On this week's The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Nick Jaffe. Nick is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Fisheries and Wildlife . Nick studies gray wolf movement, behavior, and conflict with people. Over the last 25 years, gray wolves have successfully recolonized the entirety of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP). Wolves have, on multiple occasions, also crossed over to the Northern Lower Peninsula (NLP) of Michigan, highlighting the potential for continued expansion. If wolves did rec...
Mar 09, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 26
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Nick Young. Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in Physics & Astronomy and Computational Mathematics, Science, & Engineering . Nick studies the graduate admissions process in physics. To do so, he uses actual application data to build predictive machine learning models. Using these models, he is able to determine which aspects of the application are most influential in determining why an applicant is admitted. Through this work, ...
Mar 02, 2020•25 min•Season 2Ep. 24
In November last year, Chelsie and Danny saw Doppsee, the black rhino, get an ultrasound and they had an episode about it . Doppsee is the 13-year-old female eastern black rhino at Potter Park Zoo, who is originally from Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas. The male rhino at Potter Park, Phineus, traveled to Lansing from Caldwell Zoo in Texas in 2017. Doppsee gave birth to Jaali, on December 24th, 2019. In this episode, they follow up with Dr. Ronan Eustace, and Pat Fountain again to see how Doppsee i...
Mar 02, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 25
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Lauren Eichberger, Natalie Lyric Kagole and Arienne Patano about the coronavirus. Lauren is a graduate student in the Department of Animal Science with a focus on Immunology. Her research is focused on Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) which infects over 80% of herds across North America. Her current research investigates specific alleles that may correlate to host susceptibility or resistance to BLV. After her studies, she hopes to ...
Feb 24, 2020•18 min•Season 2Ep. 23
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview David Butts. David is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Computational Mathematics Science and Engineering department at Michigan State University , working under Prof. Murillo. David’s research employs a computational modeling technique called agent-based modeling. Historically, scientific models were written mathematically and heavily simplified the real-world systems they represented. These models made large approximations, ...
Feb 17, 2020•12 min•Season 2Ep. 22
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Seyed Mohammadreza Heidari. Mohammad is a dual Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Environmental Science and Policy . He has been involved in different research projects related to sustainable nanotechnology, green chemistry, biofuel, and solar energy. His Ph.D. dissertation is about how to synthesize fullerenes with less environmental impacts. Professor Kroto discovered ...
Feb 10, 2020•15 min•Season 2Ep. 21
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Mustafa Ahmadzai. Mustafa is in the dual degree DO/Ph.D. program at MSU, which enables him to blend his love for understanding disease mechanisms with a desire to directly affect patient care. Currently, Mustafa studies the enteric nervous system or "brain of the gut" in the laboratory of Dr. Brian Gulbransen. The enteric nervous system is composed of millions of nerve cells that regulate digestion, absorption, and motility ind...
Feb 02, 2020•16 min•Season 2Ep. 20
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Tyler Derr. Tyler is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Engineering and a member of the Data Science and Engineering Lab . His research is generally focused on data science where he seeks to extract insightful patterns in data that can then be used to both understand/analyze the past and to make predictions about the future. More specifically, due to the fact that much of today’s big data can be represented as...
Jan 26, 2020•12 min•Season 2Ep. 19
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Pratap Bhanu Solanki. Pratap is a 6th year Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at Michigan State University. His research focusses on wireless communication for underwater robots. In the underwater domain, most of our standard wireless modes like wifi, Bluetooth, and cellphone signals do not work as they diminish more quickly in the water. Currently, standard industrial technology is acoustic commun...
Jan 19, 2020•14 min•Season 2Ep. 18
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Demetrice (Dee) Jordan. Dee is a dual-Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Science and the Environmental Science and Policy Program . Her dissertation research focuses on risk reduction approaches to the tsetse fly and African trypanosomiasis or ‘sleeping sickness’ control in sub-Saharan Africa. Sleeping sickness is a vector-borne parasitic illness transmitted by the bite of a trypanosome infe...
