Minhazur Sarker, an undergraduate in the College of Science, works with cell cultures in Tory Hagen's lab in the Linus Pauling Institute (Photo: Karl Maazdam)

“My father told me, ‘To get the most out of research, get there before everyone else and leave after everyone else,’” Sarker says.

And he’s following that advice, sometimes arriving even earlier than 7 a.m. and working into the evening. The first thing Sarker does when he gets to the lab is check on his cells. In a room off the main lab, he takes a flask of vibrant orange liquid out of a small refrigerator. The liquid, which resembles flat orange soda, contains the cells that Sarker’s project hinges on. By experimenting with human and rodent cells, he’s hoping to help discover a means to slow aging in humans.

A senior studying microbiology, Sarker arranged his project through the Oregon State University Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) undergraduate research program. One of the university’s most prestigious research opportunities, the institute facilitates paid research positions for undergraduate students in projects that are usually completed over the summer. While HHMI students work in all areas of the sciences, Sarker’s project draws on Oregon State’s strength in the health sciences and Hagen’s innovative research on healthy aging. When Sarker joined Hagen’s lab at the end of last school year, Hagen asked him to explore a possible avenue to promote healthier aging that began with an unlikely source — the naked mole rat.

The only cold-blooded mammal, the naked mole rat has a low metabolic rate and spends its life underground, all characteristics that contrast sharply with human life. But the naked mole rat also has something that humans have pursued for centuries: the key to longevity. These rodents, Sarker says, can live up to 30 years — 10 times the lifespan of other rats. And Hagen has an idea of what the naked mole rats’ secret might be.

Fewer calories, longer life

“When you think aging, you think of the damages that occur in the body, but people forget the other half, the body’s defense mechanisms and the way it fixes things up,” Sarker says. “Aging is two things: destructive processes and the responses.”

The quality of those response processes deteriorates over time, allowing degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s to develop because the body’s defenses can’t keep up with the damage being done. But a process known as the heat shock protein response, which involves the refolding of proteins that are disordered by physical stress on the body, has been shown to remain active longer as a result of caloric restriction. A restricted diet like that of the naked mole rat, Hagen says, allows the body’s proteins to remain in balance longer and stimulates the heat shock protein response more often. By this means, Hagen believes, the naked mole rat may be improving its longevity.

“The only real known paradigm of increasing mean lifetime of species is dietary and caloric restriction,” Hagen says. “When you restrict calories but provide vitamins and micronutrients to maintain basic function, the species lives for an inordinately long time.”

Hagen would like to see humans take advantage of a more enduring heat shock protein response, but he’s not expecting people to live on a fraction of the calories in an average diet.

“Part of our work in healthy aging is to try to have that benefit without the burden,” Hagen says. “Part of that is to find mimics that would add nothing to the diet and certainly could increase the health span.”

Cell by cell

Under the microscope, the orange liquid becomes a field of bulbous white shapes that resemble burst popcorn kernels. The cells grow in a liquid medium until there are too many for the flask, when Sarker splits them into new containers to be used in testing or to continue growing. By this means, he’s able to keep the cells growing indefinitely.

Performing cell culture requires precision and absolute sterilization, creating a sense of pressure that Sarker believes sometimes wards off students who are interested in research.

“You learn by doing,” he says. “That’s what research is. I tell new students, you have four years to mess up in college; learn from your mistakes. Do it — screw up, mess it up — no one is going to hold it against you.”

The mimic that Hagen asked Sarker to experiment with is geranylgeranylacetone, a compound that has been safely used to treat ulcers and arthritis overseas. Sarker is testing GGA’s potential to induce a particular heat shock protein response, HSP70, by applying it to cells of the four species and then exposing the cells to stressful conditions to activate the response. By analyzing how the cells react to the stress, he hopes to determine whether the compound could be used to enhance the heat shock protein response.

Though Sarker’s project began during the summer and the HHMI program doesn’t require him to work beyond that period, he’s committed to taking the project as far as he can. During his final year at Oregon State, Sarker will continue working in Hagen’s lab.

“I have some preliminary results, but there’s a lot more I can do with it, so I really want to take ownership of it and move forward,” Sarker says. “It’s more about the process and not just about the completion and getting a result. Having a positive result is a good thing, but if you don’t get there, did you learn from it?”

Research as an undergraduate

While Sarker continues to explore whether GGA could slow the effects of aging in humans, he maintains a full schedule. In addition to working at the lab, preparing to attend medical school and running his own online business netting lacrosse sticks, he works as a tour guide for the College of Science. After spending a morning piping cell cultures into new plates and running samples, Sarker can be found walking backwards across campus with a group of prospective students and their parents in tow.

As comfortable with the campus visitors as he is in the lab, Sarker uses his own experiences to encourage younger students to take advantage of research opportunities in college.

