Category: Academics

NSU Team Presents at Seattle Molecular Biology Conference

A team of 13 NSU delegates representing the  Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS) Chemistry, and Marine Biology majors, and the College of Psychology Neuroscience Major traveled together to present their research as part of the NSU Chapter of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) https://www.asbmb.org/ at the Discover Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2023 Conference. They joined thousands of presenters from around the world https://discoverbmb.asbmb.org/in Seattle, Washington from March 24-28, 2023. Six posters describing protein modeling research projects and innovations in course based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) were presented at a variety of poster sessions. HCAS Biology Major, Pujita Julakanti received the ASBMB Society Travel Award. Eight members of the team received the PANSGA Professional Development Grant and 3 received the Biology Student Award. Projects were funded by the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative through the Connecting Researchers Students and Teachers (CREST) Program. The team also presented the Master of Science in Biological Sciences Health Studies, Research, and Bioinformatics Concentrations at graduate program fairs held by the ASBMB https://hcas.nova.edu/degrees/masters/biological-sciences.html

The projects presented by the team were the following:

  • Akhil Godbole, Pranav Neravetla, Nikhila Paleati, Emily Schmitt Lavin and Arthur Sikora: Comparing Effectiveness of Two Antibodies (Aducanumab and Gantenerumab) on Reducing Amyloid-Beta Plaques.
  • Pranav Madadi, Juhi Dalal, Shreya Averineni, Arthur K. Sikora, and Emily F. Schmitt Lavin: Modeling binding of the BACE1 inhibitor aminoquinoline (68K) for the possible treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).
  • Serena Sha, Sophie Welch, Ashley Guillen-Tapia, Emily Schmitt Lavin, and Arthur Sikora: Modeling the binding of ω-conotoxin to an N-type voltage-gated calcium channel.
  • Bhavya Soni, Pritika Vemulapalli, Emily Schmitt Lavin and Arthur Sikora: Exploring structural differences between antagonistic peptides for the development of orally bioavailable PCSK9 inhibitors.
  • Lyla Abbas, Jordan Nichole Carreras, Pujita Julakanti, Sanjana Likki, Ryan Luib, Isadora Rocha De Abreu, Emily Schmitt Lavin and Arthur Sikora: Facilitating the collaborative scientific process through an interdisciplinary undergraduate protein modeling course.
  • Arthur K. Sikora: Quantification of Learning Advances in a Science CURE: Providing Leaning Objective to Corroborate and Validate the Advantages of Experiential Education.

Posted 05/08/23

University School Students Participate In Code Sharks

HPCC Systems presented an inaugural event called Code Sharks that introduced Middle and Upper School students in our Computer Science internship and robotics programs to the HPCC Systems Big Data platform and the supporting Big Data Language, ECL (Enterprise Control Language). Students were introduced to three public music datasets, and a series of challenge questions were posed for each one. In a seven-hour workshop session, students split into teams and answered as many questions as possible using ECL.

Teams were mentored by LexisNexis Risk Solutions staff and undergraduate students from the NSU College of Computing and Engineering. At the end, teams submitted their work to the judges, and trophies were awarded with prizes to the top three teams.

Congratulations to the winning teams!

  • 1st Place: Team 2 IQ: Ethan G. and Nazar A.
  • 2nd Place: Team Ctrl Alt Delete: Max B. and Enzo J.
  • 3rd Place: Team 405 Found: Maddie G., Noah R., and Dante M.

Posted 05/07/23

Academy Student Envisions Bright Future in Business

Jonathan Boulanger sits next to the statue of one of his heroes, the late H. Wayne Huizenga.

Jonathan Ryan Boulanger breathes business.

The 21-year-old from Miramar, Fla., comes from a family built on entrepreneurship. An only child, Jonathan was introduced to the world of business by his mother, Martha, who worked in sales and now real estate, and father, Rejean, who works in the construction remodeling industry. When it comes to role models, Jonathan’s parents are first on his list.

“My mother taught me resilience and determination,” he says. “She taught me good values of being patient, giving back, and following my dreams and goals with perseverance. My father taught me to have a very strong work ethic and to ensure that our family will always be in good standing.”

