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University of Windsor graduate Kathyani Parasram (PhD 2023) has discovered how biological timing is born in fruit flies, shedding light on when circadian rhythms turn on in animals and providing a path for future research in other species.

The circadian rhythm is a molecular timekeeper that runs on a 24-hour cycle, present from cyanobacteria to mammals. Best known from sleep-wake cycles, humans in fact have daily rhythms in feeding-fasting, heartbeat and blood pressure, immune system activity, metabolism, the release of hormones, and indeed most of the functions of the organs in our bodies.

“Circadian rhythms are evolutionarily conserved in all animals, and they are present in nearly all cells in the body due to a genetic timer called the circadian clock,” says Dr. Parasram.

“For many years, researchers have asked when during development circadian timing starts – we know for instance that in newborn babies, circadian rhythms are absent for many months, keeping parents awake at all hours for the first year. Most of past work has been focused on the brain and behaviours.”

But how does a clock emerge in the cells of the body? To answer this question, Parasram looked at the clock of a simple animal: Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. This animal is a favorite in research because – even though it looks quite different – the cells in the fly are evolutionarily related to those in all animals.

“Using single cell sequencing and Drosophila genetics, we determined that the circadian clock is completely absent during most of the life cycle stages of the fly,” says Parasram.

“The genes that control circadian rhythms do not get turned on until the insect hatches from its pupal case as an adult. In response to hormones released as the insect hatches the clock turns on quickly, and then the environment synchronizes the clocks in the cells to match day-night cycles.”

Her research was done in Phillip Karpowicz’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Collaborators from Brian Deveale’s UWindsor lab and Edan Foley’s lab at the University of Alberta were co-authors.

This work shows that circadian rhythms in the body of insects, the most abundant type of animal on Earth, are born surprisingly late during adulthood, with implications for everything from insect ecology to pest control.

As the founding director of WE-Spark Health Institute, Lisa Porter led the creation of a collaborative and inclusive health research ecosystem, says Dora Cavallo-Medved, interim dean of the Faculty of Science.

Now Dr. Porter, a professor of biomedical sciences, is expanding her research reach as vice-president, research and scientific director at St. Joseph’s Health Care London.

“We are excited to congratulate Dr. Porter on her new position,” Dr. Cavallo-Medved. “Moreover, we are proud and grateful for Dr. Porter’s amazing and dedicated leadership in advancing health research in Windsor-Essex.”

Over the last five years, Porter has brought together researchers to drive advancements in health in Windsor-Essex. Her new role in London will increase her ability to continue making a difference.

She will remain an active faculty member at the University of Windsor, but is stepping down as director of WE-Spark Health Institute. In the interim, Cavallo-Medved will oversee the institute with support from assistant director Karen Metcalfe and its staff.

“Through collaborative efforts, WE-Spark will continue to build a thriving and impactful health research ecosystem alongside our core regional partners,” Cavallo-Medved says.

WinHacks 2024, Feb. 17 and 18 in the Centre for Engineering Innovation, brought together more than 130 participants, volunteers, and sponsors from the Windsor-Essex tech community.

A weekend of collaboration, skill development workshops, and networking with $2,000 in prizes up for grabs, it was the first time the event has been held in person since its debut in 2020.

“Bringing WinHacks in-person for the first time is a milestone for the Windsor-Essex tech community. Hackathons provide opportunities for tech enthusiasts to collaborate, innovate, and solve real-world problems,” says Vivian Tang, fourth-year computer science student and co-lead WinHacks 2024 organizer.

“It’s important we continue investing in local tech talent to ensure WinHacks’ continued success in the years ahead.”

She and her co-lead Abbie Dewhirst are both fourth-year computer science students.

“WinHacks could not have been possible without the organizing team, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and judges who helped make WinHacks a success,” Dewhirst says. “We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from hackers saying they’re already looking forward to next year’s hackathon.”  

More information on WinHacks, and photos from the weekend, can be found here.

Partnering with specialists Block Harbor Cybersecurity will help UWindsor students develop skills in high demand, says engineering professor Mitra Mirhassani, co-director of the SHIELD Automotive Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence.

