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Deeper voice still wins, even in "feminine" leadership roles

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On December 14, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research

By Ashley Yeager

Deeper voices get votes even in PTA and school board elections. Credit: Barton Stabler, gettyimages.com

A lower pitched voice gets more votes — even in elections for stereotypically feminine roles, such as for president of the Parent-Teacher Association or member of the School Board, a new Duke study shows.

“These findings are somewhat surprising,” said University of Miami political scientist Casey Klofstad, co-author on the study. He explained that since women typically hold these kinds of leadership positions, people might assume that voters would prefer leaders with more feminine voices.

“We found the opposite, that the preference for leaders with more masculine voices generally still holds,” he said. The results, which appear Dec. 12 in PLoS ONE, however, suggest that women may want men with more feminine qualities to take feminine leadership positions.

“The selection of leaders is arguably one of the most important decisions we make,” said Duke biologist Rindy Anderson, lead author on the study. “It is worth considering that voice pitch, a physically-determined trait that may or may not be related to leadership capacity, influences how we select our leaders,” she said.

In the experiment, she and Klofstad recorded people saying, “I urge you to vote for me this November,” and then altered the recordings to create high and low-pitched versions of each voice. The scientists then held hypothetical elections by asking people to choose, based solely on voice pitch, which candidate they would prefer when voting for president of the PTA or for a position on the School Board.

The results show that women did not distinguish between men with higher-or lower-pitched voices for the two feminine leadership roles. This finding contradicts the team’s previous study, which identified women’s strong preference for men with more masculine voices when voting for candidates who were “running against each other in an election,” rather than for a specific leadership position. The new finding suggests that the strong preference women had in the previous experiment is more relaxed within the more specific context of feminine leadership roles.

“Another possibility is that women are less sensitive to this vocal cue within the context of this specific domain of leadership. It is also possible that some women might actually prefer male leaders with more feminine voices for feminine leadership roles,” Klofstad said.

The scientists need to do more work to understand what is happening to women’s preferences in this situation, he said, adding that he and Anderson also want to know whether people with lower voices are truly more competent leaders.

“We need to test whether voice pitch actually signals anything about leadership capacity,” Klofstad said. He and Anderson are now designing those experiments.

Citation: “Preference for Leaders with Masculine Voices Holds in the Case of Feminine Leadership Roles.” Anderson, R. and Klofstad, C. 2012. PLOS ONE. 7(12): e51216. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051216.

'Hoot-Dash Display' Brings the Chicks In

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On December 14, 2012

In Animals, Biology, Field Research, Guest Post

Guest Post by Robin A. Smith, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)

A male peacock roosting at the top of a tree in India at dusk. (Jessica Yorzinski photo)

Deep in the scrublands of Keoladeo National Park in northwest India, one thing was hard for biologist Jessica Yorzinski to ignore: It wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t the jackals. It was the squawks of peacocks in the throes of passion.

From behind the trees in the distance, she could hear a loud two-part whoop, the distinctive call that male peacocks make right before mating.

During the peacock courtship dance, a male announces that he’s ready to make his move by dashing towards the object of his affection and emitting a singular squawk before mounting his mate.

“Peacocks have a number of different courtship calls, but this is the only one specifically associated with the moment before copulation, a time when the female is finally right in front of the male. It’s called the hoot-dash display,” said   Yorzinski, who is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke.

The amorous peacock’s signature hoot poses a puzzle for scientists. For one thing, he’s already got the girl. “By that point she’s already right there, checking him out. You’d think that he might not need another signal at such a late stage in the courtship process,” Yorzinski said.

What’s more, the calls could alert potential predators to an easy meal. Jackals, tigers and hawks can make a quick snack of a wild peacock in their native habitat of South Asia. “In a sense, they’re advertising that they’re distracted and vulnerable. It would be wise for a predator to capitalize on that,” Yorzinski said.