“When you do research on campus, you’re learning, you’re helping your future and you’re getting paid,” he tells students on his tours. “That’s a triple positive, and that doesn’t happen very often, so when you find one, take it and run for it.”

Through undergraduate research programs like the HHMI, students can gain skills and experience that aren’t available elsewhere — and learn from renowned researchers such as Hagen. According to Hagen, involving students in research is a natural priority, both in his lab and at Oregon State University.

“We don’t have big barriers at Oregon State; faculty and students interact very easily,” Hagen says. “I’ve been here for 14 years and had undergraduate students in our lab pretty much all those years. It’s part of our reason for being here, showing students what a lab experience is like.”

Sarker ends his tours in front of the Linus Pauling Science Center, where he’s able to point out the floor he works on and describe how hands-on work at Oregon State has benefited his education, before heading back to the lab.

“That’s really the reason to come here, for the experiential learning,” Sarker says. “Research teaches you maturity, to be respectful, give presentations, interact with people, as well as organization and time management. These are skills you’re not going to get in the classroom.”

Meanwhile, other Oregon State students were at work in equally exotic places around the planet, from Kenya to New Zealand to the countryside of France. They worked on projects as diverse as engineering water systems and experimenting with emulsifiers in ice cream. Here’s a sampling of stories from these intrepid student researchers around the globe.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Pumped Up

Zachary Dunn helps bring clean water to Kenyan farmers.
Read more…

Legacy of a Whale

Marine mammal biologist Renee Albertson never forgot her childhood encounter with a killer whale.
Read more…

The Earth Burps and Burns

Whether Earth’s gaseous emissions bubble up from “mud volcanoes” or seep out of the ocean floor, WeiLi Hong has his monitoring ear to the ground.
Read more…

The Milky Way

Rachel Miller puts French ice cream to the taste and texture test.
Read more…

Horns of Africa

In Yachats, where Dylan McDowell grew up, wildlife meant seals, whales and sandpipers. A new assemblage greets him in Zimbabwe and Tanzania.Read more…

Fisher of Rivers

Haley Ohms has monitored salmon runs in Alaska followed fish in Oregon and California. Where else to go next but Hokkaido?Read more…

Dolphin Defender

Rebecca Hamner tracked the world’s smallest and most endangered dolphins in the waters off New Zealand.Read more…

Labor of Love

Giving birth shouldn’t create a public health crisis.Read more…

Sea Urchin

Ireland’s first marine reserve caught the fancy of Caitlyn Clark.Read more…

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.”

Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya, legendary for flamingoes and other birds, will be home to OSU zoology student Shalynn Pack for eight weeks this summer. (Photo: iStockPhoto, Steffen Foerster)

Ah, summer vacation. Time to kick back, right? Not so much for OSU students who are discovering opportunities to expand their horizons. They’re modeling blood flow, studying wildlife conservation in Africa, surveying Oregon’s old-growth forests and teaching entrepreneurship.

Here are a few of their stories.

In the Blood

Ishan Patel was more than pleased when he heard the news last spring. In fact, he says, “I was ecstatic.” The first-year student in bioengineering and the University Honors College had received a Johnson Scholarship to work in a research lab at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland this summer. His focus: an experimental model to simulate “pressure-driven bleeding.”

Patel grew up in Redmond, Oregon, where he attended the International School of the Cascades, graduating as class valedictorian. Research was high on his list, and at OSU, he joined Christine Kelley’s lab in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering. Under her guidance, he gained confidence in working with a genetically modified type of yeast that can be used in a process to produce biofuel.

At OHSU, Patel will work with Owen J. T. McCarty, an expert in cell transport in arteries. Medical researchers have had limited success in simulating arterial bleeding, says Patel. Working with a mechanical model system, he intends to “find ways to simulate arterial bleeding with clotting and then creating model curves for later use.”

Patel hopes to attend medical school and follow his love of research by finding ways to address cardiovascular disease or cancer.

Entrepreneur for Life

When Alexa Carey was growing up in Gold Beach, Oregon, business talk was heard as often over dinner as “please pass the potatoes.” Her parents were “serial entrepreneurs,” she says, who sold sporting goods, photography equipment and flowers; managed the local JC Penney store; and operated a dry cleaning business. “My dad took maybe three days off a year,” she adds.

That entrepreneurial spirit is stitched into Carey’s DNA. The sophomore in business, speech communications and the University Honors College is helping to run Project Earth, which stands for entrepreneurship, art, rural sustainability, training and holistic support (“Yes, it’s a mouthful,” she says).

Carey and three Oregon friends – Laura Murdoch, Carol Hahn and Darryl Lai – created Project Earth in a late-night brainstorming session. Their dream: teach children “how to run a business, how to be successful, how to create a better standard of living for yourself and your family.” Students learn to make a marketable craft product and to create a “life vision map” of their long-term goals.