Headquartered in Troy, Michigan, the company develops tests to determine whether vehicles are meeting standards against cyber threats. It will provide cases to SHIELD for training in assessing the robustness of vehicle security measures.

The partnership provides a valuable link between academe and industry, Dr. Mirhassani says.

“SHIELD was established with the goal of training experts in this exciting field,” she says. “Automotive cybersecurity requires a hands-on approach.”

Wenjuan Lu, director of products for Block Harbor, notes there is a need for professionals with the highly specific skill set required to perform these tests: “We are excited to work with the University of Windsor to equip their students with the latest knowledge and highly sought-after skills in the field.”

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an integral part of the discussion on the future of assessments. The Office of Open Learning and the Department of Integrative Biology invite the campus community to hear from Eliana El-Khoury, assistant professor at Athabasca University and expert in alternative assessment, in a session that explores the convergence of AI and assessment design in higher education.

“The emergence of generative AI and its rapidly expanding capabilities provides the perfect catalyst for critical re-evaluation of both the nature of learning, and how we evaluate it in higher education,” says Nick Baker, director of the Office of Open Learning.

Scheduled for Friday, March 8, at 11 a.m., Dr. El-Khoury’s presentation will showcase diverse assessment ideas and examples involving AI, and also venturing beyond AI’s confines. The interactive session aims to provide instructors with a unique opportunity to rethink and reshape their own assessment strategies.

Participants will leave with actionable ideas to implement in their teaching methodologies. By the end of the presentation, participants will not only be able to identify various ways to infuse AI into their assessments, but will also gain an understanding of how universities worldwide are supporting instructors in making informed decisions about AI and assessments.

Isabelle Barrette-Ng, 3M National Teaching Fellow and head of the Department of Integrative Biology, notes that experts in the field are exploring opportunities through technological advances: “This session with Dr. El-Khoury is a unique chance for educators to tap into these advancements, ensuring they stay at the forefront of innovative assessment practices.”

“Rethinking Assessment in the AI Era” will be delivered in person in room 1114, Erie Hall. Register here for this free interactive session.

Fresh on campus, Karim Malik already has big plans for his research program.

An assistant professor in the School of the Environment as of January 2024, he is developing tools to monitor land-use and landcover change, and the effects of climate change through investigating patterns of transformation in remotely sensed data.

“Given the burgeoning rate of natural and anthropogenic disturbances, the development of tools for monitoring land-use and landcover change has become more imperative than ever,” Dr. Malik says.

“My research detects and quantifies anthropogenic impacts on the natural environment. For example, if you take a natural landscape that is not developed and then humans come in, clear vegetation and build houses — there will be changes there.

“So how do we detect how much land has been used and how much is left unchanged? I am developing computer vision and geospatial tools to compare patterns in land-use and landcover; with spatially sensitive tools, we can detect and quantify change if we compare attributes in land-use and landcover maps over space and time.”

As he designs his GeospatialVision lab and recruits graduate students, Malik will focus on integrating and developing tools from Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and artificial intelligence (AI) to advance understanding of how human-induced disturbances impact the environment.

“My research investigates the potential of computer vision and machine learning methods to compare patterns inherent in Earth observation measurements such as data acquired through remote sensing technology,” he says.

“We need to extensively explore these emerging tools and begin to discover spatial-temporal changes, get some solutions, and effectively monitor anthropogenic impacts on the Earth’s systems.”

Acting director of the School of the Environment Alice Grgicak-Mannion says it is a thrill to have Malik join the department.

“His expertise in remote sensing and machine learning techniques will bring another heightened level of geospatial prowess into our unique GISc. Certificate program,” says Dr. Grgicak-Mannion.

“Dr. Malik's research will also be a wonderful catalyst in promoting specialized prediction and visualization methods of terrestrial environments and landscape change to our students and colleagues.”

His work will help propel more conversation about land-water-climate interactions and sustainability, says Grgicak-Mannion, which is something that humans are desperate to understand, especially as we continue to experience volatile environmental changes and impacts.

“Most importantly, it is Dr. Malik's belief that geospatial technologies, such as GIS, UAVs, and remote sensing can be shared and taught to anyone, especially to those who have never seen or heard of these technologies,” she says.

