Reel treasureAlso in this issue• Making it in America

• Food allergy culprit?

• Body mechanics

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA FALL 2014 / RESEARCH

Office of Research University of South Carolina

President Harris Pastides

Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti

Research Communications Manager Elizabeth Renedo

Director of University Communications and Marketing/Chief Communications Officer Wes Hickman

Office of Communications and Marketing Creative Director Bob Wertz Editor Chris Horn Magazine Designer Michelle Hindle Riley Contributing Writers Craig Brandhorst, Page Ivey, Liz McCarthy, Steven Powell Photographer Kim Truett Cover Artist Maria Fabrizio, ’08 BFA

Website sc.edu/vpresearch

To comment on an item in Breakthrough or to suggest an idea for a future issue, contact the University of South Carolina’s Office of Research at 803-777-5458 or email vpresearch@mailbox.sc.edu

The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, genetics or veteran status. 14002 UCS 10/14

The University of South Carolina is committed to sustainability in all facets of operation, including the production of publications such as this one, which is printed on paper certified by SmartWood to the FSC standards.

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In this issue

4 / In brief

8 / Reel treasure As one of the most culturally rich archives of its kind, the university’s vast Moving Image Research Collections have become a mecca for historians and documentarians.

12 / Q&A with Andrea Tanner For all of the attention, good and bad, that the Affordable Care Act has attracted, many consumers don’t really understand how the new law affects them.

14 / Making it in America The American dream isn’t necessarily a house with a white picket fence — and maybe it never was, says a social work professor who’s co-written a book on the topic.

15 / Food allergy culprit? University scientists are explor-ing the hypothesis that repeated exposure to antibi-otics might trigger food allergies among children.

16 / Q&A with Tim Mousseau Nuclear plant disaster zones in Ukraine and Japan are the field laboratories for this biological sciences professor, who studies radiation effects on wildlife.

18 / The art of science Up close — really close — objects of nature become objets d’art.

20 / Body mechanics A School of Medicine researcher is using the principles of materials mechanics to better understand the life-threatening properties of arterial plaque.

23 / In the pipeline Researchers from public health, chemistry and medicine are mapping out new defenses against harmful bacteria.

On the Cover: A still from Scott Nixon’s celebrated home movie, The Augustas.

w Visit sc.edu/vpresearch for more information

Video at sc.edu/breakthrough

Prakash Nagarkatti, Ph.D.Vice President for ResearchUniversity of South Carolinawww.sc.edu/vpresearch

This magazine exists to showcase the wide variety of research and the many success stories happening at the University of South Carolina, and this fall we have lots to share. The following pages highlight many stories about the work USC researchers are doing to advance understanding and innovation in our four research focus areas — health sciences, advanced materials, environment and sustainability, and energy — and beyond.

In the midst of these many individual success stories, there is a growing tale of a research powerhouse. Here at Carolina, researchers are generating momentum and building on that of their colleagues, earning competitive research grants and other funding, providing top-notch student experiences, publishing results in high-impact journals and creating nationally and internationally recognized centers and institutes of research excellence.

The full story of research at Carolina is difficult to articulate succinctly, but there are vistas to the big picture. External funding numbers provide one, and the view from the most recent fiscal year looks great. Fiscal Year 2014 ended on a high note for external research funding, with a total of $230.2 million in award activity, representing a 4.5 percent increase from the previous year. Digging deeper, I was especially excited to note that this year’s federal grants — the most competitive type of academic research funding — topped $150 million, a record for USC.

Yet another window into our research success is available in the following pages, and on the new Office of Research website, which features research news and fascinating profiles. I encourage you to read on and continue sharing the stories of the Palmetto State’s research leader, the University of South Carolina.

2 / Breakthrough

Maria Piroli, biomedical engineering, Class of 2015

Fall 2014 / 3

PROBING THE PAST

When she was very young, Monica Bowman would pore over the pages of her dad’s college history textbooks, intrigued by the pictures and, later, by the accompanying stories.

It’s no surprise, then, that she’s now a senior history major at the University of South Carolina. Bowman is also a Magellan Scholar, the 1,000th student to receive the Office of Undergraduate Research award in the nine-year history of the program. She’s using her Magellan award to conduct scholarly research on Richard Howell Gleaves, a Reconstruction-era politician in South Carolina.

“The term ‘reconstruction’ is interesting to me — what the reconstruction of a country entails and how the word still resonates.”Bowman’s goal is to write a scholarly paper about Gleaves, a Philadelphia native born to Haitian and English parents in 1819 who would later become a congressman and serve as the 55th lieutenant governor of South Carolina.

Historian Melissa Cooper, a research assistant professor in the university’s Institute for Southern Studies, is serving as Bowman’s faculty mentor throughout the yearlong project.

“Monica’s research promises to uncover historical evidence that will help to contextualize Gleaves’ political ambitions and the impact of his political activities in South Carolina during Reconstruction,” Cooper said. “Any new information that Monica uncovers will certainly enhance our understanding of African-American history and Southern history during the period.”

The Magellan Scholar program was established in 2005 to enrich the under-graduate experience with research opportunities in all disciplines. About $2.7 million has been awarded to 1,065 undergraduates from all eight campuses. About half of the awards have gone to science and engineering students; one-fourth to social science students; and one-fourth to students in the humanities, the arts and business.

