Month: December 2019

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Accolades Blog Faculty Spotlight Global Change

Jeff Walters presented the first annual GCC Faculty Service Award

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Jeff Walters is the Harold H. Bailey Professor in the department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech and has been heavily involved with the Global Change Center since its inception nearly five years ago.
On Wednesday evening, Dr. Walters was named the recipient of the 2019 Global Change Center Faculty Service award for his truly extraordinary dedication, leadership, and service to the GCC. Among other contributions, he was co-PI of the initial IGC IGEP proposal in 2012. He served on the initial steering committee for the center that ultimately led to our University charter and then served on the GCC advisory committee for two consecutive terms. He served as the director for the IGC IGEP in 2017 & 2018 and currently serves on the IGC curriculum committee. Dr. Walters has been a mentor to several IGC fellows, and served on numerous IGC graduate committees.
He has been a collaborator, confidant, advisor, teacher, and friend to many in the Global Change Center.  Congratulations, Jeff, and thank you for all that you do!

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Blog Climate Change Faculty Spotlight Global Change Research Water

Helping coastal communities face the challenges posed by flooding and sea level rise

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | December 3, 2019

As coastal communities continue to be threatened by more frequent and severe storms and sea level rise, there is a demand to better understand the challenges these communities face and to develop effective resilience strategies to deal with those challenges.

Assistant Professor Anamaria Bukvic of the College of Natural Resources and Environment is using a fellowship from the National Center for Atmospheric Research to look into the issue of population mobility in the face of coastal vulnerability.

Bukvic, a faculty member in the Department of Geography and an affiliate of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, housed in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, was selected as a Fellow of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Early Career Faculty Innovator Program, which provides funding for Fellows to partake in convergence research that tackles a specific pressing issue and addresses both its physical and social dimensions. This year’s research theme was “Coastal Regions and Human Settlements.”

“Recurrent flooding and other hazards in coastal areas represent a very complex and unique challenge that can only be resolved by holistic problem-solving,” said Bukvic, a co-leader of the Coastal@VT initiative.

“We already know a lot about the physical risks but much less about the human aspects, such as risk perceptions, values, attitudes, and behaviors,” she continued. “We need to understand how social systems respond to coastal flooding and accelerated sea level rise so that we can develop more effective policies and programs for adaptation in coastal communities.”

Bukvic’s research focuses on the subject of coastal vulnerability to flooding and, more specifically, on flood-induced population displacement and relocation. During her summer residency at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) facility in Boulder, Colorado, she established new collaborations with NCAR scientists and other Fellows to study the issue from different disciplinary angles and by using novel methodologies.

“A great strength of this program is that it includes both social and physical scientists,” Bukvic said. “It’s not just STEM-based — there are strong elements of social science as well. We have the opportunity to not only work with unique data sets provided by NCAR but also to interact and collaborate with scientists from a diverse range of disciplines who are all working on the issue of coastal resilience.”

In addition to supporting early career faculty, NCAR’s Innovator Program provides funds for graduate students to participate. Aaron Whittemore, a master’s student in geography at Virginia Tech, accompanied Bukvic to NCAR.

“It was a great experience,” Whittemore said. “All of the professors involved were in the early stages of their careers, and they were really motivated. New ideas were constantly sparking up during meetings, and I learned a lot, even outside the science work, just by talking to these professors. It was exciting to see how they came together to create really collaborative work.”

Whittemore spent the summer researching the factors that affect how people feel about places where they live. Those factors will be used to develop a sense-of-place metric to help scientists better understand why some people prefer to relocate and others to stay in place despite the risks.

For Bukvic, a native of Croatia, the experience of living close to the sea is a familiar one, and she recognizes the challenges in speaking to communities about sea level rise.

“Growing up, I always looked forward to summers on the Adriatic Sea. It’s given me an appreciation for the coastal culture and lifestyle and the many ecosystem services coastal environments provide. I understand that any discussion about whether people should stay in place or move away from the coast is a difficult one. It’s important to think about climate processes within the context of adaptive adjustments that would help people cope with flooding as well as safely relocate when staying in place is no longer possible.”

