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Welcome to SPARK, a publication showcasing recent research at the University of New Hampshire.

A spark ignites. It excites. And it marks the transfer of passion into something far more expansive and wide-reaching. It’s an ideal analogy for the research enterprise at UNH, the state’s flagship public university and one of the nation’s high-impact research universities.

UNH is one of a dozen land, sea and space-grant universities in the nation. This inaugural issue of SPARK reflects that distinction, highlighting our research related to challenges that affect our Earth, our oceans, our solar system and all of us.

On a star-filled night in March, I stood with UNH President Mark Huddleston, Provost Lisa MacFarlane and many members of the UNH community to watch a rocket carry instruments constructed and developed by UNH faculty and students into space. It was a striking example of the power, passion and progress of UNH research.

On these pages, you’ll meet UNH professors and the graduate and undergraduate students they mentor. You’ll see how our research is addressing vast challenges like climate change and space weather and how our faculty bring their expertise to bear on more intimate issues like campus sexual assault, hearing loss and football’s concussion crisis.

As we introduce you to the moose and microbes, the pollinators and prime number theory that drive our researchers in their pursuit of new knowledge and opportunities for commercialization, we hope you’ll share in the excitement and pride we feel at the University of New Hampshire.

Jan NisbetSenior Vice Provost for ResearchUniversity of New [email protected]/research

Photo: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

Launch of the Atlas V rocket on March 12, 2015, carrying UNH-built instruments.

S PAC E

4 Sunny With a Chance of PlasmaSpace scientists probe solar weather and its Earthly effects

8 Blast Off!UNH-built instruments fly into space

9 A Matter of FusionGrants propel prof’s plasma probes

9 Seeing SparksSpace scientists ponder planetary surface

S E A

10 More Than MappingCCOM lets no ocean mapping data lie fallow

14 Predicting PathogensKnowing when not to harvest could help shellfishermen keep illness off the raw bar

14 Man and the SeaProfs’ books detail humankind’s briny history

15 Collaborating, Hook, Line and SinkerEngaging the fishing industry in research

15 Diving for AnswersUndergrad goes underwater for research

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16 Climate Scientists, Meet Infrastructure EngineersThe climate is challenging our roads and bridges

17 Climate Change is Everywhere. So is UNHFrom Tibet to the Amazon and back to New Hampshire, UNH climate science is global

20 Glacial RaceWhen the world’s fastest-moving glacier sped up, Ryan Cassotto was there to learn why

21 A Palace for PollinatorsNew hotel abuzz with native bees

21 A Mammal’s MaladyAs moose wane, is a tiny vector to blame?

22 What Happens Here Stays HereOrganic dairy’s closed system could save small farms money

P E O P L E

26 Prime TimeA mathematician’s persistence gets results—and awards

26 A Climate Change CrevassePolitical prejudices drive deep division on hot topic

27 Coming in ClearerKevin Short separates sounds to improve hearing aids

27 Keeping Their Heads Out of the GameInnovative research could reduce head injuries in football

28 Bringing in the BystanderProgram takes community approach to preventing sexual assaults

31 Putting the “P”(hD) in PreventionPsychology student puts policies in the public’s hands

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SPARK · 2015 RESEARCH REVIEW 3

UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE4 Photo: NASA


When an unusually powerful eruption from the

sun caused an equally powerful geomagnetic

storm near Earth back in 1859, it created auroras

so bright that newspapers could be read under

night skies and telegraph systems across Europe

and North America were brought down.

Should that happen today, it could be potentially devastating—

incapacitating global power grids, rendering satellites useless and

bringing modern-day society to its knees. Scientists in the UNH

Space Science Center (SSC)—one of the top such research centers

in the world—are conducting research that will ultimately help

keep society up and running.

Sunny With a Chance of Plasma

Above: Coronal loops (white lines) are created by solar material tracing out giant magnetic fields soaring through the sun. Next page: Space Science Center researchers Stan Ellis and John Gaidos work on PLASTIC in a cleanroom at UNH.

To better understand how the sun spawns these immense storms, predict when they might occur and protect both space-and Earth-based technological systems, SSC scientists do cutting-edge, world-class research on multiple fronts—from computer modeling and simulation to building satellite instruments that can detect the high-energy sources of “space weather.”

The term space weather generally refers to conditions on the sun, in the solar wind, and within Earth’s magnetosphere (or magnetic field) and upper atmosphere that can influence the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems, as well as endanger human life or the health of astronauts and people aboard polar-orbiting aircraft.

“Today, we are a highly technological society dependent on space in fundamental and deep ways that are largely invisible to most people,” says astrophysicist Harlan Spence, director of UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), which houses the SSC. “In fact, we are so vulnerable to the effects of space weather that the Department of Homeland Security includes it as one of its top natural disasters.”