“That thinking alone brings another level of nobility not only to our programs and our students but also to EDI initiatives that are blossoming across campus."

Malik was hired through a recruitment effort of the UWindsor Black Studies Institute to hire Black-identifying scholars across campus who will enhance research, creative, and scholarly work, and community collaboration.

“This is a great opportunity for a young generation of Black scholars to contribute meaningful work to academia and the community,” he says.

UWindsor scientists are investigating a mercury contamination mystery that could threaten the future of the Kenyan Nile perch fisheries.

Although Ken Drouillard found that mercury contamination in Winam Gulf, the largest portion of Lake Victoria within Kenya, is on the decline in both the lake as a whole and in the lower components of its food web, he also discovered it is on the rise within Nile perch.

“We saw loadings of mercury increasing from 1960s to the ’80s when it peaked and then started declining and you’d expect the whole lake to recover as a result,” says Dr. Drouillard, School of the Environment professor and Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER) researcher.

“We observed that in the lower trophic levels of the food web the mercury dropped, in mussels and even in smaller fish such as Nile tilapia, but then looking at the top predatory fish Nile perch, we found the opposite pattern and mercury was increasing — this was perplexing.”

Nile perch, which can grow up to 2 m and weigh as much as 200 kg, is a high-quality whitefish that Kenyan fishers rely on for their livelihood. Nile perch were introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s to devastating effect on endemic cichlid species causing mass extinctions in this ancient African Great Lake. However, as the fish composition changed, so did its fisheries, and now Nile perch constitutes the country’s most important aquatic export commodity.

Drouillard says they were not expecting the toxin anomaly, which could be an early warning indicator that there is a problem with the sustainability of the Nile perch fisheries.

He says the mercury increase is happening despite the decrease in loadings to the system and after disproving several hypotheses as to why that is, fell upon one scientific explanation.

“It is happening because of bioenergetic stressors happening in the lake, which is reducing the fishes’ growth, meaning these fish are growing less efficiently than they used to. That slower growth rate means they accumulate mercury at a higher rate,” he says.

Among the variety of possible responsible stressors are harmful algal blooms, excess nutrients getting added to the ecosystem via aquaculture pens, and intense agriculture or other impacts of invasive species.

One positive aspect of having an early warning indicator, says Drouillard, is that something may be done about it. This could be a prelude of what may be coming to Lake Victoria as a whole.

“The biggest strategy now is to consider how to manage the water quality,” he says.

“This is a canary in the coal mine observation that the fisheries may be in trouble, and we don’t want to focus on mercury, but address other multiple lake stressors which are somehow interacting with toxic contaminants and exacerbating their effects.”

It is also a potential wake-up call for the Great Lakes, as Winam Gulf has similarities to parts of Lake Erie. Drouillard accompanied a team of UWindsor researchers led by GLIER director Mike McKay to Kenya to compare algal blooms in Africa and North America’s Great Lakes.

“Like Winam Gulf, Lake Erie’s shallower western basin has a lot of activities, from agriculture to industrial, and when you add pollutants to these shallow systems, they become more concentrated, with higher impacts as a result.

“This could make us vulnerable to multiple stressors as well.”

As part of Drouillard’s research he teamed up with senior research fellow from Saint Mary’s University, Linda Campbell, who had collected data in Winam Gulf in 1998. Drouillard and Dr. Campbell replicated her 1998 sampling design to generate a strong 25-year pollutant comparison.

The research results appeared in the journal Science of the Total Environment in the article, “Increasing mercury bioaccumulation and biomagnification rates of Nile perch (Lates niloticus L.) in Winam Gulf, Lake Victoria, Kenya.”

Depending on your age, you may not be familiar with the tremendous life of the late Howard McCurdy — but around Windsor, you’ve almost certainly heard his name.

Dr. McCurdy’s wife, Brenda, hopes his book Black Activist, Black Scientist, Black Icon: The Autobiography of Dr. Howard D. McCurdy will introduce the next generation to the trailblazer.

