 Good morning and welcome to Rackham Graduate School. I'm Mike Solomon and I'm the Rackham Dean. I want to start out I'll be introducing the panelists in just a minute but we have 8,500 Rackham students, our graduate students in Rackham. We have seven of them here and two of them are on crutches so I don't know so I'm not sure what that says about our graduate education and what more maybe they can comment on that but we're really delighted to have our panelists today and I'll be introducing them and we're gonna be getting going in just a moment. Thank you all for joining us for this for this event it's it's really one of my favorite events of the year where we hear directly from our graduate students. As University of Michigan president Mark Social has said graduate students are the heart and soul of the university. I want to echo that sentiment. I'm so excited to lead the graduate school as we build on the deep rich foundation developed over the last century of graduate education at the University of Michigan. University of Michigan conferred its first master's degrees in 1849 and awarded at its first PhDs in 1876 and in fact these were some of the first doctorates awarded at a university in the United States. Then in 1935 a bequest from Horace Rackham created an endowment that his widow Mary Rackham was instrumental in directing towards graduate student fellowships research and this building in which we're sitting right now. Her vision for this building and for the graduate school would be that it would be a center of interdisciplinary exchange on campus and student community. That vision still holds true rings really true to me today. Rackham students come to Ann Arbor from across the world and around the country the areas of study are even more varied. Rackham's more than a hundred graduate programs cover nearly every aspect of scholarship in the humanities and the arts, the social sciences, the biological and health sciences and physical sciences and engineering. Our students bring to campus a wide array of perspectives and interests that are essential to the diversity that makes our graduate school great. While many of our graduate students will pursue academic careers after completing the degrees more than half will go into a wide and expanded variety of careers. Preparation for these diverse career paths equips Michigan graduates with skills and flexibility for a rapidly changing job market. Graduate students seek to engage with companies, public and non-profit agencies, community groups, professional associations and entrepreneurial enterprises to develop their capabilities and learn how their research skills can make a difference in the world. No matter how varied their backgrounds or different their topics of inquiry may be they share and benefit from the kind of exchange that this building is meant to offer and we are trying to promote here today. All of us at Rackham strive each day to build and expand in an environment in which our students feel valued and welcomed, in which they engage in discovery, free inquiry, the open exchange of ideas and the creation of knowledge. That is what graduate education is all about at Rackham, it's what promises it to be as we move forward into our third century. I'm thankful for the chance as dean to undertake this important work and to serve such a varied and academically vibrant community. I'm thankful for the outstanding staff, the excellent faculty, the generous alumni and my devoted colleagues across campus who make our efforts possible. Most of all I'm thankful for more than 8,500 Rackham students of Michigan who are giving and are shaping the vital issues of our day. With us this morning our seven outstanding students maybe an eighth will join us who are rigorous researchers and effective teachers. They are scholars who will collaborate across intellectual boundaries and engage in their communities. They'll tell us about their research and share their perspectives on being graduate students at Michigan. The students are each going to introduce themselves one at a time and they're going to speak for about five minutes and then we'll open up the floor to question and answers from you after the last student has spoken. So with that we're going to start from the far end. I'll ask Andrew Cabanas to start us off. Thank you very much. So I'm an archaeologist fundamentally at heart. That means that on some level I kind of study communities. I study people but I also study people who I can't really observe. I study people who we don't really get to know in the way that we get to know each other but we actually can learn a lot from archaeology that can help us understand the world that we currently live in. One of the big questions for me that kind of drives a lot of my research here in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, which is the program I'm housed in between classics and art history, is that we really can use archaeology to understand what makes communities unique. So think of what makes your hometown special. What do you remember about it? Is it the food? Is it the way people walk on the street? Is it the architecture? Is it the fact that maybe people there talk slightly differently? Whatever it is that makes you think of your hometown, it's probably a practice. It's probably a behavior that people do on a daily basis. And those types of practices are a combination of several different things. They're partly the types of things that people bring with them that they learned at home. You learn how to talk from your parents. You learn how to cook maybe from them as well. But they're also an element of innovation. Something that gets brought together when a new group of people forms a new city. When a community changes over as generations pass. Thus cities are a little bit chaotic. They're difficult to understand because they're constantly combining old and new things on a daily basis, recreating a communal identity that really affects the way that cities thrive as communities. Are they going to survive for centuries? Are they going to disappear within 70 years? Those are the sorts of questions which are really important if we want to understand modern cities and the real world that we live in, but are actually kind of hard to study in the modern day. We don't know what a hundred years from now looks like. So if we want to try and understand modern cities, actually our best data set for this is the past. And that's why I'm an archaeologist is because I work on studying ancient cities to build models to understand modern ones. My own research mostly focuses on households in ancient Greece, which is a really great place for studying cities because people have been working there for a very long time. We have literary sources. We have hundreds of years of archaeology which have uncovered hundreds of cities, thousands of houses, and in that way we can actually reconstruct individual ways of life. How do individual households decide to cook their food? How do they make the clothes that now we don't think so much about that we wear, but each of us is wearing thousands, well thousands of meters, miles of thread that would have taken months to weave in the ancient world? So really these are two fundamental things, making sure that you have food to eat and making sure you have clothes to wear that were the most time consuming tasks for most of human history. And partly through support from RACM as well as through the International Institute, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, and some of the professional societies that I'm a part of, I've been able to go around through Greece and study some of these early cities that we have there and better understand the exact way that individual behaviors give rise to community identities. So I want to bring just in two very brief examples just to show kind of the types of work that I do. So on the one hand, this summer I spent some time in Athens, a little bit of time in Northern Greece near Thessaloniki, reconstructing the way that people used cooking pottery. Just in the same way that you when you stir sugar into your tea or coffee in the morning, your that spoon leaves little traces in the bottom of the mug