Spence is the lead scientist on a National Science Foundation-funded project that crosses the boundaries between space physics, atmospheric research and ice core science and is investigating, modeling and testing the complex, interlinked physical processes at the frontier of the sun-Earth system. The project involves UNH

Photo: NASA/SDO/HMI/AIA/LMSAL

UNH is among the top three universities in the nation for

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“Today, we are a highly technological society dependent on space in fundamental and deep ways that are largely invisible to most people.” Harlan Spence, Director, EOS

scientists who are expert in computer modeling and atmospheric chemistry and are also members on satellite missions gathering key data on the sun-Earth system.

For example, the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a project led by UNH researchers, is one of several space-based instruments making measurements that help scientists better understand the dynamics of the sun-Earth system—dynamics that play a role in space weather phenomena. CRaTER has provided measurements that are allowing UNH scientists to accurately characterize the radiation hazards that could be faced by astronauts on deep-space missions to Mars—an essential goal of NASA’s.

Another UNH-led instrument is aboard NASA’s twin-satellite Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission that is enabling scientists to construct the first-ever three-dimensional views of the sun—data vital for understanding how the sun creates space weather. Indeed, STEREO’s UNH-built PLAsma and Supra-Thermal Ion Composition (PLASTIC) instrument, led by SSC astrophysicist Antoinette Galvin, uncovered the origin and cause of an extreme space weather event that occurred at the sun on July 22, 2012, and generated the fastest solar wind speed ever recorded directly by a solar wind instrument. These results provided a new view crucial to solar physics and space weather as to how an extreme space weather event can arise from a combination of multiple solar eruptions.

And an instrument suite recently integrated onto the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Satellite-R (GOES-R) satellite, which will be launched in 2016, includes the UNH-built Energetic Heavy Ion Sensor, or EHIS. The GOES-R satellite will be the first in a series to replace the nation’s aging 30-year-old weather satellites. While some 80 percent of the instrumentation onboard the GOES satellites will be dedicated to tracking Earth-based weather, the EHIS instrument suite will monitor one of the components of space weather, thus adding to our abilities to understand and predict intense solar activity and protect our technology-based society from potentially devastating consequences.

eos.unh.edu


At 11 p.m. on March 12, 20 years of UNH research blasted into space from Cape

Canaveral Air Force Station, and Roy Torbert let out a sigh of relief. “Imagine 20 years of your professional life riding on about five minutes of rocket flight,” says Torbert, professor of physics in the Space Science Center of UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and UNH lead on the project. The Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS, flew into the region surrounding the Earth’s magnetic fields to learn more about magnetic reconnection, the little-understood phenomenon behind what Torbert calls “big energetic events in astrophysics,” including those that can wreak havoc on telecommunications networks, GPS navigation and electrical power grids. Led by Torbert, UNH scientists coordinated and built nearly half the instruments on board the MMS, making this the largest complement of instruments launched in the 50-plus years of space science at UNH.

unh.edu/mms

B L A S T O F F !U N H - B U I LT I N S T R U M E N T S F LY I N T O S P A C E


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A Matter of Fusion

Many of us could use a little help making sense of computational plasma physics.

Kai Germaschewski, associate professor of physics, launched his UNH career with a lot of help: He’s the first UNH faculty member to receive prestigious early career grants from both the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The DOE grant supports his work in fusion plasmas—an ionized gas considered the fourth state of matter—that could lead to a cleaner energy source; NSF funds his complementary research on plasmas in space. For both endeavors, Germaschewski’s approach is computational. “I’m working using computer

simulations to try to simulate what happens in a fusion device,” he says. The funding jumpstarts Germaschewski’s career by helping him gain access to the computing firepower his work demands (including that at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee); at the same time it launches the careers of the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers it supports.

[email protected]

Seeing Sparks

The Earth’s Moon may be a more electrifying place than we ever knew. Computer models

created by a team of UNH and NASA scientists suggest that eons of solar storms have pummeled the moon’s shadowy polar regions, electrically charging the soil. Repeated “sparking,” the researchers surmise, could break the soil grains into tinier fragments, making the soil finer-grained than expected. This finding, which taps data from UNH’s Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon, has implications for what we know about the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar

system. “Decoding the history recorded within these cold, dark craters requires understanding what processes affect their soil,” says Andrew Jordan, a research scientist in UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, who collaborated with graduate student Colin Joyce as well as EOS director Harlan Spence and research scientist Jody Wilson on the work. In a September 2014 interview with The New York Times, Jordan shared his appreciation for our nearest celestial neighbor. “It’s amazing to have this kind of natural laboratory almost in our spatial backyard.”

crater.unh.edu

S P A C E S C I E N C E R E S E A R C H A T U N His ranked fifth nationally

by the Journal of Geophysical Research in terms of publication impact

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Since its founding in 1999, UNH’s Center for Coastal and

Ocean Mapping (CCOM), along with the complementary Joint

Hydrographic Center (a NOAA partner), has established itself as

the world leader in mapping the bottom of the ocean. Indeed,

in just this past year CCOM researchers found a 1,100-meter

seamount on the floor of the Pacific and were called on to help

with the mysterious loss of Air Malaysia Flight MH370.

