Monthly Archives: August 2016

Internal Grants, Lehigh Faculty in the Summer

Tracing James and Du Bois in Berlin

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Saladin Ambar is the Department Chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lehigh University. His research recently took him to Germany to track the work of William James and W.E.B. Du Bois
On May 22nd I arrived in Berlin, Germany to begin research funded by a Lehigh Faculty Innovation Grant. I was there to investigate the influence of German education on the thinking and political thought of both Harvard University’s William James, and his then student, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to graduate from that institution withIMG_0781 a PhD. In addition to seeking out the archives at Humboldt University (formerly the University of Berlin), I was also asked to present my research to a group of graduate students at the University of Potsdam. At the invitation of Professor Logi Gunnarsson, an expert on James’s work, I was able to share the influence of James’s teaching on the young Du Bois, as we navigated James’s 1890 text “The Hidden Self.” The dialogue and feedback was wonderful. And I made an invaluable friend and colleague in Logi. We often forget how influential German intellectuals were in shaping the American academy. James and Du Bois were no different. It was truly exciting to be in this formerly divided city, thinking about race, the subconscious mind, and double consciousness, all with young men and women eager to complete their own graduate education and share their perspectives on a topic that clearly crosses the Atlantic in terms of importance. I look forward to returning to Cambridge to learn more about James and Du Bois at Harvard – but also one day to Berlin – and to Potsdam – to revisit the same field of study that so shaped these two critical thinkers in American race and psychology.
Faculty Voices

Developing a vertebrate model system for Roberts Syndrome

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Kathy Iovine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and Bob Skibbens, a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, introduce you to their research on Roberts Syndrome. This work is funded in part by a Faculty Innovation Grant. 

Greetings! The purpose of this post is to introduce you to a Faculty Innovation Grant titled Developing a vertebrate model system for Roberts Syndrome. Roberts Syndrome (RBS) is a severe form of birth defects that significantly impacts bone growth (as well as cognition and organ development).  In RBS patients, the long bones of the limbs are severely reduced, along with craniofacial abnormalities (cleft palatte, small head size, etc). The syndrome arises due to mutations in a gene named ESCO2, but the basis of the ESCO2 defect remains unknown.  An important step forward will be to develop a model system for RBS so that we can ultimately devise clinical therapies.

As part of a collaboration between the Skibbens and Iovine lab groups, we are establishing the zebrafish fin as an RBS model system.  Zebrafish fins are an excellent system since amputation results in complete regrowth, and we have the technology to turn down gene function during regrowth (“regeneration”).  We found that loss of Esco2 protein causes skeletal defects in  the zebrafish regenerating fin (Figure 1 shows a normal fin skeleton). With the ability to assay for Esco2 function in regenerating fins, we are pursuing a new model that Esco2 may cause skeletal defects by regulating the expression of genes.  Evidence obtained through this collaboration suggests that Esco2 regulates cs43 – a gene that encodes a protein previously shown by the Iovine lab to impact bone growth (check out Iovine et al., 2005, Developmental Biology) and implicated in a developmental abnormality referred to as Oculodentodigital dysplasia.  This research has been published in the journal Developmental Dynamics (Banerji et al., 2016 Developmental Dynamics)!

More recent efforts have been to provide mechanistic insights into how Esco2 regulates the expression of the skeletal gene cx43. The most direct way to show this is to demonstrate that the Esco2 protein, or a protein regulated by the function of Esco2 (i.e. Smc3), associates with the cx43 gene. Esco2 regulates the ability of Smc3 (and others) to associate with DNA. We are now testing if Smc3 physically binds to the DNA surrounging the cx43 gene. Raj Banerji has made important progress showing that she can isolate chromatin (i.e. genomic DNA plus all of the associated proteins) from a fin cell line, AB9. She can also isolate only the parts of the chromatin that are associated with Smc3. She is now testing if cx43 DNA is among the isolated Smc3-bound chromatin.