The academic publisher Thomson Reuters released a list earlier this year of the most highly cited researchers between 2002 and 2014. Three faculty members from the University of South Carolina who made the list of the top 1 percent in their respective fields are:

• Branko Popov, Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing

• Steven Blair, Department of Exercise Science, Arnold School of Public Health

• Jamie Lead, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health 1%

Top

4 / Breakthrough

In brief

The Office of Research has recognized eight professors with the second-

annual Breakthrough Leadership in Research awards. Recipients demon-

strated leadership through activities including successful mentoring of

junior faculty; establishment of research centers with university-wide

impact; promotion of research at K-12 schools; community outreach

through research; and creation of programs aimed at increasing diversity.

EIGHT RECEIVE BREAKTHROUGH LEADERSHIP IN RESEARCH AWARD

NEXT BIG THINGThe Ronald E. McNair Center for Aerospace Innovation and Research is working to become a hub for indus-trial collaboration with its acquisition of a carbon fiber placement machine.

The industrial-scale device, made by Ingersoll Machine Tools, is a smaller version of machines that make composite fuselages for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The device will be the centerpiece of a new lab facility under construction at the center that will be open to industrial partners and government agencies.

“We’ll be the first university lab-oratory in the world with a fiber placement machine of this size,” said Martin J. “Marty” Keaney, executive director of the center. “It will be use-ful for ‘last mile’ concepting in which an industrial client needs to make a full-scale prototype before beginning commercial production.

“We’ll be able to make all kinds of composite fiber components with this machine, including up to a 12-foot diameter fuselage piece.”

NASA officials are interested in part-nering with the McNAIR Center, as well as the FAA, Keaney said.

University faculty and staff are training at Ingersoll in Rockford, Ill., this fall to learn how to program the machine for operation beginning in early 2015. Undergraduate and grad-uate students will have the opportu-nity to learn about the equipment’s operation starting in 2015.

“Almost every major equipment man-ufacturer has been here to talk with us about the potential for research collaboration,” Keaney said. “We’re excited about the future.”

Francis Spinale, Depart-ment of Cell Biology and Anatomy, School of Medicine

Kim Creek, Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences, S.C. College of Pharmacy

Don Edwards, Department of Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences

James Knapp, Depart-ment of Earth and Ocean Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences

Ana López-De Fede, Institute for Families in Society, College of Social Work

Manoj Malhotra, Department of Management Science, Darla Moore School of Business

Branko Popov, Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing

Mark Smith, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences

Fall 2014 / 5

AND THE WINNERS ARE…University of South Carolina researchers from physics,

engineering and public health figured prominently in

2014 professional awards.

Milind Kunchur, a professor of physics and

astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences,

was named the 2014 S.C. Governor’s Professor

of the Year by the S.C. Commission on Higher

Education and the governor’s office. Kunchur

conducts research across many disciplines includ-

ing superconductivity and the neurophysiology

of human hearing. He’s the winner of multiple prestigious

research and teaching awards, including the Martin-Marietta

achievement award, the Ralph E. Powe Research Award

from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the 2001 Michael J.

Mungo Teaching Award and the 2012 Michael J. Mungo

Distinguished Professor of the Year Award.

Ken Reifsnider, a mechanical engineering professor

in the College of Engineering and Computing

and a member of the National Academy of

Engineering, received a 2014 SEC Faculty

Achievement Award. The annual awards

recognize a faculty member from each SEC

university who demonstrates outstanding records

of teaching, research and scholarship. Reifsnider has

40 years of teaching and research experience and is

currently the director of the HeteroFoam Center and

the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Center of Excellence at USC.

Russ Pate, an exercise science professor in the

Arnold School of Public Health, received the

2014 Governor’s Award for Excellence in

Scientific Research and Excellence in Scientific

Awareness from the S.C. Academy of Science.

Pate, an exercise physiologist whose research

focuses on promoting physical activity and physical

fitness in children and understanding the health implica-

tions of physical activity, has enjoyed a long and productive

career at the university and has served as a national leader

in the field of physical activity and public health.

USC LEADS 2014 SEC SYMPOSIUM ON OBESITY

More than one-third of American adults and one-sixth of children and adolescents are categorized as obese. The problem has given rise to a huge commercial weight loss industry and a dramatic growth in obesity-related health care costs.

Earlier this fall, faculty from the 14 Southeastern Conference universities participated in the 2014 SEC Symposium entitled “Prevention of Obesity: Overcoming a 21st Century Public Health Challenge,” held in Atlanta, GA. Led by faculty from the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, the symposium critically reviewed the body of knowledge that could guide the development and implementation of a national effort on obesity.

Russ Pate, a professor in the Department of Exercise Science, chaired the Local Organizing Committee for the symposium. Guest speakers from the Arnold School included Jihong Liu of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Patricia Sharpe of the Prevention Research Center, joined by Larry Reagan of the School of Medicine. Delia West, exercise science, led a breakout session on “Technology and Media-based Approaches for Obesity Prevention.”

Keynote speakers for the symposium included Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, and Michael Lauer, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

6 / Breakthrough

In brief

NOT EASY BEING GREENWhen Melissa Pilgrim’s undergraduate students suit up for research, they

don waders, battery-powered headlamps and lots of bug spray before

heading into damp woodlands after dusk.

Their quarry? Green and gray tree frogs and other amphibians.

“This is often their start in undergraduate research,” said Pilgrim, an

associate professor of biology and director of research at USC Upstate,

one of the University of South Carolina’s senior campuses. “They learn data

collection, data entry and data management skills in a project like this, and

then they might rotate into more senior projects.”

USC Upstate has participated in the North American Amphibian

Monitoring Program — a U.S. Geological Survey-led project — since 2008.