But recently, the center’s work has gone far above the seafloor. It’s probed the water column to analyze gas bubbles for clues about hydrocarbon resources and climate change. It’s gone out to Boston Harbor shipping lanes, where CCOM technology is steering ships away from endangered North Atlantic right whales. At the New Jersey shore, CCOM researchers are looking at the damage wrought by Superstorm Sandy. CCOM’s expertise has even extended to Hollywood, which gave one of the center’s seafloor images a role in the recent “Godzilla” film.

UNH’S CENTER FOR COASTAL

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MORE THAN MAPPING


CCOM director Larry Mayer calls this wide range of research a “value-added” approach to the center’s original mandate—to improve ship navigation safety by mapping the seafloor and making the massive data collected quickly available for chart production. “Over the years, we have made great progress in attaining this goal, so we’ve also turned our attention to the opportunities provided by this huge flow of information for marine habitat assessments, gas seep detection, fisheries management, disaster mitigation and national security,” he says.

A mission to the East Siberian Arctic in August exemplifies how the CCOM team has pressed existing tools into innovative service. There, a CCOM team used the same multibeam sonar that maps the seafloor to find and analyze bubbles of methane in the water column, a conceptual pillar of water that extends from the seafloor to the surface. On a Swedish icebreaker in the Arctic, Mayer and graduate student Kevin Jerram used techniques developed by CCOM assistant professor Tom Weber (a recent NSF CAREER awardee) to map and measure gas seeps of methane. Their work will inform a better understanding of methane’s impact on ocean chemistry and, as a powerful greenhouse gas, on climate change.

Closer to home, NOAA tapped CCOM to support post-Superstorm Sandy relief activities, awarding a significant grant for work that aims to better understand the impact of such an event on the seafloor and on marine debris. Led by research associate professor Brian Calder, the research employs multibeam sonar as well as LIDAR (airborne laser bathymetry) and could prepare coastal communities to weather future storms. “This work is aimed at pushing the research so we have the appropriate tools for quick response after the next super storm—and there will be more—and helping us understand where we will be vulnerable and where we won’t,” says Mayer.


Making sense of all this data is CCOM’s Data Visualization Research Lab, headed by professor Colin Ware. From high-resolution nautical charts and marine debris tossed up by Sandy to the feeding behaviors of whales and ecosystems interactions of fisheries, Ware and his team bring research to life with visually stunning, interactive tools that serve up data so it can be easily understood and used by decision-makers.

Even as CCOM research spans the globe, scholars from across the nation and around the world come to Durham to learn the latest in hydrography. Part of UNH’s School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, CCOM offers master’s and doctoral degrees as well as focused training for professionals working in the field. Through the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) partnership with the Nippon Foundation, each year six international fellows, primarily from developing countries, earn certificates in ocean mapping at CCOM.

Mayer credits innovation from all corners of the center’s home in Chase Ocean Engineering Laboratory with boosting CCOM’s reputation as a leader in hydrography. “The key to our success is a group of very talented people from very disparate fields who focus their energies on a very important topic, ocean mapping,” he says.

ccom.unh.edu

CCOM director Larry Mayer and research scientist Christina Fandel. Below: GEBCO fellow Tomer Ketter and ocean mapping graduate student Kelly Nifong. Left page: CCOM GEBCO students Takafumi Hashimoto from Japan (second from left) and Siong Hui Lim from Malaysia (right) join Ph.D. student Ashley Norton (second from right), master’s student Fang Yao (front) and technician Darrell Groom (left) on a CCOM cruise.

“We’ve also turned our attention to the opportunities provided by

this huge flow of information for marine habitat assessments, gas

seep detection, fisheries management, disaster mitigation and

national security.” Larry Mayer, Director, CCOM


Man and the Sea

The ocean is vast, and full understanding of its depths requires viewpoints beyond the

hard sciences. To that end, two UNH professors of history offer a humanities spin on the briny deep and our relationship to it. Jeff Bolster has collected many awards, including the prestigious Bancroft Prize, for The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, which spans 1,000 years of fishing (and overfishing) in the Atlantic Ocean. In Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas, his colleague Kurk Dorsey tells the story of the international negotiation, scientific research, and industrial development behind these efforts—and their ultimate failure.

cola.unh.edu/history

Predicting PathogensIf you’re suffering from the gastrointestinal tsunami brought on by eating a “bad” oyster,

interdisciplinary research is likely far from your mind. Yet that’s the approach four UNH researchers with funding from the National Science Foundation are taking to determine why cases of Vibriosis—the illness brought on by eating raw oysters contaminated with a pathogenic strain of Vibrio parahaemolyticus—are on the rise in New England, and how to stop the illness before it reaches the raw bar. With Great Bay and its 10 commercial oyster farms as their laboratory and a team of undergraduate and graduate students assisting, research associate professor of natural resources Stephen Jones, associate professors of microbiology Vaughn Cooper and Cheryl Whistler, and associate professor of sociology Tom Safford have joined forces to keep oysters as safe as they are tasty. “What we’re really interested in is being able to tell shellfishermen ‘don’t harvest now,’” says Jones. “We want to look at conditions and be able to predict when pathogenic strains of Vibrio parahaemolyticus are present.”

