On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Chad Hall, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics . Chad is investigating the speech of Lebanese Americans in Dearborn, Michigan. There is reason to believe that in Dearborn which is unique in the strength of its Arabic community, that an Arabic American English dialect has developed. Typically immigrants to a new country display language features from their heritage language but only if they are first or second-gen...
Mar 08, 2021•28 min•Season 5Ep. 8
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Alec Bailey, Anna Graffeo, Robert Gustke, Nic Weller from the Department of Mechanical Engineering . McLaren Greater Lansing , an acute care hospital split between two campuses in Lansing, is in the process of building a new hospital facility adjacent to Michigan State University. This new facility will feature a rehabilitation gym used for occupational therapy services to help patients achieve the highest level of independence...
Mar 01, 2021•17 min•Season 5Ep. 7
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Selin Akgun. Selin is working as a research assistant in the Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning (ML-PBL) project at CREATE for STEM Institute. As a part of the ML-PBL team, she works with 3rd-grade elementary school teachers. She supports their teaching practices through professional learning sessions and virtual curriculum materials for 3rd-grade science units. Selin’s research focuses on promoting students’ science...
Feb 22, 2021•19 min•Season 5Ep. 6
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Maria Berry. In her undergraduate research, Maria studies the effectiveness of a high school biology curriculum in fostering students' ability to understand complex biological processes. The ConnectedBiology curriculum uses a multi-level simulation of deer mice to study the process of evolution. It's divided into five units, each covering vast biological topics and phenomena, from those on the population level to those on the m...
Feb 15, 2021•22 min•Season 5Ep. 5
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jake Sawecki. Jake is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and is a member of the Predator Ecology and Astacology lab. Jake joined the lab last year and has adopted the primary research role on the Huron-Michigan Predator Diet Study that began in 2017. His research focuses on the dietary behaviors of salmon and trout species within lakes Huron and Michigan. Over the last several decades the Gr...
Feb 08, 2021•22 min•Season 5Ep. 4
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Shelby Dechow. Shelby is a 5th year Ph.D. student in Dr. Robert Abramovitch's lab. Her research focuses on how Mycobacterium tuberculosis senses and adapts to its host environment. M. tuberculosis (Mtb) is responsible for around 10 million new tuberculosis (TB) infections annually and causes respiratory disease in humans. Shelby's primary focus is understanding how Mtb uses environmental pH as a cue to modulate its physiology f...
Feb 01, 2021•20 min•Season 5Ep. 3
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brijen Miyani, Liang Zhao, and Maddie Spooner. Wastewater-based Epidemiology used to predict waves of SARS-CoV-2 in the Detroit region (Macomb, Wayne, and Oakland county). The increment/decrement in the number of SARS-CoV-2 cases could be predicted at least 14 days in advance by monitoring wastewater. This could help the public health officials prepare for the surge in hospitalization as well as the safe opening of the economy....
Jan 25, 2021•17 min•Season 5Ep. 2
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kelsey Merreck Wagner. Wagner is a printmaker/painter/textile artist, environmental activist, and second-year Ph.D. Anthropology student with certifications/specializations in Gender, Justice and Environmental Change, Human-Animal Studies, and Community Engagement. Wagner has her B.A. in Studio Arts from Western Michigan University (2013) and her M.A in Appalachian Studies: Sustainability (2017). Her research focuses on human-e...
Jan 18, 2021•23 min•Season 5Ep. 1
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sam Evalt. What does creativity look like in practice? Sam's dissertation study focused on creativity in practice through the use of resources. He conducted a comparative study between the education and culinary fields. Resources across the fields mean people such as mentors or colleagues, books, the internet, etc. Sam views the culinary field's view of creativity as an entry point for education, and in particular teachers and ...
Dec 14, 2020•18 min•Season 4Ep. 27
“We are all made of star-stuff”, is aptly quoted by Carl Sagan, a famous astronomer. Everything including the oxygen that we breathe, the carbon in our body, iron in our blood, etc. were cooked in the stars by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones, starting with basic hydrogen. Even heavier elements like gold and uranium are formed in more explosive events like supernovae and neutron star mergers. On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Rahul Jain. Rahul's resear...