“There’s a whole generation that’s coming behind him who don’t know what he’s accomplished and what he did,” Brenda explained. “And so, if they can learn about that in the book, wonderful. They might learn something about a great Canadian, a lot of people probably don’t know a lot about.”

McCurdy, a microbiologist, was a professor at the University of Windsor where he became the first Black person to hold a tenure-track position at a Canadian university. He joined the faculty in 1959 and served as the head of the biology department. He worked at the University for 25 years.

“He enjoyed being there, the students loved him,” Brenda said.

“When he was active in Parliament, we’d come back to Windsor for local events. And somebody would always come up to him and say, ‘Oh, Dr. McCurdy, I was in your class. Oh, you were a good professor.’ They really liked him. And they enjoyed his teaching.”

McCurdy started his career in politics in 1979 as a Windsor city councillor — called an alderman at the time. He then moved on to become Canada’s second Black member of Parliament when he was elected in 1984 — and the first for the New Democratic Party, which he has been credited with naming.

During his career, McCurdy worked toward the advancement of civil rights, co-founding the National Black Coalition of Canada, the Guardian Club, a local civil rights organization, as well as the Windsor and District Black Coalition.

His legacy at the University of Windsor is part of the reason it was chosen as a location for the launch and signing of McCurdy’s autobiography.

Brenda, as well as Geroge Elliot Clarke, who edited the book and was a close friend and colleague of McCurdy, will be at the event on Thursday, Feb. 29, in the Essex CORe Atrium. Other events have been held at the School of Creative Arts during BookFest, the Amherstburg Freedom Museum, as well as stops in Toronto and Halifax.

Before McCurdy’s death in 2018, he selected Clarke, a Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate and professor at the University of Toronto, as his editor. After McCurdy’s death, Brenda got his book together and passed it along to Clarke, knowing it would be in good hands.

“He said, ‘I made this promise to you and Howard, and I’m going to keep my promise.’ And he said, ‘Nothing gives me more pleasure than knowing that I'm doing something by Howard.’ He worked for Howard for several years in Parliament. And those two had such a strong bond together,” Brenda said.

To get the book off the ground, Clarke would send Brenda chapters to review to get her opinion and see if McCurdy’s mood and voice were appropriately captured and conveyed to the audience.

She said the book is very comprehensive, starting with his birth and ending with his death.

“It goes through his whole life,” Brenda explained. “The whole book — childhood, university life, his political activity, work on city council — it’s all there. I think people will really enjoy reading it.”

Brenda said she hopes the book will offer readers the chance to understand the man her husband really was.

“I think people had a certain impression of him, but he was quite down to earth. I think people maybe saw him as being grumpy sometimes — and he was,” she said with a smile. “But he would snap out of it pretty quickly. But it’s because there are issues that he was very passionate about. And when he felt that passion, he spoke out about it, whether people liked to hear it or not. He spoke the truth. And I think that’s what I admire about him.”

The autobiography, Black Activist, Black Scientist, Black Icon, is available for purchase in the Campus Bookstore, as well as online. Those interested in attending the launch are asked to RSVP by Friday, Feb. 23.

Salma Ahmida is in fourth-year integrative biology, and she is struggling to decide what she will do after graduation.

After attending the Faculty of Science’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science research panel, featuring talks by four successful scientists, Ahmida says she has more hope that it will work out for her.

“It was refreshing to see that even if you don’t know what you are doing in life, which is what I’m currently going through, at the end, you’ll accomplish something,” says Ahmida.

“To see all these successful women in different positions as they face failures in the past, or feel imposter syndrome, who are now in a career and field that they like — they are inspirational.  It makes me feel better about the future.”

The event was hosted by the Women in Science (WinS) group. Co-organizer and co-leader Hadia Malik, a fourth-year medical physics major, says the event was partly about getting insight into the logistics behind research.

“It was also about giving women the opportunity to network with other people at the university and showing the different career paths you can explore,” says Malik.

“Sometimes in science we only hear about professional schools, so it was a nice opportunity to hear other people’s experiences.”

The four scientists who spoke at the research panel are:

• Tricia Carmichael, associate dean of science for research and graduate studies and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry;
• Melissa Valdez (BSc 2015), lead consultant at Zafin Labs Inc.;
• Olivia Galloway, master’s student in the Department of Integrative Biology; and
• Dorota Lubanska (PhD 2013), research associate in the Department of Biomedical Sciences.