newenglandsustainabilityconsortium.org


Diving for Answers

It’s an understatement to say that Amber Litterer ’16 dove deep into marine science

research last summer. Litterer, a zoology and EcoGastronomy major, matched her diving skills with her passion for research as a diving intern at Shoals Marine Laboratory, the UNH/Cornell field station on Appledore Island off New Hampshire’s coast. She collected algae and invertebrates and assisted Jennifer Dijkstra, affiliate assistant professor of biological sciences, in her study of how introduced macroalgae—seaweed—affect subtidal communities, exploring how invertebrates such as green crabs use these introduced seaweeds: Did

they eat them or live in them, or both? Litterer, who worked seven days a week for the entire summer, calls the experience life-changing. “I get to dive for 10 weeks and I get to work on research that hasn’t been done before in the Gulf of Maine,” she says. “That’s such an incredible opportunity.” She’ll cap off the opportunity by presenting her research at UNH’s annual Undergraduate Research Conference, the largest of its kind in the U.S.

shoalsmarinelaboratory.org

Collaborating, Hook, Line and Sinker

UNH is home to the Northeast Consortium (NEC), whose work takes an old proverb a

couple steps further: Engage someone in fisheries research and they’ll fish for generations. UNH researchers work alongside researchers from the University of Maine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and with those in the fishing industry to promote sustainability of fisheries resources in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank. NEC’s most recent funding will support collaborative solutions for shoring up the region’s imperiled groundfish fishery. After 15 years and 300 on-water projects, the Consortium, one of just a handful nationwide to facilitate such equal research-fishing industry

partnerships, has broken down the historic distrust between scientists and fishermen. One project, for instance, put environmental monitoring sensors on lobster traps, giving scientists a big data bang for not many bucks. “Fishermen are incredibly engaged,” says consortium director Christopher Glass. “They realize they’re in the best position to gather data that will help them rather than hurt them.”

northeastconsortium.org


Climate Scientists, Meet Infrastructure Engineers

As our climate changes, bringing sea level- rise and so-called 100-year storms with nearly

annual frequency, roads and bridges suffer. With the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet), created in 2012, UNH has become a national leader in accelerating research at the intersection of transportation infrastructure and climate change. “It’s a network between groups that normally would never come into contact with each other,” like university climatologists and state departments of transportation, says professor of civil engineering Jennifer Jacobs, who leads the NSF-funded project with UNH professors Jo Daniel (civil engineering) and climate scientists Paul Kirshen and Cameron Wake.

One research project, for instance, is evaluating the impact of heavy emergency and service vehicles on roads weakened by the flooding that’s increasing as our climate changes. “We’re balancing the need to get the road open and have access with the damage that would be done to the road from these heavy vehicles on pavement that is weak,” says Daniel, who’s leading the Federal Highway Administration-funded research project with colleagues at UNH and beyond.

Since ICNet’s inception, Jacobs has watched the two formerly distinct fields grow more aligned, boosted by the awareness brought on by extreme climate

events such as 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. “In almost every state across the Northeast, the state departments of transportation are now thinking about climate change and extreme weather resiliency,” says Jacobs. “We’re in a sweet spot to make a lot of forward progress towards providing citizens with a transportation network that can handle the new normal weather.”

theicnet.org

U N H ’ S S C H O O L O F M A R I N E S C I E N C E

A N D O C E A N E N G I N E E R I N G is ranked in the top ten in competitively funded marine-related research

ICNet researchers Jo Daniel (left) and Jennifer Jacobs


From New Hampshire fields and forests

to the icy domains of the Tibetan

Plateau and the verdant expanse of the

Brazilian Amazon, UNH scientists are in

the forefront of advancing research that

helps society understand, prepare for

and mitigate climate change.

Research professor Steve Frolking of the Earth Systems Research Center (ESRC) in UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), for instance, leads a computer modeling project that spans 18 countries and encompasses all of Central, South, East and Southeast Asia, where some 1.3 billion people depend upon the waters that spring from the Tibetan Plateau.

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As the planet warms and climate changes in such regions, a looming water crisis is predicted in the wake of receding glaciers, thawing permafrost and changes in precipitation patterns. Non-sustainable water use ultimately reduces food and water security in these countries, making them more vulnerable to climate variability and socioeconomic instability—all elements under the study’s purview.

Because the aim of the study is to uncover implications for regional food security and economic welfare in the coming decades, the computer modeling project incorporates economic modeling into the mix—part of a growing trend to integrate physical and social sciences in large research projects with broad impact.

“It’s been really interesting working with the economists and seeing how these two very different fields that have totally different vocabularies and world views come together to answer questions we really couldn’t answer if we each worked on our own,” says Ph.D. candidate Danielle Grogan, a hydrologic modeler and key member of the project.

In the southern hemisphere, UNH scientists are looking at the consequences of current climate shifts as well as evidence of past wide-scale forest disturbance and recovery in the Brazilian Amazon.