Amphibians are among the world’s fastest-declining organisms, a phenome-

non that scientists call a growing biodiversity crisis.

USC’s Upstate students collect data at more than 100 monitoring points

in seven counties, cataloging weather and noise conditions, and record

calling activity at each stop. Students learn to differentiate among the

cacophony of nighttime sounds to distinguish the calls of various frogs,

and must pass a national exam before beginning the nocturnal surveys.

One of Pilgrim’s previous student volunteers has just started a Ph.D.

program in amphibian conservation. Several more are coauthors with

Pilgrim on what will be the group’s first peer-reviewed paper, to be

submitted in fall 2014.

Fall 2014 / 7

A vast film collection at the university offers a trove of research materials.Reel

treasureBabe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (seated in background) in the Yankees dugout on a Fox Movietone newsreel outtake, June 1, 1925.

w

8 / Breakthrough

Front & Center

The University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections has seen some changes over the years, but the vast archive of film and video footage has been an invaluable resource from day one, attracting scholars and

artists from around the world for more than three decades.Each year, MIRC receives nearly 200 requests from directors and producers seek-

ing footage that ranges from the iconic to the obscure. Even documentary filmmaker Ken Burns turned to the archive while producing his PBS miniseries “Prohibition.”

The collection is one of the most extensive in the nation; only UCLA’s is larger, and MIRC is always looking for more acquisitions.

“Over the past couple years, we’ve been pleased to acquire media produced by USC faculty and students in our Science and Nature and Regional Film collecting areas,” says MIRC director Heather Heckman. “We would be thrilled to see more donations from the USC community.”

Now housed in climate-controlled vaults in a nearly 40,000-square-foot ware-house about a mile from USC’s historic Horseshoe, MIRC also provides researchers at Carolina access to resources that have fueled projects across a range of disciplines.

Media arts professors Simon Tarr and Heidi Rae Cooley, for example, have each relied on MIRC for recent projects — Tarr using MIRC wildlife footage in a film that premiered at Columbia’s Indie Grits Film Festival in 2012, and Cooley delving into MIRC’s Scott Nixon collection while researching her recently published monograph, “Finding Augusta: Habit and Governance in the Digital Present.”

Meanwhile, history professor Bobby Donaldson has explored holdings depicting African American neighborhoods and civil rights struggles in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

“The extraordinary footage housed in MIRC has permitted me and my students to add important historical and visuals details to our research,” Donaldson says. “What I find most exciting about my collaborations with MIRC are the continued discoveries of materials, events and topics that set the stage for new course assign-ments and research topics.”

And it’s not just artists and historians. Even mathematics professor Pencho Petrushev has been drawn to the possibilities. He and a team from the Interdisciplinary Mathematics Institute recently worked with MIRC curator Greg Wilsbacher to develop open-source software for reproducing sound from digitized film images.

Origins

USC’s Moving Images Research Collections dates back to 1980, when 20th Century Fox transferred more than 11 million feet of film — some 2,000 hours of footage—to the university. The collection, which features newsreels and outtakes from 1919 through 1934 and 1942 through 1944, includes all of Fox’s silent newsreel footage from the 1920s, as well as the Movietone News reels from the sound era beginning in 1928.

From a media historian’s perspective that’s the celluloid motherlode — but it wouldn’t be here were it not for a relationship between then-USC faculty member Jim Jackson and legendary broadcaster Lowell Thomas, who narrat-ed the Movietone newsreels and also worked with S.C. Educational Televi-sion on a PBS series in the 1970s called “Lowell Thomas Remembers.”

Until 2009, the collection was known as the Newsfilm Library. After years of continual growth and diversification, the full archive, now containing more than 6,000 hours of recorded material, was renamed MIRC and organized as four collections: newsfilm, Chinese film, science and nature film, and regional film collections.

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (seated in background) in the Yankees dugout on a Fox Movietone newsreel outtake, June 1, 1925.

Fall 2014 / 9

NEWSFILM COLLECTIONS

The original Fox newsreels have been augmented by, among other additions, donations of footage from Columbia-area television stations shot between 1959 and 1978. The collection holds a particularly rich source of footage of civil rights leaders and rallies from the era.

The Fox Movietone collection has continued to reveal histor-ical gems over the years, from the discovery that a young airmail pilot in a routine newsreel story was actually Charles Lindbergh before he became famous, to the realization that outtakes of a news story about Babe Ruth returning to the Yankees lineup after an illness happened to contain footage of Lou Gehrig in the dugout — on the very first day of his record-setting streak of 2,130 consecutive games played.

SCIENCE AND NATURE FILM COLLECTIONS

USC biology professor emeritus John Herr was instrumental in bringing a selection of Roman Vishniac’s prodigious output to the university, including film and stills of his pioneering work using microscopy in the study of nature. Vishniac is

well known as a photographer and cinematographer who documented Jewish culture in Europe before WWII and the Holocaust, but his formal education included biology, which is amply demonstrated in a portion of the Science and Nature collection. MIRC’s science and nature holdings also include a vast collection of footage from what is now the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and a growing cache of film donated by USC faculty.

CHINESE FILM COLLECTION

USC’s Confucius Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences were instrumental in helping the University Libraries bring in a huge cache of motion pictures from the People’s Republic of China in 2009.

Nearly 2,000 titles came to the university from the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., and from the worldwide headquarters of the Confucius Institutes. Film footage provided by the embassy, which is still being processed, provides a view of what Chinese leadership wanted Americans to see of their country and is an important resource for scholars studying diplomacy through public outreach.

