Women in Pabna, rural Bangladesh, carry drinking water in large containers. (Photo: Molly Kile)

Fighting a war of independence should be turmoil enough for a small country, but in 1970, the people of Bangladesh also had to deal with a deadly cholera outbreak. This water-borne disease threatened the country’s plentiful surface water and put public health at risk. To solve this crisis, the government, together with international aid agencies, dug thousands of wells. But the clean water they hoped to deliver created a new crisis, what one researcher calls the largest mass poisoning on the planet.

Fast-forward 20 years. Symptoms of arsenic toxicity were beginning to appear in the population. Skin lesions were misdiagnosed as leprosy and led to social exclusion. Worse, skin lesions are a potential precursor to cancer.

Molly Kile, an environmental epidemiologist at Oregon State University, and her Harvard mentor David Christianie first traveled to Bangladesh in 2003 to study the health effects associated with arsenic in drinking water. “Our efforts have largely been understanding the epidemiology (of arsenic exposure) and the human health risk associated with it,” says Kile. She first traveled to Bangladesh as a doctoral student at Harvard and has returned more than 20 times.

Molly Kile studies the health impacts of environmental contaminants. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Scientists know that exposure to high levels of arsenic can lead to cancer, but Kile, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, wants to know how the metal affects other aspects of health, such as reproduction and child development. Local groups, she says, can effectively translate her results into disease prevention, but many participants in her research are among the most vulnerable in the country.

“By and large, the populations that are affected by arsenic in Bangladesh are the rural populations,” she says, “and about 60% of Bangladesh lives on less than $2 a day. So these are places of absolute poverty.”

Reproductive health effects stem from the fact that the toxic metal crosses the placenta and exposes the fetus. Low birth weight and spontaneous abortions have been associated with arsenic exposure in utero. Kile also uses genetics to look for variations among individuals that increase or decrease susceptibility to skin lesions.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of arsenic is its invisibility. “You can’t taste arsenic. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, you have no idea its there unless you test for it,” she adds.

Binding Arsenic

Not being able to detect arsenic by sight or taste has raised the stakes for communities that lack the resources to test or treat their drinking water. Kile’s favorite way to test for arsenic in people may come as a surprise: the human toenail.

Toenails are composed of keratin, which contains chemical combinations of sulfur and hydrogen called sulfhydryl groups. As arsenic in the body binds with these sulfhydryl groups, it accumulates in the toenail.

“So keratin is mostly sulfhydral, as is your hair,” says Kile. “Any inorganic arsenic that is circulating in your body will want to bind to a sulfhydral group. So your toenails, your hair, and even your skin all come into equilibrium with the arsenic in your body. You can take a toenail clipping, and you get a lovely integrated exposure of what that person has been exposed to.”

Molly Kile met with residents of Dhaka Community Hospital to discuss her studies of arsenic exposure. She and her team ask what concerns people have and recruit participants in their research. Their findings are then shared with the community. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Kile calls the health crisis in Bangladesh a preventable disaster. Arsenic was known to be present in large parts of western Asia, but that wasn’t considered in the 1970s when the country transitioned to groundwater.

“And it was seen as the public health triumph of its day, only to find out that it’s now the largest mass poisoning on the planet,” says Kile. “That’s one of the messages of this: This was completely preventable.”

Research elsewhere suggests that as exposure declines, skin lesions may go away with time, but such studies are still in progress.

Despite Kile’s start with arsenic being half-a-world away, the issue isn’t so far from home. She calls Oregon “arsenic country” and has been conducting water-testing workshops in communities east of the Cascades. In the United States, technology can remove arsenic from drinking water. So far, there have been no arsenic-related health problems recorded in Oregon.

“It really is across Oregon,” she adds. “Eugene, Salem…and across the border too. This is a Pacific Northwest Issue.”

Scientists estimate that up to 100 million people are exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in Bangladesh alone. Whether you are drawing from a well in Bangladesh or Oregon, researchers like Kile are racing to fully understand the impacts of this invisible contaminant.

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Listen to a podcast with Kile.

For more information about arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh:

D. van Halem, S. A. Bakker, G. L. Amy, and J. C. van Dijk, “Arsenic in drinking water: a worldwide water quality concern for water supply companies,” in the Journal Drinking Water Engineering and Science, 2009,

Manouchehr Amini; Karim C. Abbaspour; Michael Berg; Lenny Winkel; Stephan J. Hug; Eduard Hoehn; Hong Yang; C. Annette Johnson; “Statistical Modeling of Global Geogenic Arsenic Contamination in Groundwater,” Environ. Sci. Technol.  2008, 42, 3669-3675.t © 2008 American Chemical Society

Chowdhury, M. A. I., Uddin, M. T., Ahmed, M. F., Ali, M. A. and Uddin, S. M.: How does arsenic contamination of groundwater cause severity and health hazard in Bangladesh, J. Appl. Sci., 6(6), 1275-1286, 2006

John Miedema of BioLogical Carbon Inc., Philomath, Ore., makes biochar at a wood processing plant and explains his process in this video.

Perry Morrow, student in the Oregon State University Water Resources Graduate Program, produced this video on biochar, the carbonized remains of plants. Turning low-value wood and other biomass into biochar sequesters carbon from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The resulting material may also benefit water quality by absorbing pollutants such as copper, lead, zinc and other metals.

Mary Crow leads a hike at Rimrock Ranch for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

When Mary Crow paddles her kayak on Sparks Lake near Sisters, she can hear the water draining into the lava tubes below. Listening to the water gurgle, thinking about the ancient eruptions that formed Central Oregon’s porous landscape, makes her shiver with wonder and delight.

Dave Bone can’t stop talking about the wild wolves he spotted in Yellowstone Park last summer. If he tells you the story more than once — about how the pack jostled and tumbled playfully on a meadow where bison grazed, unperturbed — he should be forgiven. His awe is boundless and unabashed.

Crow and Bone are lifelong naturalists. Only on the land do they feel whole. Harvard’s Howard Gardner, author of the theory of multiple intelligences, believes this bone-deep connection to the earth is innate. He calls it “naturalist intelligence” or “nature smart.” Just as some babies are born with special gifts for music or math, Gardner argues, others come into the world with an exceptional sensitivity to nature.

It is this gift, this abiding passion, that Oregon State University’s Oregon Master Naturalist program (OMN) was designed to embrace and extend. “We are building support for wise stewardship of the environment and deeper understanding of natural resource management,” says Jason O’Brien who coordinates the program for the Oregon State Extension Service. It is one of nearly 40 similar programs around the nation.

Crow and Bone are two of the first 46 participants to complete all 80-plus hours of training for OMN, which began as a pilot effort on the Oregon coast in 2010. An online curriculum gave them an overview of Oregon’s biology, geology and ecology as well as natural resources stewardship and management.  They then met face-to-face with university scientists and other experts for classroom instruction and fieldwork in one of three ecoregions: East Cascades, Oregon coast and Willamette Valley. (Additional ecoregions will be brought into the program pending demand.)

Instruction spanned every perspective: macro to micro, flora and fauna, volcanic and tectonic forces shaping the landscape. One Saturday, the coastal participants met on the headlands at Cape Perpetua. There, Bob Lillie, an emeritus professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, told them about geological phenomena like tsunamis and plate tectonics. Another time, the class convened at the Tillamook State Forest, where Frank Burris, an Extension watershed educator, and Glenn Ahrens, an Extension forester, delved into watersheds and riparian zones. Jamie Doyle, an educator with Sea Grant Extension, taught a class on Pacific Ocean fisheries and marine protected areas.

What the graduates do with their expertise looks different from place to place, person to person. One person might collect data as a citizen scientist, counting dead seabirds for COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team), for instance, or monitoring water quality for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Another person might be a guide, leading interpretive hikes for the Deschutes Land Trust. A third might opt for hands-on stewardship, planting aspen seedlings or building beaver barriers for a local watershed council. People who are less physically active might greet visitors at an interpretive center or use their skills behind the scenes designing brochures, editing newsletters or updating websites.

Hooking into an existing organization — either a natural resources agency or an environmental nonprofit — is the common denominator for all Master Naturalists, who must volunteer at least 40 hours yearly to keep their certification.

“The program leverages the time and talents of highly capable volunteers,” notes O’Brien, whose degrees are in wildlife biology and natural resources interpretation, and who is himself a fervent naturalist. “It can be a huge help to private and public organizations, especially in times of tight budgets or when professional staff can’t accomplish all the services they’re mandated to provide. It’s an embodiment of the land grant mission — serving the needs of the public.”

Jonathan Hurst, right, was recognized by Popular Mechanics magazine with one of ten Breakthrough Innovator awards for 2012.

An era of walking robots that can help people with physical disabilities, take on dangerous missions or aid in disaster response is about to begin. One of the leaders in this emerging field, Oregon State University engineer Jonathan Hurst, was recognized in October by Popular Mechanics with one of its “Breakthrough Innovator” awards of 2012.

The science in this field is rapidly expanding, said Hurst, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State, who received the award along with his colleague, Jessy Grizzle, at the University of Michigan. Ten awards were made to scientists and engineers around the nation.

The researchers have built two walking robots, MABEL and the next generation model, ATRIAS. In each case, the technology is based on a fundamental understanding of how animals walk and run, using minimal energy to accomplish a maximum of locomotion and sensory response.

Hurst said walking robots are about where the automotive industry was 150 years ago, full of promise, with a number of new inventions and about ready to take off.

“In the next 20 years you are going to see legged robots all over the place, doing all kinds of jobs,” Hurst said. “The sky is the limit.”

Beginning with funding from the National Science Foundation for MABEL, and continuing with $4.7 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Oregon State and Michigan experts worked from principles of animal locomotion. The mechanical system closely interacts with the software control system, such as fiberglass springs working together with computer control to create efficient and stable walking and running gaits.

“So far much of what we’ve done has been with computer simulations, as we spent the past three years designing and building ATRIAS,” Hurst said. “The simulations are working, and our robot was walking three days after it was built. Now we’re going to demonstrate the control ideas on the real machines.”