Under a grant funded by NASA, ESRC research assistant professor Michael Palace is conducting a comprehensive assessment of Amazonian forest resilience and vulnerability to drought in the aftermath of two Amazon megadroughts in 2005 and 2010. The interdisciplinary project integrates remote sensing from satellites and aircraft platforms, contemporary physiological measurements that can determine how much a forest “drinks” and analysis of pollen records dating back thousands of years that can identify periods of severe drought.

For another NASA-funded Amazon project, also led by Palace, UNH scientists have taken hundreds of soil samples from the forest floor in search of


archeological evidence to determine how many people might have affected the rainforest through agriculture and development prior to European contact. Knowing this will help researchers understand how the Amazon Basin might withstand current pressures from deforestation, logging and development, and the synergies of those disturbances with climate change.

Closer to home, the UNH Sustainability Institute initiative Carbon Solutions New England (CSNE) has local climate change in its sights. In a report released in 2014, CSNE found that the Granite State is getting warmer and wetter as heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities accumulate in the atmosphere.

The report predicts that average annual temperatures in New Hampshire will rise by three to five degrees Fahrenheit and extreme precipitation events will likely double by mid-century. “More frequent extreme precipitation events combined with development in our watersheds will likely lead to more frequent and larger flooding events,” says report author Cameron Wake, who is a research associate professor at EOS and director of CSNE. But Wake says there’s hope. “If we decide to deal with this issue, the good news is that we have the time, the tools, and the civic structures to help our communities become more resilient to future flooding events.”

csrc.sr.unh.edu

Top left: Wil Wollheim (left), assistant professor in the Earth Systems Research Center, and postdoctoral researcher Richard Carey (right) sample New Hampshire’s Lamprey River for insights into its chemical and physical processes. Top right: In Sweden, Michael Palace (left) and Samantha Anderson ’14 (right) analyze remotely sensed imagery to predict greenhouse gas emissions. Below: Cameron Wake and students examine an ice core for clues about our changing climate.


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Call it scientific serendipity: When the world’s fastest-moving glacier sped up in the

summer of 2012—suddenly surging away from Greenland’s west coast at four times its 1990s rate—UNH doctoral student Ryan Cassotto was there to capture it, with a new instrument that measures glacier speed with much greater precision than satellites. Now, Cassotto is analyzing that treasure-trove of data to understand a simple yet important question: Why did the tidewater glacier Jakobshavn Isbrae speed up? It’s a question NASA, which awarded him the prestigious Earth System Science Fellowship, also wants to answer. “We want to understand how the ice and the ocean interact. It’s all about getting a better view of what the glaciers are doing,” says Cassotto, who studies with both assistant professor of geology and NSF CAREER grant awardee Margaret Boettcher and EOS affiliate research professor Mark Fahnestock. “Ultimately, sea level rise is one of the implications.”

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A Mammal’s Malady

New Hampshire’s iconic moose population— driver of a hunting and tourism industry

worth more than $250 million—is in decline. “We’re looking to assess the overall condition of the moose and trying to get at why they are dying,” says Henry Jones, a graduate student studying moose mortality rates with professor of wildlife biology Pete Pekins in cooperation with N.H. Fish and Game. The researchers suspect the winter tick, thriving as New Hampshire’s winters warm, is to blame. A single moose can host up to 120,000 of the blood-

suckers, resulting in anemia and blood and hair loss. With a grant of nearly $700,000 from the U.S. Department of Interior/ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the researchers are capturing and radio-collaring approximately 40 calves and 40 adult cow moose in the Androscoggin River Valley north of Berlin, N.H. “Deaths occur all the time in the wild, and nobody sees it,” says Pekins. “When you have marked animals, you can follow them to see their fate.”

[email protected]

A Palace for Pollinators

Durham’s newest hotel boasts luxury accommodations for its guests—all of whom

hail from the order hymenoptera. Launched last summer at UNH’s Woodman Farm by assistant professor of biological sciences Sandra Rehan and Cooperative Extension specialist Cathy Neal, UNH’s bee hotel can host thousands of native pollinators in its bee-friendly habitat of holes, sticks, nooks and crannies. Rehan’s research aims to understand and ultimately protect bees native to New England and essential to our region’s food crops and ecosystems. “If we don’t have pollinators, the national food supply is at risk,” says Rehan. “Increasing potential habitat will only increase pollinator populations.”

unhbeelab.com

UNH is ranked in the top five universities annually in publication impact in G E O S C I E N C E A N D F O R E S T R Y


Aber and colleagues are working to make the dairy—the nation’s only operational-scale organic dairy research farm—a fully sustainable closed system, creating energy independence and closing the loop on greenhouse gases and nutrients such as nitrogen and carbon. It’s a “what happens here stays here” approach: “Ideally, the only thing leaving the farm would be the milk,” Aber says.

About five miles from campus on UNH’s Organic

Dairy Research Farm (ODRF), University Professor

John Aber leads an innovative research project

that’s rooted in UNH’s land-grant mission. It’s work

that could have major implications for small farms

throughout the region and might even help take on

the very big issue of climate change.

