Heidi Toth

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Sept. 19, 2019

Chad Trujillo, assistant professor at Northern Arizona University, has been awarded the 2019 Paolo Farinella Prize by the Europlanet Society for his contributions in the field of planetary science concerning “The Trans-Neptunian Population.”

Along with collaborator Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Trujillo was honored at an award ceremony on Sept. 16 at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Shepard and Trujillo presented the Farinella Prize Lecture entitled “Completing the Inventory of the Solar System” as part of the award session.

The annual prize, established in 2010 to honor the memory of Italian scientist Paolo Farinella, recognizes an outstanding researcher not older than 47 years (Farinella’s age when he died) who has achieved important results in one of Farinella’s fields of work. Each year the prize focuses on a different research area. The prize is supported by the University of Pisa and by the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome.

“This was definitely a surprise,” Trujillo said. “I had no idea that we might be nominated for the prize, let alone be selected. I know that our research is well-known, but there are so many excellent scientists studying the outer solar system that I was really astonished and humbled that the committee chose us to receive this prestigious award. And it is an honor to be sharing this award with Scott Sheppard of Carnegie, who has been instrumental to the success and longevity of our project.”

“Scott and I have been working for many years discovering the outermost objects in our solar system,” Trujillo said. “It’s been a pleasure to be part of many discoveries including many Trans-Neptunian Objects as well as Neptune Trojan asteroids and dwarf planets. More recently, we have been trying to find the outermost objects in the solar system. These extremely distant objects still orbit the Sun, but have an unusual orbital alignment that has been the basis for the hypothesis that there might be a very distant undiscovered giant planet in our solar system, which is an exciting prospect. When we began our work together, I don’t think most people, including myself, realized that there would be such a rich variety of very distant objects in the outer solar system.”

Trujillo and Sheppard are part of a team that has been searching for Planet X—believed to be on the edge of the solar system—since 2014. In 2018, they discovered Farout, an object at about 120 astronomical units (AU) from Earth—the farthest observed object in the solar system. The announcement attracted attention by national media outlets including CNN, NBC News, Space.com and Science. Since then, the team found FarFarOut, another major discovery even farther from the sun.

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Kerry Bennett
Office of the Vice President for Research

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Sept. 13, 2019

After sequencing more than 400 different genomes of the West Nile Virus, an NAU scientist discovered the two reports of West Nile Virus in Coconino County came from two different places. One migrated north from the Phoenix area. The other is a bit more of a mystery.

It started with samples from throughout the western United States arriving at the lab of evolutionary biologist Crystal Hepp, who works with both the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems and the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University. She collaborates with a dozen different public health departments throughout the West. They send her West Nile (WNV) samples found in their areas, and her team sequences the viral genomes and analyzes the data to reconstruct each sample’s family tree, which allows her to determine how the virus is moving over time and throughout the region.

In this case, Coconino County Health Department sent her the two samples, one found in mosquitoes at Lake Mary and one in the Cheshire area, both in late August. Hepp sequenced the genomes of the virus strains, compared them to the virus strains she’d sequenced from other areas, and found that the two virus strains did not result from local circulation of the virus, meaning they were not transmitted among birds and mosquitoes in the county. The Cheshire strain is closely related to strains circulating in Maricopa County, while the Lake Mary strain is most closely related to a strain her team sequenced from Montana in 2018, though the Lake Mary strain showed several different mutations from the Montana strain.

This was unexpected, Hepp said. It’s also likely a good thing for Coconino County.

“We often think the simplest answer is the most likely answer,” she said. “It would have made sense if these two strains, separated by only 10 miles, were due to the same importation event. From a public health perspective, finding that these two strains are from two different places is good news. If they were closely related, it would mean that WNV had likely been cycled through birds and mosquitoes across 10 miles of Coconino County. We hope that the two separate introductions have just been cycling in the very localized geographic locations they were found, rather than across 10 miles, and that they just fade out.”

Hepp’s lab is a leader in the effort to better understand how the West Nile Virus circulates in the American Southwest. Her public health partners make the initial diagnosis, then send her strains to determine whether the virus originated. Knowing and mapping those data can help governments better predict and prepare for the possibility of West Nile in their areas. Those partners include:

  • Maricopa County Environmental Services, Vector Control Division
  • Arizona Department of Health Services
  • Yuma County Pest Abatement District
  • Coachella Valley District Vector Control
  • Southwestern Mosquito Abatement and Control District
  • Utah Department of Health
  • Washington State Department of Health
  • Montana Department of Public Health & Human Services
  • Coconino County Health Department
  • Southern Nevada Health District

This research includes undergraduate students Daryn Erickson, Breezy Brock, Samuel Poidmore and Majesty Greer-Gipson; research specialist Jill Cocking; graduate student Chase Ridenour; Krystal Sheridan and Heidie O’Neill from the PMI sequencing core as well as Darrin Lemmer, Mike Valentine and Dave Engelthaler from the Translational Genomics Research Institute.

