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Author: Cydney Livingston Page 1 of 4

Modeling Biology: Ruby Kim’s Research on the Math of Physiological Cycles

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On May 25, 2022

In Biology, Mathematics, Students

What lies at the intersection of mathematics and biology? Freshly-minted math PhD Ruby Kim and her work on mathematically modeling human dopamine cycles.

Ruby Kim, recent Duke PhD graduate

Kim’s work has centered around her creation of a math model to predict how a person’s dopamine levels ebb and flow over the course of a day “to understand the general mechanics of how disruptions in the (biological) clock lead to disruptions in dopamine.”

She said there is a pretty long history of mathematicians using differential equations to see how different clock genes and proteins change over the course of a day’s circadian cycle. Yet, no previous models have connected the circadian clock – controlled by the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus – to dopamine levels. And Kim tells me that work suggesting dopamine changes throughout the day are likely controlled by the internal circadian clock itself is “relatively new.”

The first step in Kim’s work was validating scientists’– or “experimentalists,” as Kim dubs them –  hypotheses about dopamine and dopaminergic enzyme cycling.

Many physiological processes are controlled via circadian rhythms and the internal clock in humans, as well as other organisms.

“But I’d like this work to help experimentalists go one step further and be able to test out hypotheses more easily.” For example, Kim says that her model has the potential to reveal other fascinating phenomena, such as how drug treatments or different genetic mutations may impact circadian rhythm or dopamine. This is thanks to the multifaceted layers of Kim’s model.

“From a mathematical perspective, the math model is very interesting. It has a lot of interesting dynamics,” she says. “Not only does it show nice, 24-hour rhythms, it shows both steady state behavior… but then also behavior that’s really wild – something called quasi-periodic behavior, where the internal clock is significantly different than the external 24-hour light-dark cycle.”

“This leads to oscillatory behavior that’s not periodic,” she says. These sorts of quasi-periodic behaviors have been observed in experiments and misunderstood, but they can be computed.

Kim emphasized the experimental and clinical implications of her work. Dopamine is involved in learning and motivation and is also linked a plethora of psychiatric conditions like Parkinson’s, ADHD, and schizophrenia. “Patients with these conditions often also experience circadian disruptions,” Kim says. “That’s a pretty big symptom.”

Kim began her academic career in her home state of California at Pomona College as a pre-med math major. “I had always been intrigued by human physiology. And math was one of the subjects I was also pretty drawn to. I just didn’t appreciate it much because throughout high school and the beginning of undergrad, I didn’t see any direct applications,” Kim told me.

The marriage of her love for math with her intrigue in biology actually began at Duke when Kim attended a mathematical biology workshop during the summer after her sophomore year. “I had never heard of math biology before that.”

After working on a brief project to model sleep apnea in infants at the workshop, Kim returned to California and took up math modeling courses in her following semesters of undergrad. One of her professors, Ami E. Radunskaya, PhD, was extremely supportive and introduced Kim to a lot of “cool biological problems.” Kim went on to do research with Radunskaya, modeling tumor-immune interactions. This experience, Kim says, “kind of just threw me into academia.” The project gave way to an undergraduate thesis with Radunskaya that analyzed the long-term behavior of this tumor growth and treatment model.

Radunskaya then suggested that Kim pursue grad school. “I kind of applied on a whim,” Kim said, “It wasn’t something I had specifically imagined for myself.” Kim mentioned how no one from her home community had really ever gone to grad school and so it was not something she had ever “explicitly” thought about before.

Using mathematics to fight cancer | Department of Mathematics | University of Washington
An abstract of Radunskaya’s work on mathematical modeling and understanding tumor-immune interactions to address cancer.

In her search for a graduate program, Kim applied to math programs, as well as those that were interdisciplinary. “I ended up choosing Duke because I really liked my advisor,” Kim told me. While Kim’s advisor Michael Reed, PhD “does a lot of interesting math,” Kim wanted to work with him because math isn’t his focus – understanding “really complex biological systems using mathematical language is.”

“A lot of times you see people who do things at the intersection of math and biology that are more motivated from a mathematical standpoint … that’s just not what I’m interested in personally. I’m very interested in finding an interesting biological problem and then applying whatever mathematical tools I have.”

While at Duke, Kim was foundational to founding the university’s chapter of the Association for Women in Math (AWM). During her undergrad, Kim “had a really great experience with AWM,” finding both a community of women mathematicians and a network of women professors who were involved in the chapter.

At Duke, there wasn’t a chapter “but quite a few people who were interested in starting and being part of one.” This organization, which is open to people of any gender identity, heads mentorship programming that brings undergrads, grad students, postdocs, and professors together, organizes conferences, and contributes to their central focus of community building in math.

Events – Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)
Events – Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)
Example flyers of the events organized by the Duke chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Outside of her research, Kim spends most of her free time taking care of foster pups, which she describes as “extremely rewarding but also very tiring.” Her most recent foster, a four-month-old puppy, eavesdropped on our interview as he took a nap.

This fall, Kim will begin a post-doc with the University of Michigan’s math department as she “wanted to keep studying circadian rhythms with faculty who are really great in that area.”

Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022

Jason Dinh Once Collected Cicadas, Now He Researches Snapping Shrimp

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On March 14, 2022

In Animals, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Students

Jason Dinh’s research career began unintentionally with a semester at Duke’s Marine Lab. A current fourth-year PhD candidate in Duke’s Biology Department, Dinh ventured to the Marine Lab for a mental reset in the spring of his sophomore year as a Duke undergraduate. “While I was there, I realized that people can just get paid to ask questions about how the world works,” Dinh told me, “And I really didn’t know that was a thing that you could do.” Maybe this is what I want to do, he thought.

Jason Dinh, fourth-year PhD candidate in Duke Biology Department

Dinh spent his remaining undergraduate summers investigating the impacts of soundscapes on oyster and fish larvae development. Now, he studies snapping shrimp – a small oceanic species that is “one of the biggest sound producers in the ocean,” bested only by toothed whales.

Dinh first became aware of snapping shrimp during his undergraduate research. He told me that you can find snapping shrimp “basically anywhere, from the equator up to Virginia or maybe North Carolina.” While conducting research on ocean sounds and oyster and fish larvae, Dinh noticed the frequent snapping sounds of the snapping shrimp when he placed underwater microphones. “We didn’t really know what they were doing,” Dinh said.

An image of a species of snapping shrimp like Dinh works with.

