Category: Outreach

It’s the best turnout in recent history for our high school visit program. Biological Sciences is proud to announce seven schools—about 180 students and their teachers—came to our spring semester event to help connect students to Michigan Tech. This year two schools attended for the first time in our program’s 25-plus-year history: Copper Country Christian School and Nah Tah Wahsh PSA (Hannahville Indian School),  joining the returning Superior Central (Eben Junction), Dollar Bay, Hancock, and Ontonagon High Schools. Houghton High School was also here to participate in a cooperative joint program between Biological Sciences and Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology. Unfortunately, after several attempts to reschedule, Marquette High School was unable to make it due to winter weather.

In the morning, students were greeted by our chair, Dr. Shekhar Joshi. They heard the story of how Dr. Thomas Werner became a biologist and got career advice from Dr. Amy Marcarelli, Brigitte Morin and the advisor for Pre-health, Stacy Cotey. They also attended their first college-level lecture in anatomy and physiology.  At lunch break they were introduced to the wonderful selection of food at Wadsworth Hall’s cafeteria. In the afternoon, after a quick stop to pose by the Husky Statue, they reinforced that morning’s lecture using the human anatomy and physiology  laboratory equipment to measure various parameters of their respiratory, cardiac, muscle and urinary systems and then learned how to do blood typing in the Medical Laboratory Science lab.

We are excited to participate in Michigan Tech’s mission to attract motivated students, including high school-aged girls, into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. In a broader sense the day of activities and pep talks by a diverse team of faculty, staff, and college students motivated high schoolers to think more deeply about attending college. And it hopefully encouraged a specific focus on degrees in biological sciences, medical laboratory sciences, or one of our many other life-science-related majors on campus.

Friday 15 April,

The Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology hosted a joint visit for Houghton High School’s Anatomy and Physiology classes.  The teacher, Alex Geborkoff, accompanied 35 students who spent a day on the Michigan Tech campus learning about health careers from Pre-med advisor Stacy Cotey and faculty member Steven Elmer, attending a college lecture in Anatomy and Physiology, experiencing lunch at Wadsworth Hall Dormitory and taking part in many hands-on lab activities.  Some of the lab activities in KIP included learning about the influence of stress on blood pressure in Dr. Jason Carter’s lab and conducting an experiment comparing concentric versus eccentric muscle groups in Dr. Steven Elmer’s lab.  In Biological Sciences students learned how to measure aortic blood pressure in Dr. John Durocher’s lab and being led through a dissection by Travis Wakeham in the anatomy and physiology teaching lab.

News coverage of the visit included TV6 news.

See the original Michigan Tech Article here

Released: 13-Aug-2015 1:05 PM EDT 
Source Newsroom: Michigan Technological University

Mine waste is dangerous to human and environmental health. The recent mine waste spill in Colorado is a stark reminder of that, but while details on the event may be sparse, the science behind remediation is not. Rupali Datta, an associate professor of biology at Michigan Tech, delves into how the heavy metals found in mine waste affect biological systems. She focuses on biochemistry and genetics to understand how metals are taken up by plants and animals–and how those metals are detoxed.

“The impacts from acid mine drainage affect the aquatic ecosystem mainly due to very low pH and high levels of bioavailable heavy metals,” Datta says, “Which can severely affect the biological community structure.”

Datta collaborates with Dibs Sarkar, a professor of environmental geochemistry in Montclair State University, New Jersey who is also an adjunct professor at Michigan Tech. They work on an abandoned coal mine site in Southern Illinois, testing the effectiveness of a “green” technology that they have developed to combat acid mine drainage problems in impacted water and soils. Sarkar says the spill is not a unique situation and could have been prevented.

“This was a totally avoidable situation,” he says. “It shouldn’t have happened with proper oversight, which unfortunately, is the case with many mine sites that produce acid mine drainage.”

Acid mine drainage is a routine problem in surface coal mines and metal mines, but are mostly not properly managed and the sites are abandoned. This current spill, which is from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River outside Durango, Colorado is getting media attention because of its scale, which is so vast that it would be difficult to fully gauge its impact on the environment right away. Long term impacts of the spill on the Animus River basin will need to be studied carefully. Datta and Sarkar do say the Environmental Protection Agency has taken quick steps to tackle the situation.

“However, their treatment process is generating a huge amount of solid waste in the form of contaminated sediments that they have to deal with down the road, and I hope, they will look for “green” methods instead of just dumping them in landfills,” Sarkar says.

Datta and Sarkar are available for comment on the Colorado spill to better put the event in the context of remediation science and long-term impacts of heavy metals.You can reach Rupali Datta at rupdatta@mtu.edu, office: 906-487-1783 and Dibs Sarkar atdsarkar1@mtu.edu, office: 973-655-7273