What Happens Here Stays Here


The UNH Organic Dairy Research Farm is the nation’s only operational-scale organic dairy research farm—the first and only research organic dairy at a land-grant university.

The project is a bold departure for Aber, a world-renowned researcher in forest ecosystems with 230 publications and 40,000 citations to his name who, by his own admission, knows nothing about cows. Yet he’s inspired by how this project embraces the university’s mission to extend research to those who can use it. “I’ve spent a lot of time at the high end of research and publication,” he says. “I’m at a point where it’s more satisfying to see results applied immediately, locally. This project is so interesting to me, and it’s so much fun.”

At the outset of the project, begun in 2008 with support from UNH’s Sustainability Institute and a grant from the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program, Aber asked regional organic dairy farmers about their concerns. The biggest threats to their enterprise, he found, were not keeping cows healthy without using antibiotics but rather the costs of energy and bedding materials. It turns out that, when viewed through an agroecosystems lens, those two concerns—and their solutions—are intertwined.

For cow bedding, which is sawdust and wood shavings, Aber and Ph.D. student Matt Smith ’08 looked no further than the edges of the fields of the 300-acre ODRF site. As on most New England farms, poor-quality woodland has encroached on pastures and now comprises half of the farm’s 300 acres. Thanks to a new wood shaving machine purchased with funds from the N.H. Agricultural Experiment Station at UNH, the ODRF now harvests its own softwood to produce more than enough bedding, sharing some of it with UNH’s equine facilities.

“This equipment can help dairy farmers make their own bedding so they don’t have to buy it and truck it in,” says Smith, who grew up just up the Lamprey River in Lee, N.H. “It not only helps farmers save money, but it also reduces the carbon footprint of the farm” by eliminating the need to truck in bedding from New Hampshire’s far north.

And the bedding keeps working even after its initial duties are fulfilled: A composting system using an emerging technology called static pile

aerobic composting transforms the shavings, mixed with a steady supply of manure, into energy. Instead of turning the compost to aerate it, a fan draws air through the mixture; the 140-degree air that results from the microbial breakdown of the shavings and manure is run through a heat exchanger and used to heat air and water for the milking process. The remaining compost can be returned to the fields—closing carbon and nitrogen cycles on the farm—or sold.

Elegant in its efficiency, the composting system “is a lot more complicated than it looks on paper,” Smith acknowledges. Yet the researchers say managing the complexity and risk of such an innovation—this project was funded by a gift from a private donor—and making results available to practitioners is the role of the land-grant research university.

The research has implications beyond the farm as well: As many New England municipalities face increased regulations on disposal of organic waste, the composting industry is growing. Composters from Boston to Vancouver, B.C., have looked to the ODRF work to improve the efficiency and economics of their operations.

Halfway through the project, with a new round of SARE funding, Aber and Smith are upbeat about their results and the impact it could have on the region’s organic dairy farms. “We’ve shown that we can improve finances, close the carbon and nitrogen cycles, and produce excess energy and revenue,” says Aber.

aberlab.net

John Aber and graduate student Matt Smith ’08 at the composting facility at UNH’s Organic Dairy Research Farm. Aber, who has served as both the vice president for research as well as UNH provost, jokes that he’s now the “provost of compost.”


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A Climate Change Crevasse

Gun control. Abortion. The death penalty. Think these hot-button issues create the widest

divide between Republicans and Democrats? Think again. Professor of sociology Lawrence Hamilton, a senior fellow at UNH’s new Carsey School of Public Policy, has found that Democrats and Republicans are farther apart on their beliefs about climate change than on any of these other familiar political third rails. Indeed, a whopping 53 percentage points yawn between Democrats and Republicans on questions about whether and why climate change is happening. “I’ve suspected for a while that this was happening, that climate change had become one of the main wedge issues of our time,” says Hamilton, who has been probing the intersection of politics, culture and science for decades.

“A lot of opposition to environmental protections has been mobilized over the past decades … people tend to see environmental topics through the light of their political prejudices.” With climate change as the driver, Hamilton surmises, the so-called science gap on a range of issues is widening.

carsey.unh.edu

Prime TimeAfter his 2013 breakthrough in one of

mathematics’ oldest and most captivating problems, math professor Yitang “Tom” Zhang was widely hailed as a genius, albeit one few had heard of. The ensuing year of attention from media, academics and prize committees culminated with the MacArthur Foundation making it official: In September 2014, Zhang received one of its so-called “genius” grants. The no-strings-attached award recognizes his understanding of the twin prime conjecture, which states that the occurrences of prime number “pairs”—those that are only two numbers apart, like 3 and 5 or 17 and 19—continue infinitely. Zhang’s work narrowed down the “gap” between occurrences of these prime pairs to 70 million units, and subsequent collaborations have demonstrated that the gap is significantly smaller. Zhang’s success was borne of quiet persistence. “I failed many, many times. But each time, I just thought, ‘OK, this should be the beginning of a new process. Just keep going,’” he says. “I try to show if you just really love math, love science, just keep going.”