The male snapping shrimp is asymmetrical with one very large claw and one that is regular-sized. The large claw has a tiny hook on the end and when the shrimp clamps down or “snaps” the claw, the top half latches into the bottom, shooting out an air bubble at sixty miles per hour that “essentially boils the water behind it,” producing the loud snapping noise in its wake. When many shrimp are snapping at once, it sounds almost like the frying grease when cooking bacon, Dinh tells me. (Click here to watch a video of the snapping shrimp in action.)

At first, researchers suspected the bubble from the snap was a means of stunning prey, but “It turns out that snapping shrimp also fight each other,” Dinh said. And when fighting, male snapping shrimp shoot the air bubbles at one another. The bigger the shrimp’s body size, the larger the snapping claw and the louder the snapping sound.

An image of two snapping shrimp facing off.

Going into his PhD, Dinh wanted to continue his undergraduate work in acoustics and figure out novel ways animals were producing sounds. His investigation of the snapping shrimp took him in new directions, however. Through his projects, Dinh has conducted work on the costs and benefits that keep the claw size as an honest indicator of shrimp size in competitions and approached a plethora of questions from the physiological and physical mechanisms of sending and assessing snaps, up to the evolutionary implications of the sexual selection for claw size.

“I don’t think I really knew I wanted to do research until right before I applied for grad school,” Dinh said at the beginning of our conversation. He remembers being a child curious about nature and bringing in “hundreds of cicadas” and “random critters into the house.” A few decades later and his research is centered on living creatures, which is both a rewarding and tricky process.

“Live animals are going to do what live animals want to do,” Dinh stated simply. “One thing my advisor always tells us is that you don’t get to tell the animal what to do, it tells you what you are going to do.” This has certainly held true for Dinh. While he has had many detailed and well-planned experimental ideas, he says he’s ultimately ended up doing what the “animals told him they were willing and happy to do in the lab.” However, along the way Dinh basks in the “joys in tiny discoveries in the process of research.”

I asked Dinh how he ended up at Duke in the first place and why he chose to stick around for his PhD. “So I ended up at Duke for undergrad because I really liked basketball, which is a really bad reason to choose a school.” But ultimately, this choice “paid off really well because my first year was the last year we won the National Championship,” Dinh said. He traveled to Indianapolis for the event which he says was the “best basketball game of [his] life.”

Dinh decided to do his PhD at Duke because of how deeply he admires his advisor, Sheila Patek (PhD), as a scientist. “I think she’s just a wonderful, passionate, passionate defender of basic science and just doing science because more knowledge is good for society,” Dinh elaborated, “Sheila’s also a staunch and fearless advocate for her students.” Though Dinh considers himself an “outlier” in the lab – primarily a behavioral ecologist in a lab of researchers investigating biomechanics – the way that Patek approaches science is the way that he wants to approach science as well.

Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, Dinh compares the diving explorations of science as being a “professional rabbit holer.” Science consists of picking questions further and further apart and leaning into research findings to tunnel into topics.

“I feel like science is being a professional rabbit holer,” Dinh stated. While Dinh is on the pursuit of the weapon size and fighting strategies of snapping shrimp, he doesn’t know exactly where he wants to head next, following the completion of his PhD. Like the snapping shrimp that collect information about their opponents to make an informed decision about engaging in fights, Dinh says he is conducting a sort of Bayesian method of his own. He’s assessing his experiences as he goes and sorting out the right next step for him.

A fan of the meditative art of writing, long morning walks with his dog, and reality TV, Dinh appreciates being “on the frontier of what we know” and is sure to let his deep-rooted curiosity about the natural world continue to guide him.

By Cydney Livingston

Blake Fauskee and the ‘Little Typos’ of Fern DNA

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On January 21, 2022

In Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Students

Blake Fauskee, third-year Biology PhD student, initially pitched his graduate project to advisor Kathleen Pryer (Ph.D.) as an undergrad.

Fauskee, who researches RNA editing sites in ferns, told me about the project that he’s been working on for the last several years. His research could push back against the idea that DNA is the end-all, be-all molecule for encoding life as we know it.

Blake Fauskee, third-year Biology PhD student

Fauskee broke down RNA editing for me. “RNA editing is this extra step in the whole central dogma, the whole gene expression process, that happens in plant organellar DNA,” he said. This process takes place in plant mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes.

Fauskee uses a lot of metaphors to describe his work, which I find both helpful and admirable. Science can often be dense and lack feasible connections to processes that most of us are familiar with. “Basically, in [plant] DNA, there are little typos almost. The wrong nucleotide is encoded at certain spots. When those genes are going to be expressed, they get turned into RNA and then other proteins from the nucleus come in and find the little typos so that in the end you get the correct protein.”

This image shows a simplified diagram of how RNA editing works.

Fauskee calls RNA editing an “interesting and strange process” that neither animals nor humans have. His work attempts to study the evolution of this process, the patterns of RNA editing, and why it came to be. He uses DNA and RNA sequence data and the help of computational tools to do his work. He explains that when sequencing DNA, you can think of the fragmented base pairs “as little puzzle pieces.”

“So, I take all those little puzzle pieces and try to put back together the chloroplast genome, which is about 150,000 base pairs. It’s like a thousand-piece puzzle.”

Next, he figures out where the fern’s gene sequences are on the DNA strands, making use of genomic databases that contain known genomes. He then aligns RNA sequences to the genes he has mapped. Fauskee looks for the “typos” or “little differences” between the DNA and RNA: “That’s how we find the RNA editing sites.” Finally, he evaluates how the proteins would be changed by the typos in the DNA if the RNA was not edited after being transcribed.

“So, a lot of these fern genes will have a STOP codon right in the middle, which is really, really bad if you don’t fix because you are only going to get half a protein,” Fauskee said. STOP codons signal to the protein-building ribosomes that the protein is finished once it reads this portion of the RNA. Fauskee explained that these types of errors are the ones would expect organisms to lose, but it turns out they are the ones that are conserved in ferns. “Is there an extra function there? Is it helpful? Is it adaptive?” Fauskee asked.

An image of different ferns.

Comparative analyses between fern species are important. By looking at whether there are common editing sites and common amino acid changes, Fauskee says, “we’re trying to understand if certain editing sites may be advantageous and what kinds of fluctuation we see between certain types of changes.”