10 / Breakthrough

REGIONAL FILM COLLECTIONS

Perhaps the most eclectic of the four collections, the regional films include materials from the S.C. Arts Commission, films from the USC athletics department and home movies filmed by a wide range of individuals, such as philanthropist Archer Huntington and his wife, noted sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, and WIS-TV photographer Jim Covington.

‘Regional’ is actually a bit of a misdirect as a catch-all title for this collection. Although obtained from inhabitants living in or near South Carolina, the films themselves can depict nearly any geographic locale. Home movies, particularly of wealthy or prominent citizens, frequently document travel throughout the country and all over the world.

Scott Nixon, a resident of Augusta, Ga., who always packed a camera on his frequent travels, captured 16-mm and Super-8 film from the 1930s to the 1970s and edited the footage into short movies of his own. One of these, “The Augustas,” was one of just 25 films selected by the Library of Congress in 2012 for inclusion in the National Film Registry; “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “The Matrix” and “A Christmas Story” were fellow selections that year.

The Scott Nixon collection, which found a permanent home at MIRC in 2000, is just one example of a variety of home movie holdings in the regional film collections of MIRC. The happy coincidence of the right people seeing it at the right time turned an obscure group of movie reels into a nationally recognized collection of enduring cultural value.

ART LOST IN THE ATTIC

MIRC is pushing to expand its home movie collections further, particularly as the home movies shot in 8-mm and Super-8 in the middle of the 20th century continue to slowly deteriorate in metal cans stored in attics across the country.

Using an ASPIRE-III grant from USC’s Office of Research, MIRC has acquired a device that can rapidly transfer the small-format films used by amateurs to digital media. With the new equipment MIRC can now quickly digitize home movies, and donations are starting to flow in more often, whether from the annual “Home Movie Day” held every October or from interested parties who contact the curators directly. It’s hard to say what might come into the archive next, but if the past is prologue, there are many unexpected treasures that MIRC will soon bring to light.

From left: Broadway Star Bee Jackson performs the Charleston in Charleston, S.C., with the Jenkins’ Orphanage Band in 1926; image from the film labeled “Turbellaria” (Roman Vishniac Film Collection); image from the 1985 animation “Monkey King Conquers the Demon” (Chinese Film Collection); image from a home movie of Easter celebrations (Taylor Family Home Movie Collection); image from “Two Stage Sisters,” a Chinese drama film produced in 1964 before the Cultural Revolution.

Fall 2014 / 11

With Andrea Tanner

College of Mass Communications and Information Studies University of South Carolina

Q&A

Researchers from an array of disciplines at the university

are teaming up with the Richland County Public Library to

help give people information about the Affordable Care Act.

The law, also known as Health Care Reform and Obamacare,

has requirements that people need to understand to make

informed decisions regarding health care, insurance and

finances. Andrea Tanner, associate professor in the School of

Journalism and Mass Communications, is leading the research

into what people know, think they know and need to know

about the new health care law. The goal is to identify messages

and distribution sources to get correct information to

residents of Richland County.

What is the scope of your role in this project?Our team — and it’s an inter-

disciplinary team of people

from USC — is working with the

Richland County Public Library

and we have a grant from the

Knight Foundation. What we’re

trying to do is help people in

Richland County get informa-

tion about the Affordable Care

Act in a nonpartisan way.

Because there is so much trust

in the library, we’re trying

to make the library a hub of

ACA information. USC’s part

of this project is to conduct

the formative research. What

we’re in the process of doing

is assessing the knowledge,

perceptions, communications

sources and needs about the

ACA among people in Richland

County and looking at that so

that we then can figure out

strategies to reach people in

the community. We’ve done a

telephone survey of Richland

County residents and we’ve

also done a series of focus

groups around the county,

focusing on different commu-

nities [such as] African-Ameri-

can, white, rural areas and the

Hispanic community.”

Do you have any idea of what people know or what they think about the Affordable Care Act?We asked people in Richland

County how well they under-

stand the ACA and only about

20 percent say they under-

stand it, and that’s across

socio-economic factors and

other demographics. A ma-

jority of folks say they don’t

know that much about the

ACA or maybe know a little

bit about it. That’s somewhat

similar to national results. The

Kaiser Family Foundation did

a national survey that showed

44 percent of all Americans

did not know how the ACA

impacts them.”

Do they know as much as they think they do?We asked them their subjec-

tive knowledge or what they

think they know about it, and

then we asked them questions

that could pinpoint what they

actually know — their factual

knowledge. What they actu-

ally know and what they think

about some of these things,

we’re still looking at those

results.

What is the next step in your research?We’re in the early phases of

analyzing our data. From that,

we’re going to make recom-

mendations about targeted

messages, what audiences we

should focus on and how to get

the word out in a nonpartisan

way to people who need and

want more information about

the Affordable Care Act. We

also asked people their likeli-

hood of searching for informa-

tion over the next six months.

Nearly half said they were likely

or very likely to do that. They

don’t feel like they understand

it that well and they want more

information.

hs Health Sciences

12 / Breakthrough

Where are people getting their information?The most often used sources

are cable television and local

and other broadcast news

channels, and family and

friends. When we asked them

about their most important

sources of ACA information

and what they were hearing

about it, 60 percent said they

were hearing mostly bad

things about it, which is not

surprising. What struck me is

that few people are getting

information from doctors,

from their employers, from

health insurance companies.

However, those are the sourc-

es that they want to hear it

from.