“We are very interested in understanding the connectivity among strains circulating in the Southwest,” Hepp said. “This is allowing us to determine, for example, the WNV situation in Maricopa County is for other southwestern locations. WNV from Maricopa County has additionally spilled over into Washington County, Utah; Riverside County, California; and Yuma County, Arizona in the past, and we would like to move forward with a predictive model that could inform counties of risk based on historical patterns and environmental data.”

No human cases of West Nile have been reported in Coconino County since 2010.

West Nile is the most common mosquito-borne illness in the state, although its extent is hard to measure because only about 20 percent of infected people even realize they’re sick. Most of those who do experience symptoms feel like they have the flu, but about one in 150 people infected develop a serious illness such as encephalitis or meningitis, which can be fatal.

In 2018, Hepp received a grant from the Arizona Biomedical Research Centre to investigate the circulation and source locations of West Nile in the state.

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Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
(928) 523-8737 | heidi.toth@nau.edu

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Sept. 12, 2019

Of the 850,000 youth in the U.S. juvenile justice system, youth of color account for about 68 percent, according to the Children’s Defense Fund—numbers that a national gathering of juvenile justice experts hopes to eliminate in the future.

The Center for Health Equity Research (CHER) at Northern Arizona University is partnering with the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and The NARBHA Institute to host a one-day event on Sept. 26 entitled The Consequences of Juvenile Justice System Involvement on the Health and Well-Being of Adolescents, Families, and Communities of Color,to beheld at the High Country Conference Center in Flagstaff.

This workshop is the last in a series of three NASEM Roundtable on Health Equity events; the first focused on incarceration as a structural determinant of health, and the second examined how race, ethnicity, drug control laws and policies intersect within the criminal justice system.

Nationally recognized experts in justice and health, including Scott Bales, executive director, Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) of Denver and former Arizona chief justice (ret.), will be exploring the issue. CHER director Julie Baldwin and Dr. Mark Carroll, chief health officer and vice president of discovery and development at The NARBHA Institute, will help moderate the workshop, along with other members of the NASEM Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity.

Through a series of four panel sessions, attendees will examine strategies to transform juvenile justice involvement. They will also discuss established programs and policies that are successful in all aspects of the juvenile justice system including pre-involvement, involvement and post-involvement.

Workshop sponsors include NAU, CHER, The NARBHA Institute, the Arizona Biomedical Research Centre, Aetna Foundation, The Colorado Trust, Health Resources and Services Administration, HOGG Foundation, Merck & Co., Inc. and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Health Equity.

For more information or to register, visit the event website.

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Sept. 12, 2019

Three Northern Arizona University professors received grants through the Arizona Game and Fish Department to research ways to help threatened animal species in Arizona survive.

The grants—$67,000 to Joe Mihaljevic’s lab and $71,000 to Carol Chambers‘ and Faith Walker’s lab—are both part of the Identification, Inventory, Acquisition, Protection and Management of Sensitive Habitat sub-category. Competitive Heritage Fund grants go toward conservation efforts to protect endangered or threatened species.

The grants also provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to conduct lab and field work, gaining hands-on experience while contributing to creating healthy ecosystems throughout the state.

Tracking a lethal virus in frogs

Mihaljevic, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems and an affiliate of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, received $67,000 to study the transmission and progression of Ambystoma tigrinim virus (ATV), a type of ranavirus—a pathogen that is lethal to fish, reptiles and amphibians—in the Chiricahua leopard frog population that is endemic to the Southwest. This frog species is classified as federally threatened, with its populations at risk because of habitat loss and fragmentation as well as disease.

Mihaljevic, who studies ecological informatics and infectious diseases, collaborated with AZGFD, as well as other organizations, to test wild adult frogs for ranaviruses. To his surprise, many came back positive for ATV, a disease that should only infect salamanders and newts.

“The main goals of this project are: one, to document how widespread ATV infections might be in these threatened frog populations; two, to understand which frog life-stages (tadpoles, juveniles or adults) are most often infected; three, to understand whether ATV might put these populations at additional risk of extirpation; and four, to determine whether ATV infection can be observed in preserved museum specimens to establish more long-term trends,” he said.

Chiricahua leopard frog

The non-invasive field sampling will include swabbing the skin of tadpoles, juveniles and adult frogs and extracting DNA from those swabs. From there, Mihaljevic and his team can determine whether viral DNA is included in those samples. His team includes master’s student Kelsey Banister, who is leading the lab work, and master’s student Kathryn Cooney, who is leading the field work. Several undergraduate students are on the project: Diego Olivo and Braden Spencer, who are funded by the Urdea Undergraduate Research Grant; Monica Long, who’s doing research on an overlapping project with salamanders; and Nicole Crews, who is joining the lab this fall through NAU’s Interns-to-Scholars program.

