Category: Ideas

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Ideas Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Other Sponsored Lectures

IGC Fellows enjoy conversations over breakfast with Dr. Trevor Hancock

One reward of studying as a Fellow of the Interfaces of Global Change program is the opportunity for in-depth experiences with visitors to the university beyond the seminar auditorium.  Dr. Trevor Hancock visited campus last week to share his presentation titled “How do we live in good health in the Anthropocene?”, hosted by the Fralin Life Science Institute as part of the Ecological and Human Health in Rural Communities Seminar Series.  Dr. Hancock is a public health physician and health promotion consultant, a Professor and Senior Scholar at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria, and one of the founders of the Healthy Cities and Communities movement.

A breakfast invitation for IGC Fellows to join Dr. Hancock allowed for both stimulating conversation and hearty nourishment to kickstart their day.  Topics over breakfast included ideas for reducing the carbon footprint of cities, addressing relationships between mental health and obesity trends to urban sprawl, and Hancock’s “one world region” notion.  Our health as human beings is directly influenced by our basic needs of food, water, shelter and energy.  As an increasingly urbanized species, how can we steer our communities to adapt in innovative ways that bridge the benefits of the natural world to our daily lives within built environments?

Dr. Hancock writes for a weekly column for the Times Colonist, Victoria’s daily newspaper, about population and public health issues.  Column topics focus on broad ecological, social, political, economic and commercial determinants of the health of the population and the role of public health professionals and organizations in protecting and improving the health of the population and preventing disease and injury.

One of his recent articles cites growing trends in the medical community for negative perceptions of general practitioners, described by some as “undemanding and easy” when compared to the work of specialty practitioners.

Hancock reflects, “what I think is really going on here is a wider phenomenon, found across many professions and disciplines, rooted in a societal tendency to value specialism over generalism. This attitude fails to recognize that generalism, perhaps better described as holistic thinking, is a specialty in its own right.  Rather than knowing more and more about less and less, holistic thinkers know about a great many different things, and work to synthesize and integrate them, looking for what anthropologist Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.

Many of the challenges we face in the 21st century are complex, cut across and involve many sectors, and interact as complex systems. They cannot be solved by narrow specialists, who indeed might make the problem worse. We need people trained in holistic thinking who understand complex systems and how to manage them.”

More information about Dr. Hancock and links to his column writings are found on his website at https://trevorhancock.org.

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Ideas Other Sponsored Lectures Research Water

Restoration from streams to wetlands: Can we restore and should we?

Virginia Tech’s Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation hosted Dr. Margaret Palmer from the University of Maryland this morning as part of their Spring Seminar Series.  Dr. Palmer’s presentation, titled “Restoration from streams to wetlands: Can we restore and should we?” engaged a full auditorium to explore the impacts of temporary streams throughout natural, restored and agricultural environments, and to take a closer look at her team’s research differentiating structural versus ecological restoration techniques and evaluation for coastal streams and wetlands.  Dr. Palmer serves as the Director of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), and you can learn about Dr. Palmer’s lab and research interests by visiting her website.

[FREC Spring Seminar Series March 2 Flyer]

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Ideas Opinion

Why I Won’t March for Science

By Dr. Bruce Hull

I marched in DC at the Women’s March, but I’m not marching for science.  I don’t see the end game.  Yes, we need more science, more respect for science, and better science, but more so, we need to win the political battles, and that means fighting for hearts and minds.

Scientists using their science are ill equipped to win hearts and minds.  Sadly, as I argued previously, the tendency of scientists to rely on facts and rationality often work against the ends they desire.  Winning hearts and minds mostly comes down to telling a compelling story, which scientists resist, because it means exposing their values.  For all kinds of reasons, some outdated and some legit, scientists often feel they lack the social license to be honest about their values.

Things do need to change.  Scientists need to change.  If we don’t begin winning the battles for hears and minds, we’ll lose the political war against scientific openness and deep expertise. And if that happens, society seems at real risk of sliding back into a pre-enlightenment era that characterized the “dark” Ages, when gut feelings and faith trumped facts and logic.  Those were not hopeful times (life expectancy was 20 and children had little hope of a life different than their peasant farmers living in crowded, windowless, smoke-filled hovels shared by livestock). The enlightenment (and science and individual rights and humanism and capitalism and all that came with it) gave people the courage to admit its OK to say, “I don’t know,” and realize how dangerous it is to trust myths and legends and populist leaders who promise easy answers.  The challenges of today are bigger and more complicated and more interconnected and more accelerated than ever before, so we need more science, more inquisitiveness and more tolerance for enlightened experimentation, not less.  Unfortunately, Trump is fanning the flames of anti-intellectualism, anti-truth, anti-inquisitiveness, anti-critical thinking, and anti-science.  Those flames risk plunging us into the dark.

Scientists and other professionals need to educate, agitate, and organize for winning hearts and minds. I found the Women’s March inspirational but draining (for an introvert) and it didn’t produce any next steps.  Marching for science might do more harm than good if it makes scientist feel they have done enough and are excused to go back to their labs and books.

I’ve been working for the last few years at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability helping scientists (and sustainability professionals writ large) influence hearts and minds.  The tools to do so are straightforward, but not easy.  Leadership programs have been teaching this stuff for years.  There exist tons of techniques for coalition building, boundary spanning, collaboration, interest based negotiation, collective impact, and social innovation that can be taught and mastered by scientists. Sadly, implementing those tools is time consuming and doesn’t produce grants, papers, promotion, or tenure.