When talking about his attraction to business, Jonathan hearkens back to fifth grade when he had a chance to role play as a certified public accountant. After that experience he fell in love with “reading about business, history, and writing.” In the years that followed, Jonathan was exposed to Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) while in middle school.

“Students from my future high school came to my history class and talked about DECA and how fun it was to compete and attend conferences while learning about business,” he says. “I was hooked.”

Jonathan has had a strong connection to NSU – long before college. While a student at Charles W. Flanagan High School in Pembroke Pines, he took part in speech and debate with DECA. The competitions were held at NSU’s Rick Case Arena.

“I qualified all four years of high school for the DECA States tournaments,” he says. “In 10th grade I placed second in Retail Merchandising Test & Roleplay and was able to compete at the DECA International Career Development Conference in Anaheim, Calif.”

Through a NSU University School’s speech and debate tournament, Jonathan was able to compete in sessions held at NSU’s Carl DeSantis Building, which houses the H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship.

“I thought it was cool that the sessions were hosted at NSU because of the comfy seats and boardroom settings,” he said.

When he’s not diving into business, Boulanger enjoys playing the violin.

The violin, another passion of Jonathan’s, also connected him to NSU. Having played the instrument since sixth grade, Jonathan participated in the Florida Youth Orchestra, where rehearsals were held on Monday nights at NSU University School. Jonathan also played with the quintet Aurora Strings at the Huizenga Pavilion at the Broward Center of the Performing Arts and also at NSU’s Alvin Sherman Library.

Upon graduating from high school in 2019, Jonathan made it official, coming to NSU and studying business administration. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) with a major in Entrepreneurship and minor in Venture Creation and Property Management. In May, he will earn his Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Finance and International Business as a member of the first cohort of the Huizenga Business and Innovation Academy.

During his time at NSU, Jonathan has immersed himself in opportunities and accolades.

Among those, he is a member of the President’s 64, an elite body of student leaders whose purpose is to strengthen the relationship between NSU and the community. The organization is comprised of 64 hand-picked undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, representing different constituencies of NSU’s diverse student population.

Jonathan created and developed the college’s Student Managed Investment Fund, the first of its kind in the state of Florida. The fund allows students to learn about how to build their own stock market portfolios while trading stocks with real money and creating investor pitches to a Board of Advisors of actual financial professionals.

“This was a legacy project that I created to leave a lasting impact at NSU, and I am excited to continue being involved with it, even past graduation,” he said.

Jonathan also is the co-founder and CEO of Fin Time Pros LLC, a company he created while part of the Innovation Academy. Fin Time Pros prepares college students for life after graduation by “teaching life skills through selling products and consulting.”

In the short-term, upon graduation Jonathan plans to continue his connection with NSU, working as a program coordinator with the Alan B. Levan l NSU Broward Center of Innovation. He’s also going to continue to grow Fin Time Pros beyond NSU to other universities. As for the long-term, Jonathan has his sights set on getting a law degree and starting a practice in business law. He plans to start two to three other companies related to solving social issues.

Jonathan attributes his altruistic pursuits to the late H. Wayne Huizenga, one of his heroes and the namesake of the NSU’s College of Business and Entrepreneurship.

“H. Wayne Huizenga was a positive influence in the South Florida community,” he says. “He left a legacy of institutions to help society, ranging from education to homelessness. Since I benefitted from them as a South Florida resident, I am inspired to follow his footsteps to do the same.”

Boulanger with his mother and father

 

Posted 04/25/23

Students Learn About Speech-Language Pathology

CSAD 3040 Neuroanatomy undergraduate students’ class, organizing the Craig’s Pantry collection.

Undergraduate students taking neuroanatomy during winter 2023 semester collaborated with Tambi Braun, SLP.D., CCC/SLP, associate professor, and Jennifer (Shani) Grossbard, M.S., CCC/SLP, adjunct professor, to meet with several faculty in the department and learn about the role of the speech-language pathologist in educational and medical settings. They also then collected gifts and baked goods that were donated to Craig’s Pantry Mother’s Day event happening in May 2023.

Craig’s Pantry is a privately funded, volunteer-driven, kosher food pantry in Broward County, Florida. Mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers receive several visits throughout the day from volunteers bringing flowers, goodies, gifts, and balloons.