What would happen to the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem if there were an oil spill? An international, multidisciplinary team of scientists is planning in-depth investigations into that very question.

UWindsor researchers from the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER) are joining a multi-faceted team led by Michigan’s Lake Superior State University in the Biological Impacts of Oil in Our Waters of the North (BIO-OWN) network. The four-year project has received $1,756,000 from Natural Resources Canada Multi-Partner Research Initiative fund.

“There is not a lot of research that’s been done on freshwater habitats and what happens when these spills occur,” says Chris Weisener, School of the Environment professor and GLIER researcher.

“Many studies have explored the impacts of oil spills on aquatic life; however, most studies have focused on marine systems, effects on individual species, or used lab-based experiments.”

The team will take wetland samples and run simulation exercises to evaluate long-term effects of oil on the structure and function of wetland communities.

The facility will be constructed along the shores of the St. Marys River, which connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron, and will enable researchers to study long-term, multi-trophic level effects of oil spills and bioremediation strategies under ambient environmental conditions, including harsh winters. Researchers will perform analysis in-house at GLIER.

“We do know oil impacted wetlands given time seem to respond favourably especially in saltwater environments, but the ecology is completely different compared to a freshwater system,” says Dr. Weisener.

“We’ll transplant wetland materials and expose those materials to an oil product. We’re starting at the base of the food web because we want to specifically observe whether the microbes respond favourably to that exposure.”

The project will work with real systems and study the unique possibility of bioremediation through microbes.

“Microbes see the oil as food,” Weisener says. “We also want to know whether the natural biogeochemical cycling is disrupted when exposed to these oil products and if they end up producing any harmful byproducts.”

GLIER director Mike McKay says there are other factors to consider regarding Lake Erie since the lake already has natural sources of gas that seep in.

“There are hundreds of gas swells in the central basin of Lake Erie?” says Dr. McKay. “Does this mean the system is already primed to deal with hydrocarbon contamination? Are the necessary organisms already present?”

Approaching the natural community, he says, will provide a more realistic picture of what is actually going on, including collecting local samples.

“We’ll expose real communities, taken from wetlands mainly in Sault St. Marie,” says McKay.

“But we hope to augment with local samplings including areas that might be prone to low level but chronic exposure — like low level oil pollution from the Detroit River shipping industry.”

The three main goals of the network are to:

• advance scientific understanding of the ecological effects of oil spills,
• inform risk assessment models, and
• enhance oil spill preparedness, response, and damage assessment.

Master’s student Peter Jobin (BSc 2023) will start collecting samples for the project in the spring and summer of 2024-25.

The diverse team also includes experts from Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center, Cedre (France), as well as Lake Superior State University’s Center for Freshwater Research and Education, host site of the USCG Center of Expertise for Great Lakes Oil Spill Preparedness and Response.

With scientific knowledge and plenty of patience you can grow a beautiful crystal from scratch. A team of young high school scientists from Leamington put their skills to the test and came out champions, with a little help from the University of Windsor.

Beating out competition from across Canada in the 2023 National Crystal Growing Competition, Kristen Kretschmann and Sophia Kauffman from Leamington District Secondary School placed first in the Best Quality category. A Leamington team won the same prize in 2022.

Chemistry professor Nick Vukotic and Faculty of Science experiential learning specialist Michelle Bondy worked with Windsor-Essex high schools to prepare students for the competition.

A committee from Dr. Vukotic’s research group, which grows crystals in the lab on a regular basis, judged the locally made crystals; his industry research partner Proto Manufacturing, a Windsor company that provides portable and laboratory x-ray diffraction systems and services, was one of competition’s sponsors.

“It is a pleasure for me to host this STEM centered crystal growing competition each year in our region,” says Vukotic, a researcher with UWindsor’s Advanced Material Centre of Research. “The crystals grown this year were particularly fantastic.”

For the second straight year, science and chemistry teacher Lauren Caza led the winning team from Leamington. She says the students thought it was fun to participate and as a teacher she sees the value in the experience.