Jan 12, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 17
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Alyssa Logan. Alyssa is a first-year Ph.D. student studying Equine Exercise Physiology in the Spartan Equine Research Lab under Dr. Brian Nielsen. In May she completed her Master’s with the Spartan Equine Research Lab as well. Her research uses calves as a model for young horses. During her Master’s research, she was able to determine that sprinting an otherwise confined animal 71m at least once weekly for 6 weeks, increased th...
Dec 15, 2019•24 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Abdulraouf (Abdul) Abbas is a graduate student in the Microbiology & Molecular Genetics program at Michigan State University. Abdul works in the Amalfitano Lab, where he studied different diseases related to the immune system such as cancer, autoinflammatory diseases, and neurodegeneration resulting from HIV infection. One disease he focused on is Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), an autoinflammatory disease that can result in spinal fusion and other devastating symptoms. In the lab, Abdul and hi...
Dec 08, 2019•17 min•Season 2Ep. 15
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Tracy Melvin. Tracy is a graduate student in the Fisheries and Wildlife program at Michigan State University. Tracy studies climate-induced ecological transformation. In other words, how climate change is causing ecosystems to change into new ones, really rapidly – and how to manage those transformations with a lens towards global biodiversity conservation. She uses a changing grassland on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, as a case study for st...
Dec 01, 2019•20 min•Season 2Ep. 14
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jeremy Rapp, Ally Brady, and Ben McCarthy, all of them are masters students from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences studying the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water. Jeremy’s research focuses on using satellite remote sensing and artificial intelligence to determine where farmers within the United States are likely using water to irrigate their croplands. Ally’s research revolves around using remote sensing irrigat...
Nov 24, 2019•21 min•Season 2Ep. 13
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Corbin J. Standley. Corbin is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Ecological-Community Psychology program at MSU. His research interests lie at the intersection of community psychology, public health, and policy. Broadly, he is interested in equitable community and systems change through the use of data, evaluation, and intervention. Moreover, he is interested in the application of community psychology in studying suicide and its prevention, pa...
Nov 17, 2019•25 min•Season 2Ep. 12
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny went to Potter Park Zoo to see Doppsee, the pregnant black rhino, get an ultrasound. While they were there, they interviewed a variety of people who interact with Doppsee and have experience in veterinary medicine. In this interview, you will hear the perspectives and knowledge of 9 different interviewees. Doppsee is the 13-year-old female eastern black rhino at Potter Park Zoo, who is originally from Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas. The male rhino at ...
Nov 10, 2019•41 min•Season 2Ep. 11
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Michael Pajkos. Mike is a 3rd-year graduate student in the Physics and Astronomy and the Computational Mathematics, Sciences and Engineering doctoral programs at Michigan State University. Stars act as the building blocks of the universe. From launching different elements around the Galaxy to hosting other planets, studying how stars behave grants a better understanding of the cosmos. Mike’s research focuses on the signals emitted from the ...
Nov 03, 2019•21 min•Season 2Ep. 10
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Lili Gloe. Lili is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on how anxiety relates to the way people think, plan, and learn. In order to better understand this relationship, she examines how people perform on computer tasks aimed to tap into these thinking processes and how their performance may relate to anxiety symptoms. She also uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) to...
Oct 27, 2019•19 min•Season 2Ep. 9
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Rachel Domagalski. Rachel is a Ph.D. student in the MSU Department of Mathematics. Networks are widely recognized as important for studying phenomena in multiple disciplines such as communication (how information is diffused), public health (disease spread), and political science (passing legislation). Signed networks are those that contain both positive and negative relationships between individuals. While collecting network data has its o...
Oct 21, 2019•21 min•Season 2Ep. 8
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Dianna Cowern (“Physics Girl”). This interview sheds light on Dianna’s experiences as a science communicator. She is the creator and host of the viral and PBS sponsored “Physics Girl” web series with over 1.3 Million Subscribers, which is a resource for fun physics videos and other materials about physics and topics related to physics. Her videos total over 80 Million Views. Her show has featured well-known figures including the legendary R...
