SCIENCENEWSP E N N S T A T E B E H R E N D S C H O O L O F S C I E N C E | 2 0 1 4

LIFE ON OTHER MOONS? 9DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE 2

FACULTY AND STAFF NEWS 3

GOING WITH THE FLOW 4

LIFE’S A ZOO 6

PURSUING PLAN C 8

RESEARCHING SALT RUNOFF 10

FROM BEHREND TO AFRICA 12

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DIRECTOR’S MESSAGEAs we move through another academic year, I am very excited and optimistic about what the new year will bring for the School of Science.

The school is far more than a group of buildings and

collection of majors. It is the people who bring to life the school’s mis-sion and purpose. This will become abundantly clear as you read this issue of Science News.

The School of Science is dedicated faculty members like Dr. Baxter and Dr. Williams, doing novel research and getting students highly involved in the experience. It is dynamic faculty members like Dr. Bhattacharjee, bringing scholars from around the globe to our campus for a confer-ence. It is supporters like Mrs. Judy Alstadt, aiding our students with scholarships. It is current students like Melanie Biddle and Bryanna Pierce, pursuing their dreams. It is alumni like Pete Schuster, enter-ing the working world intent on making it better.

The goals for the School of Science are straightforward. We all need to work together to make the school a place where students want to learn, faculty members want to teach and do research, partners want to engage with us, and benefactors want to support.

I thank you for your support as we move forward.

Martin Kociolek, Ph.D.

In BriefENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE MAJOR NOW OFFERED

New this fall, the School of Science has begun offering Penn State’s only Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science.

Environmental Science students study biology, chemistry, and geosci-ence within the context of the human-earth interface. They learn how to under-stand environmental processes, analyze and solve environmental problems, and communicate to other scientists and the public the impacts of using the planet’s energy and natural resources.

Two options within the new major permit sub-specialization. The Environmental Field Studies option adds a concentration in field biology, geographic informa-tion systems, and environmental geoscience, while the Environmental Lab Science option emphasizes analytical chemistry and geochemistry.

Dr. Tony Foyle, associate professor of geology, is chair of the new program. For additional information, contact him at amf11@psu.edu.

PLANETARIUM OPEN! The Erie Planetarium served as a resource for the community for more than fifty years, and it continues today as the Yahn Planetarium at Penn State Behrend.

The planetarium, located in the Zurn Building, opened in early November with a showing of Back to the Moon for Good, a presentation highlighting the competition among privately funded international teams, including one from Penn State, that is ushering in a new era of lunar exploration. The program is just one of nearly twenty shows that the planetarium offers.

Public shows are presented on Thursdays and Saturdays. Private showings for schools, scout troops, and other groups are available. Birth-day parties also can be scheduled.

If you can’t get to the college, Yahn Planetarium director Jim Gavio will bring the show to you in a portable planetarium that is available on an hourly or daily basis.

For more information, contact Jim Gavio at jvg10@psu.edu or call 814-898-7268.

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UPGRADES ENHANCE SCIENCE COMPLEXThe Otto Behrend Science Building got a facelift this summer with new energy-saving exterior windows, new lighting and flooring in the lobby, and a new connector between Otto Behrend and the Hammermill Building. The enclosed connector will allow students to move through the entire science complex without going outdoors, an upgrade they are sure to appreciate this winter!

MATHEMATICS LAB NOW IN USEPenn State Behrend’s Secondary Math Education majors have been making good use of the program’s new test-teaching room on the second floor of the Witkowski Building. The space, created with funds from a $159,000 National Science Foundation grant, al-lows Behrend students to practice teaching strategies on Erie-area high school students.

Faculty & Staff NewsNew Faculty and StaffThe School of Science welcomed seven new faculty and staff members: Dr. Todd Cook, assistant professor of biology; Dr. Kelly Ann Miller, lecturer in biology; Dr. Natalie Mikita, visiting assistant professor in chemistry; Dr. Scott Simpson, lecturer in chemistry; Dr. Jamie Henderson, lecturer in mathematics; Catherine Manno, lecturer in nursing; andTalia Finotti, administrative support assistant.

AwardsDr. Beth Potter, associate professor of biology, was awarded the 2014 Guy. W. Wilson Award for Excellence in Advising.

LeadershipDr. Dorothy Kurylo, lecturer in nursing, has been named campus coordinator in nurs-ing. Dr. Mike Rutter, associate professor of statistics, will now serve as both academic and program coordinator of mathematics. Dr. Chuck Yeung, professor of physics, has been named program coordinator in physics.

PromotionsDr. Tony Mastroberardino and Dr. Jason Bennett have received tenure and have been promoted to associate professor of mathematics and associate professor of chemistry, respectively.

