Eastern Michigan University

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-09

Engineers need to create robust solutions for society through technological, infrastructural, and medical advancements. To accomplish such tasks requires that they effectively work on teams with people from a variety of backgrounds. Effective teamwork involves skills to promote positive collaboration such as addressing challenging interpersonal situations. This project will identify the ways engineering undergraduate peers interact with each other in the classroom and whether or not they have self-awareness about their behaviors toward others. The project also aims to determine whether certain teaching practices positively influence peer interactions in engineering. The findings of the study will help instructors across engineering disciplines, through their teaching practices, help their students learn how to prevent negative peer interactions so they can effectively work on teams, a key skill needed for productivity in the engineering workforce. By focusing on peer interaction during undergraduate education, the domestic engineering workforce will be better equipped with the relational skills, including collaboration and cooperation, necessary to promote advancements in engineering at a more efficient pace. Overall, this study will improve teaching and learning practices and foster positive peer interactions in engineering classrooms, which will contribute to a more effective engineering workforce, which will in turn support the United States in achieving global competitiveness. This study aligns with the goals of NSF (1) to develop an innovative and inclusive technical workforce and (2) to improve inclusion and participation in engineering by addressing structural issues within educational systems. The goal of this CAREER grant is to advance research on peer interaction in engineering classrooms and how instructors may mitigate negative interactions to enhance student’s abilities to work on teams to improve classroom learning experiences. This study examines (1) why and how peers develop their cultural beliefs about engineering; (2) whether or not peers are aware of negative behaviors they witness or enact themselves; and (3) whether faculty instructional practices focused on positive peer behaviors can mitigate negative peer behaviors. In Year 1, an intake survey will be sent to a broad array of engineering networks to determine eligibility for participating in the preliminary research. The initial part of the study will involve instructor interviews, undergraduate peer interviews, and a peer survey. In Year 2 & 3, 2-3 courses will be selected from four case study sites, representative of R1s and R2 universities, to conduct observations of labs and/or classrooms and interview both instructors and students. During Years 3 & 4, data will be analyzed and developed into scenario-based learning videos and a toolkit for instructors that would include resources and strategies to help facilitate positive peer cooperation. In Year 5, integration of research and education activities will include a video campaign utilizing various STEM and engineering networks and the case study institutions. Podcasts as well as workshops, online and in-person trainings, webinars, and presentations at local and national engineering conferences will promote the research and educational activities. This research will advance knowledge in engineering education by contributing to the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL) and will provide practical tools and resources to support instructors in enhancing the classroom learning experience of all engineering students. The research overall will contribute to societal well-being, improvements in STEM education and the STEM workforce, and foster the inclusive participation of all students in engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-06

This award supports the NSF-CBMS regional conference titled Strong Matrix Properties and the Inverse Eigenvalue Problem to be held July 28 to August 1, 2025 at Eastern Michigan University. The ten main lectures will be delivered by Bryan Shader of the University of Wyoming and Helena Smigoc of University College Dublin. In addition to participants invited from regional research colleges and universities, the organizers will reach out to a a wide range of invitees nationally. The conference will provide early-career researchers and graduate students with access to cutting edge research tools and ideas, and established researchers will benefit from learning new ideas and incorporating strong matrix properties into their work. By utilizing strong matrix properties modeled on the Strong Arnol'd Property, the principal lecturers have made impressive advances in the past five years in the study of the Inverse Eigenvalue Problem. These new strong properties have also energized significant progress in the study of related matrix invariants, such as maximum multiplicity of an eigenvalue and minimum number of distinct eigenvalues, and they have led to new connections with graph minors and graph propagation procedures. These connections have also given rise to new matrix theory questions and results; new forbidden minor characterizations; new minor-monotone graph parameters; and new graph theoretic questions and results. The conference lectures will survey this rich subject and provide participants with the tools needed to explore this fruitful, new, and evolving area of mathematics. The conference website is https://sites.google.com/emich.edu/cbms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-05

The Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) covered much of North America ~23,000 years ago, at which time it was similar in size to ice sheets in Antarctica today. Its growth across North America shaped the landscape of the Great Lakes region, which presently host the world’s largest collection of surface freshwater and many unique ecosystems. Additionally, ~34 million people rely on the natural resources in the Great Lakes region to support agricultural, industrial, cultural, and commercial aspects of America’s economy and society. The LIS started melting in response to increased solar energy at Earth’s poles, and its meltwater flooded across North America to ocean basins where the freshwater disrupted ocean currents and led to hundreds of feet of sea-level rise. Understanding the history of the LIS helps scientists understand potential futures of Earth’s remaining ice sheets and understand feedbacks between ice and Earth’s atmosphere, topography, and oceans. This study targets the LIS glacial history through the Great Lakes where the LIS operated as numerous lobes of ice. The independent nature of these ice lobes is poorly known because there is very little data on the timing of ice activity here. Through this project, a large dataset of 80 new boulder ice-exposure ages will be collected. The dated boulders were once covered by lobes of the LIS, and the measured ages reveal when the ice no longer covered the boulder. These ages will be used to reconstruct the melting histories of the Lake Michigan, Saginaw, and Huron Lobes of the LIS. New laboratory facilities will be established at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) – a primarily undergraduate institution serving mostly students from the Great Lakes states. Dozens of undergraduate students will gain hands-on experience collecting and processing samples for this research, and eight of these students will gain paid research experience under the mentorship of the PI. This project supports the next generation of the STEM workforce through education, research, and knowledge exchange between EMU’s undergraduate students and Earth science graduate students studying at other universities in the Great Lakes region. The cosmogenic isotope, 10Be, is the most common geochronometer used to date exposure ages of glacial erratics. The currently sparse extent of geochronological data in the Great Lakes restricts our understanding Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) retreat, meltwater routing to ocean basins, and our ability to link LIS retreat to specific large-scale climatic events (i.e. Heinrich or Dansgaard-Oeschger events). This project will produce 80 new 10Be-based ages of ice retreat for >7 moraines across the region, and results will be used to (1) constrain the timing of retreat and advance for independently operating lobes of the LIS, (2) draw chronological relationships between LIS ice activity in the Great Lakes region to its better-dated margins along the Atlantic seaboard, and (3) produce a new dataset that may complement and/or sharpen existing 14C-based patterns of LIS retreat. This EMBRACE award increases participation of the next diverse generation of Geoscientists at EMU in the following ways: enhanced access to geoscience courses by reducing enrollment barriers for courses Great Lakes glacial content; mentorship of eight Geoscience students through paid research experiences (compensation is crucial because students may not otherwise afford to participate in unpaid research); development of laboratory spaces at EMU that will benefit all Geoscience faculty and students beyond the length of this award; and growth of a stronger Geosciences workforce for the Great Lakes by facilitating peer-to-peer knowledge and experience exchanges through the Great Lakes Earth Exchange speaker series. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-06

This research project will advance our fundamental understanding of the molecular players that coordinate gene expression in the cell. Through studying their structure and function, further knowledge will be gained on some of the essential processes that they are involved in such as regulation of the cell cycle and DNA repair. In addition, this project will provide research opportunities for a number of underrepresented students at Eastern Michigan University, a diverse, primarily undergraduate institution that values student-centered and inclusive learning. Over a dozen undergraduate students will be closely trained in research by a strong, collaborative duo of PIs with extensive backgrounds in mentoring future scientists and professionals. An additional 24 students will also receive the benefits of research through the continuation of a CURE-grant proposal Biochemistry Lab writing-intensive course (CHEM 453W). This project will also expand and strengthen an existing High School Research Experience at EMU program, which provides research training during the summer to students in grades 9-12 from the local Greater Detroit community. UHRF1 and UHRF2 are multi-domain epigenetic proteins that play critical roles in a variety of processes such as cell cycle regulation, DNA replication, DNA damage repair, and gene regulation. Both proteins contain two histone reader domains, called TTD and PHD, which recognize the post-translational modification (PTM) status on histone H3 to regulate DNA methylation/hydroxymethylation and gene expression. While these proteins share a high degree of sequence similarity, UHRF1 and UHRF2 have distinct and important nuclear functions that are mediated via chromatin interactions. Although much is known on the detailed histone binding properties by the TTD and PHD of UHRF1, there is still limited understanding of the structure and biological function of the same domains in UHRF2. This project will test if UHRF1 and UHRF2 exhibit distinct mode of histone binding and whether they can be specifically modulated by chemical probes. Elucidating the detailed differences between UHRF1 and UHRF2 will provide a greater understanding of the molecular requirements that dictate binding selectivity by these reader proteins. In addition, novel functionalities of UHRF2 may be uncovered by discovering new histone PTM binding partners and chemical probes that target UHRF2. An in-depth fundamental understanding of their structure, function, and ability to modulate their activities is an important step toward understanding the variety of critical cellular processes that UHRF1 and UHRF2 regulate. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NIH Research Projects · FY 2025 · 2022-08

