 Good morning, and and welcome to the Rackham Graduate School. This is our wonderful Rackham amphitheater I'm delighted to welcome those who this is the first time attending this event And I know there's a number of you that have been coming for a number of years It's really delightful to have you here for this very special event As we get ready to hear from our main event our outstanding Rackham students about their research and scholarship I wanted to begin by sharing with you just a few thoughts about what we at the Graduate School have been working on in the last year I'm really excited to share this news with you That we've we've recently launched a strategic vision for graduate education at Rackham And this has grown out of our long-standing efforts to support our students and to drive innovation that impacts their academic experience And in order to highlight for you what we see as the future of graduate education at the University of Michigan I'd like to take a moment to discuss our past and present as a university and graduate school and then how that sets us up for this future vision So looking first back at the past As you would know as as as alumni and those that are interested in the graduate school Our model of graduate education here at Michigan and across the nation at its core relies on a deep intellectual connection between faculty Often a specific faculty member and graduate students More than a century old This is often called the apprenticeship model of graduate education And it's produced wonderful important discoveries and new understandings of people and society Even today it draws both students and faculty from the world over to join us here at the university But despite the many contributions this model has inspired for us in the past and even the present We know there are some pressures on it that have been building up over time So at Rackham we have been working hard to stay ahead of these pressures and indeed lead the national conversation About the future of research based graduate education both masters and doctoral So I'd like to take just a moment to highlight a few of the most pressing dynamics that are shown here and From some headlines from the national press and from the trade press and these are informing our vision of what we should be focusing on in the future First I'd like to highlight the very idea of the apprenticeship model assumes that the apprentice will ultimately become Assuming the role of the teacher mentor However, this is not actually the case today in the year 2019 The reasons for this are complex the number of phd's Paces available jobs in academia and the academic job market is increasingly tight in all fields On the other hand and at the same time many of our graduates who are arriving here for their studies Wish to pursue careers in industry in nonprofits in government service and academic institutions that have primarily a teaching focus These career pathways typically differ from the career paths of their mentors here at the in the graduate school I want to report to you that this shift is already well underway At rackham more than half of doctoral graduates who are receiving their degrees Are going on to careers that are very different from the tenure track positions that their mentors hold At the same time if we focus for a moment on master's training That that those degrees are hard pressed to keep up with the demand for expertise in emerging fields And indeed the way in which emerging fields themselves are changing rapidly At the same time there's increased public skepticism about the benefits of evidence-based research like we focused on here in the graduate school And growing concerns about the affordability of graduate education There are reports in the national and trade press that speak of a crisis in graduate student mental health And finally there are rare but unacceptable cases of misuse or abuse of the faculty student dynamic that underpins this apprenticeship model of graduate education So those are the pressures that we face But at the same time and perhaps most important of of all to me We see that society has never had a need a greater need for the advanced training of research based graduate education For evidence-based science for expertise that cuts across multiple disciplines For thinking from the social sciences in the humanities that can help people address deep societal problems And for the understanding that helps us talk across difference communicate across difference These are the essential elements of what scholarship for the public good means and it's really built into rackham's mission We feel that we have an opportunity to address both the pressures and seize the opportunity here at rackham Especially at a university like michigan given our scope as a world-class research enterprise and also a national leader in graduate education So because of those pressures and opportunities rackham is pursuing a new strategic vision for graduate education Which i mentioned just a moment ago So in rethinking graduate education in this way, we really hold to three beliefs The first is that graduate education needs to be student-centered This means what does this mean student centered means that the students own scholarly and research interests Their needs for academic and professional development and their career aspirations are increasingly incorporated into the design of their curriculum And their academic experience And second we think that this innovation to support the graduate The academic experience to make it increasingly student-centered should be faculty led It should be led by our faculty because they can respond to the needs of the discipline to the needs of the students as they work within the disciplines And the third piece is that rackham can support faculty as they develop ideas and move them forward And also support students to have these opportunities to engage in the sorts of experiences that are student-centered and and expand their education So based on this idea, we have we have four our goals that we'll be focusing on in the next few years at the graduate school The first is what we're calling a reimagined academic experience In which faculty themselves are supported to innovate and experiment and offer a new curricula new kinds of experiential learning and new types of interdisciplinary learning Our second major goal is to strengthen diversity of the graduate school In this goal rackham students from different backgrounds with different life experiences With different distances traveled to the university can thrive and have a sense of belonging within their academic programs Our third major goal is to enhance partnerships and community And this is in which all members of the rackham community Students faculty staff alumni are welcomed into this work because we all have a role to play And the last major goal is to strengthen the organizational culture and climate of rackham itself Which we will examine our own work and strengthen it to support what will be happening as part of this as part of this plan Some of the efforts that have grown out of the conversation to reach this point are already underway We have been launching initiatives around internships Rackham is going to be continuing internship offering internet experiences Across campuses and we're going to use a variety of different modes and models to try to pilot what works best within particular disciplines As an example already with the support from the melon foundation Rackham was able to fund internships for professional development in the humanities and social sciences This involves summer experiences for example in museums Our curating collections working in nonprofits And we're also starting this year expanding these opportunities for students in the biological sciences So they too can hold internships that both advance their career Interests and also are well integrated into their academic experiences Our second activity that's launching at the moment is that we've established a graduate student mental health task force This is a team of graduate faculty graduate students and mental health professionals And their goal is to develop actionable ideas that can be used to support graduate students in their mental health And their academic progress They are a core team that will be reaching out to the many organizations across campus that are currently engaging this work And trying to coordinate it in a way that will directly benefit rackham students And finally to kind of continue this idea generation We've been standing up a series of conversations with faculty and cabinets partners We've been shaping this work in various ways. We've held retreats and engagements to arrive at this point With a range of campus partners that work began in summer 2018 So it's more than a we're going on for more than a year and we've hosted already two symposium one about