that maybe over a few years you notice build up those same types of traces build up on everything you use in daily life, including the cook pots that you might use, particularly when they're made of ceramic, it's really easy for somebody who knows what they're looking for to tell exactly how they were used. And that means that I can now trace differences in the way that maybe people in Northern Greece are choosing to fry their food, whereas people in central Greece near Athens are choosing to boil it. And that can tell us important things about maybe why they're doing that and where those traditions come from. On the other hand, I've also spent several years now about seven working in Eastern Crete in a set of small villages that were occupied between about 3,000 and 2,500 years ago, where we can trace individual households in the way that they move across the landscape with and their types of textile technologies that they bring with them. Why do they choose to make the claws that they wear in that exact way? By looking at the tools, measuring them, we can understand exactly how and when innovation arises. And one of the things that we find is that while people in small villages that are near each other may have very similar ideas about how to produce clothing, all of a sudden when they come together to form a city, there's a lot more inequality apparent. Some people keep making basic fabrics, but some people don't have to buy any more. Some people have so much wealth that they can spend their time making very elaborate tapestries, things that will never be functional in the way that a piece of clothing will, but show off the skill of the person using it. And that's something that could really only be cultivated if they had the wealth to know that they could buy their clothing on the market. So by tracing these differences through little case studies like these, we can actually build up a sense of how these types of things move in the modern world. We can understand why people move to suburbs, what types of lifestyle choices make them move there, what type of ways of life bring people back into cities. And it's by building up these models that we're actually going to develop the science of cities that I think we're currently on the verge of developing, and is currently a major topic of research. And as I continue to develop this research and present it at conferences here at the University of Michigan, as well as across the United States, or this last year I was presented at one in Germany, really it's the support of the graduate program that makes sure that trying to do this cutting edge research is really going to happen in the way that it should so that we can understand the types of communities that we live in today. Thank you. Pauline Crouch, and I am a fifth year in mechanical engineering. Those diseases that medicines do not cure are cured by the knife. Those that the knife does not cure are cured by the fire. And those that fire do not cure must be considered incurable. Hippocrates in 370 BC made the first recorded mention of the use of heat as a therapeutic. To this day, the effective temperature on the body is of interest to clinicians, researchers, athletes, and perhaps anyone that has had to live through a Georgia summer or a Michigan winter. The body maintains temperature homeostasis by the process of thermal regulation. Just like Goldilocks, our body doesn't want to be too hot or too cold. The body's ability to thermal regulate is an important coping mechanism to withstand various physiological states such as fever and environmental exposure, exposures such as weather. The cardiovascular system in particular plays a vital role in thermal regulation because of its influence on heat transfer via forced conduct convection and conduction through changes in blood distribution, blood velocity and proximity of tissues. It remains unclear how the allocation of blood in various compartments such as the innermost core, the fat, the muscle or the skin changes with temperature. Challenges in measuring core vasculature have resulted in a lack of empirical information regarding how it might change with core temperature. Therefore, to fully understand the cardiovascular system's role in thermal regulation, my thesis has focused on using urine models to study the effect of temperature on core vasculature. The overall purpose of my research is to provide a novel and physiologically accurate approach to studying thermal regulation by incorporating structural and functional changes in the cardiovascular system occurring in the core. The hope is that this research can help researchers, clinicians and others interested in the effect of temperature to better model and predict cardiovascular outcomes. So how do we use small animal models such as mice and rats to study how the cardiovascular system changes? The answer, a multi-million dollar magnet. Although historically preclinical MRI studies of the cardiovascular system have been focused on pathological diseases such as deep vein thrombosis, which is also studied in our lab, I was given the unique opportunity at the University of Michigan to create my own research plan funded in part by Rackham Research Grants, a Rackham Summer Award and a Rackham Merit Fellowship. And I get to use this ultra-high-field 7 Tesla magnet to answer some fundamental questions regarding thermal regulation and bio heat. For our first three papers, we anesthetize the mice and image the animals while monitoring respiration and heart rate. We use a PID-controlled heater to blow hot air across the animals and we can control the core temperature from mild hypothermia to mild hypothermia. At each temperature we image three or four locations of the body from head to toe and we can quantify blood flow, vessel area and measure strain at the carotid artery, the jugular vein, the aorta, the infernal vein, and the femoral artery in veins. Overall we have shown that with temperature increases in flow occur in most arteries in veins which is opposite to current hypothesis regarding the venous response. We have shown that the magnitude of increased flow varies based on anatomical location and that the increase in flow is sometimes involves cross-sectional area and velocity and other times involves only one or the other. A future incorporation of core cardiovascular changes into modeling is important because blood flow is critical in heat generation and in transfer in vivo. My hope is that my work positively influences many areas of science and engineering. From designing improved and personalized space suits to better understanding thermal regulation in the elderly who do not tolerate temperature deviations as well to designing better therapeutic protocols for critical care and to potential consequences of climate change on the human condition. Not only have I been able to publish on this work and other collaborations from the lab, I have also been able to attend many conferences around the world because of Rackham's conference travel grants and other travel awards. I've been able to meet astronauts at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, learn from top researchers in the field at a resort in Cancun, as well as explore different research topics at the World Congress of Biomechanics in Ireland. All of this would not be possible without Rackham's support. I've also been fortunate to serve on the Rackham Student Government Board and have been the Vice President for the past year and a half. I've learned so much about how the university works and I feel honored to be able to represent graduate students at all levels of the university. As much as I've learned about how people tolerate or do not tolerate temperature in the lab, my experiences as Rackham Student Government Vice President has taught me so much more and my graduate experience would not be as fulfilling without Rackham Student Government or Rackham Graduate School. I'm grateful for all that Rackham has done to support my graduate career. So my name is Cecilia Morales. I'm a PhD candidate in the English Language and Literature Department and before I start I want to just mention because I wrote a statement and did not focus so much on this in