“Amphibian disease continues to be a major challenge to Chiricahua leopard frog recovery efforts across their range,” said Audrey Owens, ranid project coordinator at AZGFD. “We are excited about Dr. Mihaljevic’s ranavirus research project because it has major implications for how we conserve and protect Chiricahua leopard frog populations in Arizona.”

Identifying opportunities to thrive for an endangered jumping mouse

Chambers, a professor of wildlife ecology, and Walker, a wildlife geneticist whose work is focused on non-invasive research, are studying the endangered New Mexico jumping mouse to identify movements, home ranges and dispersal potential. The goal is to use the collected data to identify opportunities to connect disparate habitats to help the species thrive.

This research matters because the jumping mouse is a genetically and morphologically distinct subspecies that is found only in the Southwest. Jumping mice populations are declining and even disappearing in some places of their usual range because of habitat loss attributed to livestock and water management, development, recreation and events like wildfires and drought.

This three-year study builds on previous jumping mouse research on which Chambers and Walker have collaborated. The team will live capture jumping mice, collect non-invasive (fecal) genetic samples and put radio collars on animals to track their movements, targeting areas along streams, rivers and lakes where the animals occur. DNA from buccal cells and fecal samples will be used to determine diet and dispersal with minimal impact to individual animals.

New Mexico jumping mouse
Photo by José G. Martínez-Fonseca

“The genetic and fieldwork our lab performs has provided so much new information on how the jumping mouse uses habitat,” Chambers said. “We will be looking at dispersal in the field using radio telemetry and gene flow in the Bat Ecology and Genetics Lab. The information we are already finding will help with conservation of the species.”

This grant will support one undergraduate research geneticist, with several students already involved in the broader research that’s informing this work.

Doctoral student Daniel Sanchez is studying the diet of this jumping mouse using DNA metabarcoding, undergraduate Austin Dikeman has been looking at the incidence of E. coli in this species and undergraduate student researchers Jacque Lyman and Samantha Hershauer have been involved in developing an eDNA assay to detect the jumping mouse from environmental samples. This eDNA assay was trialed in the field this summer; the team detected the species simply by swabbing plants along their home range.

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Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
(928) 523-8737 | heidi.toth@nau.edu

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Sept. 10, 2019

Northern Arizona University was awarded a $31.7 million federal grant to continue a statewide outreach program designed to increase graduation rates and postsecondary attainment levels at 41 of Arizona’s high-poverty high schools.

The seven-year grant, which includes $31.7 million in federal money matched by $31.7 million from state partners, will fund the fourth phase of Arizona GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs). In combination with Achieve60AZ, Arizona GEAR UP is part of an overall push toward greater success in K-12 and higher education that Gov. Doug Ducey and other state leaders are championing.

This is the fourth GEAR UP grant NAU has been awarded since the university began administering this program in 2000. Ducey again designated NAU as Arizona’s applicant for GEAR UP. Education professor Daniel Kain has been a principal investigator since 2002; College of Education Dean Ramona Mellott is a co-PI on the current grant, which builds on 20 years of experience, as well as research on best practices in college access to leverage an innovative design that makes it possible for more than 15,000 students to benefit annually from program services.

“NAU’s successful track record in leading GEAR UP in Arizona spans nearly two decades and stands as one of the many ways NAU contributes to addressing the critical issues of our state,” said NAU President Rita Cheng. “The success of Arizona GEAR UP, like other NAU initiatives, is in the way we work together to achieve the state’s goals of an educated citizenry, a robust workforce and a thriving economy.”

The program aims to foster partnerships and collaborations between NAU, high-poverty high schools and organizations throughout the state that are committed to enhancing education in Arizona. GEAR UP provides college awareness and readiness to students beginning in seventh grade and continuing through high school and into the first year of college.

Focused on the Five Es of Equity—engage, empower, excel, elevate and enrich—this phase of the project includes three broad efforts:

  • Expanding GEAR UP to serve all senior students in 41 Title I high schools with a graduation rate below the state average. These schools, known as GEAR UP Achieve60 schools, serve almost 11,600 seniors each year.
  • Selecting three to five high schools and the middle schools that feed those schools and working with students (on average, 4,100 students in grades 7-12 each year) to increase academic performance, high school graduation rates and collegiate preparation and success.
  • Statewide, reaching additional middle and high school students through large-scale dissemination and use of published students’ guides.

The program also leverages resources to support the state’s education priorities and broaden the capacity for partnerships and collaborations that further serve to strengthen Arizona’s education system. These partnerships make possible a variety of local and state initiatives that benefit current and future students in Arizona. NAU will continue to partner with a host of organizations statewide to provide services and programs to help meet the GEAR UP goals.