In May, Carey and the core Project Earth members took the program back to Gold Beach. “We taught 100 fifth-graders how to achieve their goals. We got crazy messy on the playground with hand painting. We taught them how to market themselves and businesses. Kids love it when you take an interest in them. It was spectacular.”

Carey has big plans for Project Earth. She’d like to take it to students in Brazil where a friend teaches school. This summer, she plans to stay a bit closer to home and do a workshop at the Oregon School for the Deaf in Salem (Carey can use American Sign Language). She will also serve as a project manager for the annual Young Entrepreneurs Business Week summer camp, July 19-25 at OSU.

Off to Kenya

Shalynn Pack likes a challenge. Right after graduating from Thurston High School in Marcola, Oregon, she bucked family loyalties when she decided to attend Oregon State University, even though her dad is “a huge Ducks fan.” She has traveled on her own in Spain and other parts of Europe. She has volunteered in veterinary hospitals and the Oregon Primate Rescue Center in Longview, Washington.

This summer, she will take her most ambitious journey yet. The junior in zoology will fly to Kenya where she will work at Lake Nakuru National Park, famous for a “pink sea of flamingoes lapping at its shores.” Surrounded by grasslands and situated between two volcanic craters, the lake is home to about 450 bird species. Working for the Kenyan Wildlife Service will bring Pack face to face with other exotic wildlife – white rhinos, tree-climbing lions, warthogs and baboons – and the threats they face from deforestation, pollution and encroaching development.

“Traveling in Europe and Spain, I knew what to expect. With Africa, what you hear in the media – the wars, that it’s really unstable – it’s hard to get over that. But everything I’ve read and people I’ve talked to say the people are really generous. And I’ll be living with a host family,” says Pack who dreams of a career in tropical wildlife conservation and community-based tourism.

After her eight-week internship, she will spend a week traveling before returning to Corvallis in time for classes in the fall. At OSU, Pack has studied molecular genetics in salamanders, served as a mentor in a science education program and volunteered for the Homeless Gardens Project.

Woods Walker

It’s not a bad job if you hike or fish. Andrew Merschel does both. The senior in forestry and the University Honors College will pack his fishing pole and a personal pontoon boat this summer and head for the Pringle Falls Research Station on the Deschutes River south of Bend. When he’s not going after steelhead and salmon, he and fellow OSU forestry student Claire Rogan will be surveying forest plots.

Under guidance from Tom Spies, courtesy professor of forest ecology, and with support from the Deschutes National Forest, Merschel is pursuing an elusive goal: a useful definition of old-growth forest in country dominated by ponderosa pine, western juniper and mixed-conifer stands.

“The old-growth forests of the west side (of the Cascades) develop their complex structure and diversity over hundreds of years, and a lot of work has been done to understand how these forests develop,” says Merschel, “but the dry mixed-conifer forests of the east side aren’t as well understood. The different species and conditions there create a much different scenario for old-growth habitat.”

Merschel and Rogan will measure trees in 45 to 50 two-and-a-half acre plots in the Crooked River area and in the Ochoco Mountains east of Prineville. They’ll record species, measure tree height and diameter, drill cores and sample woody debris on the ground.

In addition to looking for patterns that can define old growth, they’ll use data from their surveys to evaluate the accuracy of forest maps created from satellite images. Their work will assist the Deschutes National Forest in revising management plans.

Merschel intends to graduate next winter and apply to graduate school.

Immune Defense

To compete for a Goldwater Scholarship, you need a big idea. The award aims at nothing less than building the country’s future science and engineering talent pool. Beth Dunfield has ambitious goals for herself and a desire to help others, so she proposed to work on a cure for cancer. She wants to enable the body’s own immune system to recognize tumor cells and insert a therapeutic gene, killing the tumor.

If she succeeds, Dunfield may get a chance to put her ideas into practice. She plans to go to medical school and to focus on cancer or geriatrics. “I enjoy learning how the human body works. At night, I like to read books for fun on anatomy and physiology. It just really fascinates me,” she says.

This summer, the OSU senior in biophysics and biochemistry and the University Honors College will work in OSU Professor of Chemistry Vince Remcho’s microfluidics lab. For her honors thesis, she will develop a microchip-based laboratory device. This emerging technology is essentially a “lab on a chip” that enables scientists to conduct chemical reactions with control and sensitivity.

“I’ll design, fabricate and test a device for chemical and biological applications,” she says.

Dunfield’s work impressed the Goldwater Scholarship committee. In March, she learned that she was one of 278 students in the United States to receive the award which will pay up to $7,500 in tuition and fees. She credits Kevin Ahern, senior instructor and director of OSU’s HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) summer undergraduate research program with helping her through the process. “He’s been a great adviser. He really challenges students to push themselves,” she adds.