the statement that I receive a lot of funding from Rackham. I'm currently a Rackham Merit Fellowship and as I was last year and my first year of graduate school I also received conference funding from Rackham and I've participated in a lot of Rackham programs, specifically the Rackham program in public scholarship. I've done a lot of initiatives through that and so I'd be happy to answer questions about that later. So when I tell people outside of humanities fields that I work on the early modern period there's generally some confusion about when exactly this period occurs. The early modern period generally spans from the late 15th century to the 17th century which may not seem particularly modern to most people. Shakespeare, the only writer covered in my dissertation who people consistently know, feels especially foreign to most people who have only vague memories of struggling through his kind of old-timey prose in high school English classes. In fact, the early modern period is synonymous with renaissance which literally means rebirth, from rebirth, in reference to the period's revival of classical ideas. In my dissertation I use both early modern and renaissance depending on whether I want to emphasize the continuity between the 17th century and today or the differences between us and them. If you're using the word renaissance that's a way of emphasizing the period's relationship to what came before. Using early modern is a way of emphasizing the period similarities to our moment right now. I believe that it is crucial to do both and to hold both those perspectives in tension. So that's kind of my thesis for this talk and I'll come back to that later. So informed by feminist theory, critical race theory and queer theory, my dissertation demonstrates the role of maternity in shaping broad cultural values in the 17th century including religious norms, racial paradigms and sexual stereotypes. I trace the rhetorical function of maternity within English literature during a pivotal century in English history, a century that witnessed the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War and the beginnings of English colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade. In order to understand the high stakes of maternity during the century it's important to note the great deal of pressure that was placed on women's reproductive capacities as well as the concerns this pressure raised about the fragility and corruptibility of women's bodies. Scholars estimate that as many as one in 20 women died during childbirth at this time. Even if both the mother and the child survived birth, the infant mortality rate was also very high. So women's, the way that women cared for their newborns was highly scrutinized. Despite the dangers and stressors, most women seem to expect to become mothers. The cultural pressure to give birth was especially high for upper class women as you might expect because they needed to produce airs, especially male airs, to pass on the family name and property. Indeed, the practical need to control mother's roles, to control the flow of resources and power between generations via patriarchal inheritance, made mother's roles on the one hand very powerful and important and on the other hand very nerve-wracking. Men were afraid not only that women were going to cheat on them, so what the period called cock-holding, but also that they were going to physically corrupt or even kill the child in their womb. This latter set of fears was exaggerated by early modern scientific theories. So science prior to the development of empirical science in the late 18th century was based on galinic-humoral theory, which posited that bodies are made up of four substances called humors, which needed to be constantly regulated. So this is why like bloodletting was a popular treatment for basically everything in the period or leaching. Bodies were subject to constant manipulation from the outside world, and mother's bodies in particular were thought to be incredibly vulnerable to environmental influence and therefore dangerous to infants. There was this really wacky theory called maternal impression that basically said that whatever mothers focus on either visually or physically when they were pregnant could end up altering the child at birth. So there's this famous story from a text called Aristotle's masterpiece of a white woman who looks at pictures of black moors, which was a term that they used to describe North African Muslims with dark skin. So she looked at a picture of a black moor and then ended up giving birth to a black baby and it was blamed on the maternal impression because of course the father was white and what else could what else could happen in the interim. So while the logic of the story seems ridiculous to us now, this was a period before paternity tests, before empirical science, and before an understanding on how traits like skin color are passed on via DNA. It's also a great example of the influence of ideas about maternity on the development of ideas about race. In Aristotle's masterpiece, a preconceived understanding of how maternal bodies work is used to make sense of a new problem, that problem being a lack of understanding about how skin colors reproduced. As the English began to explore North Africa and witnessed the spread of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, a fear of weakening racial and religious boundaries demanded new theories about human differences and maternity was available to offer an explanation. The moral of the story from Aristotle's masterpiece is that women need to be careful because it's their actions not their biology that determine their offspring's race. So that was just one theory that was in competition with some other competing theories about how race is reproduced. So while we may no longer believe in the theory of maternal impression, our society does still feel the residual effects of this belief today. The effects of essentialized racism was used to justify slavery and continues to underlie institutionalized racism today. Furthermore, our culture continues to put pressure on women to maintain the sexual integrity of our society, a fact that I think is particularly coherent as of last week with the Kavanaugh hearings as well as other times throughout history. Returning to my thesis that this period should be viewed as both similar and different from our current moment, I believe it is by happening the mindset of early moderns, a mindset that is very different than our own, that we are able to better observe the contours of our own cultural biases. Furthermore, my work posits the centrality of maternity and maternal bodies to historical events that continue to have a global impact today. My dissertation sketches one of the avenues through which our current ideas about religion, race, and sexuality developed over time. I believe that by teaching our students to step outside of themselves, we can help them to reflect on their own values and assumptions. Educating students on how our cultural biases develop around and through women's bodies is an important strategy for overcoming those biases and producing positive change. Everybody, my name is Shama and I'm a fifth year PhD student in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and while that seems like quite a mouthful, what that means is I study very, very small things all the time. So the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, MCDV, uses model organisms to understand basic things about all of us, so basic biology. And in my lab and my dissertation focuses on using the fruit fly as a model organism. I'll explain in a second why fruit flies are really, really important. So just like everybody else, I have been supported by Rackham throughout my education here and this year I just started my fellowship as a barber fellow, for which I'm very grateful. So I use the fruit fly as a model organism. Fruit flies can tell us a lot about our own biology, even though they're quite annoying and if you want to ask me the best way to get rid of fruit flies I'll be happy to tell you later. Because that's the most important thing, right? How do you get rid of them? So most cells in our body are