research in graduate education in may And one just with the broader with the broader campus community that was held here in this amphitheater just two weeks ago And our next step in this direction will be on february 7th I'm pleased to announce that we'll be welcoming national leaders in graduate education here for a third symposium To engage with u.m. Faculty on this topic and that is critical to the future of the university So I invite you to visit the rackham website to learn more about our vision for graduate education Uh, the website is here. Um, we have in particular some just some information That will give you a sense of some of the nescent programs that are already active both at rackham and Initiated by faculty across the university. They're extremely innovative And they show some of the things that are percolating across campus at the morning So in coming years, I really hope to be able to continue with faculty staff Students alumni other members of the community to advance this vision and I'm looking forward to further conversations about it Okay, so that was a few words about the future. Now when I kind of bring our attention back to the present and our six outside Looks like seven, right? I did right. I didn't get the got six, but it's seven and that's perfect It will be seven six better Where we'll hear about their research and they're going to share their perspectives about being graduate students in Michigan So I invite you all to come up and then we'll get going Thank you So, uh, this will be uh, uh, this uh, this the way we'll have this organized is I'm going to let each student I'm going to start with you on Chen who's going to introduce himself Each student is going to speak just for you know, less than about five minutes about their area of research and scholarship We'll kind of move our way one by one down and then at that point we'll open this up for general discussion and questions And so with that, I'm gonna I'll be sure to kind of emcee but um from past experience My role is just kind of let everybody go and we'll have a nice conversation. So we'll start with you. Thank you Okay, sounds good, right So good morning, everyone my name Oh My name is Yiren Chen. I'm a fourth year doctoral student from the higher education program I received the karma scholarship this year This is a scholarship that recommended by my program Blacked it by Racky M and made possible by the generosity of our donors So I want to first take this opportunity to thank you all for giving me this award And I'm deeply honored In terms of academic work my research centers around the college choice Ask questions like, uh, how do students choose college? Why do they make such divisions and what are the consequences for themselves and for the society at large My current research focused on academic under matching a phenomenon describing some high achieving students Do not attend the colleges that match their academic strengths this pattern concentrates among uh, the Disadvantages students and so the researchers and the policy makers believe that if we can address this Problem effectively we can help the underprivileged students to get a better future The prior research suggests that there are two reasons the students go undermatch First the lower ranked colleges that might be actually work better for the students for a variety of reasons Such as close to home if staying close to home is important to you then you may choose colleges nearby over more prestigious university that That's far away second Maybe the students don't have the actually accurate information about colleges so that They are not making informed decisions. For example, if empirical Evidence suggests that the first generation students are particularly bad at evaluating the institutional quality Often they have an attitude as they say colleges or colleges or college If there's no difference between colleges then why not go to the colleges nearby? So this is clearly something that we can do and the policy intervention in the past 15 years Focus on primarily on providing information to the students while I acknowledge both reasons are valid I think under matching is more complex than that and my research explores the role of Educational aspiration in the process of division making Following Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. I argue that the people are a lot averse When making decisions, they do not evaluate the alternative based on the absolute benefit and the cost of that alternative But evaluated the alternatives against some sort of Benchmark the importance of benchmark is that it determines whether an alternative would be perceived as a gain or a loss If the alternative is better than the benchmark then it is a gain Otherwise, it is a loss and the Kahneman's research shows that the same amount of difference May carry more weight when it happens on the losing side than on the winning side In other words the pain of losing $5,000 is much more intense than the pleasure of gaining $5,000 In the context of a college choice I argue that the benchmark is largely determined by what's educational aspiration The college that you believe you are able to get in serves as a reference point and that will change how you perceive the rest of the Decision-making scenario. For example, let's say there's a student applied to both University of Michigan and Harvard And just for the sake of discussion, let's assume that the students think Harvard is better than Michigan We all know it's not true, but people are entitled to their own opinions. So and I respect that Anyway, that matters now assume the student considers Michigan as her reference point Then if she's lucky enough to get into Harvard, that's good for her She will perceive that as a gain and that is something better than what she was expecting But if Harvard rejects her application, then she probably will still be quite happy just to spend four years in this charming place On the contrary, if she considers Harvard as her reference point, then Michigan would become her defective safety college And in that case, if she is rejected by Harvard, then she has to choose to attend Michigan because she has nowhere to go Then she might be a grounded freshman on the campus For the same student, the perceived difference between Harvard and Michigan should be the same However, depending on the reference point, the gain from Michigan to Harvard and the loss from Harvard to Michigan Will be perceived quite differently and that's the influence of the benchmark My hypothesis is that students in general will not actively pursue the colleges that are below their reference point Because otherwise they will go into a situation called sure loss That means if you choose that alternative, then no matter what will happen, you lose And kind of a research shows that because people hate losses so much that they in general will not choose a sure loss of alternatives Now applying this argument to the under matching phenomenon I hypothesis that if you go to ask the students who went undermatch, how do they feel about the College of their choice? They probably will say something like It's not the best college in the world, but it's a good enough option for me If that is the case, then some of the under matching problem may not be caused by the lack of information But by the lack of aspiration Accordingly, if we want to address the under matching problem more effectively We need to not only give providing information to the students, but also need to incorporate the aspiration component Into the intervention. Um, so that's my research and that finally I want to Once again acknowledge the importance of the scholarship to my research That brings me from the work duties that I have been the computer really accelerated my research program I really appreciate that. Thank you. My name is Cara Janice Um, you might say that I am a discreet detective working on a case that has global and local implications. So Before I take the opportunity to share a little bit about my research and background I do want to extend my heartfelt Thanks to Rackham and the donor community I'm kind of coming back to academics after A unique experience working with the World Health Organization for some years And the funding and space that Rackham has provided For this opportunity to meet the employment market has been really important For my research and just the opportunity to be back here at Michigan. Um, I've been able to um Undertake some of my dissertation research in Kenya over the past summer with um a research international Rackham award As well as some other funding opportunities. So again, um, very appreciative of the community My research focuses on identifying and characterizing The determinants of immunization uptake primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, but the thing about What uh, in peace uptake of immunization generally is one