“I find it interesting to see the different strategies they come up with and love watching them problem solve,” says Caza.

“Students learn so much more when they come across issues and have to try again, so it is a great lesson to learn early on in both science and life in general.”

Both last year and this year, says Caza, the winning crystals were grown by International Baccalaureate students.

“I think it is really validating to know our focus on fostering inquiry and reflecting on their learning is paying off.”

The first-place position earned the team a $250 cash prize.

Another local entry also did well: Khrystyna Syrotynska from Maria Sawicki’s class at Catholic Central High School placed ninth in the Overall Best Crystal category.

With a long-term goal of offering a novel approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, professor Vijendra Sharma is researching biological pathways that could reverse long-term memory impairment.

Alzheimer’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease characterized by a gradual loss of memory and cognition, leading to amnesia.

“First, we want to identify the cell types in the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease,” says Dr. Sharma.

“Then we’ll study how stress alters protein synthesis pathways in those cell types to create drugs that target the affected cells and correct the dysregulated protein synthesis, which is critical for memories.”

An assistant professor in biomedical sciences who started his lab at the University of Windsor in January 2023, Sharma will focus on the integrated stress response pathway, which is activated in Alzheimer’s disease. Prolonged cellular stress along this pathway in the brains of patients impairs the formation of long-term memory.

“We don’t know which cell types in the brain are more sensitive or affected by cellular stress, so by looking at post-mortem brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, we’ll identify the cells that are more sensitive to cellular stress and then use gene therapy to make them survive.”

In Alzheimer’s disease, the accumulation of neurotoxic proteins triggers the stress response to protect and promote cell survival. However, prolonged cellular stress and activation leads to cell death and subsequent brain atrophy.

To develop targeted medication or gene therapy, his team will engineer a viral vector that will control the activity of the integrated stress response pathway in specific cell types.

“When we take medicine, we have various side effects, with the main reason being that a drug will affect all cells, including healthy as well as diseased cells — it cannot differentiate,” Sharma says. “But by using gene therapy, we have the opportunity to target the affected cells in the Alzheimer’s brain.

“Like when you have a headache, we are taking medicine which goes through the entire system. Now we could have the opportunity to deliver medication to specific cell types.”

When we age, says Sharma, external and internal factors work together to inflame the brain, exert cellular stress, and affect memory strength. When you couple that with a neurological disorder, chronic cellular stress causes cell death, leading to severe memory loss.

Sharma is collaborating with experts in the field, including UWindsor colleagues from chemistry and biomedical sciences. His research project, titled Identification of cell-type-specific dysregulated mRNA translation in Alzheimer’s disease, got a boost with a one-year $20,000 WE-Spark Igniting Discovery grant.

“It is very important, especially for an early-career researcher like me, to be given financial support at this stage,” Sharma says.

“The grant is important because it will help me to develop projects and collect preliminary data so I can apply for more funding in the future.”

The WE-Spark Igniting Discovery grants provide seed funding to stimulate the development of early-stage, novel, and innovative health research and education projects in Windsor-Essex.

A field trip to explore high-tech anatomy and physiology tools gave graduate students of chemistry and biochemistry deeper understanding of the human body.

The experiential learning field trip to the Dr. Murray O’Neil Medical Education Centre, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry-Windsor Campus, allowed hands-on exploration of medical dissection through the Anatomage table, three-dimensional models, and human cadaver physiological organ systems.

Student Victoria Kis especially enjoyed the Anatomage table, a digital tool that enables users to analyze and examine human anatomy with the touch of a fingertip.

“I felt very excited and fortunate to be able to use the Anatomage table to take a look into the pregnant body and see the different organs and related systems,” Kis says.

The demonstrations — facilitated by Master of Medical Biotechnology program co-ordinator Tranum Kaur and Anna Farias and Terri Lawrence of the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry — covered such topics as the cardiovascular system, central nervous system, and abdominal organs.

Dr. Kaur notes experiential learning opportunities are high-impact practices imparting deep learning and enabling students to apply their knowledge beyond classroom walls.