Robots that ultimately can walk and maneuver over uneven terrain have a range of possibilities, Hurst added. One would be helping to power prosthetic limbs for people, or use an exo-skeleton to assist people with muscular weakness. But there could also be applications in the military, in disaster response, or any type of dangerous situation.

For something that humans usually learn to do by the time they are a year old, walking is still a mystery to most scientists. The complexity of sensory and mechanical input from nerves, vision, muscles and tendons has challenged the most sophisticated concepts in robotics.

MABEL, however, is able to run a nine-minute mile and step off a ledge. ATRIAS is even lighter, faster, and has three-dimensional motion capabilities. Some of these advances have been possible, Hurst said, because the Oregon State and Michigan researchers took a step back to better understand the fundamental forces at work before even trying to build something.

Most robots today work in a very static or highly controlled environment, but humans live in a mobile, unpredictable world, and with further advances robots may soon be able to join it.

Don Pettit prepared for departure from the ISS on July 1. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

When he’s on Earth, Don Pettit dreams about space. But when he’s in space, he dreams about walking on Earth.  “Dreams may have something to do with humans never being satisfied, which is why we go exploring in the first place,” he says.

If there’s a gene for the urge to explore new worlds, Pettit has it. The Oregon State University alum (chemical engineering, ’78) has launched into orbit three times. He’s logged 370 days in space, placing him fourth among NASA astronauts.

Pettit has conducted experiments, spent more than 13 hours in a spacesuit outside the ISS and created a series of science videos to show how water, static electricity and other things we take for granted on Earth behave in a weightless environment.

After six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the native of Silverton, Ore., returned to Earth on July 1. He’d go back, as he says, in a nanosecond. Moreover, he’d gladly load up his family to colonize the moon or Mars — as long as they could return home safely.

In previous trips to the International Space Station, Pettit rode aboard the space shuttle, shown here when it was docked with the ISS. (Photo: Don Pettit)

He knows all too well that getting back can be harrowing. During his latest trip, Pettit landed in the Kazakhstan desert in what he calls “a series of explosions followed by a car crash.” After that, it took several weeks to adjust to living in Earth’s gravity again.

On July 20, he talked with reporters about the commercialization of space flight, why space flight is important and why he decided to grow a zucchini in the corner.

In case you were wondering, he says a space station smells like a cross between a machine shop and a science lab, although the odors of roast beef may drift in at dinner time. See the video above on the right or click here.

Mike Babcock left a thriving lumber mill and set himself a new challenge: create a seafood business. (Photo: Pat Kight)

Still, in this one-time boomtown of lumber mills and commercial fishing, the entrepreneurial spirit lives. One man, Mike Babcock, is helping to kick-start Coos Bay’s renewal with an unlikely innovation: packing fish in pouches instead cans. Besides being flat and lightweight for cheaper, easier shipping, the laminated plastic-and-metal foil pouches are superior to cans in the No. 1 consumer yardstick: taste.

“Most store-bought tuna is twice cooked,” explains Babcock’s fish-packing guru, Mark Whitham, a food scientist with Oregon Sea Grant. “That means they cook all the nutrients and flavor out. Mike Babcock’s product is cooked only once, and it retains all the good fats, juices, and nutrients, and it tastes much better.”

It all began in 2010 when Babcock, a successful-but-restless sawmill owner, was looking for a new challenge. He heard about the packing pouches — called retortable or “retort” pouches in the industry — from coastal residents who had worked with Whitham on other projects. “I wonder if pouches would work for albacore?” he thought. To find out, he tracked down the food scientist, and together they investigated the pouch potential for Coos Bay. Within the year, Babcock had launched Oregon Seafoods.

The other "Bay Area." (Photo: Pat Kight)

Since October 2011 when he started shipping sustainably caught tuna and salmon under his label, Sea Fare Pacific, Babcock’s products have landed on the shelves of all eight Market of Choice grocery stores, as well as those of Portland’s trendy New Seasons Market for health-conscious shoppers. He also has created a line of smoked salmon for outdoor recreation giant REI, and his four flavors — sea salt, salt-free, smoked and jalapeno — have made their way to several other states.

From Freezer to Pouch

Just blocks from Coos Bay’s historic harbor, Babcock’s Oregon Seafoods plant is no bigger than a medium-sized classroom, but it’s packed to the gills with canning machinery. It’s cold inside. Workers wear hats and jackets under large, turquoise-colored aprons, latex gloves and hairnets as they pack fish for Sea Fare Pacific and several other brands.

“Of course, we would like to have more space,” says the 50-year-old businessman, a hairnet snugged over his red ball cap. “But we can do a lot with a small footprint.”

From the deep-freeze at Oregon Seafoods, workers carry salmon and albacore to the filleting room, where they slice up the fish and plop the chunks, red and raw, into small plastic cups. Two machines imported from Japan stand ready to package the fish into pouches. As the machine spins, another worker transfers chunks from the cups into 8-ounce pouches, which look like UPS envelopes, only silver.

The technical know-how behind Oregon Seafood’s processing, as well as the four specialty flavors developed for Sea Fare Pacific, came from Whitham. It was he who steered Babcock through his transition from mill owner to seafood processor. A soft-spoken, laid-back 57-year-old, Whitham is an unlikely revolutionary. Yet from his food lab at OSU Extension in Astoria, the Sea Grant scientist has been in the vanguard of Oregon’s canning coup.

If there’s such a thing as a food-preservation geek, Whitham is it. And if there’s one thing he “geeks out” about, it’s the flexible, lightweight retort pouches.

Oregon Seafoods workers load individual portions of cleaned and flavored albacore into pouches for sealing and cooking (Photo: Pat Kight)

“Retort pouches aren’t new,” says Whitham. “They’ve been around about 50 years, and, from what I’ve seen, they are really big in Europe and Asia. In general, they tend to be ahead of us as far as packaging is concerned.”

Coos Bay is just starting to catch up. The pouches’ advantages are many: lightweight and compact, they take less energy to ship than conventional steel cans. For the consumer or commercial chef, there’s no can to recycle. And their flat shape makes cooking more uniform. Again, it all comes down to flavor in the end.

Whitham’s larger mission — adding value to the region’s natural seafood bounty — underpins his 30-year career working with small producers up and down the coast. “Here in Oregon, seafood has really been a stand-alone product, and there’s just tremendous opportunity for adding value,” he says. With the right price point, package and recipe, processed fish can command double, triple, or even quadruple what it sells for raw. That in turn injects money and jobs into the community.

Injecting jobs and money into Coos Bay is exactly what Babcock is doing. A self-described “pedal-to-the-metal, get-it-done” type, the entrepreneur’s steely blue eyes are now focused on fine-tuning the process that took elbow grease and determination, along with Whitham’s expertise, to get moving. In Coos County where unemployment hovers around 10.5 percent — above average for both Oregon and the nation — the eight new jobs Babcock has created are a welcome boost.

From Cannery to Shopping Cart

On the cannery’s floor, the Japanese packing machines suck the air out of each pouch and seal it. Then comes the cooking. The oven — six feet around and15 feet tall with a massive metal door — looks more like a missile silo turned on its side than something from a commercial kitchen. It can hold a lot of product — more than 2,500 eight-ounce pouches, or nearly 475 pounds of fish. The pouches cook for 75 minutes at 240 degrees. Then they’re flash cooled to retain flavor.

In the cannery’s entryway, boxes full of packed tuna, ready to be shipped, testify that things are moving smoothly. But plenty of stumbling blocks stood in the way, Babcock attests. Whitham helped the entrepreneur persevere. “Whenever I have a problem,” he says, “I call him up and he’s there.”

Babcock isn’t sure why he left his successful business to start a new one in a field in which he had little experience. When urged to pin down a reason, he cites boredom. “The day-to-day operation of the sawmill was fine,” he recalls. “But we had been building the mill for a number of years, and once we got it built and we got to the monotonous day-to-day stuff, the challenge wasn’t there.”

The cannery lets him do what he loves best: build a business. These days, his schedule is full of food tradeshows. At first, he was skeptical about pitching his fish at the crowded tradeshow scene. But his first show was a total success, generating hundreds of sales leads.

That tradeshow, incidentally, was in San Francisco — the other “bay area.” Driving home, Babcock was elated — so elated, in fact, he just couldn’t wait to make another sale. So he stopped at a small health-food store in Eureka, California, and won yet another customer.

“Everywhere I go, people who try our product, they just fall all over it, they just love the quality, like they never tasted fish like this before,” he says. For that, and for the jobs he created in Coos Bay, Babcock credits Mark Whitham and Oregon Sea Grant. “This product has Mark’s name all over it. I want to keep this relationship going.”

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Editor’s note: In March 2013, Oregon Seafoods announced that with help from Mark Whitham, the company launched a new line of soups and sauces (Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon Chowder, three albacore curries and a West Coast Ciopinno). Improved labeling also noted sustainability qualities such as Dolphin Safe and Line Caught. The company’s products are in more than 500 retail outlets.

Cooking and sharing food connect OSU artist Julie Green to family and Midwestern roots. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

In 1997, Julie Green had just moved to Norman, Oklahoma, when she sat down to read the local paper with her morning tea and toast. As she was looking at the column of news from around the state, she was riveted by an item describing an execution that had happened the previous night.

The column said a man, whose name Green does not recall now, died at 11:59 p.m. by lethal injection and that, at the time of death, his legs shook and his eyes became glassy and closed to a crescent. The story ended simply: “And his final meal was six tacos, six glazed doughnuts and a cherry Coke.”

“I was stunned,” Green says. “Of course, I had heard of last words. But I hadn’t heard last meals described in such detail.”

A newly hired artist in the University of Oklahoma’s art department, Green began clipping all the execution notices in The Norman Transcript. Oklahoma has the highest execution rate per capita in the United States, so she often was clipping several items per week. At the time, she wasn’t sure what she would do with this information. She only knew she felt compelled to keep collecting them.