Dec 07, 2020•14 min•Season 4Ep. 26
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Lexi Singstock. One of the Robison Lab's primary focuses is on how mice react to certain behavioral scenarios and how this affects their brain chemistry and behaviors. Lexi's research coincides with this by specifically looking at mast cells and if they play a role in controlling mice's behavior. Mast cells are specific immune cells that are distributed throughout the body and act to regulate the immune system that can also int...
Nov 30, 2020•13 min•Season 4Ep. 25
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Quercus Hamlin. Quercus is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences working under Drs. David Hyndman, Anthony Kendall, and Sherry Martin in the Michigan State University Hydrogeology Lab . He is entering his 6th year with the group after working as an undergraduate researcher and earning his Master’s degree this past spring. Quercus works on water quality issues from nutrient loading in t...
Nov 23, 2020•15 min•Season 4Ep. 24
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Marissa Cortright and Emily Castillo. Emily and Marissa investigate the views of psychiatrists, patients with depression, and the general public on Psychiatric Electroceutical Interventions (PEIs), or technologies that use electrical or magnetic stimulation in the treatment of depression. These PEIs include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), and adaptive brain...
Nov 16, 2020•20 min•Season 4Ep. 23
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny are joined by Cameron McClarren from Impact 89FM Sports Team to interview Derek Lasker and Brad Behan. Sports analytics is a rapidly growing industry across the world, and many pro sports teams have begun to utilize them in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage above their rivals. Statistical methods can be used to evaluate players, teams, contracts, draft prospects, and trades, as well as to optimize team strategies in different si...
Nov 09, 2020•28 min•Season 4Ep. 22
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Emily Mensch. Emily is a 2nd-year master's student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in the Applied Behavioral Ecology Lab. She studies chemical and behavioral ecology in the invasive sea lamprey and how this can be applied to management and conservation efforts in the Great Lakes and beyond. The invasive sea lamprey has been historically detrimental to the Great Lakes- decimating both economic and ecological resource...
Nov 02, 2020•18 min•Season 4Ep. 21
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Samantha Finkbeiner. Samantha is a Senior Neuroscience major in the Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University . Currently, she's leading a project in Dr. Rebecca Knickmeyer's Lab centered around infant fear reactivity and measuring this reactivity using a program called DeepLabCut (DLC). Samantha has been developing a methodology on how to accurately use and train DLC in order to automatically label body parts of infant...
Oct 26, 2020•13 min•Season 4Ep. 20
About 30 - 60 classical novae occur in the Milky Way each year. These luminous events can appear in the night sky like "new stars" and are often observed by amateur astronomers. Classical nova explosions occur in stellar binaries involving a compact white dwarf and a hydrogen-rich donor star. On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Tamas Budner. Tamas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who conducts research at the National Superconducting...
Oct 19, 2020•17 min•Season 4Ep. 19
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Justin Scott. Justin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering . Justin's work has focused on universal medical device design, in particular with regards to wheelchair users. His research has included collecting the properties of wheelchair users' tissues and modeling how pressures experienced while seated affect them. Michigan State is one of the few universities in the United States with an adaptive spo...
Oct 12, 2020•18 min•Season 4Ep. 18
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Chris Gottschalk. Chris is in the final year of his Ph.D. candidacy in the joint Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Biotechnology and Horticulture program. His dissertation research is focused on deciphering the genetic mechanisms that cause biennial bearing in apple trees under the mentorship of Dr. Steve van Nocker, a developmental geneticist in the Horticulture Department. Biennial bearing is a phenomenon that is characterized as...
Oct 05, 2020•17 min•Season 4Ep. 17
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kathryn (Kati) Ford. There is an increased interest in using Microbial Electrosynthesis to generate carbon-neutral biofuels to replace fossil fuels. This is a technique that uses microorganisms capable of using an electrode to gain energy. Kati is a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at MSU, who works to engineer an electroautotrophic microorganism. This is an organism that can grow using ...