As a part of the two-year long fellowship, Bukvic will spend another summer residency at the NCAR facility, where she and graduate student Jack Gonzales will work with NCAR collaborators and other Fellows on the new convergence research efforts. Some of these efforts will benefit from NCAR’s capacity to provide unique data and skill sets, as well as expertise in specific disciplinary domains.

Written by David Fleming

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Krista Timney

540-231-6157

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Blog Climate Change Faculty Spotlight Global Change Grants Research Water

Researcher receives NSF grant to study the fate of terrestrial carbon in freshwater ecosystems

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | November 25, 2019

Carbon serves as the building block of life — it cycles through every organism, the environment, and the atmosphere to make Earth capable of sustaining life.

Freshwater ecosystems may cover less than one percent of the Earth’s surface, but they play an active role in the global carbon cycle through carbon respiration and sequestration.

Through photosynthesis, terrestrial trees and plants take in carbon dioxide (CO2) and water to produce carbohydrates and oxygen. When plants die, the organic carbon that makes up their leaves, stems, and roots decays in the soil. But landscapes are “leaky” — some carbon seeps into the groundwater and travels through streams and rivers before being cycled back into the atmosphere. How carbon moves through a landscape and across land-water boundaries has implications for water quality and freshwater food webs.

Erin Hotchkiss, an ecosystem ecologist and assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science, and her collaborators received a $1.12 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how carbon moves across land-water boundaries and the multi-scale consequences of terrestrial carbon losses for freshwater ecosystems and global carbon budgets.

“Streams are the gutters and recycling centers of a landscape — what we see in terms of water quality and biology in streams reflects not only what’s happening in the waterway itself, but it is also an indicator of what is happening on the surrounding landscape,” said Hotchkiss, an affiliated member of the Global Change Center, housed within the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “We can’t understand the fate of terrestrial carbon without linking landscapes with their waterways.”

Carbon cycling in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems are rarely studied together. Hotchkiss and her team are working to understand how materials and energy move across ecosystem boundaries and how that alters biological functions, such as metabolism, and greenhouse gas emissions in streams. Stream metabolism, the balance between photosynthesis and respiration, is a fundamental process that contributes to water quality and food web production.

Forests are carbon sinks, or natural carbon reservoirs, but streams play an opposite role in the carbon cycle — they are often carbon sources that emit CO2 and methane to the atmosphere. When co-located streams and forests are considered as a single unit, scientists can help fill in a critical knowledge gap in the global carbon budget by addressing a key question: What is the fate of terrestrial carbon? To address this, Hotchkiss’ research will link measurements of how much carbon is stored in forests after photosynthesis, how much leaks into streams, and how much is respired and emitted by streams.

“From global budgeting perspectives, we’re still missing this concept of landscapes leaking carbon across terrestrial-aquatic boundaries,” said Hotchkiss. “Being able to quantify and propose a framework for including how much carbon moves from terrestrial to aquatic ecosystems and what that means for CO2 emissions is needed to improve future budgets of where carbon sources and sinks are located across the globe.”

Four images from the same NEON study site in Alaska’s Caribou Creek depict the various seasons of the Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. An instrument is located in the center of the stream. Courtesy of the PhenoCam Network.
Images taken throughout 2018 at the NEON study site in Alaska’s Caribou Creek. Courtesy of the PhenoCam Network.

The fate of carbon from terrestrial-aquatic exchanges is still a mystery. To investigate, Hotchkiss will use sites established by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a research effort focused on understanding how terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across the United States change over time.

Hotchkiss and her team of professors, students, and postdocs will make use of NEON’s ongoing terrestrial and aquatic measurements while also installing new CO2 sensors produced by industry collaborators. These sensors will collect stream CO2 data throughout the day, season, and year. Integrating CO2 sensor and NEON data will allow them to compare carbon emissions with carbon cycling and movement across the landscape.

“To better understand the role of streams in the carbon cycle, we need long-term, high-frequency CO2 data. These sensors will provide information on the magnitude and variability of emissions and will allow us to test our understanding of the biological, geophysical, and climate drivers of CO2 emissions,” Hotchkiss said. “There are only five NEON sites with co-located terrestrial and aquatic measurements, but they’re all very different, ranging from boreal Arctic to temperate grasslands and even a small, forested watershed nearby in Tennessee.”

