines to near zero emission.

 

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CNG engine with the Humid Air System

 

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Testing remote emission measurements from a moving vehicle

For the former project, there have been many efforts in the past, but the challenge is to develop an innovative and efficient design that is worth commercialization and investment. We are doing both simulation and experiments with the hope of having an innovative design in the near future.

 

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CT image of a patient's head
(courtesy of Taherian, Rahai, Shin, and Lopez, 2018)

For the latter project, we are developing an adaptive humid air system to reduce Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) emissions of natural gas engines. NOx is the main pollutant of gas engines and has been shown to be the source of major pulmonary diseases, especially in high risk population, young children and older adults. Our laboratory experiments have shown that we could reduce NOx by up to 60% with simply adding humidity to the air intake of the engine, using distilled water. We are working on a system to capture the heat of the engine (wasted heat) to generate the steam, and thus a humid air system for NOx reduction.

We conduct many other diverse projects and innovations. CEER has been a platform for many Engineering faculty and students to collaborate for advanced research and creativity. That research has focused on:

• improving the efficiency and performance of the existing horizontal axis wind turbines and commercial aircrafts with specific conformal vortex generator tapes
• developing a new generation of fuel injectors for liquid rocket engines with pulsatile injection which could also be used to improve design of inhalers for drug delivery
• reducing drag of trucks with both active and passive means
• continuing development of non-intrusive diagnostic systems for pulmonary diseases with current focus on identifying fundamental parameters for diagnosing sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension

Images courtesy of Hamid Rahai

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By Professor Nancy Hall
Undergraduate Advisor
Department of Linguistics
College of Liberal Arts

Speaking of Surprises...

How do you pronounce the word ‘surprise’? Do you say both of the r’s? Or, like many speakers, do you omit the first r and pronounce it ‘suprise’?

Many people associate r-dropping with the Boston, Southern or British dialects, where r’s drop systematically. But speakers from other dialects also tend to drop r’s in one special case: when there are multiple r’s in the same word.

Some words where this typically happens include ‘be(r)serk’, ‘temp(er)ature’, ‘barbitu(r)ate’, and ‘tu(r)meric’. Linguists call this phenomenon ‘dissimilation’: avoidance of identical sounds within the same word.

The causes of dissimilation are somewhat mysterious. Linguists debate whether repeated sounds are difficult to say, difficult to mentally serialize, and/or difficult to perceive. And why are repeated r’s, in particular, a problem? Why don’t people drop repeated t’s?

In the CSULB Phonetics Lab, we are running a series of experiments testing the idea that dissimilation results from perceptual errors. Undergraduates Bianca Godinez and Megan Walsh, both research trainees in the BUILD research training program, have been instrumental in carrying out this research.

We created pairs of fake English-sounding words, such as ‘marnicular’ and ‘marniculum’. Our goal was to test whether the r in ‘mar’ would be better perceived before the continuation –niculum (where there is no second r) versus –nicular (where there is a second r). To be sure that the syllable ‘mar’ was pronounced exactly the same in both words, we spliced it from a third recording. We played these words to listeners in sentences such as “pass me the marnicular”, and asked them to type the unfamiliar word.

We found that listeners who heard ‘marnicular’ sometimes wrote it without the first r, for example as ‘monicular’. Listeners who heard ‘marniculum’ never omitted the first r. This supports the idea that there is something difficult about perceiving repeated r’s. We are currently planning and running other experiments to clarify what the difficulty is, and how it relates to the specific acoustic qualities of r.

We hope that this research will contribute to a broader understanding of how and why sound change occurs, which is one of the fundamental questions of historical linguistics.