CHEMISTRY SCHOLARSHIP ESTABLISHEDDon and Judy Alstadt’s love of science, espe-cially chemistry, and their support of Penn State Behrend were both well-established over many years. Today, the couple’s commitment continues in the form of the Donald and Judith Alstadt Scholarship for Chemistry. The scholarship, established by Mrs. Alstadt in memory of her late husband, who was chairman emeritus of LORD Corporation, provides recognition and financial assistance to outstanding incoming or current students majoring in Chemistry at Behrend.

The Physics of Going with the FlowEVERY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PROJECT BEGINS WITH A QUESTION. BUT IN THE CASE OF A PROJECT BY DR. G. WILLIAM BAXTER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS, IT BEGAN WITH A MILD CASE OF HEARTBURN.

“I was trying to shake some antacids out of the plastic container, but they were all clogged up in the top,” Baxter said. “I wondered what caused them to jam like that and if a different shape of pill or container would work better.”

Baxter’s question launched an extensive research project in which he, with the help of undergraduate student researchers, has been explor-ing the physics of moving granular materials smoothly through vertical channels. He hopes to determine what factors influence a jam and what can be done to reduce the prob-ability and strength of a jam.

It’s research with a practical application.

“Manufacturers are always moving granular materials from one place to another,” Baxter said. “If there’s a very complex jam and they have to shut down the line or take equipment apart to clear it, it’s a big loss in productivity and, ultimately, profit.”

How can the laws of physics be applied to prevent granular jams?

That’s what Baxter and his under-graduate research assistant Nicholas Friedl, a senior dual-majoring in Physics and Mathematics, are trying to determine.

The two have been creating jams in the laboratory using custom-ma-chined cylindrical grains of different diameters and heights (similar in size and shape to coins, pills, etc.) that fall through a square plexiglass channel. The plexiglass tube is hooked up to a motor that turns the cylinder every few seconds. A digital camera takes photos—33 gigabytes worth in less

than 48 hours—to record any jams. Looking through that many photos

could take hours, so Baxter wrote a software program that does it for him.

“The program identifies only the photos that contain jams,” Baxter said. “Then we can just analyze those to see when the jam started, how long it lasted, and how complex it was, meaning how many pieces were involved in it.”

There have been some surprises. “We learned that, in some cases,

we’re dealing with electrostatic is-sues,” Friedl said. “Tiny grains charge up and then stick to the walls.”

Friedl, a Weedville native and recipient of the college’s 2013-14 Undergraduate Student Research Award, said he knew from a young age that he had a mathematical mind and a future in the sciences. What he hadn’t planned on was staying at Behrend.

“I thought I’d go to University Park after two years, but I stayed at Behrend because of the research opportunities,” he said. “It’s a much more personal experience here.”

According to Baxter, a lot of companies will be interested in Friedl’s experience at Behrend.

“Jamming is a known problem in the granular/powder industry,” Baxter said. “They are eager to learn which factors can cause jams and what they can do to reduce the probability of them.”

Baxter and Friedl hope to offer solutions to the all-too-common problem when they publish the first results of their project in 2015.

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Nick Friedl, left, a senior dual-majoring in Physics and Mathematics, has been working with Dr. G. William Baxter, associate professor of physics, to analyze the movement of granular materials.

This sequence of adjacent frames shows a jam appearing for three frames, then disappearing on its own the fourth time the cylinder is flipped.

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Zoo Trip Leads to New College, Career

B iddle never planned on training marsupials or helping hooved animals beat boredom. She

intended to be a doctor when she entered the pre-med program at Robert Morris University. She quickly had a change of heart.

“I knew right away it was all wrong and that I was making a major life deci-sion for all the wrong reasons,” she said.

About that time, she visited the Pittsburgh Zoo and found a new career path at the elephant exhibit after striking up a conversation with lead keeper Lisa Fox Caruso ’99.

“Lisa told me she loved her job and that she had gone to Penn State Behrend. I have always loved zoos and animals. I went home that night and applied online.”

Biddle wasted no time jumping into her new career. Within six weeks of arriving at Behrend, she began volunteering at the Erie Zoo. A year later, she was promoted to intern. Her first week was a memorable one.

“On my first day, I was helping clean the giraffe house,” she said. “I had a long ponytail and Mitch, the older giraffe, grabbed it in his mouth and covered it in saliva. It was gross, but pretty awesome, too. On my second day, a red panda was born.”

When the internship ended, the Erie Zoo offered Biddle a part-time zookeeper position in the Children’s Zoo. She works with kangaroos, walla-bies, donkeys, zebus, llamas, alpacas, sheep, goats, and lorikeets, applying what she’s learned about animal behavior and biology at Behrend to come up with new enrichment ideas for the animals in her care.