Outside of the project’s research objectives, Hotchkiss is planning to work with K-12 educators, who will be awarded fellowships to develop inquiry-based lesson plans that make use of publically available NEON data. Each lesson plan will be tailored to the grade level, curriculum, and educator’s goals. In some classes, students will build sensors that will be used to collect the same types of high-frequency data that informs Hotchkiss’ research.

“It is really important for us to get out of our lab space and communicate our science with other people. One of the greatest impacts we can have is by working with teachers to develop tools to share science and the scientific experience more widely,” Hotchkiss said.

Hotchkiss led this grant in collaboration with David Butman of the University of Washington, Wil Wollheim of the University of New Hampshire, Jay Jones of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Kaelin Cawley and Keli Goodman of NEON. Of the total $1.12 million, Hotchkiss will receive $490,000 at Virginia Tech.

—   Written by Rasha Aridi

CONTACT:

Kristin Rose
(540) 231-6614

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Blog Disease Environmental Justice Global Change Hollins Partnership Research Undergraduate Experiential Learning

GCC Partners with Hollins University to promote undergraduate research opportunities

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | December 2, 2019

A partnership between Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center and Hollins University will continue to blossom into its third year, pairing distinguished undergraduate students with Virginia Tech professors for a summer of unique research opportunities.

Hollins University is a private, women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Virginia, and students who are contemplating graduate studies and environmental research careers are currently applying for the summer 2020 installment of the program on the Blacksburg campus.

Over the summer of 2019, the Global Change Center hosted Udipta Bohara, a junior majoring in biology with minors in mathematics and chemistry, and Grishma Bhattarai, a senior double-majoring in economics and mathematics. Both aspire to complete advanced degrees after graduating from Hollins. By working at Virginia Tech with professors Dana Hawley, Kendra Sewall, and Kelly Cobourn, they gained understanding about what it’s like to work closely with research faculty on complex projects.

In Hawley’s biology lab, Bohara worked on a project seeking to understand the differences in how long the bacterial pathogen Mycoplasma gallisepticum stays active in different environments. This bacterium can cause severe eye infections in songbirds, and researchers are currently trying to discern just how virulent the disease is and how long it can remain active on a birdfeeder, where it is most commonly spread. Bohara’s work involved taking blood samples from birds and swabbing bird feeders, as well as setting up and running DNA and RNA-based assays.

Udipta pipetting samples collected by swabbing a bird feeder in order to quantify how much bacterial pathogen was present on the feeder port.
Bohara pipetting samples collected by swabbing a bird feeder in order to quantify how much bacterial pathogen was present on the feeder port. Courtesy of Virginia Tech.

When first experiments didn’t go as expected, she also learned valuable skills that all successful scientists practice: how to develop alternative questions, adjust protocols, and change the scope of experiments when things don’t go exactly as planned. Kendra Sewall, an associate professor in the School of Neuroscience, noted that this kind of adjustment “is a way of coming back with another question that might be better … science is an iterative process. You’re never done.”

Bohara felt that the positive mentorship of her professors and lab team and successfully shifting her project for the second half of the summer were some of the most inspirational and exciting parts of her summer at Virginia Tech. She described it as “a life-changing opportunity.”

Chava Weitzman, a postdoc in the Hawley lab who worked closely with Udipta during her project, said, “It’s been really fun to watch Udipta’s confidence in the lab and feeling of ownership in the experiments grow over the summer.” Hawley added, “Udi’s project helped us start a whole new line of techniques in our lab. It was wonderful to have her here as an enthusiastic stimulus for trying something new, and we’ll definitely be using Udi’s assays to try for a new NSF grant in the fall.”

Bhattarai’s experiences with Associate Professor Kelly Cobourn in the Department of Forest Resources and Conservation were equally positive. Bhattarai focused on investigating food insecurity as a function of assistance programs and gender. She wondered, is food assistance more effective for male- or female-headed households? How exactly are people being helped (if at all) and does assistance improve their access to food? Bhattarai’s interest in economics and gender combined perfectly with Cobourn’s own interests in creating models to predict food insecurity in regions like South Sudan and Ethiopia.