not dividing, but how cells make the decision to stop dividing and stay non-dividing is very, very poorly understood and this is the focus of the research in my lab and we study this in many different ways and I use the fruit fly brain to try and understand how cells in our body stop dividing and what happens with age when the ability to stop or stay undivided becomes compromised and while this seems esoteric and may not be relevant to everybody, it's important to know that the biggest cause for a risk factor for cancer is age and the biggest risk factor for neurodegeneration is age and we're trying to use the fruit fly to understand how this happens because fruit flies age within 60 days, you don't have to wait three years as you would with a mouse or 80 years as you would with a human to try and understand what happens with age. So fruit flies have very easy to understand biology and it's been well studied for over a hundred years and they have a really good well-mapped genome so when we have five or six copies of a gene fruit flies usually just have one copy and we share 50% of the same genes with fruit flies so it's much easier to make mutations in a fruit fly and ask what happens and try to translate that rather than to do that with human cells and culture. So aside from the research I do in the lab about which I'd like to talk more interactively I'd be happy to answer any questions. I'm also a GSI and I've served as a graduate student instructor and a graduate student mentor for several terms at the University of Michigan and I'm also very passionate about teaching science and doing a lot of science outreach and in the long term I'd like to take all of the education I got here at the University of Michigan back to my home country India and help develop basic biological science institutes in India where there are not very many of so thank you to Rackham for organizing this event and as everybody mentioned you know they get to go to a lot of conferences I too have been able to attend a lot of conferences all over the world with the help of Rackham and I'd like to thank everyone here for that. Good morning how are you doing? First thank you so much for being here and thank you for Rackham and for Dean Mike Solomon for organizing this and I'm excited to be here with some colleagues and friends to talk to all today and so I'm Gordon Palmer I'm a fifth year PC student and the or candidate and the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary Education which is also the Higher Education Program and so before I hop into my research I'll tell you a story of how I come to the research right so I think it's important particularly for my research to understand stories I came to the United States when I was 12 I came from a little island country of Jamaica which you probably all understand and know it's a paradise but it's also a place of incredible suffering sometimes right so I come to I came to the States to Texas when I was 12 and upon landing I was almost assaulted by the differences here I don't understand how to function what it meant to be a person in the United States and growing up I had questions about what citizenship meant what is it what does it mean to be a citizen what does it mean to function in democracy what does it mean to kind of move and change and hope for change in the political system so with those thoughts I went to college and I majored in religion and in political science because I found that for many people religion influenced the ways that we thought about politics and in those politics that spirituality can influence the way they then works and change democracies or at least change the way they try to participate so but alongside that I noticed that in college universities are charged with creating citizens right every mission statement says we are here to create citizens or we are here to create active participants in democracy and I often wondered what does it actually mean and how does it actually come to bear on the lives of students and so in college I participated in a few organizations and events and I was that typical over-involved undergrad who didn't get paid for anything wouldn't sleep but still maintain a good GPA most of the time thank god then translate to my my recommend so because of all those things I really kind of ask questions around how does spirituality and religion and gender connections to other people how do how do those connections then affect the way we think about democracies and republics and then how does that then influence the ways that we seek to change through varying civic engagement and democratic action how does that kind of spur us on to change our political systems so I come to these big questions based mostly my life experience right but for so many of us that's kind of what we do we study the things that we observe in the world so in thinking about those questions I come to our education to kind of find out just how colleges and universities serve as crucibles in which these things happen and right now in particular it's a fun moment for me because you see across the nation we see an uprising of access moments right we see spurs of it and particularly here and I'll talk about that a bit more later when I'm involved in there um well other right now so at rackham I have been able to be involved in a variety of organizations one being the students of color frackham and my roles there have served as sometimes agitator sometimes colleague and friend and in that experience have been able to kind of see just how spirituality and activism come together uh and how those two things interact and intersect to kind of spur political change and so my dissertation addresses those questions right how does spirituality um in lives of college students influence the ways that they then pursue changing their democracies and I think college is a really important space for that to happen and in more kind of tangential ways our search also to undertake spirituality as a cultural strength and black americans and seeks to understand how spirituality influences the care for children and black fathers how spirituality helps influence persistence or resilience for black men and STEM and how spirituality serves us a protective factor when people of color encounter race and race acts and so that's kind of kind of spans the boundaries there the reason I can do this research though is because the university is a place with very little walls and students are able to kind of interact with varying departments quite readily and are supported to do so it's going to broaden their interests pretty readily so I've been very fortunate in higher education to have mentors who have pushed me to explore literatures and experiments and studies in other fields and bring those into my work here I've also been very very fortunate in that I've been supported with that through scholarships from Rackham and other departments along with being supported by this really really good mentorship not only from professors but from folks in Rackham and that's been a blessing and a pleasure to kind of under to both take up and to kind of explore the implications for my work are many and I think very varied first we I think right now colleges and universities are under a bit of attack right as places of reinforcing rhetoric or ideologies and I think it's important to explore what those actually are and then kind of name those and put those into the public space that we can debate and engage democratically and not engage in a dichotomous debate we should I think we have a very nuanced and varied understanding of the university we should be able to kind of discuss that publicly I also have implications for thinking about the ways that we train scientists and STEM and thinking of a more holistic process for admission retention and persistence of people of color in some fields along with understanding ways that we can intervene in low-income neighborhoods particularly among Black parents yeah and I'm really excited about the work I really thank you for being here and thank you again Rackham and all the folks here for sponsoring this event today Thanks for your assessment and I am actually a postdoc here with the firearm