PROJECT SUMMARY The discovery of antibiotics from soil microbes is widely regarded as one of the most significant achievements in modern medicine, enabling many important medical procedures including surgery and cancer chemotherapy. However, antibiotic resistance is approaching such a critical level that we are facing an eminent public health disaster where many significant medical advancements may no longer be possible. There is an urgent need to develop and/or discover novel classes of antibiotics, especially antibiotics that are active against high-priority Gram-negative pathogens. Natural products have served as the scaffold for the vast majority of our current antibiotics, and recent advances in genomics, metagenomics, and metabolomics clearly indicate that there is still a vast wealth of biosynthetic potential encoded in bacterial genomes that could produce novel antibiotics. Unfortunately, identifying a novel biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in a genome provides us with very little information about the chemical nature of the natural product it might produce. Thus, the field of natural product discovery, and consequently the field of antibiotic discovery, faces two major obstacles: how do we quickly and efficiently identify strains that have the potential to produce desirable novel compounds from “silent” BGCs and then how do we consistently induce the expression of these BGCs to characterize the compounds they produce. The induction of silent BGCs that produce antibiotics is likely context or community dependent, especially given the self-harming effects of antimicrobial compounds. Our previous work has validated a method for identifying microbes that produce antimicrobial compounds from silent BGCs, and this proposal describes methods for optimizing single- and mixed-culture fermentation conditions to consistently produce these compounds. In the research aims, we propose two complementary approaches to develop reproducible and scalable fermentation conditions that can broadly stimulate silent antibiotic production, which is often a rate limiting step in the field of natural products chemistry. Aim 1 will expand on our observations that microbes increase the production of antimicrobial compounds when grown in otherwise nutrient-limited media where complex polysaccharides are their dominant carbon source. Aim 2 will use co-culture to manipulate microbial physiological prior to fermentation. We expect that our optimized culture conditions will enable us to obtain natural product extracts that contain sufficient compound for feature-based molecular networking (FBMN) analyses to dereplicate antimicrobial compounds prior to activity-guided purification and structural elucidation of bioactive compounds (Aim 3).

NIH Research Projects · FY 2025 · 2019-09

PROJECT SUMMARY Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), components of the highly dynamic extracellular matrix (ECM), play a crucial role in the undertaking of numerous cellular processes and a variety of human diseases result from disruption of their function. Hyaluronan (HA) is a critical component of the ECM and despite its simple primary structure, it regulates cellular responses in a highly complex manner balanced by contributions from factors that include specific signaling pathways and interactions with cell receptors or other extracellular HA binding proteins. How HA acts as a versatile macromolecule that operates via different mechanisms to regulate distinct downstream signaling and how dysregulation of HA interactions affects cell viability is largely unknown, needs to be elucidated, and currently represents a significant gap in our knowledge. Our long-term goal is to unravel the basic mechanisms by which GAGs function as extracellular molecular switches to regulate cell survival. The overall objective of this proposal is to shed light on novel mechanisms employed by HA in regulating cell signaling. Our central hypothesis is that HA is a key biomolecule that regulates extracellular phosphorylation, neurotransmitter and growth factor receptor signaling, and metabolic reprograming, and that modulation of these mechanisms ultimately affects cell function. Our rationale is that gaining sufficient knowledge of these mechanisms will offer new therapeutic opportunities. Our specific aims are to test the following hypotheses: 1) Binding of HA to IGFBP-3 blocks the protein’s ability to bind humanin which can now bind amyloid beta (Aβ) blocking its phosphorylation on Ser8 by extracellular PKA; 2) Nicotine acting via either the α7-nicotinic acetylcholine receptor or the β-adrenergic receptors activates epidermal growth factor receptor and insulin-like growth factor type 1 receptor to increase PKA activity, increasing HA levels and activation of HA-CD44 signaling, inhibiting p53, increasing the levels of heparanase in the media leading to activation of ecto-casein kinase 2, inhibiting caspase-3 and blocking apoptosis; 3) Hypoxia leads to increased HA levels activating HIF-1α and glycolysis, increasing lactate production which will then activate MMP2 decreasing Aβ40/42 toxicity (A) and MMP9 increasing sE-cad levels (B) and the BDNF/pro-BDNF ratio (C), blocking apoptosis, increasing cell survival and hypoxia-induced cisplatin resistance. This proposal is significant because better understanding of these basic mechanisms will advance our knowledge of diseases resulting from dysregulation of protein-peptide- carbohydrate signaling and innovative because it will investigate heretofore-unexamined HA functions. Expected outcomes will include unraveling HA signaling networks to develop novel therapeutics targeting specific HA- mechanisms. This R15 application will have a positive impact because it will lay the groundwork to develop better approaches to target GAG-related diseases, provide an effective vehicle for introducing undergraduate and graduate students to an authentic and extensive hands-on research training at an early stage of their education, and cultivate student confidence, resilience, appreciation, and interest in biomedical research careers.