“I collected the menus for a while, and I can’t really pinpoint why — it just bothered me,” Green says. “The meals brought me into this issue. I grew up in a family of wonderful cooks, and there was a lot of tradition with meals passed down through generations. And the idea of a meal whose purpose is not to sustain life, or be shared, but seems to have this other symbolic meaning, just compelled me.”

An Idea Is Born

When she accepted a position in the Oregon State University Department of Art in 2000, she began The Last Supper, a project that would translate her feelings into a public statement. Her first piece was a portrayal of those tacos and doughnuts that had caught her attention in Norman. Expressed through blue mineral paint fired on white porcelain plates, the series now has more than 500 pieces depicting last-supper choices by death-row inmates.

The work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, most recently at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The Corvallis Arts Center plans a show in early 2013. National news media including Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica and National Public Radio have featured The Last Supper, as has Dark Rye, an online magazine produced by Whole Foods Market. OSU-Cascades artist Henry Sayre has included text and images, as well as Green’s narrative tempera paintings, in the 2012 edition of his textbook A World of Art, published by Prentice-Hall.

At Oregon State, Green teaches painting, drawing and contemporary issues in art. In 2011, she received grant support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Its prestigious award is given to only 25 contemporary artists a year to acknowledge painters and sculptors nationwide who create work of exceptional quality.

Green paints The Last Supper plates in her studio in a cozy historic bungalow in Corvallis, which she shares with her husband, artist Clay Lohmann. Every month or two, she loads newly painted plates into a dish rack and drives a slow half-mile to the home of artist and collaborator Antonia “Toni” Acock, who fires them in her ceramics kiln.

Green applies blue mineral paint on white porcelain to create each plate. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

At home, Green is a warm hostess, welcoming guests with a pot of tea and a delicious dessert freshly baked, or a bowl of fruit picked from the trees and raspberry vines on their property. She attributes her hospitality to Midwestern family roots. Born in Japan to a naval officer father, she grew up in Des Moines and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from University of Kansas.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” Green says. “My grandmother taught in one room school house and my mother taught home ec before she had children. I could sew before I could walk.” Home crafts – sewing, cooking, quilting – were an essential part of Green’s household.

“I never saw the difference between museum art and quilts,” she says. “Perhaps that is why the plate project, and combining conceptual ideas with very basic visuals, is something that doesn’t intimidate me.”

As a college student, Green worked with Roger Shimomura, an acclaimed artist with more than 80 pieces in permanent collections around the world. Shimomura’s paintings and prints have decidedly political overtones that address Asian-American sociopolitical issues. He has followed Green’s development of The Last Supper.

“It’s important work; important because it deals with subject matter that no one else has dealt with in such creative terms,” Shimomura says. “Not only is it original, but it is well-crafted, thoughtfully considered and politically forthright. Good work that takes chances politically always draws attention.”

Green has said in media interviews that she plans to add 50 new plates to The Last Supper project each year until capital punishment is abolished. Does she ever worry that she has over-committed herself as an artist to such an overwhelming task?

“I did say I would continue until capital punishment is abolished, and I meant it. But if I felt like I wasn’t doing the project justice or I wasn’t connected to the work, I would take a break,” she says. “Because this is work that has to be meaningful; it can’t be me just going through the motions. I have to honor the painting and honor the memory of these people.”

Devotion to Story

In order to keep the project fresh and herself creatively inspired, Green spends six months per year working on The Last Supper plates. She devotes the rest of the year to her narrative paintings that are less well-known but for her, just as essential.

“Contemporary issues inspire me, and it comes out in my other work,” Green says. “I need that break from the plates, and I need to express myself in other ways.”

Green’s narrative paintings often have a whimsical tone. For example, in the summer of 2011, she painted a series of iPhones collected from friends and colleagues. More recently, she has started a series depicting figurative imagery on decorated plates, mostly drawn from memory.

One of Green’s signatures is her use of egg tempera, a painting technique that uses colored pigments mixed with egg yolk as an emulsifier. Known for their rich colors and durability, tempera paintings survive from the first century A.D. Green is one of the few art professors on the West Coast to teach this style.

Tala Madani, a 2002 OSU alumna, took an egg tempera workshop with Green and also accompanied her on a trip to tour art facilities in China. Madani is an Iranian-American artist who has gone on to international acclaim and splits her time between New York and Amsterdam.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” says Julie Green. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

“Visually her work is very subtle, you get wheeled in and suddenly you don’t know what hit you,” Madani says. “Personally I respond strongly to Julie’s other works, her surrealist imagery and translucent paintings with egg tempera have always struck a very strong chord with me.”

Green has just finished another batch of The Last Supper plates, which includes a group from Virginia, the state with the second highest annual execution rate after Texas. When she began the project, she received last meal documentation through the prisons through fax or mail. Now, last-meal menus are often posted online, and she can be painting a plate within 24 hours of the execution.

National Survey

In 2005, she received a fellowship at the OSU Center for the Humanities, which allowed her to delve more deeply into the history and sociopolitical consequences of last meals. Along with a research assistant, Green contacted every state that had capital punishment and asked questions such as: Do you have a final meal? What is its purpose? What are the rules (do you allow restaurant meals, what is the spending limit)? She found many states have a $20 maximum spending limit; others, like Oregon, with fewer executions, don’t limit the amount.

“Many prisons I called said that meals were given for ‘good behavior,’” Green says. “If you don’t make a scene, you get a meal. And others had some interesting traditions. For instance, in Louisiana, your family can join you for the last meal.”

Texas, which accounts for more than a third of all executions in the U.S. since 1976, eliminated last meals for death row inmates in September 2011, after a state legislator called the meals a waste of money. The irony, Green says, is that most inmates have very simple requests, such a hamburger and fries or a slice of pepperoni pizza.

“In part it is because many of the inmates are from lower income backgrounds and that maybe is the meal they want,” Green says. “Many pick comfort food items, things they associate with home. They don’t have time to digest it anyway, and it’s not as if the meal is meant to sustain them. So what they do with it is their choice, I think.”

The OSU Center for the Humanities has awarded Green a fellowship to write a book titled The Last Supper in 2013.

Green is starting a new group of plates on which she repeatedly paints the words “Declined last meal.” That is what the documents she was sent from Virginia claimed the prisoners wanted.

She says it is perhaps best she didn’t know what she was getting into when she clipped that newspaper column while having her morning tea and toast in 1997. Maybe if she had known, she would have never jumped into the fray. But now as meal notices keep coming in from all over the country, the sense of urgency is as great as ever.

“Once I started, and I saw that this was a way to humanize those who have been portrayed as monsters, by making visual something we all share — the love and comfort of food — I couldn’t stop,” Green says. “It opened my mind and made me an activist, so my hope is that this work somehow does that for others.”

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See a review of Green’s project on The Salt, National Public Radio’s food blog.

The computer models Chris Patton wrote for Oregon State’s Formula SAE team helped create a faster, more efficient car. (Photo: Robert Story)

But Patton, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, had a powerful tool at his disposal: the ability to simulate the impact of that move.

The results were surprising — and positive.

“We would tell design judges at the competition that we were doing this, and they wouldn’t believe us. We would have to measure it in front of them,“ he says. “They’d tell us our car would be slow and undriveable. And then we’d go out and be the fastest car in competition.”

Being the fastest is one of the reasons why Oregon State’s Formula SAE team, in partnership with a student team at DHBW-Ravensburg in Germany, has been so successful. In May 2012, the team won for the third consecutive year in the U.S. championships in Michigan. In 2011 the team won Formula Student Germany, which is widely considered to be the premier competition in the world.

The trick for Oregon State’s team, at least in part, has been computer simulation. During his seven years with Formula SAE (sponsored by SAE International, formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers), Patton has set the team apart by expanding the range of parameters used in designing its car. The flexibility of Patton’s modeling structure is one of the key parts of his dissertation.

“We can basically program the car in a computer and make comparisons between different cars without having to build them,” Patton says. “I can say, ‘You want to add this parameter? And this parameter? Sure, just add it in.’”

By “program,” Patton means he writes scripts in the programming language MATLAB that represent all the characteristics the team needs to consider when designing a car — whether to turn the rear wheels outward or to make the body of the car narrower or wider.

He starts with processing tire data collected by the transportation research company Calspan and the Formula SAE Tire Testing Consortium. To the uninitiated, it might seem like the raw power of the engine is what drives the car’s motion. But tires, Patton says, are the foundation for the cars the team builds.

“Tires are where all of the motion of the car comes from,” he says. “All of the forces that dominate the movement of the car come from the tires.”

Tire data give him information about how the tires behave when they’re in motion. For example, he gets measurements for friction against pavement, tire pressure and temperature, and how tires behave when the driver applies the brakes.
Having a detailed sense of what the tires will do ultimately gives the team a much better idea of how to design other elements of the car, and it helps them understand how those elements will behave in competition.

“I’m pretty confident that no other teams are doing the modeling at the level we’re doing it. There might be some that are close, but I don’t think it’s very common. I would say that’s something unique to us,” Patton says.

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Note: See Relentless, a video about Oregon State’s SAE Formula racing team.

(Photo: Video, Following the Plastic Trail)

Bear with me; here’s the problem. Plastic mulch — those shiny sheets spread across row upon row of veggies, strawberries and other crops — enables farmers to produce more types and greater quantities of food. It makes farming more profitable, preserves soil moisture, reduces weeds and saves on labor costs. But this type of mulch lasts for only a single growing season. After that, it gets dumped in landfills or is torched in the field — right here in the Willamette Valley and as far away as China.

Mark Ingman and a team of fellow Oregon State students are looking for alternatives to plastic mulch. At a national competition for sustainable technologies sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, they impressed the judges enough to walk away with a promise of a $90,000 grant to develop a cost-effective, biodegradable option made out of flax straw and low-grade wool.

They are now exploring a collaboration with a Canadian company, Naturally Advanced Technologies Inc., which is conducting flax trials in the Willamette Valley in cooperation with Oregon State scientists.

