Mason Media Blog

George Mason University has been selected to receive a $28.5 million Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education and will lead the Virginia Initiative for Science Teaching and Achievement (VISTA). The project is a partnership that includes 47 Virginia school districts, six universities, SRI International and the Virginia Department of Education. University partners include the College of William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and James Madison University.

The VISTA project will be led by Donna R. Sterling, professor of science education and director of Mason’s Center for Restructuring Education in Science and Technology (CREST). The goal of VISTA is to improve science teaching and student learning throughout Virginia, especially in high-need (high-poverty, high-minority) schools.

The VISTA project expands on prior research and active-learning programs conducted within Mason’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) and CREST over the past 15 years. VISTA will build an infrastructure to provide sustained, intensive science teacher professional development to increase student performance.

“Science teaching in Virginia is hindered by two fundamental, unmet needs. Elementary school faculty often lack a solid grounding in the inquiry-based nature of science, while on the secondary level, teacher shortages have led to the hiring of uncertified teachers,” says Sterling. “Our model to improve K-12 science teaching was previously incorporated into two programs that have produced statistically significant gains in teacher instruction and student achievement.”

To read more, visit: http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3884.

Image by br3akthru, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What causes childhood obesity? Mason College of Health and Human Services researchers Panagiota Kitsantas, Lisa R. Pawloski and Kathleen F. Gaffney believe that obesity risk factors begin even before a child is conceived.

Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, which followed thousands of children from birth through kindergarten entry, the researchers found that both white and Hispanic women who were overweight or obese prior to pregnancy were more likely to have children who were overweight or obese as toddlers and preschoolers than women who had a normal prepregnancy BMI.

“This study is exciting, as it clearly shows a link between a mother’s prepregnancy weight and the weight of her child. Therefore, prevention of childhood obesity begins earlier than we ever thought before. Interventions should be tailored that way, particularly among specific ethnicities, as these data clearly show,” says Pawloski, associate professor and chair of the Department of Global and Community Health.

To read more, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3663.

Students Michael Kane and Fiona Lu work on a project in their Bioinstrumentation by Design course taught by Nathalia Peixoto. Creative Services photo

Do engineers hold the key to cutting health care costs? By inventing new technologies that will help the sick and disabled to live more independently, they just might.

Bioengineering applies engineering tools and approaches to solve problems in biology and medicine and has already had a substantial influence on medicine.

Mason’s new bachelor of science in bioengineering will begin this fall, allowing students to be a part of the health care technology revolution. The program is the only undergraduate bioengineering degree available in Northern Virginia.

“Bioengineering is all about using technology to help people overcome disease, ease pain and improve the quality of life,” says Joseph Pancrazio, director of the bioengineering program and professor of electrical and computer engineering. “It’s also about contributing to fundamental understanding of biological systems through engineering and computational tools. Our students will have the opportunity to be part of this, and, whether they discover the next pacemaker or biomarker, or ensure that patients are receiving a safe and reliable exam, they will have affected the lives of people in need of these technologies.”

To read the full article, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3549.

Kathryn Jacobsen. Photo courtesy of Kathryn Jacobsen

Bullying among teenagers is a global problem that can take a toll on teens’ health, Mason researchers have found.

In their ongoing work, Kathryn Jacobsen and Lila Fleming have examined the health effects of bullying in adolescent boys and girls from lower- and middle-income countries.

Lila Fleming. Photo courtesy of Lila Fleming

Jacobsen is an associate professor and Fleming is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Global and Community Health in the College of Health and Human Services. Fleming is also a PhD student in environmental science and policy.

They explain that bullying includes actions intended to harm or embarrass another person: teasing, spreading rumors, deliberately excluding them from group activities and using physical violence.

Their research was based on data from the Global School-Based Student Health Survey (GSHS), which was developed by the World Health Organization to assess self-reported student health and risk behaviors.

To read the full article, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3449.

To read a Washington Examiner article featuring this research (“New research shows bullying is rampant in the DC Area and globally too”), visit http://cli.gs/qmHMdh.

Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs of The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) received one of 12 Google Digital Humanities awards announced this week.

Over the next two years, these awards will help fund research projects that focus on applying quantitative methods to specific fields within the humanities. In the case of CHNM, Cohen and Gibbs submitted the proposal, “Reframing the Victorians,” which will use Google Books and CHNM’s own tools and software to re-examine Victorian literature and determine if the stereotypical description of Victorians as optimists is actually true.

The research team will look at the claims of popular Victorian critic Walter Houghton and his book, “The Victorian Frame of Mind,” in which he states that most Victorians were very optimistic, and therefore in written texts used many more optimistic terms such as “light,” “sunshine,” and “hope.” However, because the author used only a very small group of works to test this theory, scholars have never been able to thoroughly assess this theory in a widespread fashion.

“The vast digital library of Google Books presents for the first time the possibility that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing—not just the well-known authors, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even forgotten authors—to see if the Victorians truly did use the kinds of words and phrases that Houghton thought were indicative of their character,” says Cohen.

Google has worked to digitize more than 12 million books in more than 400 languages. Digital humanitarians can use text-analytic techniques to analyze massive amounts of literature, like those in the Google Books corpus, and identify trends over selected periods of time, by language, geography and topic.

