Students from the UConn ScHOLAR2S House Learning Community visited Washington, D.C. last week to attend events surrounding the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference. While there, they met with UConn alumni and Connecticut legislators at a special networking reception honoring the students and their supporters. The event, held by the UConn Foundation, was attended by students and alumni from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, the School of Engineering, the Neag School of Education, and the School of Nursing. Former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd greeted students and spoke about his longtime support for the University and its programs, and UConn Foundation Board of Trustees member Jonathan Greenblatt ’77 (CLAS) hosted the program. Junior sport management major Sebastien Kerr ’20 (ED) spoke about the impact that Scholars House has had on his life, and the importance of having a support group of peers that come from a similar background, who want to see him “be great and do great.” “It was really nice to meet people who care about Scholars House as much as I do,” Kerr said. Now in its second year, the ScHOLAR2S House Learning Community supports the scholastic efforts of male students who identify as African American or Black …

Read More »

As the seasons move through their annual procession, they are accompanied by the presence of a spectacular diversity of insects. Bees, butterflies, moths – you name it, if you look closely you’ll see them. Connecticut is home to more than 10,000 species of insects, says ecology and evolutionary biology professor David Wagner, and the number is climbing each year – due to climate change. Winners and Losers Among Insect Populations Since his arrival in Connecticut in the late 1980s, after finishing his degree out West, Wagner has been studying the insects around the state, starting in his own backyard. “I started keeping a list right after I arrived,” he says. “I was able to record around 1,200 different butterflies and moths within a mile of my first house here in Connecticut.” Wagner says that with climate change, as with any other environmental change, there will be winners and there will be losers. He says we can expect to see around 10 new butterfly and moth species per year in the state. Some notable additions include the pipevine swallowtail and the giant swallowtail. The beauty of the pipevine swallowtail rivals that of many tropical butterflies, the hindwings are electric metallic blue-green with orange crescents. “If you want to …

Read More »

The University of Connecticut held a recommissioning ceremony on Thursday morning for the school’s marine research ship, the Research Vessel Connecticut, at its home on the UConn Avery Point campus. The 19-year-old ship has gone through a total makeover over the past year that increased its length from 76 feet to 90 feet. The work doubled the laboratory space on board and increased the number of bunks from 12 to 18, allowing for missions at sea of up to 14 days. “Not every university president gets to recommission a vessel,” said President Susan Herbst, moments before she performed the traditional breaking of a bottle of champagne against the ship. “I feel bad for those land-locked presidents. We are a Sea Grant institution, and that is a very important part of our mission.” The R/V Connecticut has been used extensively over the years by UConn researchers in addition to other groups that have chartered it, including the U.S. Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In its previous five years of service, the ship spent 474 days at sea and traveled 38,721 miles. “There is great work being done on this ship, from the study of …

Read More »

UConn is joining 16 other leading North American research universities in the University Climate Change Coalition, or UC3, announced Tuesday by the Second Nature organization. UC3 aims to promote climate action and resilience by leveraging the strengths and skill sets of its member schools. As a nationally recognized leader among green campuses, UConn’s membership in the coalition is another indicator that the University is continuing to pursue a path toward sustainability. President Herbst says universities have a key role to play in finding solutions to the challenges of climate change. “We can lead not only by developing research, technology, and policy to effectively curb carbon emissions and ameliorate the effects of climate change on our communities, but also by making sustainability a core component of our mission and identity,” she says. “The University of Connecticut is proud to join with our UC3 partner institutions in working to find solutions now to what could ultimately be the most important challenge of the 21st century.” Richard Miller, director of UConn’s Office of Environmental Policy, says, “As a coalition of top research universities, UC3 is working on research that helps multisector climate action and resilience initiatives.” “Coalition members’ expertise spans many disciplines, ranging from atmospheric and marine sciences, …

Read More »

The amount of gray matter in a kindergartner’s brain can predict whether she will have trouble with reading comprehension as a third grader, according to researchers at UConn, who made up part of an international team. Their work, published in the journal PLOS One, provides new information on the neural basis underlying reading development and possible root causes of the common learning disability dyslexia. About 10 percent of U.S. children have dyslexia, which is a general difficulty learning to read that does not affect other aspects of intelligence. Most people affected eventually learn to read, but it can be a challenge for many of them to grasp meaning from text. However, some dyslexics have trouble decoding – translating print into sound – yet their reading comprehension is high. Neuroscientists call these people resilient dyslexics. UConn cognitive neuroscientists Fumiko Hoeft and Roeland Hancock wondered if there was something fundamentally different about the brains of resilient dyslexics compared with others. In a multi-part study, Hoeft, incoming director of UConn’s Brain Imaging Research Center (BIRC) and Hancock, associate director, collaborated with researchers at Tel Aviv University, Boston College, MIT, and Haskins Laboratories to try and see what these brain differences might be. They first looked at children between the ages …