to be a diverse set of reasons But the implication is the same that we have susceptible communities Largely the global immunization kind of practice has focused on this indicator of 95 percent coverage To protect children and now many countries have family oriented programs or an adolescent adult as well But what that doesn't get at is if you have an isolated community that has Either zero protection or untimely protection You're opening up the wider community to risk So I look at trying to use classical statistical methods to predict the determinants of where these clusters are that then map often to disease acquisition that can result in sustained transmission And the loss of some incredible gains that globally we've been able to achieve with immunization We like to say in the immunization community that we're often a victim of our own success With kind of eradication has come a clarification And to an extent kind of complacency taking hold of Just behavior change And you know while in higher Resource settings we talk a lot about vaccine hesitant sentiments and outright refusal A lot of that is just edits through an opportunity for education and conversation Instead of blame and and kind of pointing fingers We found in our research taking Kind of hold of that relationship between the practitioner and patient There is an opportunity to kind of reverse those Sentiments and then in the settings that I work with where generally it's an issue of access We're looking to kind of identify where those barriers are To inform more successful programming and outreach But again, the implication is the same That where you have these clusters of under on their untimely vaccinated populations We're at risk for resurgence reemergence of diseases that have largely been eliminated and eradicated in fact Britain last year lost the school in the nation's status for needles America's as a whole Lost it, which was a huge Kind of heartbreak for me personally because I previously Worked at the pan-american health organization where it was part of the effort in Achieving that elimination status and we're quite close to losing it here in the u.s. So My research, I hope to continue to Use the skills that I'm gaining through my program to Continue Kind of the global achievement of Eliminating and eradicating that I don't think I got a chance to say I am Hello Okay, hello, my name is retchen already and I'm a phd candidate in anthropology And racking has supported me in every part of Um and really every stage of the project that I'm about to tell you about Um, so I am interested in understanding the emotional and cognitive social relationships And what their function is in our lives and how they're shaped by power and knowledge over time And I study social relationships and why of chimpanzees that live in go-go into ballin national parks in nirvana Um, this is the place where chimpanzees have been studied for 25 years Which seems like a very long time, but chimpanzees can live to be over 70. So in their lifespan That's actually a very short time Um, and the chimpanzees I study specifically are adolescent and young adult male And like humans of that age, um adolescent males occupies the minimal social space Um, they begin to travel independently from their mothers and about 12 Um, but they're technically out spirits of the social world of adult males And adult males I want um Adolescents are around 10 with draw all the affection they used to show them And they start to target them with aggression And adolescents become aggressive themselves and they regularly pass and eventually dominate all females in their community And in my research, I examine how dominance aggression and the fluid of relationships like friendships um shape the social relationships between male and female chimpanzees And how these contribute to male reproduction which in the evolutionary process is the main process So Um, just to give you some background in most mammal species Mothers are the primary caregivers of offspring And I think many of us know that we are males But offspring here requires so much time and energy From mothers that at any given moment very few females are able to mate and conceive And this causes a shortage of mates for all males in the animal kingdom. This is the biggest challenge for their reproduction And they need to fight other males to obtain matings And in these contexts the males that win are usually the big strong and experienced males however Relatively weak and small and young males still manage to reproduce in a lot of species And we call in animal behavior research we call the strategy they use alternative tactics Even though sometimes they're highly successful in widespread Um, and um, there's just anything to allow the male to avoid direct combat And in our closest living relationships to chimpanzees Multiple males and multiple females live together in communities where members of both sexes may come excuses Um, so they're not pair bonds like those we see sometimes in humans um, and these groups that they live in have up to 200 members And um males um, even though everyone makes with everyone in chimpanzees males don't fire even members of offspring So high-ranking males um have the most offspring and they achieve the status by competing with other males and fighting with them Um, but even before their contenders in this hierarchy They do they can still father offspring. Um, so adolescent males even though they're small and socially and physically immature Like adolescent humans manage to have a lot of offspring. So in my research, um, I tried to figure out how this happened Um, and I studied, um, the behavior of 20 adolescent males and 10 young adult males Um, so this is females ages 9 to 20 years old, which is similar to males 9 to 20 in humans um, and I Recorded every all of their social interactions for two years And I found that they, um, made it with females by forming strong supportive bonds with them Um, and in these relationships, um, males and females would groom each other Um, they would spend time resting together holding hands embracing each other when they were frightened Um, and males also were really really, um, affiliated with the offspring of their females So they would groom them and play with them as well. Um, but despite the affiliative nature of these relationships males also directed aggression to these females um, and And this aggression often involved intimidating them shooting branches to scare them Um doing things to sort of restrict their movements and where they went Um, and I found that that, um, the affiliative and aggressive aspects of these relationships Influenced as intimidating success with them as males got older So males generally used to become dominant to females when they're around 15 years old So when they were younger than 15, the only thing that determined how often they made a particular female Was the affiliated behavior. So how often they were sitting to groom each other holding hands and grooming Um, and as they got older aggression also started to improve their mating success So not just how often they were grooming the female and being nice to her But how often they were shaking branches of her and causing her to fear them and sort of controlling their movements and um But um, even even in that case I found that, um The aggression and mating success only when it was happening within a really strong affiliate relationship So if a male was aggressive to a female who didn't have a bond with she wouldn't listen to him But they would in these relationships. Um, so taken together these results, um, sort of They inform our understanding of how male chimps reproduce But they also have important implications for understanding relationships in humans. Um, so male chimps and females form highly affiliated relationships Um, and these bonded pairs mate and they've all spent together and males have really strong bonds with these offspring They're really gentle and Affiliated with them. Um, but males also dominate females. Um, and then and they sometimes use coercion to control their behavior And these are things that I'm deserving them to see in our own species too So as I mentioned back then it supported this research the number of stages. I um, it supported my first summers Going out to this chimpanzee research site So all the data I collected I was only able to do after I'd already learned how to find chimpanzees in the forest Follow them for 12 hours a day Navigate and not get lost Um, and I'm going to identify all of them. So they're now as similar to me as any person is I can't really describe how I recognize any one individual and once I was one particular detail just as a person I know um, and When I went out to conduct the main research Our main data collection the two years of data collection I did Back I'm also supported that research time. Um, and now that I'm back and I'm supporting