Grishma in the Center for Environmental Analytics and Remote Sensing (CEARS) lab analyzing large datasets to explore the interaction between assistance, gender, and food security. Courtesy of Virginia Tech.
Bhattarai in the Center for Environmental Analytics and Remote Sensing lab analyzing large datasets to explore the interaction between assistance, gender, and food security. Courtesy of Virginia Tech.

Cobourn explained that “the difficult challenge as an economist is that you can’t usually design experiments. You have to work with what you’re given.” Mining the massive amounts of data from the World Bank to find the right data set became Bhattarai’s biggest challenge. “If you ask the wrong questions,” she said, “you’ll get the wrong information. You have to be sure your own biases aren’t reflected.”

Bhattarai recently presented her research at an international applied agriculture and economics conference in Atlanta. “It was the experience of a lifetime for me personally, to be surrounded by people in academia driven to solve the world’s problems with their research. It was an amazing opportunity.”

“Bhattarai has been wonderful to work with,” said Cobourn. “She’s very intrinsically motivated, energetic, and self-directed. She had a clear idea of what she wanted to do, and all I had to do was steer her toward the right questions. It’s important to recognize that being able to do all this research in two months is phenomenal.”

Bhattarai and Bohara agree that the opportunity to participate in intensive research at Virginia Tech has helped them better understand what graduate school might look like, laying a solid foundation for these students’ future careers in research. Collaborative work, positive mentorship, and exciting research made for a rewarding summer for both students.

The Global Change Center’s mission is to advance interdisciplinary scholarship and education to address critical global changes impacting the environment and society. For more information about the Hollins-GCC partnership, visit the GCC website.

“It is extremely exciting to see the positive impact that this program is having on young women who plan to pursue graduate training after finishing their studies at Hollins. I continue to be impressed by the talented and motivated students from Hollins and am grateful that they regard Virginia Tech as a place where they can obtain high caliber research training under the mentorship of our outstanding faculty. I am hopeful that this partnership will continue long into the future,” said William Hopkins, director of the Global Change Center and professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.

 

Related News: Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center and Hollins University partner to increase student careers in life science research

~Written by Jessica Nicholson and Tiffany Trent 

CONTACT:

Kristin Rose
(540) 231-6614

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Categories
Blog IGC Special Events

IGC takes on “The Merchants of Doubt”

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By Jennifer Brousseau and Sam Silknetter  |  December 3, 2019

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]It was to shocking to learn just how influential the “Merchants of Doubt” (MOD) have been in shaping policy and public sentiment for over 40 years. What was even more stunning was discovering that the entire premise of Naomi Oreskes’s book by the same name remained unknown to the general public until 2005. Both the book and the adapted documentary center around ‘scientists’ (the merchants) who left their fields of expertise to spread doubt regarding the consensus of scientific issues such as the link between cigarettes and cancer and between fossil fuels and climate change. They instigated polarizing and heavily politicized debates using a myriad of tactics to refute consensus issues and take advantage of the public’s perception of scientific expertise. They circulated their denialist material through mass media, and thus were able to reach the public far more effectively than the authentic scientists who primarily published in peer-reviewed journals.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”46709″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In our recent IGC seminar, we discussed the main points presented in the documentary and reflected on how to evaluate scientific material and approach a scientific issue from a different perspective. Dr. Jeff Walters first discussed the IGC’s background with MOD and Naomi Oreskes’s visit to Virginia Tech in Fall 2015, during which she discussed her and Erik Conway’s mutual discovery of the MOD. We also read a commentary article from Nature, in which the author makes a case for dams as a potential solution to climate change. While it reads like peer-reviewed science, this format of article is only reviewed by editors, and the author turns out to have a financial interest in promoting dams to mitigate the effects of climate change. Our seminar discussion underscored the need for consumers of scientific material to maintain some healthy skepticism and showed how disingenuous arguments may persist in science.

As part of our discussion, we tried to understand the perspectives of different stakeholder groups, including climate science experts, consumers of science material, journalists reporting on the debate, consumers of the climate denialist material, and climate denialists and corporate interests/think tanks. Early in the semester, we were given the advice to try to take a ‘devil’s advocate’ stance when our discussions seemed to be informed from a single, liberal, or academic worldview. It is common to find yourself among like-minded individuals in a program such as IGC, and we were intentional in trying to see this issue from a new angle. Getting to role-play as stakeholders was helpful to check our biases. It also led to a greater sense of empathy, especially for those who unwittingly consume denialist material.