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Dr. Bruce Hull is a Senior Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), a professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment (CNRE), and an affiliate faculty member in the Global Change Center.

 

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Logo: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53269705

 

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Ideas News

New in Nature: how to solve the world’s biggest problems

“Interdisciplinarity has become all the rage as scientists tackle climate change and other intractable issues. But there is still strong resistance to crossing borders.”

See the latest issue of Nature, which features a variety of articles on this topic:

 

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Campus Seminar Announcements Ideas

Join us for the upcoming EEB Seminar featuring Dr. John Jelesko

EEB Seminar Title: “Itching to Understand the Zen of the Toxicodendron”
Speaker: Dr. John Jelesko, Associate Professor in the Dept of Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science at Virginia Tech
Date and Location: Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 3:30 pm in Derring 4069

John Jelesko, PPWS
John Jelesko, PPWS

The EEB speaker for 9/17 is Virginia Tech’s very own Dr. John Jelesko, Associate Professor in the Dept of Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science. His talk is entitled “Itching to Understand the Zen of the Toxicodendron” and is hosted by The Global Change Center.

Information about Dr. Jelesko’s research can be found at https://www.ppws.vt.edu/people/faculty/jelesko-john.html and an abstract for his talk is below. There will be an opportunity to meet with Dr. Jelesko after the talk over beverages downtown (details TBA).

Abstract:
Poison ivy is paradoxically a “familiar stranger”. On one hand, the plant seems ubiquitous and the natural product (urushiol) responsible for the characteristic allergenic skin rashes is well known. Nevertheless, nearly all other aspects of poison ivy urushiol metabolism and chemical ecology remain largely uncharacterized. We are deploying a variety of technologies to investigate urushiol metabolism and chemical ecology. These approaches range from NextGen DNA sequencing technologies to identify putative urushiol biosynthetic genes, Viral Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) for rapid reverse genetics, to crowd-sourced big data to model poison ivy’s increasing allergenicity in response to CO2-associated climate change. Early studies suggest that poison ivy harbors a fungal pathogen for selective infanticide, whereas avian frugivory provides a concomitant means for fungal decontamination, drupe dissemination, and priming of seedling germination.

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Ideas Interfaces of Global Change IGEP

Think Piece: What makes a graduate superstar?

As the new academic year starts, it is timely to reflect on characteristics that help make a student successful in graduate school.  Raw intellect is only one part of a more complex recipe for success.

Characteristics of Graduate School Superstars

“Graduate school can be a traumatic experience. Some graduate students spend their time complaining about a heavy work load, uncaring attitudes of faculty, or constant pressure of being evaluated. These students quickly begin to devalue their graduate education, deny its relevance, and develop strategies that help them to “beat the system” (i.e., merely satisfying degree requirements without engaging in any actual learning). Graduate school for these people is an unpleasant experience to be endured, survived, and forgotten as quickly as possible.

Another group seems to thrive on their graduate education. According to Bloom and Bell (1979): “These are the few who proceed through the program with the minimum amount of difficulty and a maximum amount of quality performance. They are respected by the faculty, they receive the best financial assistance, they receive accolades, and as a group, they end up with the best employment” (p.231). These are the graduate school superstars. But what makes them so successful? Bloom and Bell identified four factors which were named most often by graduate school faculty to identify superstars they had known:

• Visibility: The most often mentioned behavioral characteristic was visibility. Superstars were observed to be physically present in the department, during and often after working hours.

• Willingness to Work Hard: The next most often mentioned quality was that they were hard working. It is important to point out that the superstars were perceived as hard working because faculty actually saw them working hard. Other students may have worked harder, but because they were working hard at home or in the library, they were not perceived to be as hard working as the superstars.

• Reflection of Program Values: A consistently mentioned quality was the faculty’s perceptions of their professional values. These values were concordant with program values of research and scholarly excellence. Superstars also recognized the value of having contact with broad areas of psychology, even though their own programs might be highly specialized.

• True Interest in Research: Many students preparing for graduate school in clinical psychology may assume that clinical and counseling skills will be much more valuable to them in graduate school than their ability to perform research. However, potential clinicians should work equally as hard to develop their research skills in courses such as research methods, statistics, experimental lab courses, and directed research, as they do to develop their clinical and counseling skills. Superstars were engaged in ongoing research projects in addition to their MA and PhD theses. (Non-superstars did research because it was a degree requirement.) Superstars viewed research as an integral part of their discipline and a desirable and worthwhile activity for any professional psychologist. They were curious enough about a problem to want to see data on it.

• Development of Relationship with a Mentor: From the time they entered graduate school almost all superstars attached themselves to one or two faculty members with whom they continued to work during the course of their training. Faculty reported that they “were easy to teach,” “picked up things quickly,” “could receive and use feedback well,” “were not constant complainers,” and “were able to grow into colleague status without taking advantage.” In essence, the superstars listened, learned, grew, and produced through close working relationships with faculty.

Note that the above characteristics do not include intelligence, excellent grades, or writing ability. Perhaps these qualities are simply assumed to exist in superstars. The lesson to be learned from these findings is that success in graduate school is due to more than just raw brain power. It is also strongly affected by dedication, hard work, seriousness of commitment, clarity of goals, and a willingness to embrace the values of a program.

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Adapted from Appleby, D.C. (1990). A Handbook of the Marian College Psychology Department. Indianapolis, IN: Author.

Grad Superstars (pdf)

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