The Center for History and New Media will also use their own software product, the open source tool Zotero that helps researchers gather and organize resources, and then annotate, organize and share the results of their research. Zotero already integrates well with Google Books, and the research team plans to incorporate both innovative tools in their research proposal to make the work of other scholars even easier.

Read more about the grants and CHNM’s work in the article by Inside Higher Ed.

George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) has made the Consumer Reports GreenerChoices useful links list for Climate and Energy Basics.

The center has made great strides this year with its Six Americas report which surveys and polls Americans on their opinions about climate change. Director Edward Maibach is also working on a National Science Foundation grant related to television weathercasters. He recently conducted the largest and most representative survey of television weathercasters and news directors.

Using this data, Maibach and his research team will next conduct a field test of 30-second, broadcast-quality educational segments that TV weathercasters can use in their daily broadcasts to educate viewers about the link between predicted (or current) extreme weather events in that media market and the changing global climate.

Ultimately, the team hopes to answer key research questions supporting efforts to activate TV meteorologists nationwide as an important source of informal science education about climate change.

How do the delicate bacteria that cause tularemia or “Rabbit Fever” survive in the wilderness? By building a fortress and pulling an army of allies inside their walls.

Mason microbiologist Monique van Hoek. Creative Services photo

This is the conclusion of Mason researchers who investigated how the bacterium Francisella tularensis survives and thrives in the environment.

By growing the bacteria and using special stains to examine the growth, Mason microbiologist Monique van Hoek and biosciences postgraduate students Meghan Durham-Colleran and Anne Brooks Verhoeven found that the organisms constructed a biofilm or protective coating resembling a “sticky matrix” to survive in harsh environments.

They also identified the gene that regulates the biofilm formation and some of the different types of sugars that were used to build the film.

Tularemia is a zoonotic disease, meaning that it can be transferred from animals to humans through skin contact. In its aerosol form, tularemia can be used to infect large groups of people, making the bacteria a substantial bioterror threat.

To read more, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3240.

Sikdar, right, with students Avinash Eranki and Dianna Purvis in his lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell

Approximately 50 million people in the United States suffer from chronic pain. Musculoskeletal, soft tissue pain is the most prevalent type of chronic pain, with low back and neck pain the areas most frequently affected. These conditions may be associated with hard nodules or trigger points in muscle and soft tissues, but no one knows why these knots appear, persist or why some are painful and others are not.

“Chronic pain is a significant public health problem. In particular, a large number of Americans suffer from soft tissue pain syndromes that are poorly understood. It is actually one of the most common findings in patients who come to a pain center with pain complaints,” says Siddhartha Sikdar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Mason’s new bioengineering program.

Sikdar was awarded a four-year, $1.974 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the relationship between the nodules or “trigger points” and chronic muscle pain. Women and men over the age of 18 who have ongoing neck pain for at least three months may be eligible to participate in the study.

To learn more, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3123.

The new Biomedical Research Laboratory on the Prince William Campus. Creative Services photo

George Mason University administrators, faculty, staff and students, as well as elected officials and members of the community, celebrated on June 10 the formal dedication of the university’s new Biomedical Research Laboratory (BRL).

This facility provides Mason researchers with tremendous new opportunities to advance their groundbreaking work on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infectious diseases and contribute even more to the national effort to fight bioterrorism.

Mason’s BRL is one of only 13 regional biocontainment laboratories that have been or are being built nationwide through competitive grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

To learn more, visit http://news.gmu.edu/articles/3115.

Daniel Gartenberg developed the Proactive Sleep Alarm Clock. Photo by Nicolas Tan

And now your cell phone can help you sleep better! Mason student Daniel Gartenberg recently developed a smart phone application called the Proactive Sleep Alarm Clock that helps you track the ZZZs you do get and develop a healthier and more productive sleep pattern.

The alarm clock features a settable sleep goal and a sleep diary, which you can use to track the hours you’ve slept or the dreams you’ve had. It also allows you to record personal factors — such as mood, alcohol and medication intake, exercise habits, diet and productivity.

“The behaviors we’ve chosen to include in this application are those most commonly recommended by sleep professionals as the ones you should monitor for healthy and restful sleep,” says Gartenberg. “We’ve already had numerous sleep clinics and sleep professionals express an interest in the application.”

There is also a simple game, inspired by sleep research, called the Vigilance Task that allows you to test how groggy you are upon waking.

“If you play the game as soon as you wake up, you get more points than if it takes you awhile to wake up. Also, the faster you do the task, the faster the target moves on the screen. This makes your score more sensitive so you can see how getting a poor night of sleep may affect your performance.”

The Proactive Sleep Alarm Clock can be downloaded for a small fee for both iPhone and Google Android.

The application has been featured on the CBS “Early Show,” “Discoveries and Breakthroughs inside Science,” and by the National Sleep Foundation, among others. It won the 2009 Schoofs Prize for Creativity, an annual competition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that rewards innovative and marketable ideas.

Gartenberg believes that developing tools such as these for new technologies is the way to go. “As smart phone technology becomes increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, we can use these devices as tools for science.”