It is tempting to simplify the facts of this ‘debate’ to good (i.e. climate science community) versus bad (denialist) or right vs. wrong. However, these simplified stances are not enough to explain or understand what people believe. Some denialists act deliberately as bad actors, but do the consumers of that material deserve that label? We think not and propose that as good scientists we should think about creative ways to engage the public at large and earn their trust.

As we continue our training in the IGC, it is important to recognize the role of honesty and legitimacy in our work. We must call out denialism when we see it, and we must make an effort to convey the significance of scientific consensus to the public. Transparency is important, but we must also engage the public with our science and give them a reason to have faith in the scientific process. Skepticism and controversy will always be present as we continue to make scientific progress, but that should be a sign of a healthy discourse, not a reason to doubt it.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text]Jennifer Brousseau is a first year IGC Fellow and PhD student working on a climate adaptation workshop evaluation with Dr. Marc Stern in the Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation (FREC) Department. 

Sam Silknetter is a first year IGC Fellow and PhD student studying landscape genetic relationships among stream invertebrates in the Mims Lab in Biological Sciences. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Categories
Biodiversity Blog Faculty Spotlight Global Change Invasive Species Research

New expert findings seek to protect national parks from invasive animal species

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | December 2, 2019

More than half of America’s national parks are facing a grave and immediate threat: the ongoing presence and spread of invasive animal species. The National Park Service has taken the first step in combatting this invasion by asking a group of experts to help chart a course that will ensure the survival of these national treasures.

The experts’ findings were recently published in the journal Biological Invasions. According to lead author Ashley Dayer, assistant professor of wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, “As Americans, we value national parks for the natural habitats and wildlife they protect, but because of invasive species, some of our native species are struggling or unable to survive, even with the protection of our park system.”

More invaders are likely to arrive and flourish because, currently, the National Park Service has no comprehensive program to reverse or halt the trend. Coordinated action and a financial commitment by the NPS and others will be critical. According to Dayer, “If we don’t take action, native species will continue to struggle due to the invasives. But taking action is no small feat; it requires the commitment and resources of the National Park Service, neighboring lands, and the public.”

Dayer received the opportunity to address this complex problem when she accepted an invitation from the National Park Service to serve on a panel of experts to address the threat of invasive animal species and suggest solutions. As a conservation social scientist, her work in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservationfocuses on understanding how to best engage people in wildlife conservation issues. Other panelists were selected for their expertise in such areas as parks management, invasive species management, emerging technologies, economics, or decision support.

As to why the agency chose this particular time to act and form the panel, Elaine Leslie, former chief of the NPS Biological Resource Management Division, said, “The NPS is very concerned about nonnative and invasive species across the landscape within and outside of national park units and their impacts on native biodiversity, especially at-risk species and their habitats. . . . Nationally and internationally, the world is losing native biodiversity at an alarming rate. Threats from invasive species play a critical part in this loss.”

Dayer and the team of experts have been grappling with this complex issue for three years. Their primary finding is that the presence of invasive animals undermines the mission of the NPS. These invaders can cause the loss of park wildlife, lessen visitors’ enjoyment of parks, introduce diseases, and have huge economic impacts due to the cost of control measures.

Yet invasive animal species can be found in more than half of all national parks. Of the 1,409 reported populations of 311 invasive animal species in national parks, there are management plans for 23 percent and only 11 percent are being contained. The invaders include mammals, such as rats, cats, and feral pigs; aquatic species like lake trout and the quagga mussel; and reptiles, including the Burmese python.

Everglades National Park has been well-known for its invasive animal issues since pythons were found to be thriving and reproducing there in 2000. Local and national media, as well as documentary producers, quickly found an audience in the general public for their works featuring these snakes, which can reach up to 23 feet in length. Researchers have also been attentive to what is happening in the Everglades, reporting huge declines in native mammals like raccoons and opossums.

In Virginia, the hemlock woolly adelgid has infested hemlocks along the Blue Ridge Parkway and in Shenandoah National Park. Hemlocks help maintain the cool habitats needed by other species to thrive, such as native trout. Although hemlocks can live up to 600 years, a woolly adelgid infestation can kill a tree in just three to 10 years.