For more information, please visit https://www.craigspantry.org/

Posted 04/23/23

Student Studies Harmful Algal Blooms in Lake Okeechobee

Paisley Samuel

Lake Okeechobee (or Lake O) can be considered “Florida’s Inland Sea,”, as it is  the largest lake in the southeastern United States and is located at the center of Florida’s Everglades ecosystem. Before heavy development in the 19th century, Lake O provided freshwater to the Everglades ecosystem to its south. Now the lake has been permanently altered by a series of major drainage projects which allow canals to drain the water to sustain large South Florida urban communities and agriculture.

Unfortunately, because of the increasing development, nutrient pollution and degrading water quality, cyanobacterial based harmful algal blooms (or cyanoHABs) have now become a common occurrence in Lake Okeechobee. In recent decades, these bloom events have increased in both abundance and prevalence.  However, unequivocal causes for the blooms have not yet been identified.

Four years ago, the molecular microbiology and genomics (MMG) laboratory at the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center (GHOC) and the Department of Biological Sciences (DoBS) in Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS)  was commissioned to investigate the microbial community structure of HABs through a grant from the Army Corp of Engineers, Aquatic Nuisance Species Research Program (ANSRP). Working with the colleagues at the Florida Gulf Coast and the US Geological Society, the MMG has now generated millions of DNA sequence reads of the freshwater bacterial communities from 19 sites around Lake O.

“The samples were taken during active blooms and also more quiescent periods for comparison over the last three years,” says Paisley Samuel, a marine science master’s student.

She will soon graduate from Halmos and the MMG laboratory, as well present a portion of her thesis research in a talk titled  “Effects of Cyanobacteria Harmful Algal Blooms on the Microbial Community within Lake Okeechobee, FL” to a professional audience at this year’s Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration (GEER) meeting in Coral Springs (https://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/geer/).  Her attendance at the meeting was generously sponsored by the South Florida and Caribbean Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (SFC CESU) which “was established in 2000 under the leadership of the Department of the Interior and has led to the partnership of nine federal agencies and 21 academic institutions and non-government organizations.”

“Ms. Samuel has done a masterful job at generating the data in the laboratory and then carefully learning various computational methods to analyze the large volumes of digital sequence data. This has now produced a coherent and interesting story about microbial community dynamics that could affect cyanoHABs on the lake”, says Dr. Jose (Joe) Lopez, a professor and director the MMG Laboratory.

Posted 04/23/23

Lab Finds Differences between Port and Reef Sediments

Port Everglades

Marine ports can be very busy places. From the vantage point of NSU’s Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (GHOC), one can easily observe and be part of the boat traffic going in and out of Port Everglades Inlet (PEI). This includes small and large recreational vehicles, Coast Guard patrols, sleek and modern looking yachts, huge tankers, and cargo vessels, loaded with oil or other commodities, and of course cruise ships ferrying passengers to good times in the Caribbean.

All this activity contributes to PEI being one of the busiest ports in the SE United States, which started almost a century ago in 1928.  The human activities also set the port physically apart from nearby natural habitats, which our laboratory has corroborated by profiling the marine sediments from both port and nearby coral reef sites. Molecular microbiology analyses provide some stark contrasts.   “Although most of the sites are within a few kilometers from each other, and are connected by daily tidal flows, the port and reef microbial communities showed distinct characteristics which were statistically significant.”, says Jose (Joe) Lopez, Ph.D., a professor with a laboratory at the GHOC and the Department of Biological Sciences in Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS).

The study was analyzed and co-written by Lopez and affiliate NSU faculty, Lauren Krausfeldt, Ph.D., and published in the open access online journal PeerJ.  With the help of dedicated NSU students, like Catherine Bilodeau and Hyo Lee, and project initiation by former FL Dept of Environmental Protection manager, Shelby Casali, molecular microbiological methods, now routine in the field, were applied to uncover the details of which microbes live in nearshore or port sediments.  The universal gene used to identify bacteria, is called 16S rRNA, which has been previously used to characterize other samples ranging widely from shark and human teeth, octopus skin, sponge and anglerfish tissue in the GHOC molecular microbiology laboratory run by Lopez.

In the Port Everglades study, NSU researchers found that some photosynthetic cyanobacterial group abundances decreased in the reef sediments in 2021, which could indicate changing irradiance reaching sensitive corals and other symbiotic hosts that depend on sunlight.