Fauskee underscored the importance of his work. “RNA editing is a really interesting process that kind of undermines what I learned in molecular biology…They always tell you DNA is the bedrock, it’s the be-all, end-all. But what happens when the DNA is wrong? What’s the other added layer on this?”

Simply put, Fauskee, says that because of RNA editing, “We have to rethink central dogma a little bit.” In some plants, 10% of all their gene products contribute to RNA editing, Fauskee tells me. “That’s a big chunk and that’s got to be important,” Fauskee said, “Why would evolution keep such a burden going?”

Biology’s central dogma is the idea that DNA is transcribed into RNA and then translated into proteins. RNA editing adds an extra step before translation and protein production.

There may also be implications for how RNA editing sites affect the way that genetic relationships are mapped through phylogenetics. If differences between the DNA of different species at RNA editing sites, this could be misleading. Though the DNA indicates a change in base pair, RNA editing could lead to the same output in protein despite the seeming change. “If you took [RNA editing] into account,” Fauskee says, “does it give you a different answer?”

Fauskee studies ferns because of the amount of editing sites found in these plants. While flowering plants have lost editing sites over time, ferns have not. “For RNA editing, you can look at all angiosperms (flowering plants) and for the whole chloroplast genome, they might have 30-50 RNA editing sites. When you get into ferns, that number jumps up to 300-500 and I am trying to understand why.”

Botanical science first captured Fauskee’s interest while he completed his undergraduate degree in his home state at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). As a sophomore at UMD, Fauskee was taken under the wing of Amanda Grusz (Ph.D.). Grusz received her PhD in biology from Duke and worked under Pryer during her own time at the university. “I’m like my advisor’s academic grandson, which is kind of funny.” Clara Howell, who is part of Fauskee’s PhD cohort and who I spoke with last Fall, is also an academic grandchild in her own lab.

Being an “academic grandson” has worked out well for Fauskee. His key advice to me for any person considering a PhD, “Make sure your advisor is not someone you just admire as a scientist, but as a person.” On a day-to-day basis, Fauskee says that advisor Katheen Pryer “is pretty hands off” but is also “one of the most supportive people ever. I’m pretty much the driver of my own ship. If I am falling off the road, she’ll push me back on the road, but she’ll give me freedom to swerve around on that road.”

Fauskee also emphasized a piece of wisdom that Pryer passed down to him. “If whatever you’ve got going on is working and everyone else is doing something different, who cares?” he said.

Though Fauskee says that “lab work can be frustrating,” getting his long analyses to run after wrangling lots of data is very rewarding. Fauskee, who does not have a background in coding or computer languages, likes to “tell people that [his] floor of biology combined is one competent coder.” When he’s not stealing bits of his biology neighbor’s code, Fauskee loves to attend Duke Basketball games and is a fan of the television show Survivor.

Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022

A Conversation with Emily Levy, Soon-to-Be Biology PhD

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On January 14, 2022

In Animals, Biology, Field Research, Students

Emily Levy studies how the physical and social environments that baboons experience affect their physiology and life outcomes. The Massachusetts native, who works under advisor Susan Alberts (PhD), is in the final year of her Biology PhD and will defend her thesis later this Spring.

Though Duke’s in-person classes have been delayed until next week, I caught up with Levy over Zoom. The wall of her home office displays a fascinating Russian map of Chicago from the cold war era that shows bridges with their weight capacity. Levy tells me that she had no idea how her husband, who is from Evanston, found the map.

Emily Levy, an almost-PhD in Duke Biology

Levy’s research stems from the Amboseli Baboon Research Project – a nearly 50-year-old, ongoing study of wild baboons in Kenya. Duke’s Alberts has been studying these baboons for over 35 years and is a renowned primatologist involved with the project. Alberts’ lab collaborates with field researchers in Kenya to receive data and samples that are imperative to much of their work.

“Something that I really appreciate about Susan and the way she runs the lab is that she starts first-year grad students on a starter project,” Levy told me. Following a discussion about Levy’s interests, this project led to her first work on dominance rank, stress levels, and what this means physiologically for baboons. Levy also “poked around” at how scientists study dominance rank and found that the methods used for assessing rank “matter a lot.”

In her more recent project, Levy is trying to figure out what early life environments mean for adulthood in baboons. “So, we know that baboons that experience a really harsh early life, if they survive to adulthood, have really, really reduced lifespans as adults – like half as long – as baboons that had no adverse events,” Levy said.

“I’m focusing on two hypotheses to get at what might be happening under the skin that could have something to do with longer term effects on health and mortality.” One hypothesis is that a tough early life environment, especially nutritional stress, could stunt baboon growth and impinge adult activities like foraging or maintaining dominance rank. The other hypothesis proposes that early life adversity disrupts immune development, leading to an immune system that is either always inflamed or produces an overpowering inflammatory response when a baboon does get sick.

The second hypothesis is one that has been supported by human research, but Levy’s preliminary results “are the exact opposite.” This highlights one facet of the importance of her research: Its implications and parallels to human health and mortality. But Levy says her research is also “cool because it’s just cool” and appreciates what her work may add to basic science beyond human application.

Images from Scientific American’s article about the Amboseli Baboon Research Project.

In her journey to Duke, Levy said that she “tried a few ways of studying” animals before arriving at the work she conducts now.  Levy, who really liked animals, enjoyed time outside, and was “hooked on biology” in high school, began her undergraduate career at Williams College with this in mind. “In college, I took biology and neuroscience and then took animal behavior my sophomore year and was like Oooo, this is cool!,” Levy exclaimed with a big smile on her face, “And it felt sort of light-bulby.”

Along the journey to her PhD, Levy studied plants and insect pollinators and spent a few weeks in Madagascar in a tent filled with fleas. Though Levy said that these experiences of field work became “one of my favorite things about my job,” they also helped shape her trajectory as a scientist as she figured out which model systems and research questions “did and did not spark her joy.”

It was during her undergraduate thesis assessing social behavior in rats that she felt a strong “click” for studying social behavior in animals. Taking a couple years to work in a clinical research lab that conducted work on autism in humans, Levy enjoyed working on research to aid in special needs people. “But pretty quickly,” Levy said, “I was like, Alright, I don’t want to study humans for my whole life.”

“I’d basically been crossing things off my list up until this point,” Levy continued, “I now knew I wanted to study social animal behavior in non-human animals.” In her year away from research, Levy worked as an outdoor educator in Wyoming while she applied to grad school with this study plan in mind. Her time in Jackson Hole, Wyoming narrowed her interests even more, pushing her towards behavioral ecology because of her observation of an amazing, unbroken natural ecosystem.