The second finding of the panel is that coordinated action is required to meet the challenge of invasive species. The four additional findings carry the same mandate for collaboration: partnering is essential for success; public engagement, cooperation, and support are critical; decision support across all levels must be strategic; and emerging technologies, when appropriately used, would be beneficial.

According to Mark Schwartz, a fellow panelist and professor of conservation science at the University of California–Davis, it is the complex nature of this problem that calls for such a coordinated and widespread effort. “Our national parks face a suite of wicked management problems, with the invasive species standing out for the sheer diversity of species, the geographic spread of their impact, the magnitude of the threat, and the complexity of solutions.”

Both Schwartz and Dayer, as well as their other panelists, agree not only that national coordination is the way forward, but also that this will be a major challenge, an idea that is expressed in their findings. Schwartz said, “In addition to national coordination on invasive animals, a better means to fully integrate managing invasive animals across the full suite of challenges facing individual parks is needed.”

Organizational change is possible, Dayer believes. As an affiliate of the Global Change Center housed in Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Sciences Institute, she sees good examples of progress through cross-jurisdictional efforts like the National Invasive Species Council and the Invasive Species Advisory Committee, as well as through regional collaborations that have engaged national park units.

Schwartz also sees promise in some recent park successes: “After a false start, Yellowstone regrouped, sought broad public input, and now has an effective program to manage invasive lake trout. Working with the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, the NPS has coordinated with other agencies, tribes, and private parties to control the invasive sacred ibis. More such collaborative efforts are needed.”

Elaine Leslie believes that a coordinated effort as well as additional funding will be critical to success. “This issue is also one of economic importance,” she stressed. “If we can take national steps, as other countries have, to prevent and eradicate invasive species, we can make a difference — but it has to be a priority and well-coordinated.”

Another important group of people that is referenced in the findings and could pave the way for long-lasting change is the public. “The public can play a key role in helping the parks detect or remove invasive species, pushing for new governmental policies and funding allocations, or assisting through philanthropy efforts,” Dayer said. “In order to make headway, it is critical that the people of the U.S. are engaged fully in determining and implementing the solution to this challenge.”

Along with the other panelists, Dayer will continue to tackle this complex issue by making sure that the findings are disseminated, promoting action from the NPS, and encouraging people to buy into and participate in efforts to protect our national parks. All of this matters because, as she firmly states, “The national parks are not the National Park Service’s parks; they belong to the U.S. public and serve as conservation models nationally and internationally.”

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Krista Timney
540-231-6157

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Categories
Accolades Blog Faculty Spotlight

VT faculty receive top honors from American Association for the Advancement of Science

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | November 26, 2019

Five scientists from Virginia Tech were named as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a high honor of the world’s largest scientific society, according to an announcement this week.

Elected by their peers and representing a broad range of AAAS “sections,” including statistics, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, and geology/geography, the Virginia Tech professors are among 443 newly elected scholars.

The five new Fellows are believed to be the most from Virginia Tech in a single year and are the most additional Fellows from any Virginia university in 2019.

  • Ronald Fricker, a statistician and the associate dean for faculty affairs and administration in the College of Science, was named for distinguished contributions to the field of statistics, particularly for advances in biosurveillance, testing, and survey methods with applications to public health and national security.
  • Michael Friedlander, a neuroscientist, Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology and executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, was named for his outstanding work on developmental plasticity in the visual system and his sustained service to the neuroscience community and neuroscience education.
  • Y.A. Liu, an alumni distinguished professor and the Frank C. Vilbrandt Endowed Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering, was named for excellence in design teaching, pioneering textbooks and creative scholarship in sustainable engineering, and global leadership in implementing energy/water savings and CO2 capture.
  • Sharon Landesman Ramey, a professor and distinguished research scholar at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, was named for distinguished contributions to the field of human development, particularly for determining the role of early experience and interventions on later developmental outcomes.
  • Shuhai Xiao, a paleobiologist and professor of geosciences with the Virginia Tech College of Science, was named for outstanding contributions to paleobiology and geology of early animals and eukaryotes and for distinguished contributions and service to academe and the earth science community.