[email protected]


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Coming in Clearer

He brought a Woody Guthrie concert back to life, launched music download

services and wrote what may have been the world’s first smartphone app. Now, University Professor Kevin Short is applying his mathematical superpowers to technology that could improve hearing aids and even help iPhone’s Siri understand us better. Short has developed signal separation technology that addresses the “cocktail party problem” of hearing aids by preferentially enhancing one conversation over background noise. The work is at the core of his company Setem, which is the fifth such commercial company to have come out of UNH research endeavors. Short, who

holds nine U.S. patents and won a Grammy for his resurrection of the Guthrie performance, was recently named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. “At my core I’m an inventor more than anything else,” he says. “It’s very rare that you publish a paper in a journal read by 10 people that makes an impact in the world. What’s driven me is to get the stuff out there into people’s hands.” And, in this case, their ears.

[email protected]

Keeping Their Heads Out of the Game

Throughout their winning 2014 season, several dozen UNH football players participated

in an innovative, if counterintuitive, drill to minimize head trauma: They removed their helmets and tackled each other. The Wildcats are subjects in a two-year study being conducted by UNH researcher Erik Swartz to test the effectiveness of the Helmetless Tackling Training, or HUTT™, Technique he developed to train players to “keep their heads out of the game.” Swartz’s hypothesis is that practicing tackling without protective equipment will translate into full-contact, fully protected play that minimizes head impact.

“Our primary goal is to reduce head and neck injuries in football,” says Swartz, a professor in the athletic training option of the kinesiology department. “It sounds simple, but if there isn’t contact to the head, there won’t be a head injury.” Swartz’s work, inspired by his time playing rugby, caught the attention of the NFL, Under Armour and GE, which awarded him a Head Health Challenge II grant to bring the HUTT™ Technique to local high schools.

[email protected]


BRINGING IN THE

BYSTANDER


From the halls of justice to campus residence halls, from the Oval Office to student

unions and locker rooms around the nation, campus sexual assault was in the

spotlight this past year. Repeatedly, those working to curb it—legislators and campus

administrators alike—turned to Prevention Innovations, a UNH research center

that is at the forefront of campus sexual assault prevention.

P R O G R A M TA K E S C O M M U N I T Y A P P R O A C H T O P R E V E N T I N G A S S A U LT S


Left to right: Prevention Innovations co-directors Jane Stapleton and Sharyn Potter, graduate student Jenn Demers.

Prevention Innovations advances what’s known as bystander intervention with two proprietary licensed education programs, Bringing in the Bystander® In-Person Prevention Program and the Know Your Power® Social Marketing Campaign.

“Bystander intervention is a different approach where women are not approached as victims or potential victims and men are not approached as perpetrators or potential perpetrators,” says Jane Stapleton, who co-directs the research center with associate professor of sociology Sharyn Potter. “Instead, we utilize a community approach to prevention, where everyone has a role to play in ending sexual and relationship violence and stalking,”

What distinguishes the team’s prevention programs and makes them sought after is the firm foundation of rigorous research on which they’re built. “We go to our target audience for our ideas, and as we’re developing the prevention strategies we’re evaluating them,” says Potter. “We do pilot testing of our prototypes. Even after we’re satisfied with the results of the pilot testing we do as much experimental evaluation as we can, comparing our strategies to a control group. Then we make adjustments.”

Potter and Stapleton say the second key to the program’s success is its multidisciplinary approach: Prevention Innovations draws expertise from the departments of social work, sociology, women’s studies, justice studies and communications as well as UNH Law. The tight collaboration between researchers and practitioners—those working directly in the field, on campuses and in communities—further strengthens the program. “It’s a mutual respect,” says Potter. “It’s not the researchers in one corner of the field and the practitioners in another. We rely on each other.”

The effectiveness of Prevention Innovations has helped extend the program’s reach far beyond UNH. Some 300 colleges, universities and other organizations in the U.S. and Europe are working with either Bringing in the Bystander or Know Your Power—or both. The tools are commercially available and customizable and have been adapted for the U.S. Army. Both programs were recently translated into Swedish and will soon be translated into French.

In May 2014, Prevention Innovations was one of four programs tapped by a White House task force to further research and training on ending campus

“It’s a mutual respect. It’s not the researchers in one corner of the field and the practitioners in another. We rely on each other.”

Sharyn Potter, Associate Professor of Sociology


Putting the “P”(hD) in Prevention

For a student motivated to make a difference, Jennifer Demers may have landed the ideal project. Pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, Demers is helping the Prevention Innovations team assess various ways of teaching sexual misconduct policies at seven U.S. universities and colleges—a project undertaken at the request of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. Demers is working closely with Sharyn Potter on all aspects of the project, from recruiting actors and writing scripts for some interventions to analyzing data and writing the final report. Along with her doctoral work with professor of psychology Vicki Banyard, the Prevention Innovations study meshes neatly with Demers’s interest in activism and advocacy. “The results of this study are going directly out to the general public and to universities across the country,” says Demers. “It’s not just siloed in academia.”

sexual assault and to conduct a multi-campus study of the most effective ways to educate students. In June, Stapleton testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP). News media have taken notice as well, with Prevention Innovations and its principals cited everywhere from Cosmopolitan to National Public Radio, The New York Times and the BBC.