“This exploration provided 3D simulated medical learning where learners interacted in fun and engaging ways with the innovative and technologically advanced medical educational tools used for human physiological systems,” she says.

“Notably, these real-life experiences create deeper interest in medical related careers and programs. In addition, the field trip was instrumental in making meaningful connections with the human physiological topics covered in the Medical Biotechnology program.”

Medical biotechnology student Tasfia Tahiat says working with the models allowed her to go beyond textbooks: “My understanding of anatomy was expanded by the three-dimensional element, which made it possible for me to see and engage with anatomical structures in ways that static pictures could never do.”

Chelsea Salter spent her master’s studies combing through Lake Erie sand investigating microbes because they were doing something unique. They were cleaning water tainted with an algal bloom toxin called cyanotoxin.

Salter (BSc 2020, MSc 2023) first heard of the phenomenon happening off the coast of Pelee Island when she was an undergraduate working in Chris Weisener’s lab. Dr. Weisener is a School of the Environment professor and researcher with the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER).

“It is really unique, and we don’t know of other natural bacterial communities that are doing this,” says Salter.

“As climate change intensifies and water resource demands increase, proper management and protection of freshwater resources must be prioritized to ensure water security.”

Harmful algal blooms are collections of cyanobacteria which can produce toxic secondary metabolites, such as microcystin, and release them into freshwater bodies, creating potentially significant human health risks. The western basin of Lake Erie, bordered by Michigan, Ohio, and southwestern Ontario, is frequently contaminated by toxic algal blooms.

Yet monitoring programs of public well waters on Pelee Island, also situated in the western basin of Lake Erie, have shown an absence of contamination of microcystin in their drinking water supplies.

Pelee Island’s municipal water supply and residential drinking wells both gather their water directly from the lake, which has passed through sand-filled trenches along the shoreline of the island. Salter looked at how and why the resilient and adaptive bacterial community in that sand were degrading the toxin from several aspects: the metabolic breakdown, gene transcription and taxonomic response to the toxin.

“Because of where it is located and the repeated exposure, it adaptively acquired all the tools it needed to break down this toxin as if it was a food source,” she says.

“Bacteria are extremely resilient and will utilize any resource in their means to survive.”

To recreate this degradation in the lab, Salter performed a benchtop batch experiment to monitor the breakdown of microcystin and the associated microbial activity over 48 hours to gain insights into the mechanisms controlling toxin degradation.

Overall, the results revealed a complex metabolism and supported that the community established a novel breakdown pathway, says Salter.

She says this complex community is very effective at degrading microcystin which means there is great potential for a water treatment application to treat outbreaks as they happen elsewhere in Lake Erie.

“We need more research but using bacteria as a potential biological sand filter application when there is toxin in the water would offer a safe and effective means to eliminate microcystin toxins without the need for chemical treatments,” she says.

Salter recently published her findings in the journal, Water Research, in the article, “Elucidating Microbial Mechanisms of Microcystin-LR Degradation in Lake Erie Beach Sand through Metabolomics and Metatranscriptomics.” She was also featured in the fall 2023 Great Lakes HABs Collaborative Newsletter.

“I’m definitely interested in the water quality of Lake Erie because I’ve lived here my whole life — Lake Erie is my great lake,” she says.

“Hopefully my research bridges the gap to get us to a place where it is more viable to harness the power of bacteria to mitigate the risks posed by toxic algal blooms, which frankly are not going to go away anytime soon.”

During her master’s at the University of Windsor, Salter was awarded a graduate research fellowship with the Cooperative Institution for Great Lake Research (CIGLR) at the University of Michigan. She is currently working as a microbial ecology laboratory technician at the Agriculture and Agri-food Canada Harrow Research Station.

300 Ouellette Avenue was filled with students, faculty, and industry partners for the ninth annual Computer Science Demo Day on Friday, Dec 14.

Groups of students stood in front of computers, eager to pitch their programming projects about applied Artificial Intelligence, agriculture, healthcare, social media trends, education and tech for consumer decision making.

Two MAC students, Vaibhavi Sathishkumar and Kashish Rastogi, showcased their health-care project called “DrugPulse.”