Have you done a project on this scale before?It’s a different topic, but we

were looking at the state of

South Carolina and looking

at people’s knowledge, per-

ceptions and communication

needs regarding clinical trial

participation. The number

of people participating in

clinical trials — across the

United States — is dreadfully

low and there is such a need

for people to participate in

that type of research. And we

were trying to figure out what

people in South Carolina know

about it, think about it, would

they be willing to participate.

We’ve analyzed data, and we

are in the process of making

recommendations of what

to do to get people more

informed about it.

Fall 2014 / 13

When it comes to poverty in this country, Kirk Foster wants to change the conversation.

As coauthor of the book “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes,” the University of South Carolina social work professor spent the past few years interviewing Americans about economic opportunity and the barriers to it. What he and fellow authors Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl discovered contradicts many of our established notions of what it means to “make it” in America.

“We asked people what defines the American dream, and we started to get some very interesting responses,” says Foster, whose interviews were conducted during the recent economic downturn. “We had thought that we’d by and large get some version of the quintessential American dream that we all know — the house, the family, the car. One person out of 75 that we interviewed described the American dream that way.”

Instead, Foster says, people tended to define the American success story in terms of economic security. But even

that concept is fluid, changing relative to a person’s background and economic status. For the CEO of a multinational corporation it meant one thing; for the first responder or the out-of-work laborer, it meant something very different.

“I spoke to a single mom living in subsidized housing, and for her, economic security simply meant providing a roof over the heads of her kids — while still being able to give 10 percent of every dollar she made back to her church,” says Foster.

While the book is built around the personal accounts of real Americans, Foster’s qualitative interviews are contextualized and supported with four decades worth of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Combined, the interviews and statistics depict an America where individualist aspirations and ideals routinely bump heads with real economic hardship.

And policymakers and academics have taken notice. Last November, five months before the book’s publication, lead author Mark Rank penned a New

York Times editorial stating that roughly 40 percent of Americans will experience poverty at some point between the ages of 25 and 60. Days later, the Atlantic Monthly picked up on the story, and on Dec. 4, President Barack Obama alluded to that same startling figure in a speech on economic mobility.

Foster describes that series of events as a game-changer, and an indication, he hopes, that we might start to recognize just how pervasive poverty has become in America — and how important it is to rethink the ways we address it.

“Many people in this country have this bootstrap mentality that, ‘If I just keep working harder, I will get ahead. If I take on one more job, if I mow a few yards when I’m not working one of my other two jobs, I will finally make it,’” Foster says. “It’s not that way for many people.”

“America was really built on commu-nities working together to make change, to help people advance, to help someone when they’re down and out,” he adds. “I’m hoping that we can recognize that and start a different conversation.”

Making it in AmericaSocial work professor’s new book explores the myriad meanings of the American Dream.

Book Corner

14 / Breakthrough

Scientists at the University of South Carolina have uncovered what might be one of the root causes of the recent surge in food allergies among children: early antibiotic exposure.

Using retrospective Medicaid data of S.C. children, the interdisciplinary team found that infants given a course of antibiotics in the first year of life had a higher chance of developing a food allergy diagnosis later on.

“There was almost a one-and-a-half times increase in the odds of developing allergy compared to controls,” says Bryan Love, an associate professor in the S.C. College of Pharmacy who led the team. “We’re basically working on the theory that the bacteria within our gut are important to the development of a normal immune system and immune response.

“We think that repeated antibiotic exposure can alter that microbiome in a way that may lead to the development of food allergy.”

The effect was also dependent on the extent of exposure. With three or more courses of antibiotics, there was an even stronger association with developing one or more food allergies.

The data were compelling enough to earn the team an ASPIRE-II grant from the Office of Research to expand the study. They will soon work with a much larger data set of one million to two million patients from 30 states, which will allow them to bolster the statistical methodology and address other diseases and health problems that could be affected by antibiotics in the microbiome. Those might include obesity and digestive disorders such as celiac disease and Crohn’s disease, Love says.

The interdisciplinary team — which included physicians Joshua Mann and David Amrol in the School of Medicine, biostatistician James Hardin in the Arnold School of Public Health, and faculty members Christina Cox and Kevin Lu in the S.C. College of Pharmacy — will also do a pilot study comparing stool samples of children with food allergy to determine if any differences in the microbiome exist.

Food allergy culprit?Team studies potential link between infant antibiotic exposure and food allergy surge.

hs Health Sciences

Fall 2014 / 15

With Tim Mousseau

College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina

Biological Sciences professor Timothy Mousseau has made more

than 30 trips to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine since

1999. In the past few years, he has traveled a dozen times to the

Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear site in Japan to study the aftereffects of

that catastrophe. Mousseau, as a part of USC’s Chernobyl Research

Initiative, is focused on the health and environmental outcomes of

radiation effects in wildlife.

What do you hope comes out of your research? Initially, our work was motivated by a basic interest in the

genetic, ecological and evolutionary consequences of elevat-

ed mutation rates in natural populations. The landscape scale

of these disasters leads to population and community level

impacts that have not been possible to study in the past. Our

findings to date suggest that these impacts are significant,

widespread and much larger than would have been predict-

ed by conventional laboratory-based approaches to such

questions.

For example, recent studies by others suggest that the

sensitivities of natural populations in Chernobyl to radiation

effects are at least eight-times larger than expected based

on the conventional modeling approaches used by most

risk analysts. It is too soon to determine how Fukushima

will compare, but our preliminary results suggest persistent

negative effects for many species with no signs of any

positive changes so far.

