Category: Academics

Professor’s Co-Authored Paper Promotes Marine Biodiversity Strategy

A fundamental challenge to marine biodiversity protection is the relatively poor and patchy understanding of the diversity and distribution of marine life, making it more difficult to strategically designate protective measures and assess their success.

The marine environment presents unique challenges: the world ocean is vast, much of it is distant from human populations, its life is often hidden from view and sampling presents formidable logistical difficulties. As a result, observations of ocean life are a fraction of those on land and are especially sparse in the water column and deep sea. These ecosystems have been the subject of an internationally recognized program led by researchers at Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS).

The program, titled “DEEPEND” (www.deependconsortium.org), is led by Professor Tracey Sutton, who was among 28 scientists, economists and marine policy experts worldwide who were invited to assess the U.S. national strategy for marine biodiversity protection. Sutton participated in a series of dialogues and workshops over the past three years, the results of which were recently published.

In this paper, published in One Earth, the task force that included Sutton proposed a scientific framework to assess the distribution and abundance of marine biodiversity in U.S. waters inside and outside existing protections and  applied it to waters from the near coast to the borders of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (200 miles offshore).

Why This Matters

Marine biodiversity globally is in crisis. Climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction and other extractive industries are causing species losses at an alarming rate. Increasingly, scientists, managers and governments are taking steps to protect marine life. But it requires a network of protected areas that are ecologically representative, foster connectivity between habitats and consider the dynamic nature of coastal and marine habitats.

The framework is the basis by which managers and communities can ground regional and local actions with knowledge of marine biodiversity distribution. It’s crucial to fulfilling the president’s commitment to protect 30% of land and waters by 2030, implementing the White House Ocean Climate Action and National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy. It can inform existing mandates that involve area-based management, from the National Marine Sanctuaries Act to the Marine Mammal Protection and the Endangered Species Act.

Posted 02/04/24

Honors Course Leads to Conference Presentations

Members of the protein modeling course

Students in the Farquhar Honors College Intro to Protein Modeling course will present their innovative 3D protein models at the annual American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) conference this March. The models were created using advanced computational tools to predict a protein’s structure.

Understanding the structure of a protein is essential to altering its function. Students used a variety of methods to map out the structure, such as artificial intelligence and metal-binding force fields. Understanding the functions of proteins can give us hints to answer the question “What is life?” since proteins work together in a complicated and coordinated way to support life.

“Each year the creativity, passion and drive of the students results in a rich diversity of not only project ideas but innovative methods of accomplishing their lofty goals,” said course co-instructor Arthur Sikora, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Physics in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences (HCAS). “I am learning and exploring the scientific world right alongside my students every time.”

Emily Schmitt Lavin, Ph.D., professor and chair in the Department of Biological Sciences at HCAS, teaches the course with Sikora. The course gives students experience as scientists, including conducting research, analyzing data and discussing and presenting their findings. At the end of the course, students can present their work at a conference of their choice and return as a mentor for the next cohort of students who take the course. More than 20 honors students have presented at conferences as part of the course.

Saleh’s protein model

The course has been especially influential for honors student Omar Saleh. Based on the work he completed in the course, Saleh was chosen to co-lead a protein modeling workshop at the American Chemical Society’s Biennial Conference on Chemical Education in Kentucky, where he will train and encourage faculty from other universities to create similar courses at their institutions.

“I feel both incredibly honored and privileged to take such a novel step in my undergraduate career,” said Saleh, a junior biology and neuroscience major. “It will be my first time traveling to another state, and the workshop will significantly increase both my leadership and public speaking skills. I am proud to showcase not only our wonderful protein modeling class with other out-of-state instructors, educators and faculty, but also the work my team and the other teams, both past and present, have produced.”

View projects from the honors Intro to Protein Modeling course.

Posted 02/04/24

Halmos Faculty Member Publishes Chapter on Game ‘Monsters’

Melissa Bianchi, Ph.D.

Melissa Bianchi, Ph.D., associate professor in NSU’s Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts, has written “A Field Guide to Monsters: Practices of Wildlife Watching in Video Games,” a chapter appearing in the recently published “Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis.”

The collection from Amsterdam University Press brings together established and emerging voices in the scholarly conversation about how video games increasingly participate in the production, circulation and interrogation of environmental assumptions.