me to write up the results of my research That allows me Time to write about all of this but also to work on other academic activities. One of which is writing policies and coming up with Actually like actions to take to prevent a section is conductive in most field sites Which is something that's really common in my field Um, we're working out of these places where everyone is looking together and tense them together and really isolated for a long period of time So that's the most important thing Thank you Good morning, everyone My name is Joseph. I afraidy, but please call me joe I am in my sixth year in the phd program in applied physics working in the physics department And my sixth unit program is going to be my best year and should be my last year as well I want to thank rackham for Giving me the pre doctoral fellowship to support me through this sixth year So that I have time to finish up the really exciting projects. I've been working on over the past five years So if I wanted to sum up my research in applied physics for you in one sentence I would say that I hit semiconductors with lasers today To get us better electronics tomorrow So let me give a little more detail on what I'm talking about So who here has some electronics with them? Maybe a cell phone a tablet A laptop computer. I can see quite a few of these just from here on the panel Technology is amazing and it gets better and better every year and one One thing that has been a part of that one drive that has been a part of that is something that's called morse law Has anyone heard of morse law here So morse law is this industry drive to make the little electronic components on computer chips smaller and smaller to make The to have the ability to have twice as many on a chip every two years or so Now that sounds great and it's led to a lot of cool innovation However, that can't last forever Eventually, you're going to get so small that you're going to run into different physical barriers such as heating or so small that Physics doesn't work quite the way you expect it to anymore So if we're going to keep innovating keep getting better and better electronics Even if we're going to run up against a size limit, we might need to rethink How we think about electronics. So electronics comes from the word electron, right? That's that tiny negatively charged particle that hangs out in atoms And electronics use currents Flows of electron charge we turn those currents on and off. That's how you get the sorts of electronic chips we have today But electrons have more than charge. They have this really quirky quantum property called spin And spin is really cool And could be the key to a new form of electronics that has been called very appropriately spin tronics So instead of using the charge of the electron, what if you could use the spin now? I haven't told you what the spin is if you want to know more about that We can have a 10 to 30 minute discussion after after this where I can wax poetically about electron spin But the idea is a fundamentally different kind of electronic Device now if you wanted to build such a device you need to check off a couple boxes You need to have some material where you could Align electron spins now. I want to say here. I'm not doing quantum computing That's another buzzword you might be familiar with where we might look at a single electron spin Instead I'm looking at lots of electrons billions and billions and billions in tiny materials the sides of my fingernail And so we would need to have a way to access those electron spins That's one thing we'd have to figure out we have to figure out How what how to manipulate them and what happens to them just naturally? And then we would need to figure out a way to measure them or detect them And so my research has intersected with a few of these questions over my time at michigan Luckily, I work with a material known as gallium arsenide gallium arsenide is used in things like red leds If you've seen a red led you might have seen gallium arsenide in your life And we can use a laser to access the electron spins we can align all of these spins together We can also use a laser to figure out how well they stay aligned sometime later and when I say time I'm not talking seconds. I'm talking picoseconds. That's trillions of seconds Which is a really really short time and we're able to do that using Mirrors and lenses and a whole table full of optical elements And so we want to know what happens Once we've aligned electron spins and then when we measure them what happens in between And there are lots of complicating factors there One of which I mentioned atoms before and atoms have nuclei the protons and neutrons at the center Those also have spin and so the electron spins and the nuclear spins interact They're They're going back and forth throughout this really short time scale i'm talking about and we want to understand that interaction If we can answer all three of these questions how to Align electron spins how to manipulate and also figure out what's going on with them when we're not looking And then detect electron spins and we can answer all three of those questions We could identify materials that could then be used to make spin tronic devices So as i've i've hinted at i'm not the device person myself I'm trying to lay the groundwork for these devices by understanding the underlying spin physics And so like I said i'm over in randall lab on the dyag hitting semiconductors with lasers over and over and over again Using magnetic fields electric fields using a whole host of physics things out of my physics toolbox to understand the spin physics So we can hopefully have a dare I say it faster better spin-based future So that's where my research is interested. That's the 20 year goal that we're looking at in the future But another thing other than the rackum predoctoral fellowship that i'm grateful to rackum for has been opportunities to explore what my own future might be in less than 20 years And so one one such thing has been conference travel grants So i've been able to travel to the big conference for my professional society the american physical society i've been able to go to our march meeting which is a meeting of over You know 11 000 speakers Covering all sorts of physics and that's given me the opportunity to hear what the new up-to-date research is in my field Try to establish connections with other graduate students and researchers And that that's been great to see what that life As a researcher might be like In addition one question that i've had for all graduate school. That's unrelated to physics has been how do we as researchers communicate our work To audiences who haven't gone through the same education that we have So i've been highly involved in a group here at michigan called relate which trains researchers in communication Fundamentals and we've been very lucky to have the support of rackum As we go about the university being invited to give workshops on how do i talk about my science with my neighbor with my Grandma with this person down the street I've been lucky enough to take a summer workshop nine weeks once a week to Work on my own communication skills and then have had the opportunity the last two years since beginning in 2018 To help train others in this same thing and rackum has Funded us through the rackum interdisciplinary workshop program to reach in the times that i've been teaching at least 60 uh university michigan Postdocs and graduate students Here over the summer as well as hundreds of other Folks both at michigan and elsewhere through workshops right here And we've also had the support of some great faculty members some of whom may have been Maybe in the audience right now and so as I think about how communication might factor in my future career as well I'm really grateful for the opportunity rackum has given While also getting to do cutting-edge research as well. So I'd be happy to talk about physics Communication or anything in between Thank you for listening Hi, good morning. Um, my name is wearable p.a I'm a second year phc student in the department of chemistry Um, but first let's say it's really exciting to be here. Um, I'm pretty new as you hear I'm second year. Um, so I'm really just starting to get in the net and grit of my research Um, so hopefully you guys find it interesting. I do the little gross, but I'll definitely see how you feel about it later. Um, But yeah, I definitely want to thank rackum for doing me so many opportunities Um, rackum actually has funded me from the beginning of my program. So I'm a rackum rackum merit fellow So they've funded me for the first two years of my program Um, which has been great. Um, I'm originally from the virgin islands So this negative 35 weather probably would not have put me in the best mood to be teaching students in January So I'm exceptionally happy to have been funded for those first two so