Other students engaged in the project are Kara DiFrancesco, Alison Doniger, Tucker Selko, Dustin DeGeorge, Courtney Holley, Isaiah Miller, Michelle Andersen, Randi Ponce, Veronica Nelson and Caity Clark. Faculty advisers  are Mary Santelmann in Oregon State’s Water Resources Graduate program, Hsiou-Lien Chen and Brigitte Cluver in Design and Human Environment, and James Cassidy in Crop and Soil Science.

(Photo: Karl Maasdam)

“A lot of people think you have to look like this to be a scientist!” says Professor Sujaya Rao, pointing at Einstein. A giggle ripples through the room.

Professor Rao is here to dispel that stereotype. An entomologist (bug scientist) who studies pollinators, like bumble bees and honey bees, as well as pests that damage crops, Rao wants young girls to know that science is wide open to them. That’s why she and other women at Oregon State University, students as well as professors, are devoting their Saturday to being role models and encouraging girls to consider careers in science and engineering.

About 120 girls from all over the state of Oregon participated in the annual science workshop for girls, Discovering the Scientist Within. “We collected information on schools and towns where they came from,” Rao reports. “Some came from Burns and Hines and Jewell and places I had never heard of!”

The discovery began with an engineering challenge: build a catapult. After teams of five or six girls had finished fashioning their catapults from wood and rubber bands, they tested their inventions by launching cotton balls as far as they could fly.

After that, the girls headed across campus to visit labs of their choice. At one lab, students learned about amphibians in the Northwest from graduate students Lindsey Thurman and Jennifer Rowe, a duo that calls itself “Women of Wildlife.”

First they gave a presentation about all sorts of frogs, newts and salamanders — including a weird video in which a bullfrog eats a poisonous newt and dies instantly from the poison, after which the newt triumphantly emerges from the dead bullfrog and walks away. Then the girls got to handle and feed the live amphibians living in lab.

(Photo: Karl Maasdam)

At another lab, the girls built and tested blades for a model wind turbine. They generated wind with a big fan, and then measured the voltage produced by their blades. Kari van Zee, who was leading the lab, helped them rethink their designs to produce more electricity.

Discovering the Scientist Within is sponsored by the OSU Provost’s Office, the SMILE Program, STEM Academy (formerly Saturday Academy), Scientists and Teachers in Education Partnerships, 4-H Youth Development, the Women’s Center, and Pre-college Programs.

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Read a story and see photos from the Discovering the Scientist Within workshop in the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

Listen to a TerraTalk podcast with Brian Sidlauskas

For two weeks in 2011, dawn signaled the beginning of another day of fish sampling for Oregon State University professor Brian Sidlauskas and his small team of colleagues and graduate students. Their camp was wedged within a mountainous area of northern South America called the Guyana Shield, and they surveyed a 125 mile stretch of the Cuyuni River that had never before been sampled.

“A typical day we’d get up at first light or not much after it, make a fast breakfast in our camp, and we’d get out on the little boat we had commissioned, it was maybe 18 or 16 feet. We had our guide, and we would say, ‘this is the type of habitat we are looking for’ or ‘do you know a good place we can fish today?’ We’d go out with our scientific equipment and our nets and spend a couple of hours running nets through the water trying to see what fish were there.”

Sidlauskas (right) sorts through samples from the Cuyuni River. During the expedition, he spent two weeks sampling a 125 mile stretch of river that had never before been surveyed. (Photo by Whit Bronaugh)

This expedition, sponsored in part by the Smithsonian Research Institution, was an attempt to survey fish diversity within this unexplored portion of Guyana, a country Sidlauskas says is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

But compared to estimates for the river based on the rest of the country, Sidlauskas and his team found an astonishing lack of diversity present.

“All of the herbivores were either absent or rare. As far as I can tell, the reason for this is that there is so much sediment in the water that the plants are dying and there is not a lot of food for the fish that eat the plants or that live in the plants.”

Mining and dredging have consumed the area as they are a cornerstone for the local economy. One result of these activities is the dumping of sand, which causes immense buildups that are potentially making the river inhospitable to plants.

Following the survey, Sidlauskas found himself with a few thousand fish and a mandate from the Guyana EPA to identify them down to species before exporting them from the country for further study. Due to a sudden departure of one graduate student, Sidlauskas was short-staffed and with only eight days to identify the specimens and it would be social networking that would allow the research to continue.

Some of the 150 species of headstanding tetras (Family Anostomidae). These fish range from less than an inch to about a foot in length.

Rather than just trying to do this on his own, he said, “Well we have Facebook, we have the internet, we’ve got all these photos, what happens if we just stick all of these photos up on my Facebook page and send a bunch of messages to our friends saying, ‘Hey, you’re an expert on this particular group of fish, do you know what this is?’ We started tagging the fishes as different people who are experts on those fish,” Sidlauskas says. “We did this and within about 24 hours we had the vast majority of our photographs with an ID on them.”

After successfully importing the specimens back into the U.S., Sidlauskas has been busy assembling an official report for the Guyana EPA with the hope of seeing mining reform in the future to prevent further biodiversity loss.

For more information, listen to the Terra Talk Podcast with Brian Sidlauskas.

Since its establishment in 2008, NNMREC has attracted nearly $20 million in private, state and federal support.

The NNMREC wave energy test site is about three nautical miles off Yaquina Head near Newport, Ore.

Just off the coast, not far from OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, a marine ecologist affiliated with NNMREC has been analyzing life on the seafloor. Working at depths of 60 to more than 400 feet, Sarah Henkel and a student team scoop sand and sediments to examine organisms and physical properties. They conduct beam trawls to gather bottom-dwelling fish. They use a remotely operated vehicle to survey rocky outcrops.

Henkel aims to anticipate the biological consequences of ocean wave energy on the Oregon coast. Her work complements studies of gray whale migrations conducted by OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute (MMI). In a 2007-08 survey, a team led by MMI Director Bruce Mate followed 120 whales within about 10 nautical miles of the shore. “As expected,” they reported, “the migration paths of some gray whales cross through areas of proposed wave energy development.” Studies under way focus on acoustic techniques to help whales avoid wave energy arrays if the facilities are deemed to create problems for the animals in the future.

Meanwhile, OSU engineers are testing wave energy devices and working with AXYS Technologies, Inc., of Vancouver, British Columbia, to build a new offshore moored test buoy. A search for an additional test site connected to the nation’s power grid is being led by Sean Moran, NNMREC ocean test facilities manager.

Testing the Wind

To add a new wrinkle to ocean energy, scientists are starting to investigate the potential to capture energy from sea winds. With a U.S. Department of Energy grant, Rob Suryan, a seabird expert at OSU, will lead another NNMREC project to develop remote monitoring technologies that can assess potential wind turbine impacts on seabirds and bats.

The goal is a thorough analysis of Oregon’s wave energy potential. Engineered systems will need to survive extreme ocean conditions and minimize impact on the environment and traditional ocean uses. “We’ve got the technical side, the environmental side and the outreach to communities through Oregon Sea Grant. You don’t have that everywhere,” says Belinda Batten, director of NNMREC.

Plans are to deploy the NNMREC’s test buoy in a site three nautical miles off the coast at Newport in 2012. The moored buoy will allow wave energy developers to place their devices in the ocean and monitor performance. “It can gather all the data we need about the devices: systems performance and power analysis. The developers will go out and moor alongside the buoy and connect through a cable,” says Batten, a mechanical engineer.

Companies such as Columbia Power Technologies, Neptune Wave Power and Northwest Wave Energy Innovations have been discussing plans for testing prototypes in Oregon. A fourth company, Ocean Power Technologies, has already received permits for a small commercial-scale device near Reedsport.

What links these four students and their diverse scientific interests is climate change. Lindsey Thurman, Sarah Frey, Sihan Li and Seth Wiggins have been granted fellowships from the Northwest Climate Science Center, a program of the U.S. Department of the Interior hosted by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) at Oregon State University.

“The purpose of the fellowships is to support promising graduate students whose research is relevant to the Climate Science Center,” says Phil Mote, OCCRI director.

Their academic talents are exceeded only by the energy with which they engage the world. Here are their stories.

Little Nooks and Crannies

Her forest-green Toyota pickup was packed to the gills when Sarah Frey climbed in and steered toward I-90, trailer in tow. The Vermonter was in a bit of a daze. A chance encounter barely a month before had launched her on an unplanned journey across the United States, destination, Oregon.

It all started in 2008 at an American Ornithologists’ Union conference in Portland, where Frey ran into OSU forest ecologist Matt Betts, an acquaintance from an earlier population-modeling workshop. After five years of tramping around the Americas and Pacific Islands doing fieldwork for conservation nonprofits — studying hawk migration in Nevada, banding owls in Michigan, investigating avian pox among forest birds in Hawaii, tracking tropical birds in Ecuador — she had recently finished her master’s thesis at the University of Vermont on Bicknell’s thrush, a rare, high-elevation species. She hadn’t yet mapped out her next move. Then Betts sprung a fellowship offer.

Sarah Frey (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“How about starting your Ph.D. next month?” he asked. A few weeks later, she was enrolled in the College of Forestry with a minor in Ecosystem Informatics.

For the next three field seasons, she monitored birds in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. From mid-May through early July, she and other researchers climbed the rugged slopes, from creek bed to mountaintop, documenting behaviors and population densities of about 50 species. “We went out to 184 sites, stood, listened, and looked for 10 minutes at each site,” she explains. “During 2011, we carried out fiberglass poles and PVC pipe to all of the points for installing temperature sensors.”

Enduring the brutal conditions of fieldwork is an occupational hazard for Frey. Ever since the iconic behavioral ecologist Bernd Heinrich (Mind of the Raven) turned her on to birds during an ornithology field trip when Frey was an undergrad, she has thrown herself into more adventures than Indiana Jones. Braving the tropical forests of Queensland, Australia, for a study-abroad program was one. Another was her Bicknell’s thrush study, which took her up and down a different Appalachian mountain every day for two breeding seasons. Her studies also have taken her to Switzerland where she recently spent two months working with a statistical modeler at the Swiss Ornithological Institute.

