Ah, summer vacation. Time to kick back, right? Not so much for OSU students who are discovering opportunities to expand their horizons. They’re modeling blood flow, studying wildlife conservation in Africa, surveying Oregon’s old-growth forests and teaching entrepreneurship.
Category » Healthy People
April 24, 2009
Sensors for Safety
Microbiologists aim for rapid, accurate monitoring of food and water
The news grabbed national headlines in early 2009: eight dead, hundreds sickened by food poisoning in 34 states. After investigators traced the outbreak to Salmonella-tainted peanut butter from a Georgia plant, stores pulled thousands of products from their shelves. Worried consumers tossed suspect items into the trash. At least 100 companies will post losses from [...]
February 24, 2009
Resilience
Three times a week, as dawn breaks over the Willamette Valley, 25 women show up at the Benton Center gym in Corvallis.
February 24, 2009
Living Downwind
By collecting and testing the toxicity of particles in Northwest air samples, OSU Ph.D. student Julie Layshock is shedding light on the relative health threat posed by long-distance air pollution.
January 23, 2009
Lunging for Life
Next year, a class for 90-year-olds
The risk of falling rises as we get older, but researchers and fitness instructors have a prescription: Better Bones and Balance. Even if you’re 88 years old, there’s a class for you.
September 23, 2008
Strong Medicine
In 2005, the Terri Schiavo drama riveted the nation with a cast of thousands: a feuding family, legions of lawyers and judges, dueling neurologists, irate clergymen and rowdy picketers. Politicians plotted and offered legislation, and President George W. Bush flew from Crawford, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in the middle of the night to sign emergency [...]
September 23, 2008
Air Beneath Their Wings
Five undergraduates — five dreams. Blake Kelley sees a bright future for nuclear power and is learning all he can about reactor designs. For Hiromi Omatsu, the future is in technology that enables elderly people to stay in their own homes. Writing is Stephen Summers’ love. He publishes poetry and fiction in OSU’s student literary [...]
September 23, 2008
Pipeline to Science
Strange, alien environments — far–away planets, fathomless seas, shadowy forests — figure in countless daydreams. What child hasn’t imagined herself at the controls of a futuristic spacecraft? Or at the prow of a wave–tossed vessel? Or on the trail of a secretive beast? Exploiting kids’ universal yen to explore remote and exotic places, a noted [...]
September 11, 2008
Movie maker
Zebrafish star in amazing tale
Kate Saili’s films won’t show in theaters any time soon, but they do feature zebrafish, a rising star in molecular biology, in a dramatic role — regenerating tissues that have been injured. Saili, who grew up in Kalispell, Montana, studies the effect of nanomaterials on inflammation. She uses transgenic zebrafish whose white blood cells fluoresce [...]
September 11, 2008
Student goes for gold
How do gold-based nanoparticles behave in the body?
Nanomaterials are on the health-care horizon. Gold-based materials have long been used to reduce inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis and to improve biomedical imaging. They have intrigued Lisa Truong since she first heard about their potential to help solve intractable problems from cancer to heart disease. Truong, who grew up in the Seattle area, wants [...]
July 19, 2008
No Barriers
Access to mass transit opens the world to people with disabilities At night when she dreams, Marlene Massey hikes the Cascades on sturdy legs. But when she gets up in the morning, a four-inch curb can stop her cold. That’s because the 50-year-old Corvallis woman is in a wheelchair after losing a big chunk of [...]
July 19, 2008
One to One
As students explore opportunities, mentors provide personal support Most students come to college as works in progress, their interests only partially identified, their potential still to be realized. And as they explore and develop that potential, many students find something equally important: a mentor. OSU offers an “opportunity-rich environment” for mentoring; at the same time, [...]
July 19, 2008
Hallie Ford spent a lifetime advocating for youth and families
Her work will continue to inspire research in the new Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families at OSU. Prompted by an $8 million gift from her estate, the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences will build on existing strengths of the faculty and anticipate the needs and challenges of children and families. [...]
July 19, 2008
From Risk to Relationship
Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds
Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds In 1998, Michelle Inderbitzin decided to conduct a study of youth in a detention center for violent offenders. Almost every Saturday morning for 15 months, the University of Washington graduate student in sociology made the 90-minute drive from Seattle to an [...]
July 19, 2008
Birth Mothers
Anthropologist leads study with Oregon midwives
“Would you like to help us listen to the baby?” Melissa Cheyney asks 8-year-old Isaiah. “OK, push that button!” As Isaiah carefully holds an ultrasound device against the pregnant belly of his mother, Amanda Wise, ocean-like sounds fill the bright, freshly painted living room. The eyes of Isaiah and his younger sisters and brother widen, [...]