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Students are using spectrograms (as shown above) to study how the frequency content of sound changes over time

Images courtesy of Nancy Hall

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By Professor Colleen Dunagan
Department of Dance
College of the Arts

Catapulting Brands into the Forefront of Our National Imagination through Dance

Our fascination with motion, music, and design makes itself apparent in photography and film’s immediate and ongoing engagement with dance. Since the 1890s and the first experimental forays into capturing human movement, dance has played a role in American media culture. Similarly, throughout the 20^th Century, advertising has drawn on dance as a source of imagery, authenticity, and style. Irene Castle, well-known exhibition ballroom dancer and fashion icon, graced the pages of Ladies Home Journal, while Broadway ballerina Harriet Hoctor lent her fame to the likes of Lucky Strikes Cigarettes and Wonder Bread.

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As early as 1948 and the first ventures into television, commercials featured dance: one of the earliest examples is Lucky Strikes’ “Barn Dance”, which used stop motion animation to feature cigarettes square dancing. While dance has not been consistently prominent within advertising over the decades, it has remained a steady presence and, at times, has been responsible for catapulting brands to the forefront of the national imagination. For example, Dr. Pepper’s “Be a Pepper” campaign in the 1970s featured David Naughton connecting people across the U.S. through dance and soda, and The Gap’s dance-based khakis series in the 1990s helped promote the revival of swing dancing as well as go-go, soul, and country line dancing.

Advertising’s fascination with dance reflects the art form’s ability to capture and convey human agency, affect, and identity. In my research, I examine how advertising uses dance to promote product and brand. However, I also reveal how ads promote an understanding of personal and social identity as performance and as fundamentally tied to the act of consumption. The power of dance and its presence in advertising form the basis for my recently published book, Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising (Oxford University Press, 2018).

My interest in dance in media extends beyond advertising to engage with the role of choreography in movies, music videos, and avant-garde filmic forms. In researching the history of film’s engagement with the dancing body, I hope to highlight how theatrical and social dance participate in constructing social identities and tap into the breadth of human feeling as a phenomenon of the body-mind.

Images courtesy of Colleen Dunagan

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By Assistant Professor Mimi Kim
School of Social Work
College of Health and Human Services

Radical Changes Needed in Our Response to Domestic Violence

Ask survivors of domestic violence – would you rather escape to shelter -- or stay at home free from violence?

Would you rather call the police -- or call upon friends and family to support care and safety? Many would choose the latter but are faced with options that point to shelter, law enforcement and separation as the safest and most viable options. In recent years, the anti-violence movement has begun to question the narrow remedies that it offers – and has asked itself what more community-based, collective and holistic responses might look like? Given the current attack on immigrants, this question has taken on greater urgency.

The terms community accountability, transformative justice and restorative justice are now concepts that have reached the public. However, the anti-violence movement has historically rejected these types of solutions – opting for more crisis-oriented, individualized direct service and criminal legal remedies.

My research has built upon my many years as an anti-violence advocate to join in what has been called a social movement “pivot” – a radical turn from direct service/pro-criminalization approaches to gender-based or interpersonal violence – towards new community-based approaches.

In some ways this is a turn back to community legacies of resilience – unearthing the strengths of everyday, culturally grounded responses to violence – and bringing them into 2019.

My dissertation research looked historically to better understand how the U.S. anti-violence movement moved from its grassroots, social justice origins to growing investments in crime control (see Social Problems, forthcoming). These findings caution against mistakes of the past to guide new strategies for the future.

In an overall research initiative called “Social Network Responses to Domestic Violence,” I spearheaded a California-wide training series on alternative community-based approaches, based upon a pilot project I led from 2004-2010 through an organization, Creative Interventions.

These efforts have developed into another pilot project established in Contra Costa County, California. Launched in 2018, the countywide project, Community Restorative Justice Solutions, is adapting restorative justice circles and family group conferencing practices and applying it to situations of domestic violence. This remains one of the rare programs in the nation that is undertaking this call for change in the field of domestic violence. As an engaged scholar, the opportunity to bring applied research to innovations in the field is an exciting meeting of academia, the community and the public good.

The historical research will be featured in a forthcoming article in Social Problems entitled “The carceral creep: Gender-based violence, race and the expansion of the punitive state, 1973-1983.”