“This group of new AAAS Fellows reflects the breadth and depth of multidisciplinary excellence among the faculty at Virginia Tech,” said Cyril Clarke, executive vice president and provost of Virginia Tech. “These distinguished faculty deserve the recognition they will receive through this honor. We are proud to be associated with these extraordinary colleagues who are making new discoveries, creating significant innovations and impacts in their fields, and leading students to academic and professional success.”

The new Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on Nov. 29.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. New fellows will each receive an official certificate and a gold-and-blue rosette pin on Feb. 15 at the organization’s annual meeting in Seattle, Washington.

Ron Fricker
Ron Fricker

Ron Fricker

Prior to coming to Virginia Tech as head of the Department of Statistics in 2015, Fricker was a professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. Fricker also has served as associate director of the National Security Research Division and a senior statistician at the RAND Corp., where he oversaw a $40 million research portfolio conducted by the National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center.

He has more than 20 years of statistics experience, including work in both corporate and academic settings, and conducting research on Gulf War illnesses, military recruiting and retention, disease detection and surveillance, and body armor testing.

Fricker is widely recognized for his research in quality control and statistical process control; statistical methods for bio-surveillance, survey design, and analysis; and data analytics and data science.

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), a former chair of the ASA Section of Statistics in Defense and National Security, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Earlier this year, Fricker took on a new role as associate dean for faculty affairs and administration for the College of Science. His duties include assisting Dean Sally C. Morton in the recruitment, retention, and development of faculty.

Fricker earned his bachelor’s degree with merit in mathematics from the United States Naval Academy in 1982, his master’s degree in operations research from George Washington University in 1991, and a master’s degree and a doctorate in statistics from Yale University, in, respectively, 1994 and 1997.

Michael Friedlander
Michael Friedlander

Michael Friedlander

Michael Friedlander joined the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in 2010 as inaugural executive director. Today, he leads 30 translational research teams with more than $125 million in extramural funding working to solve major health challenges and to bring biomedical innovations to the clinic and marketplace.

Friedlander is neuroscientist who studies synaptic plasticity — how connections between brain cells strengthen or weaken during development or in response to experience and injury. He is currently leading research to determine how temporal patterns of neural activity modulate synaptic strength under normal physiological conditions and after mild traumatic brain injury.

Friedlander became known early in his career while conducting research as a graduate student. He studied how behavior, molecules and electrical signals in the brains of goldfish adapted to temperature changes – work his lab has followed up recently with studies in icefishes in Antarctica. The resulting paper in the Journal of Comparative Physiology was hailed as a landmark analysis of how an organism adapts behaviorally, physiologically, and biochemically to temperature change and continues to be cited four decades later by biologists studying climate change.

As a postdoctoral fellow and early career faculty member, Friedlander established some of the first direct structure-function relationships between individual neurons in the brain’s visual processing regions resulting in a series of papers in Science, Nature, and the Journal of Neurophysiology. His lab’s work on nitric oxide published in Science and the Journal of Neuroscience provided some of the earliest evidence on how this molecule modulates release of neurotransmitters and enhances signal detection in the brain’s visual cortex.

In addition to serving as Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology and executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, Friedlander is a professor of biological sciences in the College of Science and the senior dean for research at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Before joining Virginia Tech, he served as the Wilhelmina Robertson Professor of Neuroscience and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine.

Prior to that, Friedlander was a professor and founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology, founding director of the Neurobiology Research Center, and director of the Civitan International Research Center for Intellectual Disabilities at the UAB School of Medicine. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois and his bachelor’s degree from Florida State University.

Y.A. Liu
Y.A. Liu

Y.A. Liu

Since joining the College of Engineering’s Department of Chemical Engineering faculty in 1982, Liu has achieved international recognition for his promotion of sustainable development and environmental stewardship. He and his graduate students have made significant contributions in the areas of energy and water savings and design and optimization of polymer, biodiesel, and petroleum refining operations.

For close to 40 years, Liu has worked in industrial outreach during university breaks, promoting sustainable development in Virginia industries and developing countries.

While serving as a senior advisor to the president of China Petroleum and Chemical Corp., the largest energy and chemical company in Asia and a global top three chemical company, Liu led the development of water-saving engineering and investment proposals throughout the company’s 45 refining and chemical subsidiaries. This effort resulted in a $256 million investment, a 60 percent decrease in freshwater usage, and a 65 percent decrease in wastewater discharge.