first two years. Um, so thank you very much I'm a thank you to donors who's helped that happen. Um, it was fantastic um So a little bit about my research Um, so I would define my research as natural product drug discovery Um, but to say plainly, um, I have two major projects I'm going to focus on one but feel free later to ask you about my second project just for the sake of time I'd only want to focus on one thing Um, with at least this panel. Um, but my focus is on the oil microbiome So why would I be interested in that? Um, so recently research has kind of discovered how the um, the bacteria in our body are actually pretty important for like systematic diseases that we have Um, I particularly focus on the oral microbiome But recently, um, right now actually harboring doing this study on the gut microbiome, particularly, um, in stomach diseases Um, particularly Crohn's disease and they're showing how when you have spurs for like inflammation during Crohn's disease They're actually correlating it with certain bacteria that are proliferating in your stomach at that time Um, so it's pretty interesting Somehow like certain bacteria can really affect your ghillie function and like your your system. I'm your regular system So what I study is how oral microbiomes also affect our Our systemic diseases as well as oral diseases as well Um, so I study natural product chemistry So if you guys don't know like when you have jujavadas or other oral diseases It's kind of caused by fluctuations of bacteria in your mouth So your bacteria kind of goes to this really interesting evolutionary system where they kind of balance each other out It's kind of like a fight to the death most of the time This is about it that way Um, but they regulate each other quite efficiently. Um using different metabolites and signals to let one know Okay, you can't grow anymore. It's enough like you're kind of taking over Um, so when we're up taking or where we're kind of contracting these oral diseases What's happening is our theoretically bad bacteria is overpopulating our mouth It's causing this Producing too many metabolites that's causing other signals or down regulating the growth of the good bacteria that would kind of keep it balanced So what I study is what from this metabolites that these different bacteria in our mouth are producing to see how we can regulate our stuff and have a natural um Have a natural substance that we can regulate like incorporate with our body That's not foreign But it's just already naturally produced but can also help us balance out the bacteria that's going over going in our mouth And causing these oral diseases Um, and that's just one component of this project But it's really fascinating is that they found that some of our oral microbiome can actually be humongous biomarkers for other systemic diseases Um, right now. I'm studying how different um Or micro different bacteria in your mouth are proliferating when you have like different cardiovascular diseases or have diabetes Um, so that's actually been a really big part of my project To see if we can actually use bacteria within your mouth as biomarkers for disease in general So that's like a major component of my research But um, this isn't really important for me just because vacuum has definitely funded a lot of the Experiences that I've had outside. Um, and being a vacuum air fellow Can introduce a really large community of others graduates students on campus That have allowed me to learn a lot more My project is a lot. A lot of it is partially Statistic based and I can definitely tell you I have no background in statistics. Absolutely not And it's definitely not my strong suit But in these communities, I was actually able to gain a friend who Has been exceptional in my research because they have offered to help me so much with it Doing statistical analysis and this is a really big part of my debt my data and being able to Coralite these different. Um, yeah The these different tablets and exactly what they mean. So I'm really grateful for echo. So if you guys have any questions, please Hello everyone with morning Some of you may be familiar with the Genome the human genome project That was completed a couple almost two decades ago 2003 The main objective of the human genome project was to Ping down all the different human genes their physical location in respect to each other And and their function So this was a massive multinational collaboration That as you can imagine impacted many fields in science But particularly, uh, it allowed us to look at human evolution at a very different scale So one of the most interesting findings from That stemmed from from this project and other research that follow just after was that some populations of humans have a significant proportion of Neanderthal genes in their genome some of them up to 5% of of the of mental genes in their genome and Uh, an important subset of these genes have immune functions So human acquire, uh, this variation to interbreeding with, uh, Neanderthals so this, uh, hybridization that's what's happening in eurasia 60 to 40 Thousand years ago. So humans were interbreeding with Neanderthals We you might be aware we don't do that anymore. Uh, we have, uh, those Uh, archaic hominids have been extinct for for a long time and So it's kind of difficult to know what exactly, uh, happened With all these hybridization and disinteraction in terms of the genes Uh, well, fortunately, there are some species of primates that still do hybridized And i'm very lucky to work in a lab where we have one of the few well characterized hybrid zones or, uh Of primates these are the how the hybrid zone with how they're monkey species The mantle how they're monkey and the black color monkey in in southeast mexico And this allows to to look at what is the effect of of hybridization this interaction of these two species In terms of the of the immune genes can they be passing this this favorable or advantageous genetic variants from one another So that's mainly the the scope of of my of my research So from rackham i've been able to, uh, travel to the field Do all these sample collection with the, uh, um rackham international research award and then also i've been, uh Able to bring back my samples process them get all these data and also this has been done through Some research couple research grants from from rackham Uh, and also again rackham has allowed me to present my work at different places So the help i received from rackham has been tremendous But i think some sometimes it's just It's missed that is not just the How rackham supports students and how this helped advance science and particular in our field It also has a very deep impact in In people so i my in my program. There is a big teaching component to that I did my master's here and have taught for I think 12 terms now. So, um So without that without your support, uh, I wouldn't be able to tell my students What is like to go to the field? Do all this research what it's like to do data what it's like to be A grad student here and you know, hopefully inspire them to to be scientists also, I've been able to Go and do these outreach programs that also that go to high schools here in an arbor detroit or programs that we bring in like fans To just show high school students. How how science is done and what is What is the process behind it also some other programs in the in the in the museum in the new building In central campus that you you might know of so so yeah The impact is it's really really high also on on other people and promoting science particularly Now I run into some other students of mine. They're got students now. They're in PhD programs. They're In medical school. So it's your help just not impacts me impacts a lot of people here and I think it's just a How do they say this just my my little Giving back to the community here for for the help I receive and so I just want to say thank you for that Yeah I'm Jung Yoon. I'm a music composer I'm Jung Yoon. I'm a music composer and I'm currently studying music composition in the music department I'm currently a fourth year doctoral student And it's typically a third three-year program But I'm very grateful to have one more year to finish my dissertation Yeah, so talking briefly about my background. I'm korean. I Came to the united states when I was 16 So I came here for high school and then I went to college in Ohio and then I'm still here. I'm 29. So it's been 13 years since that's I've been in the states yeah So talking about my project my project is basically A music video for the string quartet that I wrote myself My string quartet is in five different movements And it's a music video for my string quartet that features two dancers And the string quartet as well as my own music So my string quartet is called han And han is supposedly a uniquely korean concept Han I don't know if you're familiar with a concept