safety among children and teens consortium I just recently completed my PhD in the school public health in health behavior and health education and my training I am an adolescent development researcher I have I started studying adolescent development and I studied it from a perspective of the resiliency perspective and a positive youth development perspective I found that as I was reading the literature a lot of what we know about adolescent development is from a very negative perspective a lot about risk factors and thinking of youth as problems to be solved adolescents as a period of storm and stress and that didn't sit well with me and so when I started reading about resilience theory and this idea of positive youth development I became interested in thinking about what are the positive factors in youth's lives that can send them on a positive trajectory so we know that youth face adversities and yet there are youth that are able to positively develop whereas there are also youth that may not do so as successfully and so I wanted to start studying what it is that can put youth on that positive trajectory and when I first got here as an MPH student I was interested in understanding a little bit more about this idea of future orientation and future expectations and I studied contextual factors that influenced future expectations among youth and how that impacted youth outcomes including bullying behavior aggression and youth violence in general and that led me to study other positive factors and I transitioned when I started my dissertation to this concept of mattering I had happened upon the literature on mattering as I was studying for my preliminary exams and it spoke to me and Rosenberg identified these two different types of mattering and there's interpersonal mattering and then societal mattering and no researchers had studied societal mattering and there had been quite a bit of literature on this idea of interpersonal mattering which is how much you feel that you are important to those who are closest to you specific others in your lives and then societal mattering is this idea of how much do I matter to society how much do I feel as though I actually make a difference in this world and that hadn't been studied and so I spent my time on my dissertation developing a measure to measure this construct and I was fortunate enough to receive funding from Rackham to be able to do primary data collection and I studied this concept mattering among rural youth and what I was able to do is I developed a survey measure and I looked at different contextual factors across the school the community and then within the family and among friends so I looked at different levels of factors and how those influenced both interpersonal and societal mattering and then I looked at okay so does mattering have important implications for adolescent outcomes and I looked at nonviolent delinquency substance use and violence and I found that mattering has a very important role in these adolescent outcomes but we didn't really under I needed to know more and so I studied the mechanism by which these two different types of mattering impact youth violence and substance use and nonviolent delinquency and found that youth who have a sense of societal mattering are more likely to be civically engaged in their communities and to feel like okay since I matter to society and since people believe that I can make a difference in the world then they are more likely to go out and do so and that is what protects them against negative outcomes for people that feel that they matter very specifically to those closest in their lives go through this self-regulation and feel like I don't want to let those people in my life down and so I'm going to be less likely to engage in negative behaviors that may disappoint these people so these two types of mattering are important to study separately because they have the mechanism by which they protect youth from negative outcomes are different and so now I'm taking what I've learned from my dissertation and I am applying it in my work with youth gun violence and so we are currently in the stages of putting together pilot projects to study this mechanism of mattering specifically with youth gun violence and the first step that I will be taking is looking at mattering in relation to suicide by firearm among youth 0 to 17 and just figuring out if this is a a factor in the lives of youth that we can develop programs to enhance and my ultimate career goal would be to implement youth-led fully youth-led programs to enhance youth perceptions of mattering as a way of protecting them against negative outcomes and supporting them in positive outcomes so I'd be happy to talk more about that in the Q&A Good morning My name is Cara Palmer I am a fifth year doctoral candidate in the School of Kinesiology I work in the Child Movement Activity and Developmental Health Lab and the big premise of our lab is to help young children start out their lives on positive developmental trajectories of health and we do this in several ways but the biggest way that we do this work is we're actually interventionists so we spend a lot of our times in local schools and in local Head Start Centers actually implementing movement interventions to help promote children's anthropometrics so their BMI their weight their body composition their weight their motor skills how well they move their physical activity how much they move their perceived motor competence so how well they think they move and then also we look at other things like their self-regulation and their early academic achievement so the bulk of this work centers around one intervention in particular it's called the Children's Health Activity and Motor Program the CHAMP program we are currently in year two of a five-year randomized control trial looking at the intervention effects of CHAMP the longitudinal study so we work with approximately 300 children in Ypsilanti looking at how this intervention is going to implement or impact their health longitudinally I think it's pretty cool work we do also other work in our lab we have some yoga interventions we have some other movement interventions that we're looking at my dissertation in particular is interested in not only how does this intervention work but why does this intervention work and so CHAMP is what we call a high autonomy intervention and if anybody ever has had young children or worked with young children try to envision this you've got 30 young children in a room you've got three stations and you say go and they go and it's really an interesting phenomenon because they self-organized they pair up with their own groups they go to the stations to learn the skills that they want to learn they spend time where they want to spend it and then we act as facilitators to help them navigate through this climate and it's one of the reasons this intervention has been shown to help self-regulation in this population and so I'm really interested in understanding well what's happening within that intervention that promotes these positive health outcomes and the reason I'm really interested in that is if we can understand what happens within maybe we can start to build better more time and more cost effective interventions that work for very specific populations so for instance in the work that we do and again if any of you guys have ever worked with young kids or spent time with them we find that girls are often less skilled than boys and so the question is well how do we help these girls catch up with their peers so that they can have healthy trajectories particularly in weight in girls it's a problem and in physical activity across the lifespan and so that's what my work kind of centers on and so as part of this work when you work with preschoolers you have the prime hours of 9 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. every day with which you can get all of your work done and so I'm very grateful to RACM for their financial support so they've helped support me to be able to do that work and relieve me of my GSI duties because without that I simply couldn't be in two places at once and moreover we work at three different centers and so