Some of our latest results from studies of Chernobyl birds

suggest that because of the intensity of some of these nega-

tive effects, some species are actually adapting by adjusting

their allocation of antioxidants in their bodies towards the

defense of radiation in ways that have not been observed

before. So in many ways, this research is helping to push

basic science forward.

What is the goal of your research? More recently, our goals have expanded to include the

development of a better appreciation of the risks and

hazards of nuclear accidents for human populations living

in these regions. Can the effects observed for plants and

animals be extrapolated to predict possible long-term out-

comes for people? Humans are just animals, and there is no

reason to expect qualitative differences in their responses to

mutagens in the environment. Anything we can do to help

refine predictions of these risks will be of great interest and

potential importance for people living in the face of nuclear

hazards.

What’s the latest at the Fukushima site? We don’t know yet how things are changing at Fukushima.

The government there has invested billions into removal of

contaminated dirt from towns. It is too early to say if this will

have a positive or no effect. It is a big experiment. Certainly

there will continue to be significant consequences for the

wildlife living in the areas of contamination deemed too high

Q&Aes Environment & Sustainability

16 / Breakthrough

to be worthy of clean up. Actual cleanup is only feasible for

the slightly contaminated areas as the best they can do is

drop the ambient radiation levels by a half or so. This leaves

vast areas that will require decades to centuries before

cleanup is feasible.

Is the Fukushima site becoming less dangerous?A significant part of the initial dispersal of radioactive

materials has now dissipated. Perhaps the most dangerous

radioisotope was iodine-131, which is extremely dangerous

for mammals and can lead to thyroid cancers relatively

quickly in exposed populations. More than 9,000 thyroid

cancers were reported for Chernobyl victims. Currently it is

believed that there are more than 40 cases of thyroid cancer

among children who were living in the Fukushima region,

a frequency that is believed to be much higher than what

would normally be expected. It is still early to say what the

final rates will be as such cancers normally have about a five-

year latency period, and it has only been three years since

the disaster. Fortunately, Iodine-131 has a relatively short half

life so pretty much all of it disappeared within months of the

disaster. Similarly, many of the other highly radioactive gases

dissipated very quickly and are no longer a threat to the

people and animals living there.

That said, a massive amount of radioactive cesium, mostly

Cs-137 and Cs-134, was also released and they have half-

lives of about 30 and two years respectively, and thus are

still very much part of the local environment. Most of the

ongoing cleanup efforts are aimed at removing these cesium

isotopes. Unfortunately, because cesium is water soluble

and a potassium analog, it tends to be taken up by plants

and redeposited onto the topsoil every fall and so it is not

disappearing very quickly. We have now measured radiation

levels at 400 locations across Fukushima for four years in a

row and after an initial drop, we are now finding that levels

have stabilized and may even be increasing in some areas

because of movement with water and the effects of plants on

redistribution. So the short answer is that although things are

much less dangerous now than they were during the weeks

and months following the disaster, current conditions are

expected to persist for decades to centuries in many areas.

Will the new cover for the Chernobyl reactor site help to alleviate the problems in Ukraine?The new reactor cover at Chernobyl will certainly reduce

the potential impacts of the collapse of the old contain-

ment shelter. The concern has been that the reactor

contains tons of unspent nuclear fuel, i.e. plutonium

and uranium, that is in the form of nano-particles that could

be jettisoned into the atmosphere should the old structure

collapse, leading to another environmental disaster that

could rival the initial explosion in terms of potential health

and environmental impacts. Also, it has been impossible

to decommission the old reactor as the basement is full of

water. The new structure should help to dry out the old

building, allowing workers to begin a cleanup of the area.

Hence the urgency for the new shelter structure, or safe

confinement building as it is called in Ukraine.

When did you first become interested in studying the impact of nuclear fallout? I first developed an interest in doing research in Chernobyl

while on sabbatical in Paris. I wanted to work in a new system

— birds — in some unusual places. Many folks have studied

how variation in natural selection can drive evolutionary

responses in natural systems, but no one had ever looked

at how evolution might work along a variably mutagenic land-

scape such as can be found in Chernobyl and now Fukushima.

Also, I had had a long-standing interest in how maternal ef-

fects shaped adaptation, and I believed that maternal effects

(i.e., things that mothers can do to enhance the survival and

success of their offspring) could play a significant role in

dealing with the stress of a radioactive environment. So

we started studying barn swallows in Chernobyl and Spain.

In summary, what have you found at these sites? These findings clearly demonstrate landscape-scale individu-

al, population and ecosystem consequences of these nuclear

disasters, with many examples of developmental abnormal-

ities and deformities that likely contribute to the depressed

abundances and biodiversity seen in radioactive parts of the

Chernobyl and Fukushima regions. These findings contrast

starkly with the optimistic, unsupported claims made by

the United Nation’s Chernobyl Forum and UNSCEAR

committees. Continued study will be required to

determine not only the time-course for population

and community adaptation

to this perturbation, but

also if and when these

regions will ever again

be suitable for human

habitation.

Fall 2014 / 17

18 / Breakthrough

Cerebral landscape

THE ART OF SCIENCE

A cross-section of the cerebellum of a mouse,

magnified 100 times, shows an elevated presence

of an important protein called PACT (brown areas).

When functioning normally, PACT activates the PKR

enzyme, which helps protect cells from viral infection.