Oct 13, 2019•21 min•Season 2Ep. 7
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Kaitlyn Casulli. Kaitlyn is a third-year Ph.D. student in Biosystems Engineering. Prior to coming to MSU, she received her Bachelor of Science in Food Science at North Carolina State University. Her dissertation focuses on relating heat and mass transfer kinetics to microbial inactivation during dry roasting, using peanuts as a case study. She is currently developing a model to simulate Salmonella inactivation on shelled peanuts in a flat-b...
Oct 06, 2019•23 min•Season 2Ep. 6
This week on The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Mike Morrison. Mike is a former User Experience (UX) designer who quit his tech career to become a Ph.D. student in Work Psychology. He says he’s trying to do three things in his career: 1) Bring User Experience design principles to science, to help disseminate knowledge faster and more efficiently 2) Understand the factors that make work meaningful (or meaningless). 3) Understand the psychological differences between so-called ‘realists’ a...
Sep 29, 2019•26 min•Season 2Ep. 5
On this week, The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Nguyen Truong. Nguyen is an MSU Physiology Ph.D. student in Dr. Karl Olson’s lab. She studies the pancreatic beta-cell, the cell type that secretes insulin to maintain our blood glucose. Her research focuses on studying the effect of inflammatory cytokines on the function of the pancreatic beta-cell. Studying the mechanism of how cellular metabolism is altered by these cytokines helps her understand the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes and ...
Sep 22, 2019•23 min•Season 2Ep. 4
On this week, The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Vanessa García Polanco. Vanessa García Polanco is a master student in the Department of Community Sustainability . Her research interests are minorities, immigrants, and refugee’s involvement in their local and regional food systems, especially in the areas of production, garden, and farm governance, access to markets and culturally appropriate foods and food policy. She studies the Agro-Biodiversity of Lansing Community Gardens run by min...
Sep 15, 2019•23 min•Season 2Ep. 3
On this week, The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Cort Thompson. Cort is a Ph.D. student at MSU’s Biomedical Engineering department where he is studying the ways in which implanted neural interfaces affect the brain. His research focuses on understanding how specific components of current electrode array technologies affect biocompatibility at the molecular and cellular level. His experiments explore the ways in which device design impacts the cellular populations in the brain to better i...
Sep 08, 2019•22 min•Season 2Ep. 2
On this week, The Sci-Files, Chelsie and Danny interview Lauren Cooper. Lauren directs the Forest Carbon and Climate Program at the Michigan State University Forestry Department . Her work focuses on the intersection of forests, people, climate, habitat protection, wood use, and sustainability. With trees and forests taking center stage in terms of climate change mitigation and adaptation, her work aims to bridge the wide knowledge gap for professionals and the public in the physical science, ma...
Sep 01, 2019•25 min•Season 2Ep. 1
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kayla Conner, Justin Lee, and Jon Kaletka, all of them are graduate students from the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics . At the Hardy lab , they lab study prenatal infection and how it affects pregnancy outcome/development. Jon’s research focuses on understanding how Listeria infection changes the extracellular vesicle production in host cells, and how those regulate the immune response. Kayla studies how infec...
Aug 25, 2019•28 min•Season 1Ep. 25
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Tatiana Bustos. Tatiana is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Ecological Community Psychology program at MSU. Her training is primarily in program evaluation, implementation science, and community-based research. Her work is focused on promoting access to health services among underserved communities. She has been involved in projects that prioritize the needs of Latinx communities and child mental health. For her doctoral work, s...
Aug 25, 2019•25 min•Season 1Ep. 26
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jaimie Strickland, DVM and Matt Kuhn, DVM. Cows have impressive immune systems compared to humans, yet they tend to get sick more often around the time of calving. The causes of this are still being uncovered, but changes in the metabolism of the omega fatty acids, like fish oils, appear to be a contributing factor. Matt’s research focuses on understanding why these changes occur around calving and what we can do to prevent it....
Aug 18, 2019•26 min•Season 1Ep. 23
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Diondra Straiton. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by challenges with social communication as well as restricted and repetitive interests. Parent training is an evidence-based treatment for ASD in which providers train parents to build on their child’s skills or address their child’s challenging behavior. However, it is not frequently offered in community settings like mental health...
Aug 18, 2019•28 min•Season 1Ep. 24