Levy says she ultimately ended up at Duke because “the Baboon Project is amazing,” “Susan Alberts is amazing,” and “the Duke Biology Department is really wonderful.”

Images of Emily Levy conducting field work. On right, Levy is conducting field work in the Amboseli National Park in Southern Kenya.

While Levy enjoys working with Alberts and mentoring undergraduates, as well as using grant writing as a “fun way to develop really exciting ideas and hypotheses,” she also shared some of her frustrations with me. “Science is very slow — often, not always — and a project from start to finish takes a long time. And the publication process is so long. I struggle with that pace sometimes” Additionally, as someone who was raised to never take herself too seriously, Levy also said that she has felt a lot of pressure in grad school to take herself more seriously than she should as part of academic culture.

Levy loves teaching and her hope is to become a faculty member at a small liberal arts college or undergraduate institution following a post-doc, for which she is currently in the application process. Through this future work, Levy aspires to “bring undergrads through the scientific process.”

In her time away from the lab and science, Emily is an avid baker. “One of my goals in grad school has been to acknowledge and own what I am good at, and I know I am good at baking,” Levy said with a grin. Chocolate chip cookies are her specialty.

If she could give any aspiring science PhDs a word of advice, Levy offered that you should have fun and “pay attention to the non-intellectual, as well as intellectual, things that you enjoy most.” As exemplified by her path to figuring out what exactly it was in science that inspired her, Levy says not to worry as much about figuring out where you are going, and when, but reaping the lessons and insights of the experiences along the way.

Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022

Experts Unpack the Space Debris Challenge Just Before an “Irresponsible” Russian Missile Launch

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On November 16, 2021

In Climate/Global Change, Computers/Technology, Environment/Sustainability, Physics, Science Communication & Education

Russia sucessfully tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile on Monday, creating a debris field of more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris — space junk — whizzing around the planet. The crew aboard the International Space Station was ordered into their spacesuits to help them survive if one of the shards hit their home.

The Russian test, which has been strongly condemned by US officials, has created extreme hazards for satellites. US Space Command Commander General James Dickinson stated that “Russia has demonstrated a deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability, and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations.”

You might be wondering, What’s the big deal?

Just last Friday on November 12th, a group of experts met with the Duke community to discuss the threats to space – an environment we often forget about – and why space junk poses a large challenge for the 21st century.

Benjamin Schmitt PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, facilitated the group conversation, which featured Hugh Lewis PhD, Professor of Astronautics and Head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton. Schmitt stated that for the last two weeks, people around the world have paused to look up at the climate with the proceedings of COP26, but they “should also tilt their heads back a bit further” and consider the problem of space junk.

The challenge of space debris requires technical and diplomatic solutions, which are often complex. This has been effectively demonstrated by the Russian launch and resultant global reactions to the “irresponsibility” of the maneuver.

Schmitt and Lewis were joined by Brit Lundgren PhD, Laura Newburgh PhD, and W. Robert Pearson JD. Lundgren is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Newburgh is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University, and Pearson is a retired U.S. Ambassador and current Duke University Center for International and Global Studies Fellow.

Space experts engaged in Friday’s conversation

“The space debris problem is a wicked problem,” Lewis said. And the problem is this: According to the European Space Agency, there are over 36,500 objects larger than 10cm, 1,000,000 objects over 1cm, and more than one-third of a billion objects over 1mm in size in orbit around the Earth. These numbers, though bewilderingly large, are posed to expand.

As all this junk collides with itself, there are more and more fragments and particles in space. Lewis said that unlike climate change, there is not a “tipping point.” There will not be a warning or any sudden event that pushes us into the exponential growth phase – it will just, sort of, happen.

These pieces of debris pose substantial risks to the space systems that our modern societies have come to rely on, like piloting and navigation, communication, and many forms of entertainment like television. “Without those services, all of us, the entire planet, would suffer,” Lewis said.

A visualization of the space debris currently rotating around Earth.

But this issue of space debris likely feels entirely disconnected and irrelevant for most of the world’s population. “For us down here on Earth, we are really not aware of this growing problem … and we are really not able to connect to it,” Lewis said. “Unless we make that human connection, it’s not something we would be able to address.”

The panelists all agreed that making the connections between space debris and the current functioning of our globe is a critical step to getting the public to engage with the space debris challenge.

There are also other important reasons to care about space debris. Lundgren pointed out that there has already been a global 10% increase in brightness relative to the natural, dark sky because of light-reflecting space debris. This is the kind of light pollution that you cannot escape, Lundgren stated, “You can’t just drive away like with city pollution.” For communities of people, like the Indigenous, this is also having severe impact on the cultural ways in which they use nighttime skies.

Newburgh’s scientific research uses a particular satellite frequency for data collection. This wavelength was just sold to a communication company, meaning that eventually, she will no longer be able to do her work. The frequencies used for satellites are limited, and thus an extremely valuable and expensive, monopolizable commodity. Scientists like Newburgh are gravely concerned about the protection of the future of their work and worried that we might “lose out on science.”

Because of the initiatives like Starlink, a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, Newburgh said that space has begun to feel like the “Wild West” with no rules or regulation. “It feels like you could just do anything.”

This was a very important tenet of the discussion: “[Space debris] is not just a technical problem we have to solve, but a social one as well.” While technical solutions are needed to constrain the exponential growth of space debris, the even bigger challenge seems to lie in answering questions like “Who gets to use the remaining capacity in lowest orbit and how do we decide?” that Lewis asked. “Lots of companies, governments, and so on want to use space,” Lewis said.

Starlink satellites are changing to night sky. The company’s satellites can be seen traveling through space.

Ambassador Pearson said that this issue could be resolved by starting with a shared interest in the space debris issue and working outwards to points of change that are important across nations. The result would not ultimately be the full wish of any singular entity. Pearson also emphasized the pertinence of action: “It’s one thing to talk about what ought to be done and to talk about what we will do.”

While Pearson says that he does not believe there is a way to avoid national competition in space, it is essential to develop rules to mitigate and govern international interactions in space. This is likely to be a long process and has been on the minds of experts for decades already. But as Pearson reminded the audience it took almost 40 years to “get the ball rolling on climate change” and 10 years for the first nuclear disarmament.