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Community Restorative Justice Solutions Team in Contra Costa County, California

Images courtesy of Mimi Kim

Health Care Administration
College of Health and Human Services

Teaching Students to Think Globally about Healthcare

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Professor Henry O’Lawrence considers himself an agent of change. He is dedicated to eradicating poverty globally by promoting the ideas of increasing community awareness, preventing unnecessary war, especially in third world countries, and educating people about accessing quality healthcare. Dr. O’Lawrence’s research focuses on the issues we face here in the United States and around the world regarding the health system, policy, health insurance, and the economics of financing healthcare as a whole.

A major underlying theme is that factors such as war, poverty, and access to quality healthcare are dependent on prevention strategies against these problems - a self-understanding of issues surrounding these factors and the knowledge we have on preventing poverty and living a healthy life.

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He says students today studying health care need to discuss issues surrounding global health policy, as well as understand the major steps taken in the fight against global poverty. Thus, he has published a new book to help students do just that. 

Entitled, The Effect of Poverty and War on Global Health: Systems, Policies, and Economics, his book stresses issues and trends and possible implications for the future of global health care. The material in the book is central to improving students’ skills and students’ ability to engage in discussion about global health issues including health care systems, policies, and economics.

The key feature of the book is the richness and different subject topics that have become major global health issues, which challenges students to think critically and outside the box with reflective and timely application of the information presented.

Therefore, healthcare students especially must be able to study, research, and understand standard practices of global health issues, policy, systems, and economics. He says this book will help students clarify their perceptions, increase their awareness on issues around global health, and perfect their skills in global health care subjects.

Images courtesy of Henry O'Lawrence

Department of Physical Therapy
College of Health and Human Services

Effective Methods for Reducing the Risk of Falls in Vulnerable Populations

Falls are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in older adults, with a third of those 65 and over and half of those 85 falling each year.

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Dr. Vennila Krishnan is investigating the mechanisms responsible for falling, and is evaluating the effectiveness of specific interventions in reducing the risks of falling in older adults and in neurologically impaired population. Dr. Krishnan is personally passionate about working with community-dwelling older adults to reduce their fall risks, with a goal to improve their quality of life. 

Currently, she is part of an interdisciplinary team that include Dr. Young-Hee Cho (Psychology), Dr. Olfat Mohamed (Physical Therapy), and Dr. Barbara White (Gerontology, Director of Osher LifeLong Learning Institute – OLLI). With funding from SCAN Health, the team has been conducting a multi-component intervention program in CSULB’s LifeFit Center and at Leisure World in Seal Beach for the past 5 years.

Presently, the team has been investigating the effectiveness of a dual-task (i.e., cognitive and physical) intervention in older adults at the American Gold Star Manor in Long Beach. The goal is to reduce fall risks by not only improving balance and physical strength, but also the cognitive ability. This effort was funded by CHHS as a grant, “Systematic Innovations in Serving the Need of Older Adults.”

As part of this effort, students have been actively involved in the research. Certified balance instructor and Kinesiology student Julia Callow has been conducting dual-task balance classes for a total of twenty-six older adults at the manor. Fifteen students from Physical Therapy, Kinesiology, Psychology, and Bioengineering are actively involved in assisting the class, as well as with the data collection and analysis.

 

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Training helps older adults reduce the risk of falling

 

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Students help older adults during training

Psychology graduate student Zachary Tuttle describes the research as a rewarding learning experience. He has assisted with collecting gait data and cognitive data before and after each intervention. He says he enjoyed the complexity of working with a community of older adults, and he understands the importance of collaboration between the university and the community that result in helping older adults. Zachary says that the best part of the experience is being able to witness the remarkable progress that the older adults have been making in such a short time, and, even more so, the confidence that they have developed in performing the tasks that they initially thought would be difficult to perform.  

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Fall Prevention @ the Beach Team

Footnote:
Professor Krishnan has been investigating the biomechanical factors responsible for falling in older adults and in neurologically impaired population since in 2009 as a post-doctoral researcher at UIC, Chicago. She joined CSULB in 2013.

Images courtesy of Vennila Krishnan