Yorzinski on stakeout inside a blind on a day hotter than 100 degrees F. (courtesy of Jessica Yorzinski)

Intrigued, Yorzinski recorded the loud carrying-on of males in mid-conquest. Then she played the calls to free-ranging females in India and videotaped their reactions. At each site, a loudspeaker played copulation calls on one day and silent controls on another day.

The result: the recorded love sounds made by amorous peacocks in the throes of passion drew eavesdropping females from afar. Females approached and spent more time near speakers that were playing hoots compared to silent controls.

To make sure the birds weren’t simply drawn to any noise, Yorzinski repeated a similar experiment with captive birds in an outdoor enclosure at Duke. There, a speaker played two different sounds: peacock copulation calls, or crow caws.

The results matched what she found in the wild. Captive females paid little attention to the speakers when crow caws were playing, but when the love whoops were played, the females moved toward the source of sound and spent more time near the speaker.

“Why they’re attracted to these calls and what it tells them — these are still open questions,” Yorzinski said.

Announcing the fact that he’s getting a girl could help a male attract additional mates, she explained.

Studies in other species have shown that females flock towards popular males. “It’s like someone’s already vouched for him. If he’s good enough for one girl, then he might be good enough for another girl, too.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGlKRSzPKsk&version=3&hl=en_US]
That dating boost could make up for the risks involved in disclosing his whereabouts to potential predators, especially in the birds’ native habitat where dense trees and grasses make strutting males hard for females to spot.

If distant females are drawn to the love calls made by mating males, why don’t the males simply boost their call rate to give the impression that they’re more successful than they actually are?

“One of the biggest unanswered questions is why males don’t fake it,” Yorzinski said. “I’ve heard males making false calls when there’s no mate in sight, so there definitely is some level of cheating going on. Figuring out why they don’t do it more often would be the key.”

The study will appear in the January print issue of the journal Behaviour, and is available online at http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/10.1163/1568539x-00003037.

CITATION:  Yorzinski, J. and K. Anoop, “Peacock copulation calls attract distant females.” Behaviour, Jan. 2013. DOI:10.1163/1568539X-00003037.

Higgs Hunters Seeing Double

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On December 13, 2012

In Field Research, Mathematics, Physics

By Ashley Yeager

An stuffed animal artist’s conception of the Higgs boson. Credit: The Particle Zoo.

Scientists searching for the Higgs boson on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva are reporting small discrepancies from the two main channels they use to look for the particle.

With these channels – the decay of a Higgs to two light particles (photons) or to two Z bosons – the scientists determined the mass of the Higgs-like particle to be roughly 125 GeV, about 125 times the mass of the proton.

They announced complimentary results from both channels in July 2012, and since then have been crunching more data to support the findings. The scientists gave updates on their work Dec. 13 at CERN.

“It’s turned out that for ATLAS the Zed-Zed channel and gamma-gamma channel differ quite a bit, by about 3 GeV, for the respective masses of the Higgs particle from which they decay,” says Duke physicist Mark Kruse, who is analyzing data from the ATLAS experiment. “It doesn’t sound like much, but the probability they could differ by this much or more is only about 0.5 percent.”

“This is probably not a big deal,” he says, noting that the new results explain why the ATLAS team was not ready to report the separate mass measurements at the November 2012 Hadron Collider Physics Symposium in Kyoto, Japan.

Kruse says there could be several reasons for the discrepancy. It could just be a statistical fluke. Or, there could be a subtle problem with one or both of the measurements. “There is a lot that goes into these analyses and it is not always possible at this stage to be absolutely certain every detail has been done perfectly,” Kruse says.

The more dramatic scenario is that these results could be due to two different Higgs-like particles.

Kruse, however, thinks the two Higgs-like particle answer is highly unlikely, especially if scientists using the CMS experiment at LHC do not report the same discrepancy. CMS scientists have not yet released their new “two photon” result.

The ATLAS result is most likely due to a statistical fluctuation. Right now, though, the team has only crunched about half the data from the collisions. Of course, scientists will only know more once they have analyzed the full ATLAS dataset a couple of months from now, Kruse adds, suggesting that there is still the possibly for more Higgs mania to come.