called han, but it's A unique type of korean concept That's supposedly that koreans have developed during their experience of violence and oppression during the time When they're colonized by japan and it's very interesting because it's a Passive type of emotion that is potentially very explosive But what I find it really interesting that it's passive So it's a mixture of feelings that are contradicting to one another Including it's mainly a form of grief and also anger and wanting to revenge But then you also have passion hope and There is happiness there too So I think that although that concept is a uniquely korean concept but it's something that Everybody can communicate with everybody has han in their life So in this video, I'm talking about my han and my experience as navigating in different cultural references In my experience as a woman And a female composer in the field where the composers are actually still mostly Caucasian and male So my uh my piece talking about my piece itself. It's in five different movements In the first movement, I set a korean folk song called bird for blue birds. It's So I set it in my first movement And then in the second movement with a string quartet instrument I try to try to emulate the color of pansori, which is a type of korean theater It's usually featuring a korean Female singer who has a very brash breaking and dark Voice quality that's also very nasally and bored but very harsh than breaking And I try to emulate that color in my second movement In my third movement incorporates a korean drum called junggo It's an hourglass drum And then there are two sides to it with left hand you use your hand and then on the right hand you have a stick So I use junggo in my third movement and then Try to use it together with a string quartet instrument And my fourth movement is called mu. So it's a cello solo movement featuring Actually just the concept of mu. Mu means nothing or nothingness or I think Maybe we're more familiar with the concept of like zen or being empty So in this movement, I don't have any melodies Or anything that you can relate to but I use a register contour and dynamics to communicate like the grief and anger in the fourth movement In fifth movement, it's called maom Maom means heart or mind in korean and in this movement, I specifically incorporate a buddhist chant so Uh, the lyrics involve mainly repetitious calling of amitabhuda So they keep going, uh Namu amitabhu Namu amitabhu So namu amitabhu is basically calling uh amitabhuda, which Symbolized cosmic energy in buddhism. So I'm calling the cosmic energy And I juxtapose it with the concept of maom, which is a Maom in individual person So I juxtapose between the cosmic energy and the concept of individual maom there So that's the gist of my pieces And I have two dancers that are, uh, singing, uh, not singing acting and also dancing for my music video We recently did a video shooting at a private farm in Mulberry, Michigan and this, uh Dancer actually flew from tokyo japan. He's a buddho dancer I don't know if you're familiar with a buddho dance, but They developed buddho dance in japan as a reaction to creating something of their own Uh, because they thought that their dances were Prominently western during that time. So it was, uh, this buddho dance was used to talk about taboo topics in japan As well as bizarre and things that we cannot conceive as human beings So this is, uh Currently How my project is going, uh, the project is almost done except a couple more recordings and the video shootings for the musicians And I'm happy to share the photos and any other things that I have during our lunch And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to finish my project. It's been really wonderful experience meeting all these, uh Artists from different disciplines and this is basically a prototype for what I want to do As a music composer in the future and as possibly a music faculty as well. So thank you so much for making this happen Thanks very much everyone for sharing your research and your stories. So we're uh, now we have we have time for questions So I would welcome, uh You to engage directly with our panelists with questions you might have we have one right here to start and we have a microphone Uh, if you just call it close it'll she work First there we go First I want to thank all of you for our very fine explanations for those of us who are not in any of these fields So I appreciate that and I'm curious to know a little more about you as human beings Where you came from how it is you came to choose the Career path you have chosen and what brought you to michigan university michigan in particular If a couple you are willing to To speak on that working. Oh, yeah. Uh, so I'm from Mexico by with my undergrad there I believe uh, they're my whole life. I came here, uh for my master's program and now PhD So I chose michigan because the university is Really good, right stop much, right? So, uh, it's not harvard, but Uh Anyways, uh, but yeah, no, I was really interested of my department in particular. It's uh one of the Top top three in the nation now So we have a very diverse group of people working on many many things. So for me It was a very easy choice when I got the The admissions the offer to to come here And you know, uh, it's been it's been The adjusting to everything has been Uh I would say easier than than than what I thought to be honest, you know, you have many many resources for any any particular problem that you might face for mental health from funding for For any any anything I I cannot you know, we have this great also Benefits program and So I was very very lucky very lucky to be here and continue to do my my phd here And I don't know as an individual. I I felt really happy And it's a decision that I that I felt very, you know, very Rightful that I that I took and and yeah, I think that's that's my story overall I'm from Michigan originally I grew up on the west side of the state Michigan Holds a special place in my heart I went here for undergrad and was gone for almost 13 years and frankly never thought I would move back to Michigan. Um, I always Had an interest or spark for adventure And knowing myself more through getting to know other cultures I lived abroad for quite a long time And then was based in dc working for an intergovernmental international agency And when it came time to decide to further my career and I also had at that point, um, been adjunct lecturing at a university in DC and knew that I wanted to Have an opening to academics in the future There's really no other choice but michigan out of the schools that I was looking at the Kind of offer for inter interdisciplinary and work that michigan provides And just kind of the funding mechanisms that facilitate that Gave me kind of the push that I needed to I guess to come back to michigan And I've been really really pleased to be here. I mean just to give you one example The university has a program called m cubed, um, which I'm hoping to maybe use for a postdoc here That facilitates, um inter school collaboration By funding their students through getting three separate schools within the university to tag on to an interdisciplinary and project anything just that unique, um Kind of especially you could probably speak to this more but um in a higher education now being a truly research based hard money school provides A few more unique collaborations in the field of public health and you would otherwise being in a school that's funded By what we might call soft money Or project kind of based resources Yeah, one more, please go ahead So mine is a little different as I said before I'm from the virgin island But I didn't think about graduate school until it's in my junior year of college Um, so I was a politics major when I started Um, and I went to dc for my undergrad to do advocacy for education Um, so as many of you guys know um virgin island. I'm from the u.s. Brejans particularly st. Thomas. Um, so education wasn't my education at least in high school wasn't as developed as my peers were And I didn't really realize that until I got into undergrad Um where like my math skills was probably like two years behind everybody else Um, so it was really hard. So I really didn't think um, I really could Make an impact in science as I thought other than through like advocacy through education and education policy specifically um, but then I got thrusted into this Um research opportunity at university michigan. Um my junior year on the summer before my senior year Um, now it's in the lab. I'm in right now actually doing research as an undergrad for the first time in my life And I love the experience. I loved michigan. I've met a lot of people. It was to the college of pharmacy and They connected me through the chemistry department through pips different programs under rackam And that's how I figured out I wanted to go to graduate