In her chapter, Bianchi connects video game analyses to the beliefs and practices that determine how we reproduce animals in visual media. Touching on a variety of games, including “New Pokémon Snap,” “Monster Hunter Rise” and “NUTS,” the chapter demonstrates how gameplay can exemplify troubling aspects of the human-animal divide and support critical perspectives on human ecological agency and responsibility toward animals.

“I am honored to be a part of this valuable resource for scholars, designers and players who see the critical potential of games and are acutely aware of pressing environmental challenges,” Bianchi said.

Learn more about the M.A. in Composition, Rhetoric and Digital Media here.

Posted 02/04/24

Honors College Hosts Data Visualization Competition

Data visualization is important now more than ever. With large amounts of information at our fingertips at all times, data visualization is lucrative for making information more accessible to all. To help students hone this skill, the Farquhar Honors College hosted a Data Visualization Competition over the summer that prompted students to transform an existing class assignment into an interactive visual narrative for public viewing.

The top three winners received a cash prize. In first place, receiving $300, was Shweta Shah for her project “Empowering Women’s Breast Health with Racial Inclusivity.” In second place, receiving $200, was Corinne Renshaw for her project “Anthropogenic Influences on the Biscayne Aquifer.” In third place, receiving $100, was Ruthie Fogel for her project “Artemis: NASA’s Return to the Moon.”

All projects were created using ArcGIS StoryMaps, a free and easy-to-use digital storytelling web platform, which allowed students to break down complex ideas into easily understandable parts with compelling visual aids. Contestants were judged based on creativity, innovation, rhetorical effectiveness, and proficiency.

“[Through] this project, I learned the real-world implications and applications of assignments done in the classroom,” said first-place winner Shweta Shah, whose project focused on educating racial minority groups about an amendment to the Mammography Standards Quality Act that may lead to earlier breast cancer detection and lower mortality rates. “For many of my public health classes, we are required to create PowerPoints that only the professor sees. However, many of these assignments contain critical information that the public also needs to be informed about. … This project allowed me to create a multi-media resource [for] patients.”

The competition welcomed projects from all disciplines as data visualization is an important tool for any field. Projects focused on subjects ranging from environmental science to mental health.

“I am thankful [to] the Honors College for creating this opportunity for their students to apply and present their research in a new and innovative way while [emphasizing] that learning does not necessarily always occur in a classroom!” said third-place winner Ruthie Fogel, whose project focused on the importance of NASA’s mission to return to the moon. “The ways in which we present our ideas to the world are ever evolving and now has never been a more perfect opportunity. . . to learn something exciting!”

View project gallery.

Posted 01/17/24

Halmos Faculty Present at ACR Conference

McKay

Judith McKay, J.D., Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies (DCRS) and Charles Zelden, Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Humanities and Politics (DHP), presented at the 2023 Association for Conflict Resolution Annual Conference held in Arlington, Virginia and virtually.

The theme of the conference was “Conflict Resolution: Collaboration the New Normal?” Their presentation was titled, Dialogues in Local Democracy: Creating Connected and Socially Just Communities.  Zelden and McKay are the co-directors of the Council for Dialogue and Democracy housed in HCAS. The Dialogues in Local Democracy project was funded by Florida Humanities and NSU.

Zelden

McKay’s areas of teaching and research interests include strategic community planning, conflict coaching, violence prevention and intervention, and organizational conflict.

Zelen’s areas of teaching and research interests include American legal history, civil rights, voting rights, election law, and constitutional history.

 

Posted 01/14/24

Halmos Faculty’s Book Assesses Seafloor Biodiversity

Jose V. Lopez, Ph.D.

Assessing the biological diversity that lives on the seabed across more than 70% of the planet’s surface, also known as the “benthos,” provides a challenge and task that will endure well into the future. Jose V. Lopez, Ph.D., and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS) decided to take up the call by writing a comprehensive reference book called Assessments and Conservation of Biological Diversity from Coral Reefs to the Deep Sea: Uncovering Buried Treasures and the Value of the Benthos(Academic Press Publishers). This decision was based on his past collective research experiences and resulted in the publication 2023.