RACM has also helped helped me to hire and train people to be at centers when I can no longer be there and so it gives a wider impact of our work one of the neat things about the work that I do and I particularly love about my research but it's great to hear about all this other research as well as I like the translational approach so we do follow these kids for years we get very close personal relationships with the children with the teachers with the schools and we actually have nice real-world benefits to the work that we do that being said my ultimate career goal is to take the programs that we develop and start to change them from research led programs to practitioner implemented programs so that they're no longer dependent on a research team coming in but rather they can be implemented by the community themselves and so as I transition out of my graduate student career and into my next endeavor whatever that will be I'm working with my mentor Leah Robinson and other members of the lab to try to translate our program into a curriculum that can be used without us being there so thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be at this event I'm happy to chat more about my work or anything else I'm excited to learn more about the panel's work as well it's very cool so thank you so much for having me wow I mean each one of you is really impressive to hear but to hear all of you together you know we're so grateful to have the opportunity to support you and the work that you're doing we have a play time for discussion now so I'd like to open up to questions from the audience and I see we have one and we'll be off to the races so please go right ahead thank you you I think have all acknowledged the contributions that some of us here have made to to your education and we thank you very much for that but I would tell you that I think most of us are here today to acknowledge you and to recognize you and to be impressed by you and the projects that you undertaken as part of your PhD and I have to tell you you've really succeeded I think this is I'm a PhD from Michigan and what you would call the rest of the probably the late middle ages 76 but you certainly reinforced my conviction that I couldn't get admitted today to the school that I graduated from but your your projects it seems to me all have a kind of future futurist orientation you're doing something working on something which is going to improve lives in a very specific way for people who are coming after you and and and your peers and I wonder if you could maybe just I certain not everybody but ruminate somewhat on what those dreams are like what is it that you really would like to how would you like to transform the world and how you kind of sustain that optimism for as many years as you can and actually make it make it happen thank you for such an easy and low stakes question I think that one thing is that that we have the knowledge certainly in my in my PhD program I feel that other people I have the social support of other people who have gone through the same process the same process of finding an idea of recognizing that it has applicability beyond the field it was originally a part of and actually I would say that a lot of it is the social community that institutions like Rackham like the Kelsey Museum like Rackham work groups things like that come create actually helps you with a lot of the oh hey it's not just what I'm writing on the page there is a bigger world out there there is a social community I'm a part of that's certainly part of what keeps me going every day and part of the reason I'm able to maintain thoughts like this Tara oh I think I think for me my my personal goal was to help children interschool healthy and ready to learn and especially children who come from at risk at risk environments with children from low SES homes or or backgrounds where they don't have as much and so I think for me trying to maintain that optimism it's it's a struggle some days when the kids are going everywhere but I think one of the great things about Rackham and I think all of us have mentioned are the conferences and so through that I actually have a nice I have a great support system at Michigan and then throughout the country and throughout the globe that really there's more than one person working on this problem and and I have you know close friends in Canada in Australia and we'll text and we'll call when we get discouraged and it kind of helps to keep us uplifted and keep us going and we kind of all have share the same same vision so that's kind of how I approach that I would just like to add that I think my main goal with my research is to push back against the stereotypes and the misconceptions about youth and what keeps me going towards that effort is being able to work with youth as often as I can in different types of settings as volunteer, substitute teaching however I can interact with the youth with youth and I also think sorry I lost my train of thought but my ultimate goal is to never read an article a news article about and I don't know if you're familiar but there was a a mayor in Kentucky who spoke out about youth that were fighting against gun violence in their schools and he made a quote to a local newspaper about these youth just want attention they have no idea what they're talking about they don't even understand this issue and I never want to read something like that again and so that's what motivates me to continue this fight one over here we have a mic we're sending around thanks yeah it was funny as Chris has stopped speaking I like turned to Chris like that's what you do that's really really cool because I think so much of the work at this table is aimed at kind of like getting rid of luck because I think a lot of us up here often say we're so lucky right we're so lucky I've made it and I think a lot of us are trying to get rid of luck we're trying to have societies that are open and accessible and equitable and I think that string kind of I would just kind of speak for you in this kind of aligns some of the work at this table right Andrew's work like speaking towards equal cities and goodness there right aligns some things I'm doing and so I think that that thought is very well placed and I think we're all trying at least in some way to perform so that kind of get rid of luck I'm going to have a world that is very equitable and just individuals so with empowering individuals to study science in India empowering youth to contribute to their community and feel as though they matter but I'm just kind of curious how you might see our lines of work coming together sorry straight back we don't have think of the band diagram with three circles and I felt they were all coming together I didn't know whether you defined your spring spirituality or if you gave us the the project of what's mattering is it might sound very different I do other people share that idea or not? so yeah my question is if you know some connections your work with the meeting will work with your experience is everybody are you able to hear the question in the back no okay so do you want to do you mind repeating the question before you before you ask me if I see my work connecting with the me too movement today I think in a lot of ways part of my drive within pedagogy is to encourage my students to learn how to like evaluate sources to be critical so in this era fake news and kind of like I think is like a total collapse of like intelligent discourse at large so I think part of what you know studying literature studying English studying writing and discourses is learning how to like evaluate sources thinking particularly about you know women's bodies in the way that I do the me too movement is not one that I like have thought particularly about connections because my work doesn't concern sexual violence in particular but it does often touch on thinking about kind of the dubiousness of consent in that really modern period so in the science they believed that they believed that if a woman got pregnant that that was evidence that she was not in fact raped because the woman had to release her seat as well because the model of the woman's body was paralleled to the man's so