Under NAU’s first two grants, GEAR UP students graduated from high school and entered college at much higher rates than Arizona’s average. From 2006 to 2012, 83 percent of seniors at GEAR UP schools graduated from high school and 72 percent went to college, compared to the statewide average of 73 percent and 51 percent, respectively. From 2012 to 2019, 88 percent of GEAR UP students graduated, compared to 83 percent at comparison schools, while 58 percent completed their FAFSA, compared to 47 percent at comparison schools.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to enhance education in our state,” Mellott said. “NAU has demonstrated again its deep commitment to the young people and teachers in Arizona.”

GEAR UP is a highly competitive national grant program of the U.S. Department of Education designed to help provide greater opportunities for low-income students to get into and succeed in higher education. The goals of Arizona GEAR UP are graduation rates that meet or exceed the state average and increase the percentage of graduates who enroll and persist in postsecondary education to the target levels outlined in Achieve60AZ.

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Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
(928) 523-8737 | heidi.toth@nau.edu

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Sept. 9, 2019

Earning a master’s degree from NAU’s Center for Science Teaching and Learning is about to get a lot more accessible.

Starting in 2020, the center, also known as the CSTL, will revamp its two master’s programs into one fully online curriculum, with a focus on getting classroom teachers certified and helping already certified teachers prepare for the next phase of their career.

“We’re just designing it to accommodate more teachers and have larger cohorts working together online,” said Danielle Ross, the graduate programs coordinator in CSTL.

The Master of Arts in Teaching Science (MAT-S) has been a full-time, on-campus master’s degree, designed for people who earned a degree in a science field and wanted to begin teaching but didn’t have a teaching certificate. The focus was on pedagogy—how to teach science. It included a semester of student teaching, as well as hours in the classroom starting in the first week of the program.

The Master of Arts in Science Teaching (MAST) was geared toward in-service teachers who wanted to move into administration, be a STEM coordinator or teach at a community college. Ranked 18th in the country for online master’s in science education programs, it was a hybrid program with on-campus classes that students throughout the country could join via Zoom. However, they had to participate in class at the time it was offered, which was usually after the regular school day. That meant students on the East Coast finished class at 10:30 p.m., then got up to teach the next day.

CSTL professors noticed a drop in MAT-S enrollment about three years ago that coincided with Arizona allowing people who were subject-matter experts to teach in secondary schools without certification. At the same time, they heard from students in other parts of the country who wanted to earn their MAST degrees that taking the online classes at a set time was too hard on their schedule.

“They want to be able to work at their own pace and on their own time because of their professional and family commitments,” Ross said. “What I’ve noticed is when someone inquires about the program, I explain that they still have to show up at certain times and they say, ‘I can’t do because of work and family commitments.’”

After some brainstorming, she said, they came up with the idea to combine the curriculum, which would mean larger cohorts with fewer classes, and to make it all online, allowing students to complete their work on their own schedules. The MAT-S program will be geared toward teachers who are already in the classroom but who don’t have certification; although they will still have a mentor teacher, do practicum hours, student-teach and meet all of the state’s requirements for certification, that can all happen in their classroom.

“We’re trying to be more accommodating to someone who’s in the classroom and give them the opportunity to get certified,” Ross said. “We thought it would be more of a draw for more people to say, ‘hey, you’re working, you’re getting paid for teaching, now you can also get your teaching certificate by taking these classes.’”

The benefit of that, besides learning pedagogy from the experts, is if teachers want to leave the state. Most states accept teacher certification from other states with a few or no caveats; they will not accept subject-matter certification.

The MAST curriculum will basically be the same, just all online; Ross has told about half a dozen excited applicants that they can apply this year and defer to next year. It will still include either a thesis or a research project, which for many students involved them developing curriculum to introduce what they’re learning as students into their classrooms as teachers.

“That’s more of a personalized, individualized, culminating project for their graduate degree, bringing together everything they’ve learned into one final piece of work,” she said.

“To address the extreme shortage of properly qualified and certified science teachers in our state and nation, we need a multipronged approach to teacher preparation and professional development,” said Max Dass, director of the CSTL. “The revised, fully online, master’s degree programs for pre-certification and certified teachers will make teacher education and enhancement opportunities available to many more teachers than was possible previously. We are essentially taking education to where the teachers are, rather than expecting them to come to us. The fully online option opens up this opportunity to teachers all across the U.S., which helps advance the CSTL mission of impacting science education in Arizona and beyond though innovative programs, partnerships and scholarship.”

People interested in learning more about the revamped programs or about NAUTeach, CSTL’s innovative program for preparing math and science teacher candidates, should visit the CSTL’s website.