school and specifically graduate school at u of m They kind of made a community here for me That made me feel comfortable enough to feel like, okay. Well, maybe I can actually do this. I can do science Let's try it a little bit. Um, but yeah, so it was definitely um, University of michigan definitely gives you a community that inspires growth Um, I visited after when I started applying to grad schools. I visited some other universities like randor bell I'm some schools in um, florida One washington state and I don't think any of them fostered a community like university of michigan It gives you the cutting edge research that you want without feeling that you're being pinned against your classmates Regularly and that's definitely an environment. I didn't want Um, and the university of michigan definitely helps create a very comfortable environment where like, okay You learn at your own pace you get what you get done and we're going to try to make you the best scientist you can Um, so then that's particularly why I chose university of michigan. They kind of inspired me to do research in the first place um, so I kind of stuck it for the long hot university of michigan, so Thank you another question from our audience Joe, uh, I know you're not a device man, but pretend you're a science fiction writer for a moment with your background tell us about something that spin uh spin, uh, Tronics would look like, you know 10 20 50 years in the future So I think what I like about spin tronics is the idea that it wouldn't Have to be something that looks wildly different But that you could replace the electronics we have now with spin tronic devices The certainly the goal in the field is just to be able to take. Oh, here's an electronic transistor Let's have a spin based transistor instead And so you get a a future that on the surface might not look a whole lot different than today But the hopes would be devices that could be certainly more energy efficient If not better or faster in other device benchmarks that I am not an expert in and so whereas the The future of quantum computing, which again is not what I do But it's something that people often think of when I talk about my work That could look like a very different future, but spin tronics would hopefully look a lot like what we have today But better and I realized that but better isn't incredibly satisfying So I'm not going to go right to science fiction novel based on that But the the idea would be doing what we're doing now Better in a way that wouldn't be a huge paradigm shift Is that okay great It's kind of directed at your arm, but it I have a follow-up comment for all of you But you were mentioning a lot about the students who Go to a kind of a backup college or a baseline college in terms of Dealing with that you were talking about giving information to students. Have you also looked into encouraging students that go to these schools to Continue on to hire graduate schools such as michigan where you can get a an amazing degree and this is a lot of us I kind of speak from personal base is that You know, I went to a university. It was comfortable for me as well But I also ended up coming to see university of michigan. So I think another pathway Of solving that might be trying to figure out a way to get these students to apply to graduate school and always apply to the best graduate schools regardless of Of what field they're in but The other comment for the rest of the field since a lot of you do field work around the world To spend time looking at the people you're working with who are from that local area to consider Maybe they would be a good candidate to come to the university of michigan or come to the united states to to graduate work and because there's a lot of Wonderful people out there who'd never get an opportunity, but they're working with you and I think it would be something that would be worthwhile to Just put in the back of your mind while you're international traveling Well, I think that's an excellent point and I think On your side speaking, I feel like providing information to the students is relatively less important than encouraging them to realize that they have a Way more potential they then they think they have because In this case we are talking about the many students that they are from underprivileged background and the their social surroundings is kind of Harder for them to open their eyes. It's everybody else from the high school is just to go to a nearby nearby college or She the students never met anyone from the University of Michigan, then they may feel like going to university such a distant ideas Never occurred to their mind and they were just a golden worm. So I think Related to your point of encouraging them to go to the best graduate school or Go to the best undergraduate colleges. It's a it's the same idea to Help them to realize that they have potential and once they have that idea What I mean once we can implement Implant that idea into their mind, then they have a computer. They have internet. They have google they can figure out Part b was a bit of a comment and a bit of a question. Does anybody want to Take that as a question So and how are you please I was looking no, no, no, no, sorry. I was looking at I was going to say that one um Or it's a lot of graduate students who work at the research site that I met in Uganda one of something that um That this site is the research site of Yvonne and university mockery um, it's their field station more sort of guests there, but um, there are a lot of undergraduates from that university that Are are fantastic. It's sort of it specializes more in Like the research they're doing in the forest is like more ecology based and not plants So they're um tend to not be like a lot of undergrads who are interested in working in the forest or not So obsessed with chimpanzees and that they they like them. But it's kind of like, um, oh, you're just you are studying these like fluffy Creatures who are very interested in sex Yeah, there's like a whole social world studying different animals and like what it means um, but They so a lot of times um if graduate students if we're we get enough funding we can have can hire Um, like a recent under a recent undergraduate to be a research system And then they can get really direct experience and collecting data um Like developing all these skills may be conducting an independent project and then they're in a really good position to apply to um the in the university and work with like Yeah, I guess anywhere in the world because you students are from different places, but that has been something that um like that uh rack and funds can support is The funding for more assistance Excellent. Thank you in this Yes, uh Very impressed with the panel again this year. Thank you rackham for choosing a Diverse set of topics. Thank you panelists for sharing your projects and your passion and it shows um, I have a question for maribel um, I Was interested in terms of your findings and your research about the Role of diet in terms of maintaining the balance that you mentioned in terms of The oral microbes and also Is the impact of diet if you have found that different from in terms of your gut Microbe system versus your oral In terms of my maintaining health my balance It's hard to say. Um, I'm really at the cusp of my research. So it's really starting to It Natural product research is really is a really long process Um extracting compounds and characterizing it really takes a long time Especially like sometimes there's not enough of a compound. Um And specifically because my research doesn't necessarily focus on diet I can't particularly say much on that topic but And yes, like from what I've studied and what I've researched so far when I understand Um, that's what we're trying to correlate right? So we're trying to correlate how Your diet and what you're incorporating and Incorporating into your system how it affects the microbiome Within your mouth and if that microbiome then affects other places like your gut and affects other systematic diseases and how it affects you Later on so that's that's kind of like what our whole end goal is like We're hoping that we can find these correlations so that we can have faster processes and more efficient processes Of finding these biomarkers and finding ways to see okay if you're having an illness What is it and like being able to kind of like Have a faster way of I guess breaking down and figuring out what sort of diseases that you might have or what issue you might have Um, but in case with a specific diet it does affect it. Um, so right now we have samples from like Um, a couple patients We have like saliva samples and they have different variations of health And then we're comparing them for what we're doing in the lab and seeing if the metabolites are the same See if metabolites are different if certain things are being produced