An Evening with Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee

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On December 13, 2012

In Biology, Cancer, Lecture

By Pranali Dalvi
Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells. We take this idea for granted today, but the definition of cancer evaded us for many years.

In a talk on on Dec. 6, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, physician, and cancer researcher Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, took his audience on a journey through the archives of medicine to build a bird’s eye view of cancer and how we define the disease today. The presentation was part of the Weaver Memorial Lecture, hosted every other year in memory of William B. Weaver, a 1972 Duke graduate.

“The entire history of our encounter with cancer really consists of four major discoveries, of which we’re experiencing and living the fourth,” Mukherjee said.

Phase I: A Disease of Cells

The first discovery was that cancer is a disease of cells. In the late 1800s, the idea that cancer is a dysregulated growth of our own cells was a deeply radical idea. Scientists at the time and earlier insisted that all diseases in the human body could be explained by either an excess or a deficit in one of four fluids – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Making no exception, Roman physician Galen posited that cancer, too, resulted from an excess of black bile in the body.

Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern human anatomy, overthrew Galenic tradition by disproving the existence of black bile, which forced surgeons and early cancer scientists to seek a different explanation for cancer. That explanation came from Rudolf Virchow, who examined cancerous tissue microscopically and realized that all cancers had a commonality – the overabundance of cells. This conception of cancer drew in surgeons: if cancer originated from a single cell, it could be eliminated by surgically removing the cancerous cluster.

Scientists also developed radiation therapy to destroy cancer. Unfortunately, many who received radiation therapy for cancer ended up contracting cancer. Biologists were perplexed: how could X-rays which killed cells also be responsible for the abnormal growth of cells in cancer? Was there an interaction via the environment that was inducing cancer in cells? This question remained a mystery for over 70 years.

Another way to kill cells was chemotherapy, which emerged when mustard gas, a war gas, was found. Scientists added it to their arsenal of surgical and radiation treatment for cancer.

Phase II: A Disease of Genes

Still, these cancer treatments were all empirical; scientists had no biological understanding of the mechanism of the disease. They hypothesized that the empirical strategy in conjunction with chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery would bring a cure to all cancers by the summer of 1979. However, that summer came and went, forcing scientists to explore the mechanism of cancer before planning their next attack.

“The number of cancers diagnosed increased at the same time the number of deaths [due to emerging treatments] decreased, creating a cancer society – a society in which cancer became more visible in our public consciousness,” Mukherjee said.

The increased presence of cancer pressed for a mechanistic understanding of cancer at the gene level. The idea, first proposed in 1976, that cancer was a disease of genes was revolutionary yet disappointing. People had hoped that cancer was a virus or something foreign but the idea that cancer was in our own cells was terrifying – the enemy was our own body.

Phase III: A Disease of Genomes

The tall peaks in this map of human prostate cancer represent genes commonly mutated in cancer. The smaller peaks are rarely mutated genes, and the small dots are genes mutated in a single cancer patient. Credit: Johns Hopkins University.

In 1990, the definition of cancer changed once again as it was discovered to be a disease of genomes. Not just one gene but many genes are mutated in cancer, a depiction of the disease painted by the work of Bert Vogelstein among others. As multiple genes in our genome regulate normal cells, multiple genes must be mutated to cause cancerous cells.

While some genes are mutated in cancer patients across the board, there are mutations unique to each individual, too. The problem is that the tumors look identical under the microscope. Mukherjee compares this phenomenon to the fact that every single human face has a common anatomy but is still quite different.

“The challenge as you sequence cancer genomes is that there is great diversity and therefore you reach the frightening corollary that every breast cancer is unique in the same way that every woman who has breast cancer is unique,” Mukherjee said.

With such variation, how do we remain optimistic about a cure?

Mukherjee offered acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) as an example. Once known as the most threatening variant of acute leukemias, APL is now the most curable variant. One gene was identified that was common to all APL variants and one medicine – retinoic acid – was successful in treating this disease.