With Formosa Plastics Group in Taiwan, one of the world’s top chemical producers, Liu led engineers to achieve similar water savings. In addition, the renowned scientist has worked closely with American-based corporations, such as Honeywell Specialty Materials.

Liu and eight of his Virginia Tech doctoral students have co-authorized seven pioneering textbooks on the methodologies for industrial water reuse and wastewater minimization; for the simulation, optimization, and sustainable design of polymer plants, petroleum refineries, and adsorptive and chromatographic separation processes; and for the artificial intelligence and neural networks in bioprocessing and chemical engineering. All of their textbooks have received excellent reviews by academic experts and industrial practitioners.

Prior to joining the Virginia Tech community, Liu began his professional career at Auburn University, Alabama, in 1974. He earned a bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University, a master’s degree from Tufts University, and a doctoral degree from Princeton University, all in chemical engineering.

Sharon Ramey
Sharon Landesman Ramey

Sharon Landesman Ramey

Sharon Landesman Ramey has devoted her career to studying the multiple biosocial and environmental influences on prenatal and early child development, the transition to school and academic achievement, family dynamics, and intergenerational vitality and competence.

Currently, she is a leader of the nation’s first multicenter pediatric stroke recovery trial, headquartered at Virginia Tech and uniting researchers and clinicians from 12 sites across the United States to evaluate a therapy to help 8-month-old to 24-month-old infants who have suffered strokes.

In addition to multi-site trials, Ramey leads studies of the impact of the social ecology on quality of life for individuals with intellectual disabilities, longitudinal studies that address health and educational disparities, and innovative early childhood and parenting programs to improve the educational and health outcomes of children.

She is a distinguished scientist and professor of psychology, neuroscience, and human development with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute; a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine; and chief science officer for human development for the City of Roanoke, Virginia.

With her husband, Craig Ramey, a research professor and distinguished research scholar, she has written award-winning parenting books that became the companion volumes to two PBS television series, “Right from Birth” and “Going to School.” She has authored more than 250 scientific publications and seven books.

Her current research focuses on the new field called implementation science that seeks to discover the most effective ways to rapidly translate scientific breakthroughs into practical use for children and families.

Previously, she was director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was the founding director (along with Craig Ramey) of the Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education.

Ramey received a bachelor’s degree from New College in Sarasota, Florida; studied at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota; and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Shuhai Xiao
Shuhai Xiao

Shuhai Xiao

A professor of geobiology in the Department of Geosciences and a member of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, Xiao has focused his career on researching life in the Precambrian eon, studying life and environments in early Earth history using paleobiological, geological, and geochemical data.

His research has taken him to Australia, China, India, Siberia, and other parts of the world, where he studies ancient rocks to illuminate the history of the biosphere.

Among his standout discoveries: Finding what could be among the first trails made by animals on the surface of the Earth dating back 550 million years.

Xiao called the unearthed fossils, including the bodies and trails left by an ancient animal species, the most convincing sign of ancient animal mobility. Named Yilingia spiciformis – that translates to spiky Yiling bug, Yiling being the Chinese city near the discovery site – the animal was found in multiple layers of rock. The findings were reported in Nature in September 2019.

He also has helped solve paleoclimatic and geochemical mysteries, such as the impact of massive ice ages on the biosphere and Earth system more than 600 million years ago, the rise of an oxygenated atmosphere and its relationship with animal evolution, and the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere going as far back as 1.5 billion years ago.

His research, totaling more than $4 million, has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the American Chemical Society, and National Geographic Society. He was a recipient of the 2006 Charles Schuchert Award by the Paleontological Society and the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a Fellow of The Geological Society of America and The Paleontological Society. In 2017, he was named as an Outstanding Scientist by the Science Museum of Virginia. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellowship by the College of Science, an award established by its namesake and Virginia Tech alumna, Patricia Caldwell.

Xiao earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from China’s Peking University in 1988 and 1991, respectively, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He joined Virginia Tech in 2003.

CONTACTS:

Lindsey Haugh
540-231-2476

John Pastor
(540) 526-2222

Steven Mackay
540-231-5035

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