May 23, 2008
Sacred Landscape
Tribes confront the cultural risks of contaminant exposure
The traditions of native cultures — making reed baskets, eating wild foods, participating in sweat lodges — sustained people for centuries. Now those cultures are threatened by contamination. Researchers from the Umatilla reservation and OSU show why.
April 23, 2008
Baskets of Concern
Food is only the most obvious way contaminants enter the human body. Poisons also come in through the pores of the skin and the lobes of the lungs. Living in intimate contact with the landscape, as many indigenous peoples do, raises the risks of exposure. Traditional practices of the Umatilla members of the Columbia Basin [...]
January 23, 2008
Building the Pauling Legacy
Oregon native Linus Pauling had already won two Nobel prizes when he turned his genius to the chemical complexities of diet and health. Not content to rest on his laurels as a world-renowned chemist and international peace activist, Pauling plunged with characteristic ardor into the study of micronutrients, particularly vitamin C, in the late 1960s. [...]
June 1, 2007
The Zinc Link
When you eat a steaming bowl of tofu and bok choy while sipping a cup of rain-flower tea, you may be doing more than just having dinner. You may also be fighting cancer. Together, the ingredients of a traditional Asian diet — soy, green tea and vegetables in the cabbage family — may create a [...]
April 1, 2007
Young Immigrants
Growing up in a strange land
Coming of age in a new land is an American story. Children who bridge two cultures — their parents’ homeland and their adopted country — struggle to find a transnational identity and to succeed. In a child’s mind, memories of friends, familiar play places and sounds compete with a strange world and unintelligible language. In [...]
April 1, 2007
Mental Health Lifeline
The most important visitors to Stacy Ramirez’s office walk around her desk and sit in a chair next to her. As they talk, Ramirez catches subtle cues about her visitors’ emotions, whether or not they are taking their pills or maybe hearing voices again. “I can tell by their eyes if there’s something going on [...]
April 1, 2007
Stories That Heal
Once upon a time in an Oregon river valley, there lived a woman named Dale-Elizabeth Pehrsson. At the big university where she was a teacher and researcher, her students called her Dr. Dale. When visitors walked into Dr. Dale’s office at the College of Education, they noticed something very important about her: She loved working [...]
April 1, 2007
Bibliotherapy in Kenya
It was at the bedside of a dying relative that the idea for Daphne Kagume’s doctoral dissertation took hold. As her beloved uncle succumbed to AIDS in a Kenya hospital, the OSU graduate student witnessed the heartbreaking isolation that so often afflicts AIDS patients in her native country. She resolved to help. With guidance from [...]
February 1, 2007
The Ice Sages
For millennia the people of King Island have depended on the walrus hunt. But as Arctic ice recedes in response to a changing climate, hunters have to go further to reach their quarry. OSU anthropologist Deanna Paniataaq Kingston leads a team documenting the culture, language and natural history of her ancestral homeland.
February 1, 2007
Across the Divide
Parting the Waters.
In the summer of 1997, Aaron Wolf and a Berber guide trekked up narrow mountain paths to a village high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Despite the steep terrain, they walked lightly. A donkey carried their gear. As they moved toward snowcapped peaks, they crossed one dry, rocky ridge after another. It took four [...]
February 1, 2007
Reinventing High Schools
High school today is startlingly like it was in the days of “Grease.” Kids may be wearing low-rise jeans and nose rings instead of poodle skirts and letterman sweaters, but their path to a diploma looks and feels much like their parents’ — or their grandparents’. For many students, the old ways aren’t working. Low [...]
July 23, 2006
Tense Times
In middle school, why do some students glide through while others struggle?
Remember middle school? No stress, right? Psychologist Jennifer Connor-Smith knows firsthand how difficult that transition can be. She and her students are looking at how personality helps or hinders teens’ ability to deal with the crisis of the day.
July 23, 2006
Undergrads in the Lab
Undergraduate researchers Janelle Quest and Kathryn Cellerini have been working shoulder-to-shoulder with their professor Jennifer Connor-Smith to identify and isolate the factors that influence adolescent stress management. As part of a cadre of research assistants in OSU’s Department of Psychology, they are getting the kind of nuts-and-bolts experience in social science that typically comes along [...]
July 23, 2006
To Conquer Vitamin E
Trekking through the last frontier of vitamin exploration
Taking a vitamin E supplement? There’s more to it than just popping a pill. Maret Traber of OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute is revealing E’s secrets, including its cozy partnerships with vitamin C and fat.
April 23, 2006
LPI Researchers Take Aim at Lou Gehrig’s Disease
How did Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Institute become home to groundbreaking research on nerve cell degeneration?