The conversation ultimately kept returning to the need to engage the public and the impact that unconstrained space debris would have on their lives. Pearson said it is important to let the public know that the access to health, technology, communications, and many facets of society people had come to expect in their lives, would be severely impacted by damage to our space infrastructure.

“Whenever you think about the environment down here that we all occupy, that we are all connected to, we have to also think about the environment in space,” Lewis said.

He ended the conversation with a quote from the science fiction movie, Terminator 2: There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. This fate is dependent on cooperation between scientists, diplomats, regulatory and technical experts, and the public around the world.

Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022

Law Tech Demo Roundup, Using Technology to Address Gaps in Access to Justice

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On October 29, 2021

In Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Policy

If innovative technology solutions are the key to addressing gaps in our justice system, Duke Law Tech Lab (DLTL) is a place where these solutions come to life.

Friday, October 22nd, three teams presented on their work, supported by DLTL, to change the way that legal services are delivered. And the presentation had more at stake than just educating the attendees. Real cash prizes were on the line – voted on by a panel of judges and even audience members – to provide even more funding for these startups.

Jeff Ward introduces the 2021 Law Tech Legal Demo Judges.

The three teams were accepted out of dozens of applications to work with the DLTL, according to host Jeff Ward (JD), Director of Duke’s Center on Law and Technology and Clinical Professor of Law. The Lab looks for early-stage companies striving to increase access to legal solutions to offer monetary support, but the missions of the DLTL initiative go far beyond that. DLTL is building a community for creative entrepreneurs in the legal tech space, connecting start-ups with valuable partners and mentors, and fostering a space of growth through tailored resources and support.

First up at the 2021 Law Tech Lab Demo Day was Creators’ Legal. “The traditional legal solutions simply don’t work for the modern content creator,” said Eric Farber, founder and CEO of Creators’ Legal. Farber’s company is seeking to help what is now the second-fastest sector of the world economy: Content creators. Content creators are people who generate revenue by sponsorships and advertising, often through social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. This market is huge and expanding, but “completely underserved” with legal solutions, said Farber.

Creators’ Legal CEO and Founder, Eric Farber, explains how the company works to support modern content creators.

Because content creators can go from production to distribution within just a few hours or less, traditional entertainment legal that is filled with time-consuming, expensive, and unresponsive lawyers is not a viable option.

Farber says that “Industry Standard Agreements and deals are hidden behind the doors of [this] traditional legal.” By creating a platform that has easy-to-use contract templates, eSignatures, and a digital briefcase for storing files offered on a by-contract or subscription-basis, Creators Legal wants to be a company that serves the gaps left for content creators.

Next up was Justice Innovations, represented by its CEO, Sasha Davenport. Davenport and Justice Innovations want to rearrange the workflow associated with the process that happens from the time a crime takes place to the person who has been arrested for the case makes their initial appearance in court.

“This [at the initial appearance] is where things get really interesting for me,” said Davenport because about 40% of cases are dropped for no-actions. This leads to a huge number of wasted time, effort, budgets, and more. By creating and integrating a software system that they are dubbing Vet-IT, the company wants to increase data-sharing across agencies that should be on the same page with each other but often are not.

Sasha Davenport, CEO, explains how Vet-IT works through different steps from initial crime reporting to someone’s first appearance in court.

Through the data-sharing platform, information would be entered about a case from the first moments of crime investigation to help decide if this is a charge that would even end up being prosecuted or not. The benefits, according to Davenport, including filtering out bad cases, deflecting more people from entering the carceral system, decreasing jail populations, expediting redirection for individuals in need to mental health interventions, and, potentially, improved community-police trust. Justice Innovations were inspired to pursue this idea because of the great success that Harris County Texas has had in producing few no-action cases. Harris County achieved this by a process of phone-trees across agencies for the last 50 years.

Founder and Executive Director of SAEF Legal Aid, Eamonn Keenan, explains the company’s marketing strategy of community outreach.

Last, but not least, was SAEF Legal Aid. Eamonn Keenan, company Founder and Executive Director, laid out the team’s legal tech solution. There is a systematic problem of finding the legal support that one needs before it is too late, bringing with it immense challenges and large expenditures of time. Keenan became aware of this issue while working at a legal aid help desk. SAEF Legal Aid’s solution is to leverage practical tech to more accurately diagnose user’s legal problems and facilitate access to free or affordable legal solutions via reliable referrals and strategic partnerships.

In doing this work, the team hopes to help low-income families more immediately, starting with family law services and expanding out. A large part of their solution also includes building partnerships with “word-of-mouth marketing” to embed the service in high-need communities. “People without internet access might need legal help the most,” Keenan said. SAEF Legal Aid hopes to cut through the lack of staffing for legal aid advice desks and bypass the waiting game of larger legal aid providers who often have high turn-away rates and long waiting periods for attorney follow up to resolve the barrier that intake causes in gaining access to legal help.

At the end of the presentation, Justice Innovations walked away with the Audience Favorite prize and SAEF Legal Aid took the Grand Prize. Regardless of prizes, these three teams will inevitably continue to be part of the solution to gaps in justice as they carry their work forward.

Post by Cydney Livingston

The Life of a Biology Ph.D. Student, Clara Howell

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On October 25, 2021

In Animals, Biology, Students

Clara Howell and I meet to chat on a lovely October afternoon under the trees of the Bryan Center Plaza. In my final Fall at Duke as an undergraduate, I am happy to connect with Clara, a third-year PhD student in the biology department. We meet on the auspices that I want to learn more about her trek through academia and her current work in the Nowicki lab for this very profile piece. “I’ve never been written about before,” Clara says to me. I suspect that, though most grad students’ work is totally cool, most of them never have.

Clara Howell, Ph.D. student, conducting field work.

Clara talks with her hands as she lays out her current work for me. Right now, she is studying sexual selection and infection in different bird species. Duke biology professor Steve Nowicki, one of Clara’s advisors, has done a lot of work on honesty in communication systems between animals. Most species, Clara tells me, rely on honest signals for mate choice, because it benefits females to be able to discern between low- and high-quality mates, and it benefits high quality males to be able to advertise their quality. In general, animal signals should be reliable. Clara’s other advisor, biology professor and chair of evolutionary anthropology Susan Alberts, specializes in life history trade-offs of signaling: Animals only have so many resources and they must make choices about how to use them. A male bird, that is, for example, fighting an infection, cannot devote as many resources to sexual signaling as an uninfected male.