Frey’s OCCRI-funded research challenges certain longstanding assumptions that underpin today’s species-climate models. Typically, these models are based on “bioclimatic envelopes” — that is, the mix of temperatures, precipitation levels and other climate variables within which species thrive. She wants to know what other factors might be driving species extinctions and biodiversity in a time of shifting climate. How important is vegetation, for instance? What about competition among species? Where does predation fit in? How do microclimates help birds adapt to climate change?

One of the things she’s investigating is the role of temperature in small-scale species distributions. The buffering capacity of “microclimatic refugia” (habitat havens she characterizes as “little nooks and crannies”) in mountainous terrain could be critical as birds make adjustments to a fluctuating environment in nesting, breeding and foraging.
“I’m trying to tease apart the main drivers of where species occur,” she says. “Most scientists think climate is the primary driver at large scales, while vegetation and other species are the main drivers at small scales.”

To find out, she compared the influence of microclimate on distribution dynamics for three species with different migratory strategies: hermit warbler (a neotropical migrant), chestnut-backed chickadee (a resident) and Pacific wren (a partial migrant).

“There have been very few rigorous tests of these alternative hypotheses,” Frey notes. “Uncovering the relative importance of different drivers of species distribution — climate, land cover, competitors, predators — is critical for both ecological theory and environmental policy.”

Worldwide Weather Warriors

College student Sihan Li gazed in astonishment at the terracotta warriors, massed by the thousands on a silent, earthen battlefield near Xi’an in central China. Little did the Yunnan University undergrad know that soon she would be marshaling her own army from a computer lab in Oregon. But unlike Emperor Qin’s clay troops, built to do battle in the afterlife, Sihan Li’s flesh-and-blood legions are taking up arms against the here-and-now threat of climate change. And instead of spears and swords, her climate warriors are wielding keyboards and barometers.

Li’s army, enlisted by a global project called climateprediction.net, comprises more than 50,000 weather geeks. They have volunteered to collect information on local precipitation, temperature, humidity and other weather events and load it onto their home computers. Li’s job is to analyze the data from the western United States — one of three regions being studied worldwide with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey. To do that, she is using BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a software system for volunteer computing.

Sihan Li (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“Usually, communities feel removed from the research going on around them,” notes Li, who goes by Meredith. “But volunteers for climateprediction.net become personally involved and committed to the project.”

The experiment, characterized by Li as “unprecedented” in its scope and reach, is a perfect fit for this 23-year-old Ph.D. student in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. To the young atmospheric scientist, only the colorful richness of humanity rivals topics like wind-ocean circulation dynamics and heat-flux transfer on the list of fascinating things to study and experience. As an undergraduate, Li explored the far corners of China with a train ticket and a backpack whenever she wasn’t taking classes and working on regional climate modeling. The ancient city of Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Army, enchanted her with its palpable sense of history. “You can almost smell the culture in the air,” she says.

Like humanity, climate is infinitely complex. So far, computer models designed to predict future climate scenarios have been hobbled by one of two problems: too broad a scope that glosses over the finer details of geography, or too narrow a range that fails to capture the larger context. The army of weather volunteers will remedy these deficiencies, Li says, by collecting data broadly and finely simultaneously. The result will be “super ensembles” — suites of large-scale simulations — for the western U.S., Europe and southern Africa.

“This research,” says Li, “is not only scientifically groundbreaking, but likely to provide the greatest value to date in assisting the western region as we attempt to cope with and plan for climate change.”

Along with Oxford University, OCCRI’s partner on the project, OSU is consulting closely with stakeholders, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the California Department of Water Resources and the Water Utility Climate Alliance.

“Science is, in the end, to be of service to people — to make the world a better place for people to live in,” says Li.

Carbon, Cattle and Costs

These days, Seth Wiggins spends long hours staring at a computer screen in his lab at OSU. But the master’s student is not a natural habitue of chairs, swivel or otherwise. In 2009 his dead-accurate aim and rocket-fast arm won him a gold medal in Ultimate Frisbee at the World Games in Taiwan. The next year he pedaled his Giant OCR2 road bike from Seattle to New York, spinning 3,000 miles in six weeks, solo. The biggest challenge, he says, was getting enough calories. “I would go to these all-you-can-eat pancake places and eat them out of business,” he reports. “My record was 23.” Pancakes, that is. With butter and syrup.

Seth Wiggins (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

Soon after his cross-country ride, Wiggins got serious about his other passion — saving the planet — and enrolled in graduate school. But instead of choosing a field like forest ecology or conservation biology, the 27-year-old from Corvallis is taking a less-usual path to planetary protection: economics.

“What I care about are environmental issues, specifically climate change,” says Wiggins, who earned his bachelor’s in econ and international studies at the University of Oregon. “But in this society, things don’t happen unless money is attached.”

Take CO2 reduction, for example. Attaching a dollar figure to greenhouse gasses is the idea behind cap and trade, which lets companies exchange carbon credits on the free market. In Oregon, where rangelands comprise about one in nine acres, grasses soak up carbon dioxide by the ton. By capturing and holding (“sequestering”) CO2 from the atmosphere, Oregon’s vast rangelands create a powerful sink for pollutants that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere. If policymakers were to offer economic incentives to ranchers, Wiggins suggests, the state could lock up significant quantities of emissions every year.

“This is an enormous land resource,” says Wiggins. “Carbon sequestration on rangelands could potentially have a huge effect.”
To test that potential in the Pacific Northwest, he is looking at ranching operations across Oregon, Washington and Idaho with at least 100 acres and cattle sales grossing $10,000. Using a statistical model designed by Professor John Antle in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Wiggins is analyzing data from the most recent Census of Agriculture to weigh various assumptions — costs, returns, profits, and so on — that underlie the sequestration concept. The study’s goal is to find the optimal price point where ranchers could be persuaded to join a sequestration program and improve their land management practices.

“Currently, much of the rangeland is overgrazed,” says Wiggins. “It’s cheaper for ranchers to add more cows than to maintain healthy grasslands.”

Attractive economic incentives would encourage ranchers to adopt eco-friendly methods, such as rotational grazing or intensive pasturing — methods that allow soils to absorb carbon in the atmosphere, according to Wiggins. The way he sees it, practices that are affordable as well as environmentally sound allow people to align their actions with their values without taking a hit in the pocketbook.

“Right now there’s a disconnect between our values and our actions,” he says. “No one wants to leave a deteriorating environment to generations going forward, but many people act as if they do. Figuring out how to get people to act in accordance with their values seems incredibly interesting to me.”

Blue Crabs to Cascades Frogs

The little girl with the sunburned nose and whorl of sun-bleached hair felt as much at home swimming and diving in Florida’s Santa Rosa Sound as did the blue crabs she loved to trap. Since those carefree days on the Gulf Coast, Lindsey Thurman has stalked wildlife both cold-blooded and warm. She has monitored sea turtle nests from Pensacola to Alligator Point as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Netted freshwater fish in Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge for the Florida Museum of Natural History. Sampled tissues from snakes and other reptiles in Ocala National Forest for the U.S. Geological Survey. Tracked carnivores in California’s Sierra Nevada range for a U.S. Forest Service study.

And she did all this before she was admitted to graduate school at OSU.

Lindsey Thurman (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“I’m a field biologist at heart,” says the Ph.D. student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, which she chose because of its No. 1 national ranking. “I’m fascinated by phylogeny — how species are arranged on the tree of life. I like the challenge, physically and mentally. I like the serenity of being out there by myself.”

These days, “being out there” means trekking through the Cascades, her backpack stuffed with topo maps and sampling kits for collecting live amphibians. In alpine ponds, creek beds and leaf litter, she seeks to discover how high-elevation frogs and salamanders are coping with climate change. With her yellow Lab, Sierra, loping merrily beside her, the 25-year-old is already blazing new trails in amphibian research. Her master’s project, carried out under the guidance of Assistant Professor Tiffany Garcia, revealed that long-toed salamanders have modified their egg-laying behavior to protect their progeny from the interplay of mounting temperatures and UV (ultraviolet) radiation, which are dangerously strong in the upper reaches. Instead of laying masses of eggs at the water’s surface, Thurman discovered, the salamanders are depositing their eggs singly under protective rocks or silt at high elevation.

For her new study, she’s pondering a wider range of variables — what she calls the “litany of threats” to the survival of mountain-dwelling amphibians.

“The impacts of environmental stressors on amphibian populations typically have been studied independently,” Thurman notes. “My study will contribute a broader analysis of climate change variables on multiple species across diverse, freshwater ecosystems.”

Scientists know that amphibians’ permeable skin and soft-shelled eggs make them hypersensitive to changes in temperature, moisture and UV rays. But there are all sorts of other questions demanding answers, Thurman says. For example, How do the animals’ “plastic” (quickly adaptable) developmental traits mitigate climate stressors? What happens to animals living in ephemeral ponds and meadows (those that dry up part of the year)? What is the impact of inter-species competition?

“I’ve always wanted to look at these variables on a landscape scale,” says Thurman. “Climate change is a global issue, and the variables are not independent. It’s hard to tease them apart.”

To find out how amphibians respond to the synergies of climate and high elevation, her ambitious study has three parts: field work, lab experiments and theoretical modeling. In the field, she will document frog and salamander populations in three watersheds at elevations above 1,000 meters from southern Oregon to southern British Columbia. In the lab, she will run climate and population scenarios (wetter, drier, hotter, more animals per tank) on the Cascades frog, the western toad, the Pacific chorus frog and the long-toed salamander. In the computer lab, she will use models to predict climate-driven changes in ecology and species distribution.

“Mountain amphibians are losing suitable breeding habitat rapidly,” Thurman says. “These species are going extinct at a disproportionate rate worldwide. With new baseline data, land managers will be able to fast-track conservation strategies for high-elevation freshwater ecosystems in time to make a difference.”