But mutations in the PACT gene can cause dystonia, a

movement disorder characterized by painful involun-

tary muscle contractions and abnormal posture. With

funding from the Dystonia Medical Research Founda-

tion and from the University of South Carolina Office

of Research, biology faculty members Rekha Patel and

Shannon Davis are studying the biochemical pathways

of PACT expression to learn more about its links to

the disease.

This image was obtained with a Leica DMI 3000 B microscope and a Leica DFC290 HD camera in Shannon Davis’ laboratory.

Fall 2014 / 19

Body mechanicsPredicting the risk of arterial plaque rupture

hs Health Sciences

Heart attacks and stroke strike suddenly, killing and incapaci-tating without warning. And there aren’t many places where the problem is worse than South Carolina.

“We’re in what’s called the stroke belt,” says Sue Lessner. “Currently we’re ranked No. 4 or 5 in terms of U.S. states with the highest per capita incidence of stroke and the highest rate of stroke deaths. We’re also near the top of the list for cardiovas-cular disease.”

An associate professor in the School of Medicine, Lessner focuses her research on atherosclerosis, a condition that often goes unnoticed for years and can cause unexpected onset of stroke and cardiovascular disease.

“Atherosclerosis is the disease underlying the majority of heart attacks and ischemic strokes,” Lessner says. “A key feature of atherosclerosis is plaque building up in the arteries. Most people in Western societies have some level of plaque buildup by the time they’re in their late teens or early 20s, and it progressively increases.”

The plaque that builds up on artery walls is a complex mixture of biological components that Lessner compares to a pimple or a boil. There’s an inflammatory core covered by a fibrous layer, or “cap,” that seals it against the arterial wall. As long as the fibrous cap is intact, it might take decades for a problem to become evident.

“You really only have symptoms of a plaque when it’s occupying more than 75 or 80 percent of the artery’s cross-section,” she says. “You can have a plaque that is clogging 50 percent of your artery, and you won’t know it. It’s not symptomatic at that point.”

But the absence of symptoms doesn’t mean there’s no danger. Plaques can rupture, exposing the material inside to the flowing blood, which will quickly form a clot at the site.

If it’s large enough, the clot might cut off blood flow, or it could break off and float downstream and lodge in another blood vessel, cutting off the blood flow there.

“When you hear about people who have a sudden, massive heart attack without any previous symptoms or history of disease, a lot of times it’s from a plaque rupture,” Lessner says.

Lessner, a biomedical engineer by training, uses many engineering tools and techniques to better understand cardiovascular disease progression.

She and her students are applying the basic principles of material mechanics to the clinical situation, which is essentially a mechanical failure in the artery.

“Every time the heart beats, the artery expands and contracts, and you’re putting stress on the edges of the plaque, where it could rupture,” Lessner says. “We want to predict — for a given blood pressure, for a given heart rate — how long you have before failure occurs.”

Using funding from an ASPIRE-II grant from the uni-versity’s Office of Research, Lessner has set up a collaboration with physicians in Greenville, S.C. They’re providing plaques removed from the carotid arteries of patients who had such severe blockage that the invasive operation, an endarterectomy, was called for.

Lessner and her team are subjecting the plaques to mechan-ical tests to determine a range of material properties, which could be the basis for developing an invaluable computer model for clinicians.

“A long-term goal is to have a predictive tool,” Lessner says. “So with the imaging data and some baseline measurements — like gender, blood pressure, risk factors, clinical measurements and the blood flow in the carotid artery — we will try to predict the risk of that person having a plaque rupture.”

20 / Breakthrough

Fall 2014 / 21

am Advanced Materials

Multitasking on the bench Better materials make for better devices, whether it’s a smartphone or a jet engine. Speeding up their devel-opment is the goal of the Materials Genome Initiative, an effort the U.S. undertook in 2011. One bottleneck has been the slow pace at which new materials can be made and characterized, but University of South Carolina chemical engineers Jochen Lauterbach and Jason Hattrick-Simpers are international leaders in doing multiple experiments and characterizations in a single step. This combinatorial approach enables researchers to prepare far more samples than ever before, and by cataloging properties and sharing the data with an organized approach, scientists aim to cut in half the time it takes to discover a new material and bring it to market.

The Eureka! moment comes quickly when many samples can be tested simultaneously each step of the way.

With a combinatorial approach, materials scientists can cast a wide net early in the development process.

After following the most promising leads in early experiments, researchers fine-tune properties later in the process.

22 / Breakthrough

Getting the upper hand on super bugs

Creating a protective armor that turns ordinary penicillin into a stealth fighter. Discovering what causes some antibiotics to turn the human immune system into a saboteur attacking the body’s own cells.

These are the promising advancements University of South Carolina researchers are making in the battle against drug-re-sistant bacteria.

“In the United States every year, around 100,000 patients die of bacte-ria-induced infections,” said Chuanbing Tang, a Carolina researcher and chemist. “And the problem is increasing because bacteria are building resistance. It’s a really, really big problem, not only for individual patients, but also for society.”

REINVIGORATING THE WONDER DRUG

Without question, one of the greatest medical advancements of the past century is the ability to kill bacteria inside the human body. But now, nearly 100 years after the discovery

hs Health Sciences

In the pipeline

of penicillin, the liberal — some would say overly lavish — use of these wonder drugs has led to the evolution of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

Tang’s work looks at making existing antibiotics, like penicillin, more efficient against the defenses bacteria have devel-oped over the years to combat them.

A particular portion of the molecular framework of many antibiotics — their three-dimensional geometry — wreaks havoc on the bacteria’s ability to reproduce. However, new strains of one particular bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, can create an enzyme called beta-lactamase that breaks down this structure, rendering the numerous antibiotics whose effective-ness is based on it useless.