Sep 28, 2020•17 min•Season 4Ep. 16
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Osama Alian. Osama studies how a community of microbes survives in a hydrothermal vent system deep in the Atlantic Ocean in an environment that's funky, unique, and probably present everywhere in the universe where there are water and rock interacting with each other. It's a cool location to study because it challenges our ideas about how life generates the energy it needs in really isolated and extreme places, but also gives u...
Sep 21, 2020•25 min•Season 4Ep. 15
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Katie Mitchell. Katie is a doctoral student in the Information and Media program at MSU . She is interested in how media and technology influence interpersonal relationships and health. She is currently studying telemedicine and its impacts on patients as well as providers. Katie received both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Department of Communication at Michigan State University . Healthcare providers actually ha...
Sep 14, 2020•19 min•Season 4Ep. 14
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Aalayna Green. Aalayna is a senior undergraduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology / Zoology studying the gendered implications of urban wildmeat trafficking in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her work draws from conservation criminology as well as women's and gender studies. She seeks to give voice and a narrative to the womxn involved in wildlife crime so as to create more sustainable and gender-inclusive con...
Sep 07, 2020•18 min•Season 4Ep. 13
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Matthew Swiatnicki. Matt is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics . The Andrechek lab studies primarily breast and lung cancer, with Matt’s thesis work having potential implications for lung cancer patients. Work from the Andrechek lab has uncovered a gene mutation within certain lung cancer tumors. The normal protein product that is derived from the mutated gene is known to regulate an impo...
Aug 31, 2020•14 min•Season 4Ep. 12
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Carolyn Kroger. Carolyn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology - Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience . The coordination of movements in space and time is required for successful action in a dynamic world. Behavioral and neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease, stuttering, and Cerebellar dysfunction can make even simple actions difficult to execute, with devastating repercussions for independence and qual...
Aug 31, 2020•20 min•Season 4Ep. 11
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Josh Lensmire. Josh is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics . Josh's research focuses on the pathogen methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA. MRSA is capable of growing in various human organs and it needs to gather nutrients from our bodies to grow and cause disease. One specific nutrient Josh's research focuses on is sulfur, a nutrient key for MRSA metabolism. The goal of Josh'...
Aug 24, 2020•16 min•Season 4Ep. 10
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Anna Raschke. Anna is a master's student in the MSU Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering department. Anna's lab is called 'Computational-Ecology', meaning they simulate ecology! She is specifically working on modeling the movement of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) through the Huron River Watershed. PFAS embodies over 4000 different compounds and some have been observed to have toxic effects. Unfortunately, PFAS have been ...
Aug 24, 2020•21 min•Season 4Ep. 9
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Lin Liu. By 2050, the population in the Africa continent will double and food demand will triple. How can we sustainably produce staple food to feed the future population in the backdrop of climate change? Lin Liu’s dissertation research focuses on using agricultural technologies, including smart devices, crop modeling and remote-sensing images, to assess agricultural systems in Africa and Central America. Specifically, her res...
Aug 17, 2020•22 min•Season 4Ep. 7
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview John Tison Williams. John is a PhD-candidate in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics through the College of Natural Sciences . John is in his 5th year and completing his dissertation, which focuses on understanding how small molecules inhibit the growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Dr. Robert B. Abramovitch 's lab. M. tuberculosis is the primary cause of Tuberculosis (TB), a respiratory infection and the nu...
Aug 17, 2020•15 min•Season 4Ep. 8
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Garrett Weidig. As a lab researching biomechanics, it is the goal of Dr. Bush's lab to study how the body functions. They extend their research to create models and devices that can assist people in everyday life. In the past, they have worked closely with many interdisciplinary professions, ranging from Michigan State University Athletics to rehabilitation facilities to clinicians. Garrett Weidig is starting his second year in...
Aug 10, 2020•18 min•Season 4Ep. 5