A study published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2009 examined the activity of chlorophyllin and found that, on a dose-by-dose basis, it was 10 times more potent at causing death of colon cancer cells than hydroxyurea, a chemotherapeutic drug commonly used in cancer treatment.

Beyond that, chlorophyllin kills cancer cells by blocking the same phase of cellular division that hydroxyurea does, but by a different mechanism. This suggests that it – and possibly other “cocktails” of natural products – might be developed to have a synergistic effect with conventional cancer drugs, helping them to work better or require less toxic dosages, researchers said.

“We conclude that chlorophyllin has the potential to be effective in the clinical setting, when used alone or in combination with currently available cancer therapeutic agents,” the researchers wrote in their study.

The concept of combining conventional or new cancer drugs with natural compounds that have been shown to have anti-cancer properties is very promising, says Rod Dashwood, professor and director of the Cancer Chemoprotection Program in the Linus Pauling Institute.

“Most chemotherapeutic approaches to cancer try to target cancer cells specifically and do something that slows or stops their cell growth process,” Dashwood says. “We’re now identifying such mechanisms of action for natural compounds, including dietary agents. With further research we may be able to make the two approaches work together to enhance the effectiveness of cancer therapies.”

Chlorophyllin is a water-soluble derivative of chlorophyll, the green pigment found in most plants and many food products that makes possible the process of photosynthesis and plant growth from the sun’s energy. Chlorophyllin is inexpensive, and animal studies plus human clinical data suggest that it can be ingested at relatively high levels without toxicity.

In the study, researchers found that pharmacologic doses of chlorophyllin caused colon cancer cells to spend more time than normal in their “synthesis phase” in which DNA is duplicated. Timing is critical to the various phases of cell growth, researchers said, and this disruption started a process that ultimately led to cell death, the study found.

In particular, the presence of high levels of chlorophyllin caused a major reduction in the level of ribonucleotide reductase, an enzyme critical to DNA synthesis, researchers found. This is also the mechanism of action of hydroxyurea, one drug already being used for cancer chemotherapy.

“In cancer research right now there’s interest in approaches that can reduce ribonucleotide reductase,” Dashwood adds. “At the doses used in our experiments, chlorophyllin almost completely stops the activity of this enzyme.”

Further research is needed both in laboratory and animal studies, with combinations of chlorophyllin and existing cancer drugs, before it would be appropriate for human trials. Chlorophyllin, in general, is poorly absorbed from the human gastrointestinal tract, so it’s unclear what levels might be needed for therapeutic purposes or how well they would work.

Other dietary agents also might have similar potential. Work published by LPI researchers in the journals Carcinogenesis and Cancer Prevention Research explored the role of organic selenium compounds in killing human prostate and colon cancer cells. Colorectal and prostate cancers are consistently among the leading causes of cancer mortality in the United States and accounted respectively for 18 percent and 9 percent of all cancer deaths in 2009, according to estimates from the American Cancer Society.

In the recent studies, a form of organic selenium found naturally in garlic and Brazil nuts was converted in cancer cells to metabolites that acted as “HDAC inhibitors” – a promising field of research in which silenced tumor suppressor genes are re-activated, triggering cancer cell death.

“Whether it’s HDAC inhibition leading to one manner of cancer cell growth arrest, or loss of ribonucleotide reductase activity leading to another, as seen with chlorophyllin, there’s significant promise in the use of natural products for combined cancer therapies,” Dashwood says. “These are areas that merit continued research.”

These studies were supported by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Other collaborators included researchers from the New York Medical College and the Penn State College of Medicine. Further information on chlorophylls and selenium compounds can be found in the LPI’s Micronutrient Information Center.

Clothing designs get the sweat test. OSU professors Hsiou-Lien Chen, Brigitte Cluver and Leslie Burns test experimental fabrics and outdoor apparel on "Newton," a manikin that perspires through artificial pores. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

He was right — but only partly. Beakers are just the beginning of science-based apparel design in the Department of Design and Human Environment (which also offers undergraduate degrees in interior design and merchandising management). In their investigations, students and professors employ such high-tech instruments as a scanning electron microscope for examining fibers and a $20,000 machine for gauging the moisture-management properties of fabrics. They use a wind tunnel for simulating thermal resistance of protective helmets under walking-speed conditions. They master CAD software (computer-aided design) for rendering functional items like ski boots and running shoes.

A manikin named Newton is the pièce de résistance of OSU’s apparel labs. Cast in carbon-epoxy and jointed at the elbows, knees, ankles, hips and shoulders, he looks a lot like the Tin Woodsman — that is, until researchers wrap him in an indigo-blue “sweating skin” to measure the thermal properties of clothing. They have used this $200,000 system, manufactured by Seattle-based Measurement Technology Northwest, to research everything from military helmets for Oregon Ballistics to adult diapers for a Japanese firm specializing in geriatric health care.

OSU prepares fashion designers who have special expertise in “functional” apparel — that is, clothing made of specialized fabrics for specialized purposes. In Oregon, that often means outdoor and athletic wear. But it can also mean apparel that ensures safety for the military and police, comfort for the old and infirm, and even sustainability for the planet and its inhabitants.

“We are not an art school,” emphasizes Leslie Burns, department chair. “Granted, we do have the fashion component, the aesthetic piece. But this is a research university, so our program is research-based. We focus on problem solving and commercialization of design.”

At the Industry Nexus

Researchers top up Newton's fluids through hoses in the manikin's eyes. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Many of the problems they tackle are quintessentially Oregon — that is, how to stay dry and comfy when you throw yourself headlong into the watery wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Oregonians’ full-tilt embrace of nature (bumping down hillsides on mountain bikes, shooting class-3 rapids in kayaks, tramping old-growth trails in boots and backpacks, plying fresh powder on skis or snowshoes) has created a fertile seedbed for active-wear entrepreneurs. Here was a captive market for high-performance gear that resists wind and rain, holds in warmth while wicking out sweat, weighs little but breathes a lot.

As far back as the early 1900s, pioneering firms such as White Stag (skiwear), Jantzen (swimwear), Pendleton (woolen sportswear) and Danner (boots) catalyzed an athletic and outdoor cluster in the Portland metro area that’s now 300 companies strong. Anchoring it are the world headquarters for industry giants Nike, Columbia Sportswear and Adidas America. KEEN, Korkers and Icebreaker are just some of the up-and-coming brands in the cluster. The Portland Development Commission (PDC) has named this sector one of its five “signature industries.” Aiming to create 10,000 new jobs in the next five years, the PDC is directing resources to its target industry clusters with an eye to drawing new talent and new investment opportunities to the city.

“There’s a wonderful quote from the PDC that goes, ‘What Hollywood is to the movie industry, Portland is to the athletic and outdoor industry,’” says Burns, who serves on the forum’s board. “There’s no place else like it.”

And OSU, boasting the West Coast’s only research-based apparel design school, is right in the middle of it all. “We’re the industry’s higher-education partner,” says Burns. “The PDC wants Portland to be identified as the worldwide hub for sustainable design — not just in athletic and outdoor but inclusive of all the sustainability aspects of Portland.”

Materials in the Raw

More often than not, when Hsiou-Lien Chen tells people she’s a professor in apparel design, they say, “Oh, so you sew!” “I tell them, ‘No, I don’t even know how to make a pillowcase,’” she reports ruefully. Stereotypes from the old days of “home economics ” linger, it seems, much to Chen’s chagrin.

Chen is not a seamstress but a fiber scientist. She studies the raw materials from which textiles are woven.

“I’m fascinated,” says Chen, “with environmentally friendly fibers.”

That fascination is easy to understand when you put your eye to the lens of an electron microscope. The internal structures of nature’s fibers — everything from silk, cotton and wool to flax, poplar and hops — zoom into view, magnified nearly 1,000 times. Some look like forests of battered drinking straws. Others resemble dried pasta or strands of DNA. Are the fibers long or short? Hollow or solid? Thick or thin? From these observations Chen can determine their strength, weight, durability, insulating properties and, ultimately, their suitability for textiles.

Chen’s research at OSU began with naturally colored cottons — those fluffy bolls that burst from the plant already tinted with pigment. Spanning an earthy palette from ochre and rust to moss green and even blue, they benefit Planet Earth by negating the need for chemical dyes. One intriguing finding: Instead of fading in the wash, these colors get darker.

She has gone on to investigate the properties of poplar fibers — those wispy, hair-like strands that float on autumn winds when seedpods burst — already being used by a German firm for insulating winter wear, comforters and sleeping bags. In a study that examined the physical, chemical and thermal properties of poplar, Chen and OSU apparel design colleague Brigitte Cluver found it to be an ideal alternative to synthetic insulation materials such as polyester, which is made from petrochemicals. “Evolution has provided poplar seed hair with several characteristics that enhance seed dispersal, both in air and on water: lightweight, fine, hollow and resistant to wetting,” the researchers wrote in Clothing & Textiles Research Journal in 2010. “This combination of characteristics is also the basic prescription for an effective bulk textile insulation material.”

Another of her subjects is flax, a super-strong fiber inside the stalks of plants that have been used for clothing in the past, but now are being grown mainly for their oily seeds. “The Willamette Valley has perfect weather for growing flax,” she says. “Here at OSU where we are doing research on making bio-fuels from oilseeds, the stems get burned.” She and a colleague are designing a machine that can quickly separate the sturdy fibers from the woody material that encases them. “We want to optimize the mechanical separation process,” she says, envisioning a potential patent on the horizon.

And then there are hops. A couple years ago, a consultant for Rogue Ales sent Chen an email probing the feasibility of extracting fiber from Oregon hop vines. “As you are likely aware,” he wrote, “hop vines and stems are in no short supply here in Oregon. At present, they are discarded, since it is only the strobile (fruit) that is used for brewing.” From a corner of her lab, Chen picks up a fat bundle of dried plant material and holds it to the light. Lamenting the waste of thousands of pounds of textile potential each year, she notes, “Hops fibers have the same chemical composition as cotton.”