MELANIE BIDDLE NEVER WANTS TO LEAVE WORK. “I hang out there on my days off,” says the senior Biology major, a part-time zookeeper at the Erie Zoo. “When I’m home, I’m usually doing research on the animals or looking up enrichment ideas for them.”

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“I try to think of things we can do to make life more interesting or fun for the animals,” she said. “There’s an approval process, of course. We have to do research and be sure that the things we do aren’t harmful or stress-ful to the animals.”

This summer, Biddle experimented with spraying different scents in the marsupial exhibit and offering them yoga balls to play with. She also froze apples and other treats in blocks of ice to entertain the donkeys on hot days.

After Biddle graduates in Decem-ber, she plans to bid Penn State Beh-rend kwaheri (“goodbye” in Swahili) and travel to South Africa for four weeks to volunteer at Cheetah Experi-ence. While there, she will be respon-sible for helping care for cheetahs, lions, leopards, servals, and wolves.

“I’ve dreamed of doing this my whole life,” she said. “It’s amazing to me that I’ve come this far, this fast. Behrend really got me where I wanted to go.”

And, now, she’s hoping donors will help her get to Africa. She must raise $4,000 to participate in Cheetah Experience. Donate or learn more at Biddle’s fundraising website, gofundme.com/9u77r4.

“ A lot of animals are more intelligent than you might think. The donkeys may look kind of dopey, but they are very smart and they have great personalities.”

— M E L A N I E B I D D L E

Melanie Biddle, a senior Biology major, works on target training a wallaby at the Erie Zoo. Wallabies are taught to touch body parts to a target to enable better and safer veterinary care.

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Pursuing Plan CDIAGNOSIS LEADS FORMER GYMNAST TO NEW FOUR-YEAR NURSING PROGRAMBryanna Pierce was a competitive-level gymnast when a routine health exam at school revealed an S-shaped spine that would thwart her dreams, not just once but twice.

Her scoliosis diagnosis at the age of 12 put an end to her gymnastics aspirations and, later, her plans to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.

All was not lost, though. Pierce said her experiences eventually led her to Penn State Behrend’s Nursing program.

“When I was first diagnosed, I spent a lot of time with doctors and nurses, and they were so kind,” she said. “I was very emotional back then because gymnastics was all I had ever known, and I knew that eventually I wouldn’t be able to compete anymore.”

Through her teen years, she endured a battery of tests and wore a series of back braces to prevent the disease from getting worse. Despite these measures, Pierce said her scoliosis is so severe that she will eventually need surgery.

“They start doing surgery when you are at a 45 degree curve, and I’m not there yet,” she said. “I want to put it off as long as possible.”

While her pain and worsening scoliosis forced her to quit performing gymnastics when she was 16, she stayed involved in the sport. She coaches five nights a week at the Erie Gymnastics Center in Harborcreek.

“I love being in the gym and coaching the kids,” she said. It was her newfound joy for nurturing young gymnasts

and her positive experiences with health care professionals that inspired her to pursue a career in nursing.

Bryanna chose to enroll in Behrend because of its four-year nursing program and also because the location allows her to continue coaching.

“My plan is to become a traveling nurse to gain experi-ence,” she said. “Then, I’d like to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner.”

For now, though, Pierce says she’s lucky to have two places that feel like home—Erie Gymnastics Center and Penn State Behrend.

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Could There be Life on Other Moons?PROFESSOR’S GRADUATE SCHOOL HYPOTHESIS NOW BEING ACTIVELY STUDIED

In 1977, a young stargazer sat in a dark movie theater mesmerized by George Lucas’ imagination and the vast possibilities of the filmmaker’s fictitious Galactic Empire. Though just a boy at the time, the future Dr. Darren Williams, professor of astronomy

and physics, found an element of truth in Star Wars that would later serve as the topic of his dissertation.

“Some of the military bases in Star Wars were located on moons,” Williams said. “Every-one talks about life on other planets, but it’s entirely possible that moons could sustain life. Not our moon, of course; it’s too small. But moons in other solar systems may have the magic combination of size and location needed to make them habitable.”

Williams first wrote about the possibility of life on exomoons—moons outside our solar system that are large enough to be earth-like—in 1997. Though it was just a hypothetical idea, it received national attention when his work was published in the journal Nature.

Fast forward fourteen years and, thanks to the Kepler space telescope that has been monitor-ing more than 100,000 stars since 2010, Williams’ hypothetical is now a theoretical. Kepler has revealed thousands of solar systems, some of which may have moons with the right criteria.