The benthos encompasses all the organisms at the seafloor. Although daunting, Lopez was assisted by the realization that many communities of benthic organisms remain a black box.  Many benthic descriptions and conservation activities understandably occur and concentrate near coastlines, which allow easier and less expensive access for researchers.  For example, many studies appropriately focus on shallow coral reefs because they are considered to hold the lion’s share of biodiversity or species (estimated at ~25%) on the planet.  This may be true, and many researchers and decades of study have yielded fascinating facts about reefs, such as the phenomenon of singled celled green algae and stony coral hosts living in an obligatesymbiosis (distinct organisms united to compose a whole organism) as the crucial basis for the ecosystem’s structure.  Nonetheless, the very deep ocean benthic zones that lie below 800 to 4000m (bathyal zone) and 4000 to 6500 (abyssal zone), represent the largest surface habitats on the planet and have been understudied.  These zones have extreme living conditions (4oC average temperature and high hydrostatic pressures). However, deep sea expeditions require much planning and can be expensive.  In the book, Lopez describes how more often remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) or sonar must be applied to obtain useful views of the deep seabed.

These understudied seabed habitats will undoubtedly yield many biological surprises –   what may live there and how they survive. The new Assessments… book connects various topics (genomics and cryptic taxa) related to biodiversity via data, review articles, anecdotes, public policy and even art.  For example, besides sporadic mining operations, or the search for sunken treasures (or wrecks such as the RMS Titanic), the deep seabed has not been accurately mapped.   This may change over the next few decades. Overall, Lopez recounts that “we know the surface of the moon better than we do what lies on the bottom of the ocean, even though the latter is closer”.  His laboratory research on the microbial communities of marine sediments and reading the whole genomes of benthic invertebrates attempts to add to the scientific knowledge of the benthos. For information about the book, see https://shop.elsevier.com/books/assessments-and-conservation-of-biological-diversity-from-coral-reefs-to-the-deep-sea/lopez/978-0-12-824112-7 

Posted 01/14/24

University School Teachers Attend Institute in New York City

Two Lower School teachers recently attended a weeklong institute at Teachers College Columbia University in New York City. They participated in professional development workshops focused on supporting small group work in reading and writing. Additionally, members of our administrative team presented at the FCIS convention, emphasizing the identification of core competencies to drive experiential learning.

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

Posted 01/14/24

2024-25 FAFSA Now Available for Students, Families

The new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is now available for students and their families to complete at studentaid.gov.  The long-awaited overhaul has been underway since Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020 and has caused the 2024-25 FAFSA to become available in late December 2023 instead of the customary October 1 date. The ultimate goal of the makeover is to expand federal student aid eligibility, including Federal Pell Grants, and to streamline the user experience. The Department of Education estimates that more than 600,000 new students from low-income backgrounds will be eligible to receive Federal Pell Grants due to updates to student aid calculations.

In the meantime, the NSU Office of Financial Aid encourages students and parents to complete the 2024-25 FAFSA as soon as possible and to take advantage of the many informational resources provided by the NSU financial aid office as well as the Department of Education to be prepared for the new experience:

Halmos Faculty, Student and Alum Present at Conference in Virginia

Katherine Sosa, Ph.D.; Neil Katz, Ph.D.; Terry Savage, Ph.D.; and Annette Taylor Spence

Neil Katz, Ph.D., and Terry Savage, Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies (DCRS) in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS), and DCRS alum Katherine Sosa, Ph.D., and doctoral student Annette Taylor-Spence, presented at the 2023 Association for Conflict Resolution Annual Conference held in Arlington, Virginia and virtually. The theme of the conference was “Conflict Resolution: Collaboration the New Normal?” Their presentation was titled, “Experiential Workshop Design: A Portal to Self-Awareness and Effectiveness in Group Life.”

Katz’ areas of teaching and research interests include negotiation theory and practice, group dynamics, and organizational conflict.

Savage’s areas of teaching and research interests include restorative and transitional justice, human rights, and peacebuilding.

Posted 12/10/23

USchool Students Get Hands-On Suturing Experience at NSU

Students from our Upper School Medical Fellowship program recently took part in a lab at the NSU Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Osteopathic Medicine, where they gained hands-on experience in suturing techniques using pig’s feet.

This practical exercise was designed to enhance their skills in dexterity, precision, and understanding of different suturing methods.

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

Posted 12/10/23

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