that the woman was basically an undeveloped man so the organs were literally just like flipped inside of her was the idea so that had like weird implications for consent and so and I think you know that idea is still present in our you know in our moment today this idea that like women you know somehow are somehow are at fault even like I don't know who is that there was some senator that made some comment about this recently about like don't women's body don't women have ways of shutting this down right so I think yeah absolutely the implications are there um and thinking about you know putting that in context of this is you know these are ideas that come from like you know Galen or Galen you might know how to pronounce that better than I do is I think definitely a way to to speak to that sir I'm Shagama if I'm pronouncing that right but anyway but basically yeah medical doctor doctor fossil apple s s e l and he's studying telomeres and how the telomeres has to do with aging you know on the way and there's a product currently listed as a nutraceutical and it's sold in bottles and it's called ta 65 I don't know if you've heard about take ta 65 but currently so as opposed to promote the health of telomeres and I see where what your subject matter is and Dr. Fossil he's a medical doctor you get the license or whatever he lives in California but for you to be involved with Dr. Fossil he says human trials are going to be on this thing to possibly treat Parkinson's disease but apparently a month one month's supply as far as I know is $600 a month and you know like a big box you can afford that kind of stuff but anyway I just like heard a comment on the use of ta 65 the health of telomeres and aging the combat because we don't know too many people who are like in the 20s who have Parkinson's disease that's why there's some logic on treating telomeres I'm all done I don't know very much about that drug I haven't heard about it but I know how telomeres work and they're just basically like to explain it in layman terms you know the things you have on the end of your shoelaces that protect it and as they get frayed your shoelaces get more and more frayed so that's what your telomeres do they prevent your DNA from getting damaged and anything that we can find that so as you age yourselves keep dividing some of them don't divide and your telomeres just get shorter and shorter and when your DNA gets damaged there's nothing yourselves can do because they're not going to divide anymore there are a lot of clinical trials and a lot of drugs out there that that may help lengthen telomeres or keep telomere length stable but I don't know about that one it might be interesting to look at our favorite event it's always good to know that we can influence a little bit about your projects your research and your lives and your future influence into society in the future I have a question for Carissa I was wondering if you have come throughout your research or if you have read about are there any differences in terms of the two mattering factors that you mentioned interpersonal versus social in terms of relationship with different populations or minorities minority groups I was wondering if one is more important than the other are they equal are they related and it's a little bit of a follow up to that any key factors that you have identified in terms of how can you intervene if you're starting in a path especially for you if you're starting a path are there any factors things that could influence a change in that path either if you're an interpersonal or social mattering thank you thank you for that question so yes actually so let me start by saying that most of the most of the literature on the interpersonal matter or on societal mattering is not it's just not existent so most of the literature on mattering has been with interpersonal mattering but they have researchers have found there to be differences between males and females as well as across racial groups with females reporting greater perceptions of interpersonal mattering compared to males and then white youth report higher perceptions of interpersonal mattering compared to minority groups when it comes to societal mattering it has not been studied in fact the first measure of it in its construct has been just developed and is just under review right now so it's um I can't answer it about that but I hypothesize that there would be differences as for factors that I studied in my dissertation for societal mattering I found that youth who perceive there to be more opportunities in their communities are more likely to feel as though they matter to their to society same with youth resources or just resources in the community so I studied rural youth and overall the perceptions of resources in the communities were very low but those who perceive there to be more were more likely to feel as though they matter to society and then there I also studied a couple of school factors and so perceptions of the support for autonomy within schools from faculty or from staff and administrators had played an important role in youth's perceptions of societal mattering and then the more opportunities that youth had to be involved in decision making in their schools also increased their perceptions of societal mattering when it comes to interpersonal mattering these have been pretty well studied predictors of interpersonal mattering have been studied in the literature but things like parental support friend support things like that they've they in parent I studied this was the first study that looked at it but it was parent child communication quality and that played an important role in youth's perceptions of interpersonal mattering so there are definitely avenues for enhancing perceptions of mattering but I appreciate that question thank you so much they're right there and then here as well but this is for you you mentioned early on in your talk about cities being chaos and I'm not sure if you meant that as just a phrase or the actual theory of chaos which is roughly constrained randomness and I'm wondering if you've actually tried to apply that especially with perturbations in how technology happens and you made a really good example of clothing and weaving and at some point technology changed so that nobody actually has to make their own clothes unless you really want to which is a lot more effort so it would be interesting to see if you can apply those kind of theories and adding perturbations to that and see how they affect and see how you can project that into the future oh thank you for that question and I really do mean it both in kind of the the layman's sense of chaos that you know they're very difficult to understand they're kind of disorderly in some way but I do mean it in the technical sense as well that they really are systems that if you can if you as much as you can a lot of cities do operate deterministically there are actually a lot of ways in which if you had perfect knowledge you probably could predict how long a community would survive in the other hand an individual community you can't predict that for and of course with any you know any amount of uncertainty which it's a social science we deal only in uncertainty we have no facts that really does mean that we are at the end of the day unable to really predict anything in the long run so it's just how welcome welcome to historical sciences so I do really do mean that in that technical sense as well I mean that's one thing that I actually have been working on here we have on campus the center for complex systems which is a very good kind of umbrella group that brings in a lot of people who work on weird hard problems that started in physics and now are applied to a lot of different places and one of them is how do we understand chaotic systems and so that is something I think that's very fruitful for studying cities technological change is a really interesting one to study there's lots of studies about how individual technologies build on each other and there's lots of there's lots of studies on how cities radically change in their apparent appearance when when major technological shifts happen so we can think about the industrial revolution