Phase IV: An Organismal Disease

As of 2010, cancer has been reconceived as an organismal disease: the human is simultaneously the site of the cancer, its prevention, and cure.

“Our next step is to understand the physiology of cancer – not just the cell biology, not the gene biology, nor the genome biology – but the physiology of cancer,” Mukherjee reminded us.

Despite the disease’s high level of complexity, scientists have new tools of computation to process data they previously could not, leading to the belief that cancer is a pathway disease. It’s not just genes and genomes that are mutated in cancer, it’s the cells’ language that drives those pathways and the resulting abnormalities. That language is the focus of scientists new cancer investigations and another piece of the devastating disease’s biography.

The new blood diamond is your cell phone

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On December 13, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Environment/Sustainability, Global Health, Lecture

by Ashley Mooney

There is an African proverb that says “when the elephants fight, the grass suffers.”

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the elephants are militias and the grass is the women, said John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough Project, an organization that fights to end genocide.

Congolese rape victims assemble outside of a peace hut. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Prendergast, who spoke at Duke Nov. 29, said the DRC is now the home of the deadliest war since World War II. The conflict has been created in part by large corporations seeking a variety of natural resources within the region throughout the past 150 years. Currently, the Congo is the main source of gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten, which are used to power electronics such as cell phones, laptops and digital cameras.

“Congo is now the most dangerous war because powerful corporations have come to [the country] for the last few centuries to take whatever they want, and structured the state to facilitate that,” he said. His talk was part of the Ferguson Family Distinguished Lectureship series on the Environment and Society.

The nation is currently riddled by struggles between the Congolese armies, militias and other groups from bordering nations Rwanda and Uganda. Many of the groups utilize brutal tactics throughout mineral-smuggling networks, and, Prendergast said, use sexual violence at the center of their methodology.

“[There has been] no other war in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and sexual violence is so direct,” he said. “All of these groups use rape as a means of social control… They target women to humiliate and destroy the will of the community.”

Prendergast has dedicated himself to the pursuit of peace in the region for over 30 years and has lobbied several companies – including Apple – to use free-trade models of mineral trade.

“Unless international capital or profit-seeking capital is regulated in some way, it will trample all over human rights,” he said.

Prendergast credited Duke’s student body for leading the nation in the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative, which 115 schools are involved in.

The way to create peace, he said, is to pressure the United States government to encourage the United Nations and other countries to support “an African-led peace process in Congo,” which deals with the root causes of the issue.

“We aren’t going to solve all of the Congo’s problems sitting here – we aren’t going to solve them in the United States or Europe,” he said. “But we can play a major role in supporting the Congolese to find those solutions.”

He added that until everyone is more aware of the root cause – the demand for phones, laptops and other electronics – the conflict will not end.

“When you log onto your laptops tonight, remember they wouldn’t be so cheap without minerals from the Congo,” he said. “When you answer your cell phone or make a call, remember… all of the women of the Congo who have survived sexual attacks.

From the basement, female physicists shaped Duke and German science

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On December 5, 2012

In Lecture, Mathematics, Physics, Science Communication & Education

By Ashley Yeager

Google Doodle honors physicist Hedwig Kohn who fled Nazi Germany

Google Doodle honors physicist Hedwig Kohn who fled Nazi Germany

Physicist Hedwig Kohn‘s brother was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1941.

Yet, when she trained young German physicists at Duke University a little more than 10 years later, she bore no resentment against them. Those students later returned to Germany and helped educate the country’s students in quantum mechanics.

Kohn fled Nazi Germany with the help of several prominent scientists in 1940, teaching first at the Women’s College in Greensboro, now UNC–Greensboro, and then at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In 1952, she retired from teaching and accepted a research associate position working with physicist Hertha Sponer at Duke.

“It’s important that Kohn’s and Sponer’s tenure at Duke not be forgotten,” said physicist Brenda Winnewisser, an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University. The women’s lives and their research helped shape the physics department’s early encouragement of women interested in science.