“But,” Clara says, with an increasingly bright smile on her face, “There is an interesting period of time right after an animal is exposed to a potential pathogen where it’s not immediately clear if the bird’s sexual signals will be honest. This is because it could be most advantageous for animals – especially males – to continue devoting every resource possible for sexual signaling, even if it means ignoring a pathogen that will eventually kill them.”

The punchline is, the male swamp sparrows and zebra finches that Clara studies might benefit from “lying” about being sick. By ignoring an arising infection and devoting one’s energy to maintaining strong sexual signaling, these male birds may be tricking females into thinking they are perfectly healthy mates with no sickness in sight. So far, Clara has been recording the songs of male birds following an injection of bacterial cell walls to stimulate their immune response. “The real kicker will be when I test females and see how and if they discern between the songs of sick and healthy males.”

Zebra Finch (left) and Swamp Sparrow (right)

“When we started to social distance at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, before any of us knew how long this would last, I wondered whether other animals do the same thing,” Clara said. When COVID-19 put a pause to Clara’s original work, she found inspiration in the pandemic itself to think about cues of sickness in other animal species besides our own – an idea she saw other scientists starting to buzz about.

Before grad school, Clara studied neuroscience and English at Tulane University in New Orleans. She worked in an evolutionary biology lab with former Duke Ph.D. Elizabeth Derryberry beginning in sophomore year and did her honor’s thesis in Derryberry’s lab on connections between novel foraging tasks and mate preferences in zebra finches. And Clara loved her advisor so much that she decided to follow Derryberry to the University of Tennessee as a grad student in the same year she earned her bachelor’s degree.

“What about your English major?” I asked Clara. “I was a very nerdy, book-ish child,” she replied, “I wanted to read more in college.” Her background in English has turned out to be quite useful for her work in the sciences. “Having really great scientific ideas and not being able to tell people about them is pretty useless,” she said with a short laugh. These English skills have been useful for grant writing too. That’s right – I asked Clara to tell me about the less glamorous parts of being a grad student.

“The process of finding money is something I wish people talked about more,” Clara said as she wrapped her long ponytail through her hands. The through line: “If you want to do your own ideas, you have to find your own money,” she stated plainly. The process of finding money takes up a considerable amount of her time and most grants she has applied for she does not end up getting. But because she enjoys writing, she says it’s not so bad. Though Clara wishes departments were more open about research funding policies and that there were more internal grants, she’s never thought of grant writing as a waste of time. “A lot of the time when I write grants, I’m really clarifying ideas. It’s definitely helpful,” she tells me.

Grant writing takes up a considerable amount of time for most science Ph.D. students.

Clara’s advice to anyone interested in a science Ph.D. is to truly consider getting a master’s degree beforehand. “It might not be the right choice for everyone,” Clara said, “But I found the transition from undergrad to graduate school really difficult. I spent most of my master’s degree just learning how to be a grad student and figuring out how academia works, which meant that when I started my Ph.D. I could focus much more on what I wanted to research.” The time in her master’s program also helped her home in on her central interests in biology. And oh, she also recommends noise-canceling headphones, her “favorite possession.”

Although she says she is still working on figuring out her work-life balance, Clara likes being able to set her own schedule and how each week is so different from the next. Outside of lab, Clara claims she is the stereotype of ecology and evolutionary biology grad students: She enjoys rock-climbing, board games, and craft breweries. You might have to go to the Biological Sciences building to find Clara. “I haven’t broached the other areas of campus,” she said, “Undergrads are sort of scary. They use language I don’t understand, and they are all so stylish. They make me feel old.” Old at 26, the life of the biology Ph.D.

Trust-Building, Re-Visited History, and Time Pertinent to Achieve Health Equity for Black Americans

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On September 1, 2021

In Cancer, Genetics/Genomics, Lecture, Medicine

Along with being a beautiful person and leading a productive life, Henrietta Lacks is the mother of modern medicine. Her scientific child was born without Henrietta’s consent through the clinical breakthroughs and medical miracles achieved with the help of her cervical cells – HeLa cells – stolen without her knowledge when she sought healthcare. Ironically, the same treatments developed from the cells of this Black woman are inaccessible for many Black Americans contemporarily. Though Ms. Lacks passed away from cervical cancer at the premature age of 31, her unique cells have become immortal. Her story lives on as a pertinent reminder of the importance of building trust between medicine and the Black community. In honor of her birthday, expert panelists met to both celebrate Ms. Lacks and discuss the path forward in trust-building, equity, and reckoning with our history to change the narrative of healthcare for Black Americans.

The panel honored Henrietta Lacks through discussion of the path forward for biomedical research and Black communities. The panel was hosted in August in remembrance of Ms. Lacks’ birthday on August 1st.

The panel, which took place on Tuesday, August 31, began as a conversation between Nadine Barrett (Ph.D.), Robert A. Winn (M.D.) and Vanessa B. Sheppard (Ph.D.). Among their many other titles and positions, Barrett is Director, Center for Equity in Research, Dukev CTSI and Associate Director of Equity, Community and Stakeholder Strategy, Duke Cancer Institute, Dr. Winn is the Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center, and Sheppard is the Associate Director of Community Outreach Engagement and Health Disparities at VCU Massey Cancer Center. The trio were joined by Reuben Warren (D.D.S., M.P.H., Dr. P.H., M.DIV.), Director of Tuskegee University’s Bioethics Center, along with a handful of other contributors including Veronica Robinson – Henrietta Lacks’ great-granddaughter and a registered nurse who represents the Lacks family on the NIH panel that reviews applications to conduct research using the HeLa genome.

A screenshot of panelists who took part in Tuesday’s conversation.

Winn began by referencing the U.S. 1932 public health service study that took place in Tuskegee, Alabama. The experiment exploited Black men in Tuskegee when an effective form of treatment for syphilis was discovered 15 years into the study but withheld from participants “to track the disease’s full progression.” In 1972, 40 years after the study began, it was the associated press, not the scientific community that finally led to the experiment’s demise and the issue of an apology from the U.S. President.

As Warren pointed out, the issue with the study was less about the treatment and more about the dishonesty, the falsifying information, and lies. “Stop calling them poor, stop calling them all sharecroppers,” Warren said of the Black men who participated in the study, “They were far more than that.” “[The study] was an issue of trust, not an issue of ignorance,” he continued. Unfortunately, when talking about this story, Winn said that Black Americans “don’t always talk about the power of us standing up and saying not again.”