Tang has created a protective polymer — an armor if you will — that appears to make antibiotics less susceptible to bacteria’s defenses. It has even shown success against the bacterial strain known as MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a fearsome

hospital-acquired infection that requires costly treatment. Tang’s polymer also seemed to help break apart the bacteria without damaging human red blood cells.

Therapeutic use of the polymer is probably years and many clinical test trials away, but Tang and his colleagues have taken a major step by reporting their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in March 2014.

BREAKING THE CODE

The human body is filled with bacteria, some of which cause disease and illness and some that are necessary for the digestion of food.

These bacteria, good and bad, live as communities of cells called biofilms. The communities form protective shields through secretions from individual cells, and they trigger community responses through cell-to-cell communication. This communication also is a coded message that can alter a bacterium’s gene expression. Alan Decho wants to break that code.

Fall 2014 / 23

“We are exploring a range of biological and chemical processes that occur within biofilms to understand how they function, and ultimately, how they may be manip-ulated or controlled,” Decho says. “It is those signals that trigger group responses that we are trying to control.”

Call it the power of working together. When bacteria “talk,” the biofilm commu-nity becomes more adaptable and resilient than individual bacteria cells. Decho says the creation of a biofilm also can lead to the bacteria being resistant to certain drugs.

The goal of his research is not to kill the bacteria, but to control its behavior. He is working with Brian Benicewicz, a polymer chemist at Carolina, to develop specialized nanoparticles to do just that. His is one of only about a dozen labs in the world engaged in this type of research.

FIRST, DO NO HARM

A leading cause of these new strains of bacteria is the indiscriminate use of anti-biotics. Establishing better protocols for when to use particular types of antibiotic is Brandon Bookstaver’s mission.

A pharmacist, professor and researcher at the S.C. College of Pharmacy and School of Medicine, Bookstaver is helping pilot the use of rapid testing in hospital

settings so doctors and pharmacists can build the appropriate weapon for fighting each infection.

“This can save 24 hours of giving the wrong drug,” Bookstaver says. “Rapid diagnostics have revolutionized how we manage these infections.”

The goal is to find the drug that will kill the disease-causing bacteria while doing as little damage as possible. In the worst cases, the destruction of helpful bacteria can allow a common colon bacteria, Clostridium difficile, to flourish. The extreme diarrhea and dehydration that ensues can be fatal.

“Your normal gut bacteria, or microbi-ome, is a wonderful thing, and one of the great things it does is prevent Clostridium difficile infections,” Bookstaver says. “It’s one of the worst consequences of an anti-biotic, and it has become one of the most common hospital-acquired infections in the United States.”

Bookstaver’s team has created a database with five years of bacteria sus-ceptibilities found at S.C. facilities.

THE HUMAN TOUCH

Just as these superbugs can develop a resistance to manmade antibiotics, they also can have a crippling effect on the body’s own defenses.

School of Medicine researcher Mitzi Nagarkatti is looking at how certain disease-fighting cells within the body produce toxins when confronted with certain strains of Staphylococcus. The resulting toxins these cells produce can lead to organ failure and death.

“You have to have an immune response to attack the microbes, but at the same time, there should be mechanisms to control it,” Nagarkatti says. “If this goes haywire, then you have damage.”

Nagarkatti, who is chair of the pathology, microbiology and immunology department, recently published a paper outlining early findings in studies of mice exposed through inhalation to the bacteria that causes food poisoning. The antibodies in one type of mice overreacted and began attacking lung cells. In the other type of mice, the disease-fighting cells were kept in check by an internally produced immunosuppressant.

“Following exposure to the microbes, the cells produce toxins that can activate some immune cells,” Nagarkatti says. “These are the cells that produce high levels of cytokines — small molecules — which can cause the deadly effects of exposure to this toxin.

“If we know what is responsible for the production of these cytokines, we can start to look at interventions,” she says.

24 / Breakthrough

One of our missions in the Office of Research is to foster diversity in the University of South

Carolina’s research labs, classrooms, libraries and field-study sites. We’re proud to help

connect minority students with real-world research experiences that prepare them for career

success.

We’ve welcomed more than 100 minority students to research programs throughout the

university during the past three summers. USC students are joined by scholars from S.C.’s

historically black colleges and universities and from colleges and universities around the

country who flock to Carolina to work with research mentors and enjoy social activities

that ready them for graduate school and beyond.

Learn more about the variety of minority research programs available at USC to help minority

students explore research as a career path at sc.edu/minorityresearch.

Minority research opportunities abound

NonprofitOrganizationU.S. Postage

PAIDPermit #766Columbia, SC

Columbia, SC 29208

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Horizontal crop markTail feather will always bleed o� the bottom, the pointed tip should NEVER be seen. All feather art below this crop line is for bleed use only

Norma Frizzell enjoys trekking. Growing up in rural Ireland, she walked the green hills and rocky coastlines that surrounded her small farming town. Norma’s quest for new trails was so great that she crossed the ocean three times in pursuit of knowledge. Each time, she came to USC to work alongside John Baynes, a highly respected chemist. At the USC School of Medicine she analyzes proteins that cause diabetes. Since diabetes is a leading cause of death in our state, we’re all lucky Norma continues to travel uncharted landscapes.

As a Gamecock, my motivation has No Limits.Norma Frizzell, assistant professor Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Neuroscience USC School of Medicine

sc.edu/nolimits