Prevention Innovations recently won a $1 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adapt Bringing in the Bystander for high school students, as well as a $600,000 National Institute of Justice grant to develop a

video game for teaching bystander intervention. In the meantime, the center has had so many requests for Bringing in the Bystander that instead of going to one campus at a time, it is inviting college officials to regional training sessions.

But Prevention Innovations’ work is far from done. Despite incredible progress, Potter says, campus sexual assault is tricky to eradicate. “There are a lot of cultural norms that need to be changed. We’re moving forward a tiny bit but we have a really long way to go.”

cola.unh.edu/prevention-innovations-research-center


Graduate student Bianca Rodríguez-Cardona studies with University Professor

William McDowell in the natural resources and the environment department.

She recently chatted with Senior Vice Provost for Research Jan Nisbet.

Where are you from? Why did you choose UNH?I’m originally from Puerto Rico, born and raised. I came to UNH to work with my current advisor, Bill McDowell, on the biogeochemistry of streams.

Bill has a study site in Puerto Rico. Is that where you connected with him?No! I found him through Google. He’s so well known in the field, and opportunities students get in his lab are fantastic. The people in our lab are riding the top of the wave in research.

Tell me a little about your research.My research looks at the controls of nitrogen uptake in streams, specifically how dissolved organic carbon influences nitrate uptake in streams. I work in four different sites in the Lamprey River watershed nearby, which feeds into Great Bay.

So is your work helping save Great Bay?There’s excess nitrate in Great Bay that has led to the loss of eelgrass. By reducing the transport of nitrate into Great Bay we can better the health of the estuary. And save it, yes.

Outside of academics, what do you like about UNH?My favorite experience here has been meeting new people and learning different perspectives on not just research but life. My Puerto Rican background is very different from people who live here, or who come from Ohio or California. It’s been great to interact with people from all over.

How are people here different?One of the first things I noticed here is that people are very kind and respectful. Not that Puerto Ricans are rude, but they aren’t naturally so friendly and open. Also, there’s more initiative to really care for the land and natural resources here. That’s one thing that I really like about New Hampshire, that feeling that this land is ours and we need to take care of it.

Other than research, what else do you like to do?I like to exercise. I’m currently training for triathlons. I’m not very good at them, but they help to take my mind off the academics.

What’s next for you?I’ll work in the lab, and in August I’ll start the Ph.D. program. I want to get some of my research published, and I’m applying for the EPA STAR (Science to Achieve Results) graduate fellowship.

And then? What do you want to be when you grow up?I would like to stay in academia and conduct research. Where, I don’t know, but I want to have my own lab.

A CLOSING INQUIRY


U N H ’ S U N D E R G R A D U A T E

R E S E A R C H C O N F E R E N C Eis the largest of its kind in the nation; more than 1,100 students participate

U N H . E D U / R E S E A R C H

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class

public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college.

A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state’s flagship public

institution, enrolling 13,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students.

College of Engineering and Physical SciencesSamuel Mukasa, Dean

College of Health and Human ServicesMichael Ferrara, Dean

College of Liberal ArtsKen Fuld, Dean

College of Life Sciences and AgricultureJon Wraith, Dean

Peter T. Paul College of Business and EconomicsDeborah Merrill-Sands, Dean

University of New Hampshire at ManchesterJ. Michael Hickey, Interim Dean

University of New Hampshire School of LawJordan Budd, Interim Dean

Graduate SchoolHarry Richards, Dean

Cooperative ExtensionKenneth La Valley, Dean and Director

Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and SpaceHarlan Spence, Director

School of Marine Science and Ocean EngineeringLarry Mayer, Director

Carsey School of Public PolicyMichael Ettlinger, Director

SPARK 2015 Research Review

A D M I N I S T R AT I O NPresidentMark W. Huddleston

Provost and Vice President for Academic AffairsLisa MacFarlane

Senior Vice Provost for ResearchJan Nisbet

Senior Vice Provost for Academic AffairsP.T. Vasudevan

Senior Vice Provost for Engagement and Academic OutreachJulie E. Williams

P R O J E C T M A N AG E RAmy Maki

W R I T E R SBeth PotierDavid SimsTracey Bentley

CO N T R I B U T I N G P H OTO G R A P H E R SJeremy GasowskiValerie LesterLisa NugentPerry SmithJustine RamageScott RipleySandra RehanMichael PalaceBruce F. Cramer

D E S I G NFive Line Creative

© 2015 University of New HampshireAll rights reserved.

Office of the Senior Vice Provost for ResearchThompson Hall, 105 Main St. Durham, NH 03824603.862.1948

Left Cover Image Photo: NASA

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