Winnewisser, who earned her Ph.D. in physics at Duke in 1965, spoke briefly about Sponer and mostly about Kohn during a Nov. 28 physics colloquium. During her talk, Winnewisser recounted Kohn’s history, explained how she saved Kohn’s letters and photographs from destruction and described how she is using the archived information to write Kohn’s biography, a book called Hedwig Kohn: A Passion for Physics.

In her lab, which was in the subbasement of the Duke physics building, Kohn measured the absorption features and concentrations of atomic species in flames. The research was a continuation of what she had worked on from 1912 until 1933, when the Nazis stripped her of her privilege to do research and teach because of her being Jewish and female.

Still, the Nazis couldn’t take away the quality or importance of her work, which had a resurgence in citations in the 1960s as researchers began to test rocket designs and study plasmas, Winnewisser said. She added that Kohn also had an “indirect impact on improving quantum mechanics education in Germany after World War II.”

Three of the four physicists Kohn mentored at Duke returned to Germany to teach at prominent universities, bringing with them what they had learned from Kohn about flames, absorption and also quantum mechanics. “Kohn gave them the technical basis for successful careers,” Winnewisser said.

Her biography of Kohn, who died in 1964, is slated for release by Biting Duck Press in the spring of 2014.

What To Expect When You're Expecting the Nobel Prize

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On November 27, 2012

In Chemistry, Faculty, Lecture

By Karl Leif Bates

Photo Illustration by Jonathan Lee, Duke News

Duke’s soon-to-be Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Robert Lefkowitz, is off to Sweden next week to pick up his prize and to shake King Carl Gustav’s hand  — probably more than once.

But first, he has to visit President Obama at the White House, say a few words at the Swedish embassy, and do about a half-million other photo ops.

“It has been even more intense than I expected,” Lefkowitz said  in a hurried conversation on Tuesday.

His Nov. 29 visit to DC will be “an amazingly intense day,”  starting with a symposium and Q&A session at the Swedish embassy, followed by a 45-minute visit with the President and other American laureates in the Oval Office, then a reception at Blair House and maybe a trip to Capitol Hill. He’s been invited anyway;  he ‘s not sure he can go. Then it’s back to the embassy for a black tie dinner where he is to give remarks before 130 people or so, including Senators, members of the US Supreme Court and other Washington A-Listers.

Friday it’s back to campus, where Lefkowitz speaks to the Duke University  Board of Trustees meeting in the morning and then joins the board for a social event at Hart House in the evening.  Saturday, his synagogue honors him.  Sunday he packs.

“And then Stockholm? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Guests raise a toast to Alfred Nobel at the 2011 banquet. (Nobel Foundation 2011)

Lefkowitz’s  sojourn in the Swedish capitol includes a whole week of Nobel Festival events leading up to the Monday, Dec. 10 award ceremony.  Among other things, he is to  give a formal half-hour lecture for posterity and visit a local high school.  There’s also the matter of a 5-minute toast at a white-tie dinner with the King of Sweden,  which his co-laureate Brian Kobilka was only too glad to let him handle.

“They said 3 minutes, but I watched 15 of them online and the mean was 5 minutes. So mine is 4:45.”

On Monday, Dec. 10 — the 116th anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death — Lefkowitz will formally receive the medallion, a certificate, and “a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount” with his colleague and former student Kobilka in a white-tie and tails ceremony in the lavish Stockholm Concert Hall.

The Swedish Royal Family: (left to right) Queen Silvia, King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria, Prince Carl Philip and Prince Daniel. (Nobel Foundation 2011)

Laureates each receive only 14 tickets to this event, which is fewer than Lefkowitz has family members, unfortunately.  But even though they can’t get tickets, many Lefkowitz and Kobilka alumni from all over also will be coming to Stockholm, just to be close to it. They’ll have their own reception elsewhere during the week, Lefkowitz said.  And then on Dec. 11, there’s yet another white-tie dinner with the King and Queen — in the royal palace this time.