Bioethics violations have been a continuous part of the biomedical research enterprise in the U.S., and race and racism have been part of scientific inquiry, which continues to be of great concern, Warren said. Often, rather than putting preventative protections in place, bioethics regulations have come as a reaction to extreme violations of justice. Thus, Warren laid out a central theme of the panel that “You build trust by making yourself trustworthy and that takes time.” Rather than initiating transactional research with Black communities when the scientific and medical community needs something, Warren offered that they should start when they want to help with something.

Dr. Rueben Warren presenting examples of bioethics violations in the history of biomedical research, with most examples stemming from the United States

As Sheppard said, “[Black people] have earned a mistrust” for medical communities. This is largely hinged on Barrett’s argument that the American systems from health to education to criminal justice “are working as they were designed” – to ensure that the very inequalities that exist today came to be. Using the analogy of a marathon, Barrett said while white men in the U.S. started the race 450 years ago, Black men and women only began running this race hundreds of years later. “Those who start the race are going to…ensure that they thrive,” Barrett said. This has led to Black people dying disproportionately from often treatable diseases, Sheppard said, continuing to add that these sorts of disparities were front and center for the world to see during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the creation of our structural inequalities, the system created “two bookends: Black and white.” But there has to be a narrative that keeps this story alive. “In order to create the change, we have got to do the work to change the narrative,” said Barrett.

Nadine Barrett (Ph.D.), Director of Health Equity and Disparities at Duke Cancer Institute

Robinson pointed to the importance of history, paralleling Warren’s comments that in focusing on health equities we are fully focusing on the future in a way that ignores the past and does not deal with “what really brought us into health disparities” in the first place. Robinson said that we “can no longer sweep [conversations on the historical injustices of medical racism] under the rug.” She continued to say that the reason why Tuesday’s conversation and the ongoing dialogue that is sure to follow is so powerful is because “we are no longer victims in our own legacies” by taking over conversations at the table rather than being the topics of discussion at the table.

Mistrust in the Black community for systems of medicine and healthcare are based on hundreds of years of action. Hesitancy – from Covid-19 vaccinations to participation in clinical trials for cancer research – amongst Black Americans “aren’t us saying no,” said Robinson, “We’re saying something happened.” Sharon Ribera Sanchez, Founder-Director of Saving Pennies 4 A Cure, is a cancer survivor and advocate for people of color to engage in clinical trials because of the difference they can make in medical developments that draw on more diverse and robust data.

But there is a bigger conversation than just having more Black folks take place in research and clinical trials, Winn said. “How are you going to look at my biology without looking at my history?” he asked, referencing the genetic implications of environmental conditions and stressors from socially constructed race that impact DNA.

An image of HeLa cells

The dialogue, which was opened and closed with a prayer, also spoke to the importance of establishing regular, ongoing, transparent relationships between the Black faith community and the medical community. This should happen, not just in times of crisis, because “mass hysteria is prime for miscommunication,” Ralph Hodge, pastor of the Second Baptist Church in South Richmond, Virginia, said.

“Today was a big way of us looking back at the past, looking at where we are at now, and moving forward to the solutions,” said Barrett. This comes by letting communities know that we care, said Winn, along with “doing things with our communities, not through them.”

A key factor in deconstructing this issue and achieving health equity is time. Time to reflect on the past in order to avoid reliving it; time to generate innovative solutions to the problems at hand; and time to invest in Black communities – to learn from them, support them, and earn their trust not because they can offer science something, but because science has something to offer them.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Survival of the… Friendliest?

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On April 26, 2021

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology

Chances are, you’ve heard about survival of the fittest. But what about survival of the friendliest? While we often think that the strongest, meanest, and most powerful organisms often prevail as the most fit, it seems that friendship bears the real evolutionary winners.

Brian Hare (Ph.D.) and Vanessa Woods (M.SciComm) are the researcher and co-author duo responsible for shaping this idea in their latest book, Survival of the Friendliest. On top of this extensive collaboration, the pair also happen to be married. The two discussed their work at an event series hosted by Duke Alumni Forever Learning Institute Wednesday, April 21st and Thursday, April 22nd.  Hare is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience at Duke and a core member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Woods is the Director of the Duke Puppy Kindergarten, as well as a writer and journalist.

Vanessa Woods, Taz, and Brian Hare

In the history of evolution, friendliness often proceeds unusual evolutionary success, meaning that friendly species prevail over time. Hare and Woods are uncovering critical factors for why this pattern emerges in their research. For the context of their work, Woods defined friendliness as anything that is mutually beneficial between organisms. Their questions and investigation were first centered around dogs.

“Where did dogs come from?” Hare said. This poses a really “fascinating evolutionary problem.” Prior research shows that dogs first originated 15,000-25,000 years ago, delineated from wolves. But why? Dogs have become one of the “top two or three most successful animals,” while wolves have nearly gone extinct.

The answer to their evolution and their success is found in friendliness. “Dogs have remarkable social genius,” Hare said, they are able to understand communicative gestures and in return communicate with humans in a way that not even one of our closet genetic relatives, the Bonobo, can.  This evolutionary selection for friendliness drove the stark contrasts seen between dogs and wolves today, fundamentally changing dogs’ physical shapes and forms along with their psychology. The same pattern of genetic inheritance encoding for inclination to cooperate also changes much of a species morphology in signature ways.

Vanessa and Brian co-authored the 2020 book, Survival of the Friendliest.

Hare and Woods ventured to Siberia to analyze the findings of an experiment pertaining to fox behavior that has been ongoing since it was first set up by a Russian geneticist in 1959. One group of foxes has experienced randomly selected mating, while the other group of foxes has been artificially shaped by manmade selection for the friendliest foxes.

When they compared the long-term results of decades separate population changes, Hare and Woods found the friendlier foxes had shorter faces, different colorations, curlier tails, and smaller canines. These are the same factors used by archaeologists to distinguish dogs from wolves. The morphological and physiological changes for niceness are synonymous across the two species.

A fox from the friendly group, pictured center, has evolved different physical characteristics according to the manmade selection for friendliness in a long-running genetic experiment in Siberia.

They have also found a similar pattern in humans. Our species as not alone on the planet when it first evolved, said Hare: We shared the planet with approximately four other Hominids who also had big brains, cultural artifacts, and linguistic abilities like we do. “There had to be something in addition to those traits that allowed our species to survive while others went extinct.” He proposes survival of the friendliness and the development of different physical characteristics.