when you're having a certain disease Especially particularly in your mouth or in your body in your system and seeing it how we can correlate these Are their specific metabolites are produced more in your mouth or in your gut? When you have a specific specific disease and why is this happening what it's producing it? Okay, is is this metabolite causing these like informations? Is it causing something to you or is it something that adverse effect that is this disease producing this metabolite? Can we use that as a way to detect other diseases or can we use it as a way to treat it? Um, this is kind of the questions that we're really trying to ask in our my research. So I hope that kind of answers your question Other questions I'm going to jump in with the opportunity to ask one. This is actually a question for Cara So I understood that um, you know these when you're thinking about whole populations and having protection There's these kind of local groupings can be important if they if they kind of aren't aren't on board I'm wondering, you know, when you talked about Um, when you go around the world England the United States and Africa like are there What's the same about how you think about the problems in those different locations and what is different? So I mean I'm kind of specifically Bit interested in our potential of being desertified here in the United States and what lessons can be learned about that from from the work across the world often starting with the same sort of kind of demographic characteristics that you may um include in any sort of survey Design to be able to identify these populations Um, but really the the reasons underlying why those clustering of demographic characteristics Exists are going to be in place for diverse reasons um, you know the u.s. In particular, um, you find um clustering of under unvaccinated around certain religious affiliation um, and that in part also is more present in states where there are um Religious exemptions to state laws for for vaccination. And so I think there is a policy component of revisiting that and some states have taken the route of Doing away with religious exempt exemptions and um sticking only with medical exemptions But what you actually have Are we've observed in the u.s. In states that have gone that route as you've seen an increase in medical exemptions So there's a lot of I think just open dialogue that needs to happen around this issue Engaging with practitioners. Um, and just kind of the individual perspective that what matters here is society in the community Not only the individual but that's hard in a setting Where um, kind of the potential risk for an adverse event following immunization Is more real to people In eradication elimination settings than the risk of disease acquisition Even in some of our care settings here. It's so rare to see certain vaccine-prevenable diseases that um young physicians no longer kind of Um quickly detect Early signs and so there's a whole kind of educational component that that needs to happen um, and then globally, um, I think that um There's a lot of um work Funding work that's been done by a few huge philanthropic organizations to make access Barriers um fewer um, and we see Now newer vaccines that are common in high resource settings like the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine rotavirus HPV Extending to to more populations, but you still want to be able to detect around certain almost thinking of certain kind of demographic characteristics or Other characteristics as as risk kind of profiling To be able to ensure that programmatic intervention takes into consideration those clusterings of of individuals who potentially could be under Are unvaccinated and therefore put the whole of the community at risk Thank you Last week. Oh one last question. This is your last question. Thank you Nope all you I'd like to ask you about your experience as a member of the rachem community The smaller community inside the larger community of the university of michigan Whether or not any of you knew each other In some other context before you were assembled As a panel and if there has been any particular experience that any of you would like to talk about that has Been a significant contributor to your feeling a part of the rachem community Maybe a panelist that hasn't had the chance to Speak out So the question is if i'm feeling that If i'm gaining support from the rachem community and if i feel like i'm part of this community Um, so my department is up in the north So I think I haven't met any of these individuals before because i'm up in the north sort of I don't know if you guys been to the music school, but we're kind of on our own and we're Actually building a dance building next to us so that we can collaborate so much more in here, but I have always um Reached out to rachem whenever I needed help. I think whether it was Applying for a faculty position or traveling overseas or just raising funding for my dissertation So I've been here a lot for those workshops that I had That talk about like what it what it's like to be interviewing as a faculty member for a faculty member and Writing diversity statements and all those small things. I have to travel down here to learn that and then I have had Multiple opportunities to interact with people who all went through the same workshops Do you guys have any other things to All right, I could speak a little on um, like different groups for rachem. Um, so I'm actually Part of two like major student groups for rachem. So it's on rachem student government and students of color of rachem So I'm on eboard for both I'm so really busy Um, so I can speak more of a dynamic for like at least what I definitely think rachem is definitely trying to push first guidance in here So at least what I've seen being an incoming student and relatively new they're really trying to push the graduate's experience Trying to get more availability for students to interact with each other I can definitely say at least with my department. I don't even see students from my department very often We're very lab based and in our work all the time. It's really hard to interact with other people, especially outside of chemistry So really, I think rachem is really trying to push hard for encouraging students to get to know each other Um, and I think through those groups. I've definitely been able to meet a lot of new people People I probably never would have interacted with because like I'm in a really hard time People from school education, kinesiology, things like that. I would never have the opportunity to do this because our paths don't cross um We have like annual like events like fall ball, which is like our like I guess prom of graduate school again, I don't know And that's definitely something that's really great because it's a collaboration of different schools in rachem So I think like they're definitely pushing to foster more community here And they'll just because University of Michigan in general is such a big campus and such a big population of students It is hard to kind of feel like you can Definitely settle your ground here because there's so much going on Especially with the undergrad life kind of undergrads take over I think you really need a summer here as a graduate student to really see what campus looks like as a graduate student by yourself Rather than like during the hustle and bustle during the regular semester But I think rachem is doing really doing a good job trying to foster that community here um I think at least especially based off of My friends and peers from other universities and like what they're coming from I think rachem is doing a pretty good job so far and like i'm trying to improve that Good job. Thank you So we're at the hour. Oh, I'm and uh, well, I think we we need to close the session at now. It's it's 11 30 I would just like to take a brief moment to to talk Just to mention, you know, I think we saw the both the depth of the scholarship But then also how the scholarship matters and not just matters to society and our public but also to you yourselves and uh, and specifically then how The experience of being a graduate student is not just about the research and scholarship There's these other dimensions that you all were kind enough to identify for us and that really I find very gratifying because Because because of just the the experience is like is a is a long one Is a significant one and so just knowing about all the ways in which we can make an impact at this point in your careers Is really wonderful to see so at that let's take a moment to thank our panelists for their time That's been a really wonderful Thank you very much. Um, if they're you know, I know we weren't able to take all the questions I'm sorry for that. So maybe if if you're interested in coming down to ask we could have that as well. So thank you Thank you for joining us today