most urban planners I know say that there's no reason to study cities before the industrial revolution because there's nothing in common but at the same time technologies in the way that they're implemented are a constant through time and so you actually can you know really build some nice models that kind of accept that technological change exists without saying that we can't learn anything from the past so thank you for your question I think that really yeah that's definitely something I'm actively working on right now I wanted to thank all of you again and especially commenting on the emphasis that I see on early intervention and early advancement in ideas but I'm looking around the room here and it's clear from looking around the room that 50 is the new 20 and 60 is the new 30 and having a challenge for you to look at some of the ideas that you're taking in a youth intervention and looking at them deeper out so for Cecilia maybe something like lifelong learning and the impact of post-reproductive for Colleen taking that idea of the CV thermogenesis and the ideas of impacting that into an older community and taking that kind of movement activity and the mattering particularly and the spirituality hit me in a in a very interesting spot looking at how could we translate that not only to the intervention early but also middle to late and especially the mattering addressing that in the sense of older people engaging in lifelong learning engaging in the community and being activists for change so thank you for that and just a challenge for the future thank you so much for that there has been a little bit of research and mattering across the lifespan and what they found is that upon retirement perceptions of mattering have decreased substantially so I think you're right of um interventions across the lifespan and how important that would be to this idea of mattering so I appreciate that thank you there's a question right here Joe yeah could you just paraphrase it as you answer thanks I'm paraphrasing this correctly kind of what we may not get to in our PhD or that's somewhat of a one-off that we would like to see where our research could go or would go so I can thank you so with my research it's very fundamental understanding of of bio heat and how heat is transferred throughout the body but something that I would love to do and kind of have briefly done in my PhD work which is not in my thesis so I'm sure my advisor is not particularly happy that I've deviated but in your in your comments about age as we do study aged animals but compounding factors such as cardiovascular disease and temperature regulation so my colleague does deep vein thrombosis work and there's some very little literature about deep vein thrombosis and heat stress but as we have an aging population a lot of these comorbidities are becoming apparent and cardiovascular disease is the number one killer and will continue to be until we kind of understand that so what I would really like to do is is take my research away from more of the basic fundamental science and apply start applying it as the therapeutic so we face this a lot in engineering is the battle between researchers and clinicians and so how can we get things to be more science focused and not practicing of medicine but you know we cool patients off for a reason but we don't know how to cool them off what temperature to use so actually making it more of a science so that we can start applying it to cardiovascular diseases and other other diseases so Colleen and Cecilia I think it's really interesting that Colleen you're actually looking at changing the common knowledge of how the physics work in the body which is a backing up in terms of technology what we understand is a lot of what Cecilia is actually looking into as well how we perceived how the body worked so what's some things that to consider when you talk to them specifically how hard has it been for you to change the models that how the body works I mean it's interesting that you say well this is not what we thought and I'm sure you went into your work with some models and how you thought you were going to build around them and then you actually do direct measurement it's not what you expect and how you had to change it I mean I actually thought when Cecilia was talking about what is it that we think right now that in you know hundreds of years people are going to laugh at like we did with the universe so hopefully that's not my work it has been challenging I think that with a lot of basic research it's more of why does it matter like who cares particularly in the core vasculature so these are the very large arteries and veins mathematically they're not thermally significant so they're too big to really be part of like the bio heat equation so the mathematics that you would be doing at a specific tissue so this is this really matters when you're doing heat ablation for tumors or you're trying to do cool therapies for neural protective mechanisms but but my perspective is is we need to know how the body works in a in a holistic whole system so I will say that one it's been challenging to to say why does this matter but I think if you go into well we don't just care at one specific tissue or one cell we do care about whole body systems but it's been also exciting because with MRI I actually have images you know MRIs they actually produce images and so it's a lot easier than saying oh we have these percent changes when I can say here's a picture of the vessels they get bigger and so that that's been nice is to have that very because I'm an experimentalist and sometimes if you work in computational work those of us that are experimentalists would say is that true it's goes against all these things but as an experimentalist I can just show the data and that's kind of how I've really approached it is just here it is we can't we could be wrong in a lot of our predictions of why this is happening but as far as that it's actually happening the the images are the proof this will be our last question yeah you could see a lot of overlap and imagine some interest in conversations over a cup of coffee with Cecilia and Andrew talking about how this thing in the past ordained covers that but as an engineer I'm going to ask my question to Colleen I would never yeah just mechanical engineering what's written here so can however they expected some kind of related so can you explain the collaboration between the departments of engineering and whoever else you work with because that's been fascinating thank you thank you yeah I think that I should have spoken to about that is that University of Michigan provides this interdisciplinary research that that not a lot of universities can really have because we have one of the best medical schools as well as one of the best college of engineering as well as the best you know everything else so actually my background is in material science and engineering from undergrad and then like minored in BME so there's a lot of reasons why I haven't chosen to to switch over to biomedical engineering and that's because I'm a true believer of fundamental engineering but that means nothing so a lot of people are in in BME so it's just been a personal choice but as far as how I can be a mechanical engineer is one I I work with a a BME advisor so biomedical engineering advisor and that's very common in college at least in college of engineering for for students to work but the way that I see it is that I approach things like a mechanical engineer so any kind of problem that I would see would be approach that we have these you know normally when I'm presenting I throw up the heat equations right we have conduction we have convection we have radiation those things still apply in the body itself so the next slide that I usually is bio heat transfer it's still heat transfer it just happens to be in the body and actually happens to be far more complex so I just think that I like look at problems as a mechanical engineer as opposed to to a different discipline well uh thank you so much for attending our event today and let's take our final moment to thank our panelists thank you enjoy the rest of your time at the University of Michigan