 

Keywords: skeletal disease, zebrafish, regeneration, gene expression

 

External Funding

Resources for proposal writing

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Proposal development is a regular facet of faculty life, but it is one that isn’t necessarily included in graduate training. Fortunately there are plenty of resources available to help. Below is a round up of some of the best online guides.

  • The Foundation Center has a short online course laying out the components of a typical grant application and provides tips for writer.
  • For NEH applicants, OSU posted slides and a video  of a workshop with Claudia Kinkela, NEH program officer.
  • The Social Science Research Council website includes a free publication On the Art of Writing Proposals.
  • Applicants should also begin by looking for specific advice from the foundation or federal agency to which they are applying.

All of these resources share some of the same specific advice: write for the educated generalist. Good luck!

Lehigh Faculty in the Summer

The Research Lifecycle: Seeing it Through and Starting Anew

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Jenna Lay is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Lehigh University. 

The academic lifecycle is an unusual one. Years unfold in months-long stretches of time: fall and spring semesters devoted to teaching and running academic programs; summer, as Nicholas Sawicki suggests in his post, offering time for larger projects, writing, and travel—like the archival work Elizabeth Dolan describes. The rhythm of an academic career offers similar ebbs and flows, as the boisterous conversation of graduate coursework transforms into the solitary discipline of a dissertation, which, in turn, enables the intellectual growth that will foster new forms of engagement in the classroom and in a broad range of communities.

As a pre-tenure faculty member at Lehigh, I spent the last six years building on that foundation: transforming the knowledge and skills gained through graduate study into the research, teaching, and service that structure academic days, months, and years. I can now hold the most material of these transformations in my hands: my first book, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture, was published this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

With my book’s publication, I’ve been thinking about the research lifecycle, and especially about how scholars transition from one project to the next. Watching my words evolve from malleable files on my computer to the relative fixity of a printed book, I’ve become increasingly convinced that a research project is never truly complete: that the questions answered will inevitably spark new ideas and areas for exploration. And yet this is still a summer of endings and beginnings, of one project completed and another just developing. In this blog post, I’ll say a bit about what a transitional period like this entails: what did my summers look like when I was working on Beyond the Cloister? How does this summer differ?

Continue reading The Research Lifecycle: Seeing it Through and Starting Anew →

Dave Anastasio, Lehigh Faculty in the Summer

A new project: dating the chronology of European migration

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David Anastasio is a geologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University. He is currently blogging from his research site in Spain. Catch up here!

A persistent debate surrounds the chronology of the colonization of Europe. The Guadix-Baza Basin in southern Spain is the repository of 2,000 m of ancient sedimentary strata that record the depositional, climatic, ecological, and tectonic events along the European-African plate boundary at a time of hominin migration out of Africa. The basin was also the

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lake beds where a 1.4Ma hominid tooth (pictured) was discovered site of the last connection between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea before the modern connection at Gibraltar. Retreat of the seaway resulted in the largest lake in Europe, which evolved from grassland environments to a savannah landscape with abundant game. Previous studies have established the paleoenviromental evolution of the archeological sites but without precise chronologies it is not possible to reconcile arguments as to whether evolving climactic or geographic barriers in the Betic Cordillera were instrumental in facilitating the peopling of Europe or whether hominins simply “followed the herd”.

Josep Parés (Spanish Research Center for Human Evolution) and I are using the record of periodic changes in Earth’s orbital parameters (Milankovitch cycles) that are encoded in nearly all sedimentary rocks to refine chronologies. Orbital cycles are known to result in natural long-term variations in Earth’s climate. When tuned to absolute time control, cyclostratigraphy constitutes a metronome with a precision, accuracy, and continuity that out performs other dating methods. Our sampling strategy will allow the basin’s paleoarcheology sites to be more precisely dated and correlated so that coordinated paleogeographic and paleoenvironmental parameters can be established.