In a study comparing modern humans to archaic ones, Hare and Woods found that modern humans have traits like much smaller brow ridges and narrower, shorter faces – what you would expect to see, based on the fox model from their work in Siberia that also helped explain the evolution of dogs. Our white sclera – the white part of your eye – acts as our “curly tail.” The white tissue likely has been selected for with the development of our other friendly features, as we are the only primate whose sclera is light, which makes communication by glance easier.

Reconstructions of archaic hominid groups. The image on the far right is the reconstruction of a Homo sapiens.

If we are the friendliest, Woods asked, then why are we capable of such cruelty and malice? Even though we are extremely friendly to in-group strangers, when our in-group is threatened, we are prepared to defend them against out-group strangers.

“We are all capable of dehumanization when we feel that the group that we love … is threatened,” Woods said. This is a model they are referring to as the mother bear hypothesis: A mother bear is most patient when she is dealing with her cubs, but most angry when another organism threatens her offspring.

The number one predictor of dehumanization is the feeling that your own group or identity is being dehumanized, and in those moments, the same part of the brain that enables cooperative communication shuts down and is dampened.  

The duo cited cross-group friendships, democracy, and our perception of other animals as important factors for offsetting dehumanization in the human species. Cross-group friendships provide a bridge of empathy, democracy contributes to collective group identity and decisions, and our perceptions of other animals limit dehumanization when we have an ecological view of our relation to other species rather than a top-down, human-centric approach.

Darwin was also a fan of friendliness in nature!

“You have to understand what was wrong about the past but not blind yourself to what you do find,” Woods said when asked about the dark history of morphology-based pseudo-sciences that prompted racial persecutions. This is something that the pair reckons with for a whole chapter in their book.

“You can see in our faces the faces of friendliness,” Hare said.

May we all lean into this niceness after encountering Hare and Woods work. It’s gotten us this far, and it seems particularly vital for our collective future.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Black Americans’ Vaccine Hesitancy is Grounded in More Than Mistrust

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On April 8, 2021

In Global Health, Medicine, Policy, Science Communication & Education

Covid-19 is considered a “general pandemic,” but its impacts have been disproportionate along the lines of race and ethnicity. Though vaccines may serve as our best chance to put an end to Covid, the problem of vaccine hesitancy amongst Black people in the U.S. is particularly pervasive and grounded by more than simple mistrust.

Gary Bennett (Ph.D.) discussed the issue of complex determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans Monday, April 5. Bennett is a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, Global Health, and Medicine at Duke, as well as director of Duke Digital Health and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Gary Bennett, Ph.D.

“At the end of the day, we are dealing with an issue that demands pragmatic attention,” Bennett said, “How do we get shots in arms?” It turns out, the answer is quite complex and historically confounded.

While Black people have experienced much higher burdens from Covid-19 despite contracting the disease at a similar rate to whites, they have been disproportionately vaccinated at lower rates than white people.

“Access matters and it matters a lot,” Bennett said. One clear example of decreased access for Black Americans is that fewer vaccination sites are located in areas with high concentrations of Black people.

However, Bennett said, access does not simply equal place. “How much friction are you creating in this process?” he prompted, pointing to examples of complicated registration systems, inadequate public transportation to vaccine sites, or overall distance from a location. All of these factors already limit who is able to access vaccinations without the added influences of reduced vaccine uptake due to vaccine hesitancy.

A slide from Dr. Bennett’s presentation which outlines the plethora of impactors on access.

Vaccine hesitancy was listed by the World Health Organization as a top 10 global threat in 2019, when vaccines were preventing 2-3 million deaths per year in the pre-Covid era. Though Bennett said that vaccine hesitancy “has been with us for a long time,” there “are real consequences” to continued reluctance and refusal to get vaccinated with heightened risks due to the nature of the pandemic.

Bennett said that many claims around hesitancy blame communities for their inability to access vaccines, but this fails to consider or to change the underlying behaviors that drive hesitancy. Bennett outlined these underlying drivers as 1) mistrust, 2) social norms, and 3) understandable uncertainties.

A slide from Dr. Bennett’s presentation showing the unequal distribution of vaccination sites in Atlanta GA in predominantly white areas.

“It’s not just mistrust of the medical system, it’s mistrust of institutions,” Bennett said, “There’s a lot of reasons for [Black people] to mistrust institutions.” The murder of George Floyd stands as one poignant contemporary example, but “Tuskegee [still] looms large in the minds of Black Americans.” The Tuskegee experiment exploited 600 Black men working as sharecroppers who had syphilis by knowingly withholding treatment and simply seeing what happened to their bodies as a result of the disease for over 40 years.

This experiment was not the first of its kind: Whole body radiation was tested on Black people. Fistula surgery was developed on enslaved Black women by the “father of modern gynecology.” The immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, have been used far and wide to advance science after a sample of her cancerous cervix was unknowingly stolen from her. Modern studies have also shown how different implicit biases of Black patients shape their treatment outcomes due to skewed physician perceptions.

The capital riot, the murder of George Floyd, and the Jim Crow Era all exemplify the pervasive institutionalized racism that erodes Black trust in U.S. institutions of all kinds.

Our social networks are also vitally important to influencing our feelings about receiving the Covid vaccine. In Black communities, Bennett said, fewer people in their networks have gotten vaccinations and those who have received vaccines are less vocal about it leading to a collective lack of interest in receiving vaccinations.

These two factors, paired with understandable uncertainties about the side effects of the vaccine or potentially getting Covid itself, generate the need to change our approaches to vaccine hesitancy and increased uptake amongst Black communities in the U.S.

White people have been disproportionately vaccinated over all other racial/ethnic categories in the U.S.

To do this we need to lead with empathy and appreciate the fact that changing attitudes towards vaccines is a process. “Shaming people is bad,” Bennett said. “Stigmatizing people will actually lead to the converse of what we expect.”

Over time, we can work to correct misconceptions, contextualized uncertainties, and share stories rather than statistics to push people further from vaccine refusal and closer to vaccine demand.

And when more Black Americans are ready, “vaccination should be an easy choice.” By implementing opt-out policies, rather than opt-in and by taking more direct actions like making vaccination appointments for people, Covid vaccines may indeed be the key to ending the pandemic – in an equitable and proportionate way.

Post by Cydney Livingston

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