From 4-H to Fashionista

When Leslie Burns was a girl growing up in Cut Bank, Montana, she couldn’t have imagined that her 4-H clothing club would lead to a career as a university department head, co-author of a widely used textbook (The Business of Fashion, now in its fourth edition), and researcher (investigating how culture influences design and consumers’ perception of products).

The latest feather in her cap was the Fashionista blog’s 2011 rankings of U.S. fashion schools, which put OSU among the top 20. The heady list included such elite institutions as Parson’s, Pratt and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Fashionista exists, in its own words, to “chronicle the fashion trail from the runway to the first Canal Street knockoffs.” OSU has mapped out its own path along that trail.

“Our program is a wonderful combination of science and art, function and fashion,” says Burns. “It has very much a target consumer orientation. If people aren’t going to wear it, we’re not going to design it.”

Talent for Threads

If there’s a “fashion gene” in human DNA, OSU apparel design students and alums have it. Almost to a person, they report loving apparel — the palette, the panache, the voice, the statement — ever since they could dress themselves. Amanda Grisham is one outstanding example. In October, the senior from Tigard won the Emerging Designer’s Competition in conjunction with Portland Fashion Week. Portland Monthly style editor Eden Dawn wrote on her blog that Grisham’s designs were “hands down some of the strongest of the show.”

Fortunately for them, they have ample opportunities to parlay their inborn passion into a profession. That’s because the vortex of the U.S. outdoor and athletic-wear industry is just 80 miles north of Corvallis. “Portland is recognized as the global hub for the athletic and outdoor industry,” according to the Portland Development Commission.

“There’s an enormous cluster of expertise in the Portland area,” affirms OSU alum Ron Parham, a public relations executive at Columbia Sportswear. Within that cluster of expertise, there are many alumni of the OSU apparel design and graphic design programs. Meet a few:

Kathleen McNally

Creative Director for Apparel, Columbia Sportswear

Kathleen McNally (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Portland
Beginnings: Started sewing her own wardrobe (and Barbie’s) in second grade

OSU Apparel Design: “The thing I liked best about the program was the freedom to tailor it to my strengths. I did a lot of independent projects.”
Previous Workplaces: Nike, Lucy Activewear, J. Crew
Current Trends: “Packability, compactability, ultra-lightweight”
Industry Cluster: “So many creative people move to Portland because it’s an outdoor nirvana. New York is the only other city with ready access to this kind of talent, especially talent so strongly oriented to the outdoors.”

Abby Windell Swancutt

Apparel Designer for Young Athletes, Nike

Abby Windell Swancutt (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Newport
Beginnings: Started revamping hand-me-downs in elementary school; designed her formals for high school dances
OSU Apparel Design: “The best thing about the program was that every professor knew me as a person and genuinely cared. They came to all my volleyball games. My favorite class was fashion merchandizing and marketing, where I learned that you have to get to know the customer inside and out. Your consumer’s your boss.”

Christine Cyphers

Global Sourcing and Manufacturing, Columbia Sportswear

Christine Cyphers (contributed photo)

Hometown: Portland
Beginnings: Grew up sewing, but also loved math; mom tried to steer her toward engineering. “Now I tell my mom, ‘You know what? You were right — we engineer clothing. Everything we do is math-related.’”
OSU Apparel Design: “OSU is a well-rounded education. It’s not just focused on apparel. It’s also about business — marketing, finance, international trade, foreign exchange. And it’s about science, like the chemistry of textiles and the carbon properties of fibers.”
Previous Workplaces: Pendleton Woolen Mills, Lands’ End
Current Trends: “Cotton prices and oil prices play into the bigger business dynamic. We’re always asking, ‘What can we do with the commodities that are available to us?’”

Lauren Stewart Ross

Sourcing Analyst, Columbia Sportswear

Lauren Stewart Ross (Photo: Oregon State University)

Hometown: Central Point
Beginnings: 4-H
OSU Apparel Design: Started college with K-12 teaching aspirations, but stumbled across an apparel course called “Appearance, Power and Society” and promptly switched majors. Study tours to Las Vegas, Europe and Hong Kong steeped her in the international nature of the apparel industry.
Industry Cluster: “In Portland it’s such a close-knit community that everyone knows everyone else. You can make great connections and build a great career here.”

Angela Snow

Director of Creative Operations and Macro-Trends, Nike

Angela Snow (contributed photo)

Hometown: Beaverton (a half-mile from today’s Nike campus)
Beginnings: Started by creating fashion illustration in grade school; mother sewed her designs for her to wear
OSU Graphic Design: “The program had world-class graphic design professors, which was enriching and provided a great education. I also did coursework in apparel design. It was a perfect combination of design disciplines.”
Current Trends: “We research patterns in macro-trend culture, innovation, technology, fashion, science and biometrics — we synthesize this information to help inspire and inform the design community.”

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See an October 2012 story about Oregon State’s apparel design program in the Portland Business Journal.

Carolyn Aldwin's research addresses the impacts of stress. (Illustration: Santiago Uceda)

In general, the researchers found only a few protective factors against these higher levels of stress – people who self-reported that they had good health tended to live longer and married men also fared better. Moderate drinkers also lived longer than non-drinkers.

“Being a teetotaler and a smoker were risk factors for mortality,” said Carolyn Aldwin, lead author of the study and a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University. “So perhaps trying to keep your major stress events to a minimum, being married and having a glass of wine every night is the secret to a long life.”

This is the first study to show a direct link between stress trajectories and mortality in an aging population. Unlike previous studies that were conducted in a relatively short term with smaller sample sizes, this study was modified to document major stressors – such as death of a spouse or a putting a parent into a retirement home – that specifically affect middle-aged and older people.

“Most studies look at typical stress events that are geared at younger people, such as graduation, losing a job, having your first child,” Aldwin said. “I modified the stress measure to reflect the kinds of stress that we know impacts us more as we age, and even we were surprised at how strong the correlation between stress trajectories and mortality was.”

Aldwin said that previous studies examined stress only at one time point, while this study documented patterns of stress over a number of years.

The study, out now in the Journal of Aging Research, used longitudinal data surveying almost 1,000 middle-class and working-class men for an 18-year period, from 1985 to 2003. All the men in the study were picked because they had good health when they first signed up to be part of the Boston VA Normative Aging Study in the 1960s.

Those in the low-stress group experienced an average of two or fewer major life events in a year, compared with an average of three for the moderate group and up to six for the high stress group. One of the study’s most surprising findings was that the mortality risk was similar for the moderate versus high stress group.

“It seems there is a threshold and perhaps with anything more than two major life events a year and people just max out,” Aldwin said. “We were surprised the effect was not linear and that the moderate group had a similar risk of death to the high-risk group.”

While this study looked specifically at major life events and stress trajectories, Aldwin said the research group will next explore chronic daily stress as well as coping strategies.

“People are hardy, and they can deal with a few major stress events each year,” Aldwin said. “But our research suggests that long-term, even moderate stress can have lethal effects.”

Michael Levenson, Heidi Igarashi, Nuoo-Ting Molitor and John Molitor with Oregon State University and Avron Spiro III with Boston University all contributed to this study, which was funded by the National Institute on Aging as well as an award from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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For more on Carolyn Aldwin’s research, see The Stress Paradox.

Oregon State University Professor Scott Ashford measures ground upheaval during a visit to Japan following a major earthquake there. (photo courtesy GEER)

“Our mission is to get word out to the scientific community about what’s happened on the ground,” he says. As a geotechnical engineer, he is particularly interested in soil changes following an earthquake. His findings raise questions about the adequacy of building standards in the United States and abroad.

In the past year, Ashford has inspected the aftermaths of quakes in Chile, New Zealand and Japan. The work demands humility. Out of respect for people who lived through terrifying events, he warns younger colleagues to avoid expressing excitement over significant findings. “We’re amongst people who have had their lives ruined and are in upheaval,” he says. “Even though it’s exciting to see the things we’ve been doing research on in action, you can’t show any of that. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.”

And it demands a keen eye. Careful measurements of structural damage, landslides, soil liquefaction and shifted fault lines can help engineers to design more resilient structures. The whole point is to save lives and reduce the damage that will occur when the next Big One hits, a goal shared by more than a dozen of Ashford’s colleagues in engineering and geophysical sciences at OSU.

Buildings on Quicksand

Ashford has seen buildings torn in half as if they were made of LEGOs®, bridges demolished or jackknifed on their foundations and utility pipes squeezed out of the ground. One his team’s most significant findings came from the March 11 subduction zone earthquake in Japan, which caused soil liquefaction — wet sands, gravels, silts and fill materials turned into soup as they shake, with all the load-bearing capacity of quicksand — that surprised researchers with its geographic extent and widespread severity.

In order to gather evidence of this phenomenon, Ashford and his team looked for sand boils (small sand volcanoes) and lateral spreads — that is, shallow landslides triggered by liquefaction. Although they arrived only two weeks after the initial quake, cleanup was already taking place, erasing evidence in some locations, which is why GEER teams are sent in quickly after a major event.

“The data are very perishable,” he says. But the more evidence they can gather about how soil has altered during an earthquake, the better engineers will be at predicting the outcomes of future quakes.

Collapsed bridge in Santiago, Chile, after the 2010 earthquake. (Photo courtesy of Scott Ashford)

“We’ve seen localized examples of soil liquefaction as extreme as this before, but the distance and extent of damage in Japan were unusually severe. Entire structures were tilted and sinking into the sediments, even while they remained intact. The shifts in soil destroyed water, sewer and gas pipelines, crippling the utilities and infrastructure these communities need to function. We saw some places that sank as much as four feet.”

Parts of the West Coast of the United States are vulnerable to the phenomenon. They include Portland, parts of the Willamette Valley and other areas of Oregon, Washington and California. Around San Francisco Bay, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey categorizes most of the low-lying lands as having moderate to very high susceptibility to liquefaction.

Some degree of soil liquefaction is common in almost any major earthquake. It can allow structures to shift or sink and significantly magnify the structural damage produced by the shaking itself.