WHERE TO SEE IT

If you weren’t one of the lucky 14 people to get a ticket from Bob, Duke is hosting a viewing party for the live webcast of the Nobel ceremony from 10:30 a.m. to Noon on Monday, Dec. 10. in Schiciano Auditorium A&B.  (White tie and tails are optional.)

You can also tune in wherever you might be that morning at http://nobelprize.org.  The prize committee has not decided yet whether the 90-minute Nobel Banquet Highlights program will be made available on the web. It will be broadcast on Swedish television.

Learn more about Lefkowitz’s research and mentorship on Duke Today’s special site.

 

Here’s the hardware, baby: Linus Pauling’s Chemistry medal from 1954.

Physicians and Patients Make Best Decisions Together

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On November 27, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Medicine

By Nonie Arora

Imagine yourself in this patient’s situation. You have just found out you have cancer, and the next phrase out of your doctor’s mouth is “You’re going to die with this cancer rather than of this cancer.” Which word do you think will jump out of that sentence? “With”? “Of”?

My money is on “die.” – Modified from Critical Decisions, pg. 99

Critical Decisions, Courtesy of www.peterubel.com

In Critical Decisions, Peter Ubel describes a common situation of a urologist explaining a prostate cancer diagnosis to a patient. In this exam room, the physician and the patient are on two different wavelengths. The doctor is trying to assuage the fears of the patient but is emphasizing technical details about the patient’s condition without first relating to the patient’s emotional shock from hearing a cancer diagnosis. Ubel suggests even a small acknowledgement of the patient’s emotional state could improve the situation. For instance, saying “I know it feels awful to be told you have cancer, but you should know that your cancer is curable. We can treat this.” (Critical Decisions, pg. 100)

Ubel, a Professor of Business Administration and Medicine as well as Public Policy, recently published Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together. In the book, he explores how the rise in patient empowerment has left many patients confused and physicians unprepared to appropriately partner with patients in making medical decisions.

“My background in clinical medicine, ethics, and behavioral sciences collided. That led me to an in-depth investigation of patient preferences in medical care,” says Ubel. While his ethics background left him sure that patients have the right to ultimately decide their own medical care, he wanted to use his understanding of behavioral economics to uncover how physicians can best help patients make the decisions.

Peter Ubel, Professor of Business Administration and Medicine and of Public Policy. Courtesy of Duke Today.

Ubel also comments on how some emotional desensitization is essential to practicing medicine, and how desensitization can involve medical humor. He says that sometimes physicians “need to step back and laugh at situations, but the danger is we don’t want to laugh at patients.”  He suggested a way to combat the negative aspects of desensitization is to discuss ethical issues during the 3rd year of medical education, when future physicians are being exposed to the realities of medicine through hospital rounds.

He says the bigger worry is that aspiring doctors start off with the right attitude, but beliefs and practices erode through training and practice as physicians. In the current medical system, physicians have many patients and very little time, so doctors can get into bad habits. However, he says that good communication doesn’t take more time – it just takes retaining the right skills. Ubel advocates for physicians to ask patients to explain back what they have understood to get a better idea of patient understanding.

One of Ubel’s next big challenges is studying how cost factors into patient empowerment. Discussions about cost can seem taboo or uncomfortable in the exam room, but costs certainly factor into many health care decisions.

The strength of Critical Decisions is Ubel’s multidimensional perspective: he presents facts from research studies in several disciplines and compellingly (even humorously) draws upon his experiences as a physician, patient, and family member of a patient.

Here’s a link to an excerpt from the book for more!

SNCURCS "Snickers" Conference Brings NC Undergrads Together

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On November 26, 2012

In Neuroscience, Students

By Nonie Arora

Duke student Katie Shpanskaya is excited about how education can change our brains.  She had the chance to share her work with other students in a poster session at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium (SNCURCS).

Hundreds of undergraduates from several North Carolina universities came together to talk about research at SNCURCS (pronounced like Snickers, the candy bar) hosted by Duke University on November 17th.