“DrugPulse helps people to know what medicine they’ll be prescribed for a diagnosis,” says Sathishkumar.

“We aren’t prescribing drugs, just recommending what you’ll likely be given. The user can discover how the drug is used and see how many people are currently using the drug.”

Sathishkumar points out it is better to have accurate information instead of just what turns up in an internet search, which can cause anxiety.

Co-presenter Rastogi says a second feature will be drug insight: “DrugPulse will tell you if other patients found it useful or not.”

Demo Day featured 45 presentations, including research and real-time projects from current undergraduate and graduate students. The downtown location is home to the Master of Applied Computing (MAC) program in the School of Computer Science.

“This is an exciting event for the students as well as the attendees,” says Dr. Kalyani Selvarajah (PhD 2020), event organizer and computer science assistant professor.

“We have students from a local robotic institute, and it is necessary to reach out to the younger generation in the community so they can be inspired by what is happening in the computer science field.”

Students from a local institute called Genio-Tech Robotics, which teaches robotics and coding for kids, took in the presentations along with students from the Windsor Islamic high. Joshua Stewart is a Genio-Tech Robotics student.

“I’m finding it pretty interesting, and I can see a lot of these moving on and becoming actually implemented,” says Stewart.

The following winning projects received awards at the end of the day:

• Best overall innovative project: “VirtuHire” by Saravanan Chandrasekaran and Hayden Cordeiro and Jivin Varghese Porthukaran
• Best research project: “SEERa” by Soroush Ziaeinejad
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Savannah sparrows living on a remote island off the coast of New Brunswick build their nests on the ground under dense vegetation. Sarah Dobney, a PhD student in the Department of Integrative Biology, wanted to know if this thick covering limits what nestlings can hear, potentially altering song learning — and set out to find out.

Nestlings learn to sing by listening to adults nearby. But Dobney says it was unknown what range a nestling can hear from inside the nest.

She devised a unique experiment to measure their hearing threshold with an acoustic recorder called a song meter. She took a typical omnidirectional microphone, with two back-to-back microphones, and split them up. She placed one microphone directly in the nest and clipped the second on a pole a meter above the nest, about where an adult would perch.

“I waited and let birds sing naturally and honestly, it was really awesome. We found songs are much quieter inside the nest,” says Dobney.

“I expected there to be a big difference, but I wasn’t prepared with how big that effect would be by just moving the mic into the vegetation that surrounds the nest — it was cool to see how drastic that was.”

The recordings were done after the young birds had already left the nest, so as not to disturb them during this sensitive phase of their lives. 

Dobney found that songs recorded from inside the nest were an average of 11 dB quieter than when the same songs were recorded just one meter above the nest, outside of the dense vegetation.

“This substantial reduction in amplitude means that nestlings can likely only detect song a maximum of 78.6 m away from the nest, which is much smaller than previously estimated,” she says.

“To learn their songs, savannah sparrows must hear tutor songs early in life. Our results suggest that nestlings hear 27 per cent fewer tutors than previously recognized.”

Male savannah sparrows use their songs to attract females and to ward off other males, so their song has huge implications into how they defend their territory, their resources, and how well they can attract mates, Dobney says.

Like human infants, savannah sparrows go through a critical period learning to make sounds.  When they are young, they memorize everything they hear and imitate to make their own individually distinctive sounds.

“I became interested in vocal learning because it is not a common behaviour,” she says.

“In this case, the nest may be surrounded by 15 singing adult males but say five of those males, nestlings aren’t even hearing.”

Individuals in this population return to breed in the same spot where they hatched as a baby. Dobney says this island population allows for lifelong studies of the savannah sparrows. Next, she will study whether early life social factors influence song complexity of young birds.

“Before answering questions about social factors, first you must understand what a young bird hears so you can know which adult males (aka tutors) to include and exclude from analyses,” she says.

“These results are really important and totally change my approach from how I initially planned to investigate this topic.”

Dobney’s research was recently published in the journal Avian Research in a paper called “Quiet in the nest: the nest environment attenuates song in a grassland songbird.” Integrative biology professors Dan Mennill and Stéphanie Doucet, her supervisor and collaborator respectively, co-authored the paper.