New Construction Standards

But most earthquakes are much shorter than the event in Japan, Ashford adds. The length of the Japanese earthquake, as much as five minutes, may force researchers to reconsider the extent of liquefaction damage possible in situations such as this.

“With such a long-lasting earthquake, we saw how structures that might have been OK after 30 seconds just continued to sink and tilt as the shaking continued for several more minutes,” he says. “And it was clear that younger sediments, and especially areas built on recently filled ground, are much more vulnerable.”

The data provided by analyzing the Japanese earthquake should make it possible to improve the understanding of this soil phenomenon and better prepare for it in the future. Ashford says it was critical for the team to collect the information quickly, before damage was removed in the recovery efforts.

“There’s no doubt that we’ll learn things from what happened in Japan that will help us to mitigate risks in other similar events,” Ashford adds. “Future construction in some places may make more use of techniques known to reduce liquefaction, such as better compaction to make soils dense, or use of reinforcing stone columns.”

The massive subduction zone earthquakes capable of this type of shaking, which are the most powerful in the world, don’t happen everywhere, even in other regions such as Southern California that face seismic risks. But an event almost exactly like that is expected in the Pacific Northwest from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the new findings make it clear that liquefaction will be a critical issue there.

West Coast on Edge

Many parts of that region, from northern California to British Columbia, have younger soils vulnerable to liquefaction — on the coast, near river deposits or in areas with filled ground. These “young” sediments, in geologic terms, may be those deposited within the past 10,000 years or more. In Oregon, for instance, that describes much of downtown Portland, the Portland International Airport, nearby industrial facilities and other cities and parts of the Willamette Valley.

Anything near a river and old flood plains is a suspect, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has already concluded that 1,100 bridges in the state are at risk from an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Fewer than 15 percent of them have been retrofitted to prevent collapse.

Based on reports by the U.S. and California geological surveys, this San Francisco Bay Area map shows areas with water-saturated sandy and silty materials that are susceptible to liquefaction if shaken hard enough. (Map courtesy of the Association of Bay Area Governments)

“Buildings that are built on soils vulnerable to liquefaction not only tend to sink or tilt during an earthquake, but slide downhill if there’s any slope, like towards a nearby river,” Ashford says. “This is called lateral spreading. In Portland we might expect this sideways sliding of more than four feet in some cases, more than enough to tear apart buildings and buried pipelines.”

Some damage may be reduced or prevented by different construction techniques or retrofitting. But another reasonable goal is to at least anticipate the damage, to know what will probably be destroyed, make contingency plans for what will be needed to implement repairs and design ways to help protect and care for residents until services can be restored.

The survey in Japan identified areas as far away as Tokyo Bay that had liquefaction-induced ground failures. The magnitude of settlement and tilt was “larger than previously observed for such light structures,” the GEER researchers wrote in their report.

Impacts and deformation were erratic, often varying significantly from one street to the next. Port facilities along the coast faced major liquefaction damage. Strong Japanese construction standards helped prevent many buildings from collapse – even as they tilted and sank into the ground.

Collaboration Is Key

The GEER team always pairs up with researchers from the country where they’re working. This not only helps them with cultural and language issues, but allows them to be guided by the hosting country’s scientists as to where it’s appropriate, and safe, to conduct their research. It is also a great way to foster international collaboration.

“You can develop strong personal bonds with someone spending a week together in the car doing an earthquake reconnaissance,” Ashford says. And it is those personal relationships that make the follow-up research collaboration possible.

During his trip to Japan, Ashford had to balance his own emotional reactions to the devastation. A colleague there showed him a video that hadn’t been aired on television. It was a shot of the water level rising on the Japanese coast as witnesses gathered on the shore, unaware of the danger. In a flash, the tsunami waves hit the coast, obliterating everything, and everyone, standing on the shore.

“We both teared up,” Ashford says. “It was very emotional to see that.”

Waterfall in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: Matt Betts)

If this announcement sounds like it just sprang out of the mouth of someone campaigning for climate change funding through Congress, consider that it was a statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson as he announced the approval of the Water Resources Research Act of 1964, thus officially creating a network of water resource research institutes at land grant universities across the United States. Indeed, Oregon had already established a water resources research in 1961. Through the pioneering efforts of several professors including Emery Castle, F.J. Burgess, J.T. Krygier, and C.E. Warren, the Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI) at Oregon State University was authorized by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. Whether Oregon’s WRRI is the oldest in the US is the subject of debate; Utah State University publicly claims this honor. Regardless of this claim to fame, Oregon’s center is one of the first in the nation and is this year celebrating 50 years of continuous operation from its headquarters in Strand Agricultural Hall.

Emery Castle, the first director of OSU's water research center, 1961-1969. (Photo courtesy of Todd Jarvis, OSU Institute for Water and Watersheds)

The 1964 legislation was a tribute to the vision and wisdom of Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico. Looking forward from the water use and management at that time, it was predicted that by the year 2000 there would not be enough usable water to meet the water requirements of parts of 30 states, including water-wet Oregon.

The Water Resource Research Act (WRRA) was based on the highly successful Hatch Act of 1887, which created the state agricultural experiment stations system. The Anderson bill was prescient and varied slightly from the Hatch Act in that the water centers were designed to be college-wide, or university-wide, to assure participation of all disciplines available in water research.

Statewide Support for Water Research

The Oregon Water Resources Research Institute (OWRRI) was one of the 54 water institutes located at land grant universities across the United States that received a small federal grant to provide base support for water resources research needs in each state. “Many faculty in the Oregon University System, as well as nearby privates schools, got their start through the mini-grant program administered through the Water Resources Research Act” according to IWW Interim Director Todd Jarvis. The list of grant recipients as the OWRRI matured with changes in missions, and as the federal WRRA was amended, to the Oregon Water Research Institute (OWRI), the Center for Water and Environmental Sustainability (CWest), and the Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) reads like the Who’s Who of water in Oregon and the west. For example, Law Professor Chapin Clark of the University of Oregon was provided funding nearly 40 years ago and Law Professor James Huffman from Lewis and Clark College was provided funding 30 years ago. IWW’s mission now is to facilitate research in water in Oregon through newsletters and water quality lab services. An annual seminar series has been sponsored by the OSU water center since 1964. A review of the seminar topics over the years, such as “Conflicts over the Columbia River” sponsored 20 years ago, are as relevant now as they were then.

This stream high in the Hinkle Creek watershed of the Oregon Cascades has provided scientists with data on forest harvesting and water quality. (Photo: Kelly James)

In a 1964 speech introducing the Anderson water resources research bill, Senate staffer Benton J. Strong, indicated that “… if the Anderson water resources research bill is as successful as the Hatch Act has been in agriculture, 75 years from now we will have only one remaining water problem — floods. Our cups, or reservoirs, like our grain bins, will ‘runneth over.’” According to IWW Director Jeff McDonnell, the irony regarding this statement is that according to the early results of the NSF-funded Willamette Water 2100 project, flooding may indeed create new forms of water scarcity in the summertime in the Willamette River Basin where conservative dam management operations to control for late winter and early spring floods may result in incomplete filling of reservoirs for summer water use.

The Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) continues the rich tradition of linking OSU and other researchers within the Oregon University System to water issues in Oregon. A short documentary film with interviews with all of the previous directors, save one who passed away, as well as the current Chief of External Research with the US Geological Survey who received his Ph.D. in resource economics from OSU, will be available on the Institute for Water and Watersheds website just in time for the 50^th Anniversary Water New Year Party, planned for Friday, September 30, 2011.

Neebinnaukzhik Southall wants to use graphic design to further the cultural reclamation under way in Native American communities. (Photo: Frank Miller)

Today, the senior in OSU’s Graphic Design Program and the University Honors College goes by Neebin and is combining her passion for line, texture, color and pattern with an exploration of her own story and heritage. “Graphic design is about bringing beauty to little things, elevating them in some way,” she says. “I see a cultural reclamation going on, and I feel like graphic design can be a part of that.”

Despite the emerging pride that she sensed in Native communities, Southall was concerned with what she found in her studies. In preparing for her senior project, she saw that Native Americans were poorly represented in professional associations and other parts of the graphic design world. “It’s a voice that seems lacking. I wondered why. When I started my research, I didn’t know any big designers who are Native Americans,” she says.

Through her exploration, she discovered the work of Victor Pascual (Navajo and Mayan), Mark Rutledge (Ojibway) and the Buffalo Nickel Creative, cofounded by Ryan Red Corn (Osage). She also found work by white designers that presented Native cultures in a sensitive and powerful way.

Powerful Meanings

Inspired by these examples, she has set out to combine contemporary design with traditional motifs in her own work. For her senior project — Then and Now: Asserting Anishinabek Identity Through Indigenized Apparel — she is creating designs for clothing (T-shirts and hoodies) that echo traditional symbols from her mother’s people, the Chippewas of Rama First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Anishinabek is the collective name for Native people of the region, and the thunderbird and underwater panther carry powerful meanings for them. These symbols appear in Native beadwork and quillwork. Her immediate goal is to respectfully integrate such images with modern forms that appeal to a young generation.

“Neebin approaches every project with a fire and intensity,” says Andrea Marks, associate professor in the Department of Art’s graphic design program and Southall’s mentor. “She’s very proud of her heritage and she has brought that with her from the beginning. It’s been interesting to see how she threads that into her projects.

“I can see the passion she has for her culture and wanting to give something back and empower young people. She is very secure in who she is,” Marks adds.

Inspired by Experience

In addition to Chippewa on her mother’s side, Southall traces her ancestry to Iroquois and European cultures from her father. Being of mixed ethnicities has been both a struggle and a gift, she says, since she has felt a need to clarify her personal identity and to bring people together despite their differences. And she recognizes that design inspiration for Native people has come from other cultures (European religious art, Persian rugs) as well as indigenous experience.

Southall hopes to bring her spirit and design skills to the Chippewa of Rama First Nation tribal center or to another organization that promotes Native American culture, such as the Smithsonian Institution or a Native American educational foundation.

“I have a heart,” she says, “for moving forward in a positive way and strengthening people.”