In the lab of Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, Shpanskaya studies the effects of education on Alzheimer’s disease. Originally from Raleigh, Shpanskaya is a sophomore in Trinity College studying Neuroscience. When she’s not in classes or working in the lab, she tutors through UNITED (a high school tutoring organization that she is the president of) and mentors others through the Women’s Mentoring Network.

In Alzheimer’s, the part of the brain called the hippocampus experiences great neuronal cell death and amyloid plaques accumulate throughout the brain, Shpanskaya said. The hippocampus is important for memory, and Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by progressive memory loss. In the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, the protein amyloid-beta builds up whereas this protein is normally broken down, Shpanskaya clarified.

Shpanskaya explained that the study she is working on has found that patients with higher education (17 or more years) had greater hippocampal volume size than those with less education (less than 12 years). Those with more education also had less overall loss of hippocampal volume. Shpanskaya also said that those who challenge themselves cognitively benefit: they retain more functionality when afflicted by Alzheimer’s.

MRI image depicting the hippocampal region of interest used in computing hippocampal volume. Courtesy of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).

“Education likely acts through neuroprotective mechanisms, thereby decreasing volume loss to delay cognitive decline. This is supported by our results,” said Shpanskaya.

At the conference, students also had a chance to interact with faculty members from other institutions, and attend “Lunchbox Learning” sessions on topics such as avoiding research misconduct and applying to graduate school.

Overall, students appreciated the opportunity to attend the symposium and meet students from around the state. “I thought SNCURCS was a great symposium that really did a good job of bringing together students from all sorts of research backgrounds together to learn from each other and share their work,” said Trinity sophomore Akhil Sharma. “SNCURCS really showed a good sample of the great research institutions North Carolina houses and it was a great feeling to be a part of it all.”

A Passion for Research

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On November 19, 2012

In Biology, Cancer, Genetics/Genomics, Students

By Prachiti Dalvi

Akash Shah, Trinity ’13

“Research enables me to think about a question that excites me and helps patients,” says Trinity senior Akash Shah.  A biology major, philosophy minor, and a candidate for the Genome Sciences and Policy Certificate, Akash became interested in genomics as a freshman in the Genome Focus. Originally from Fullerton, CA, Akash was drawn to Duke because of its its immense biomedical research enterprise. He also loved the fact that at Duke, the medical school, law school, and business school were on the same campus as the undergraduate campus.

Intrigued by the research his professor Dr. Hunt Willard was conducting, he asked to get involved. His work in Dr. Willard’s lab dealt with artificial human chromosomes. More specifically, he was working with others in the lab to identify which regions of the chromosome would be deleted when transformed into human cells.

Now, Akash works in the Nevins Lab, where he looks at candidate genes in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway: an important pathway in many cancers. When growth factors bind to the external portion of the receptor, the receptor becomes activated. Side effects of receptor activation include tumor growth and metastasis. When scientists target genes associated with this pathway, they can increase tumor cells’ sensitivity to pathway inhibitors and better prevent tumor cell reproduction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE4BkAw_lL4

The advent of computational genomics has allowed for major advances in the field. Fifteen to twenty years ago, cloning genes was considered a PhD project, and now, it is something an undergraduate can do.

Akash’s favorite aspect of research at Duke is its collaborative nature. Faculty members work with another and across departments. His research is not limited to labs at Duke. In fact, he as also worked with professors at UCLA and Harvard. The culture of research varies from one university to the next; thus, Shah encourages undergraduates to do research at different institutions. “It gives you a chance to succeed in different cultures.”

When he is not in the lab, Akash enjoys playing cricket and exploring local restaurants with friends. During his time at Duke, he has been involved with numerous organizations, and has become an integral part of the Genome Research and Education Society (GRES). During his sophomore year, he founded a program in which undergraduates shadowed other undergraduates doing genomics research. In order to make research more accessible to undergraduates, Akash has helped organize career talks, including MD/PhD information sessions. After graduating from Duke in the spring, Akash hopes to begin medical school, and eventually pursue a career in academic medicine so he can continue conducting research. He has worked extensively in cancer genomics research and hopes to explore cancer stem cells in the future.

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