The new PeerJ study on marine sediments has potential ramifications on local coral reef health, because routine dredging and other human activities can stir up port sediments that ultimately disperse and settle on nearby coral reef habitats.  This data, along with previous microbial research in the Lopez laboratory describing water quality provides useful baselines that can be used by local environmental managers.

Posted 04/23/23

Congresswoman Tours NSU Center for Collaborative Research

From left, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz; Jean Latimer, Ph.D., director of the AutoNation Institute for Breast Cancer Research and Care; Ken Dawson, NSU’s senior vice president for Research and Economic Development; and NSU Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Dr. Harry K. Moon.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently toured NSU’s Center for Collaborative Research. While on campus, she visited the AutoNation Institute for Breast Cancer Research and Care as well as the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine.

Posted 04/23/23

Doctor of Occupational Therapy Student Receives Scholarship

Arianna Sewell

Congratulations to Tampa Bay Regional campus third-year Doctor of Occupational Therapy student Arianna Sewell, by the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) to receive the Florence M. Stattel Endowed Scholarship.

AOTF is a charitable, scientific, and educational non-profit organization whose purpose is to advance the science of occupational therapy to support people’s full participation in meaningful life activities.

The foundation is governed by a board of trustees and awards grants for scientific research and scholarships. It also publishes a scientific Occupational Therapy Journal of Research (OTJR), Occupation, Participation and Health,[1] indexed by the National Library of Medicine and others. It sponsors the honor society Pi Theta Epsilon. It is based in Rockville, Maryland.

Arianna submitted an essay in which describes her qualifications to receive this award. Her academic performance at NSU qualifies her to receive Florence M. Stattel Endowed Scholarship, and in completing at least one year of occupational therapy specific coursework.

Arianna has a B.A. in psychology and worked as a research assistant in the HeartLAB of the University of South Florida.  As a current O.T.D. student, Arianna has earned an internship with the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), planning activities and events relative to the goals of the Developmental Disabilities Special Interest Section.

Posted 04/23/23

Halmos Faculty Presents at History Conference

Katy Doll, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Politics in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, presented at the 2023 Organization of American Historians Conference in Los Angeles, Calif.

Katy Doll, Ph.D.

Doll presented “‘The only way outside of a bullet to probe the innards of a skull: Military and Media Practices in Psychological Warfare during the Korean War” as part of a panel titled “Realities and Opponents of the American Way of War.”

The Organization of American Historians Conference is one of the largest gatherings of professional historians annually in the United States. In addition to panels of scholarship in progress, the conference also featured workshops on teaching, digital humanities, and displays of the latest scholarly publications in the field.

Professor Doll specializes in U.S. history with a focus on culture, war, and society. She studies United States overt psychological warfare from the Korean War to the Vietnam War. Her presentation at the conference explored the connections between advertising and journalism methods and military propaganda campaigns.

Posted 04/23/23

University School Fourth-Graders Showcase Business Ideas

As part of their entrepreneurship unit, fourth-grade students showcased their creativity and entrepreneurial skills by developing an innovative product along with a business plan, marketing strategies, and a commercial. Students recently pitched their products and business ideas, in Shark Tank style, to teachers, classmates, and judges who selected the winning product.

This year’s fourth grade Shark Tank Jr. is Pet+ Paste founded by student entrepreneurs Nina and Kinley. To help pet owners save on vet costs, Nina and Kinley created Pet+ Paste, an emergency paste pet owners can have readily available that will save their pet’s life in case they eat/lick a poisonous toad or get into harmful chemicals.

During this year’s event, third- through fifth-grade students who were in attendance had the opportunity to hear from our keynote speaker Steve Greenberg, award-winning author, reporter, TV personality, game show host, and expert on innovation, new products, and technology.

We are incredibly proud of all our fourth-grade students for their creativity, teamwork, and hard work in developing their products and business skills.

Congratulations, Sharks!

Check out a recap video of this year’s Shark Tank presentations on our Instagram page: https://rb.gy/um7xft

Learn more about NSU University School’s college preparatory program for students in Preschool – Grade 12 at www.uschool.nova.edu.

Posted 04/09/23

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