Read More »

When thinking about the impact of environmental change on species, certain animals in far-off places tend to come to mind: the ‘charismatic megafauna’ – such as polar bears, orangutans, and penguins, for example – that are at risk due to factors such as habitat destruction or over-hunting by humans. And yet some species actually flourish in times of change. In Connecticut, two examples of such disparate species stories are the marbled salamander and the saltmarsh sparrow. These two stories are linked by the change of a single but very important variable. While it may not sound like much, a rise in global temperatures by just a few degrees is enough to tip the scale, resulting in huge impacts on the ecosystems where these species exist. The climate in this region has changed enough to allow for predatory salamanders to completely alter pond biodiversity, and the sea level rise that accompanies climate change will likely lead to extinction of the saltmarsh sparrow within the next 40 years. The ‘Best of Times’ for a marbled salamander The first example involves an amphibian that associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Mark Urban is studying, the marbled salamander, Ambystoma opacum. Marbled salamanders lay their eggs in ponds …

Read More »

Dear Colleagues, Welcome back to the start of another school year. I hope your summers were both productive and restful! Before looking ahead, I want to highlight the accomplishments of our stellar faculty over the past year. This year, the 770 members of our research and teaching faculty: Published 103 books and 1,163 journal articles and conference proceedings; Gave 1,940 talks; Published more than 265 newspaper and magazine articles; Received 137 new external research grants totaling $27 million, bringing the College’s total research profile to 635 active grants totaling $157 million; Taught more than 371,339 credit hours, representing 70% of undergraduate and 24% of graduate credit hours at UConn. It’s difficult to express how proud these numbers make me. Clearly, our College is the heartbeat of UConn. Thank you for all you do each and every day to keep UConn moving forward. This year the College continued to be a vanguard of the University in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) awarded their inaugural awards this year, including Faculty Social Justice Award (to Jane Gordon, political science) and a community Diversity Award (to the CLAS Student Leadership Board). The CLAS DEI initiative also sponsored a College-wide poster …

Read More »

When Professor of Psychological Sciences Fumiko Hoeft was a child in Tokyo, she knew she wanted to help people. Growing up in one of the most populous cities in the world, she read the stories of Gandhi and Mother Teresa, whose work helping the sick in developing countries inspired her to become a doctor. “Most of us wanted to be a lawyer, teacher, policeman, nurse, stewardess, doctor…or maybe own a bakery,” she laughs. “I decided to be a clinician.” Hoeft didn’t waver from that ideal: She trained in medicine and clinical practice at Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, and in research at Harvard, UCLA, Caltech, and Stanford, some of the most advanced medical programs in the world. But along the way, she developed what she calls an unexpected fascination with the brain. Seemingly minor insults to the brain in neural circuits or neurochemistry can have major impact on how we perceive the world and behave, she explains. She also became adept at applying new technologies to study how the brain functions. Early on, she used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in her research on neurology and psychiatry. More recently, she used advanced approaches such as machine learning and network analyses in her work …

Read More »

Inside our bodies, there is a microscopic world teeming with life known as the microbiome. From the moment we are born, we begin accumulating a collection of helpful bacteria, viruses and fungi that support our immune system and digestive health. Nichole Broderick, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut has received a five-year, $1.92 million grant from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences to build up the knowledge base of how exactly the microbiome performs these functions. “I’m thrilled to have the support of NIH to carry out this work. The support of the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) program for early-stage investigators like myself is a critical boost to my lab as we tackle important questions about the role of the microbiome in animal health.” Broderick will use fruit flies, which have remarkably similar internal pathways and diseases as humans, to study which mechanisms in the host contribute to the establishment of a normal microbiome. She will look at how signals from microbes cause physiological changes in the host and how the host regulates the microbiome in turn. Understanding how a healthy microbiome is maintained is an essential step in developing therapies for …

Read More »

The Boston Globe collaborated with more than 350 newspapers around the nation on today’s publication of editorials promoting freedom of the press, in direct response to President Trump’s attacks on the media. UConn Today spoke with Mike Stanton, associate professor of journalism and a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, about the effort. Q. There has been a battle between government officials and the press from the early days of the nation. This is not something that just popped up recently. What is new with politicians trying to manipulate or influence the press? A. There’s always been a tension between the press and politicians, and there should be. That’s why we have a First Amendment. The press is kind of the outside representative of the people to question our leaders and hold them accountable and have a transparent country. We’ve always seen that. In colonial times Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were the primary ideological adversaries, each with their own newspaper. They would go to war with each other, printing lies, half-truths, and vicious attacks. It would get personal and petty. Now, what we’ve seen is the amplification of that with social media. The public has a more difficult time separating fact from fiction; they kind …

Read More »