For an exomoon to sustain life, it must be far enough from the sun for water to remain in liquid form and large enough to have an atmosphere. Without an atmosphere, any liquid on the surface of the moon would evaporate.

“We don’t know if any of those planetary systems have exomoons, but we know some of them have giant round objects orbiting around them that may meet the criteria,” Williams said. “The hunt is on. There are more than twenty astrophysicists actively looking for exomoons right now.”

DR. DARREN WILLIAMS, professor of astronomy and physics, recently co-authored a cover story in the journal Astrobiology about the formation and search for exomoons. You can read it at http://online.liebertpub.com.

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Research Reveals Road Salt in Lake EriePete Schuster ’14 wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life when he graduated from high school. He knew he wasn’t ready for college, so he joined the Marines.

During a tour of duty in the Middle East, Schuster gazed out over a polluted and trash-strewn sea and saw his future.

“It was such a mess over there, environmentally and otherwise,” he said. “The Arabian Sea was green from contamination. I knew that I wanted to work to help the environment.”

After he finished his time in the service, Schuster enrolled at Penn State Behrend using the GI Bill, which provides financial assistance for veterans to attend college.

As a Science major, Schuster helped Dr. Pam Silver and Dr. Michael Campbell, both professors of biology, with wetlands research work. They talked about the effect that road salt has on wetlands, which led Schuster to wonder about larger bodies of water.

A freshwater lake with too much salt can be detrimental to the plants, animals, and fish that depend on it.

With funding from an undergraduate research grant and

permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Envi-ronmental Protection (DEP) and Presque Isle State Park to conduct studies in the bay, Schuster went to work.

Road salt runoff is dense and sinks into the sediment, so samples had to be taken from the bottom of the bay. Coincidentally, Schuster is a certified scuba diver.

He collected three samples of sediment from eight sites—three on the Presque Isle State Park side, five on the city side of the bay—for two years. By pushing a clear PVC pipe straight down into the sediment, he was able to gather layers of stratified material and compare the saltiness of it from year to year.

Schuster found that harsher winters resulted in a spike of chloride on both sides of the bay, indicative of an increased use of salt in those years. Regardless of the severity of the winter, though, the research makes it clear that road salt is washing into Lake Erie.

“The salt is definitely making its away across the bay from the city side,” he said. “The park doesn’t use road salt, so we didn’t find as much in the samples I took on the park side.”

Schuster’s research work provided a baseline. Now, the DEP and other agencies can monitor the problem.

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Schuster says environmental strategies like raingardens and stormwater management can help reduce the amount of salt that runs into the lake, but it would be best to find a more eco-friendly alternative to road salt.

“Perhaps cinders or sand,” Schuster said. “But, of course, those don’t melt ice. Salt does.”

It’s a quandary Schuster can continue to ponder and possibly work on in his new role as a DEP water pollution biologist. His primary duties include site inspections of wetland mitigation and stream improvement projects. He said the job was a career goal that Behrend helped him reach.

“My science professors made me a better student and a better biologist because they forced me to think,” he said. “They never gave me the answers.”

Schuster says there was one thing his biology professors did give him in abundance: Time and support.

“They were always there to encourage me and help me with anything I needed,” he said.

“ Erie uses a lot of salt on the roads every winter. With storm water flow-ing directly into the lake, it’s logi-cal that a lot of salt ends up in Presque Isle Bay. I was sur-prised to learn that no one had really studied it.”

— P E T E S C H U S T E R ’ 1 4

While they were students at Behrend, Pete Schuster, left, and Stephanie Stoughton conducted research in Walnut Creek. Both graduated in 2014 with degrees in Biology.

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MATHEMATICS LAB NOW IN USE 3

From Behrend to South AfricaA mathematics conference held at Penn State Behrend led to a South

African residency for one mathematics faculty member—Dr. Papiya Bhattacharjee, an assistant professor of mathematics, and an expert in

point-free topology. In the summer of 2013, twenty mathematicians attended an international

mathematics conference held on campus that she helped to organize. Among the attendees was Dr. Thembe Dube, a professor at the University of South Africa. He invited Bhattacharjee to visit his campus, which serves more than 350,000 students, many of whom study online.

Bhattacharjee accepted the four-week residency. She presented a seminar to the university’s students and faculty members. She enjoyed a safari tour of Kruger Park, where elephants, lions, and white rhinos roam. But mostly she burrowed into abstract mathematics, providing theorems involving sober topological spaces and constructing examples and counter-examples to support the results.

She and Dube were a good match. In just two weeks, they had completed a paper, which they submitted to Bulletin Mathématique.

“I have never had a paper written that quickly,” Bhattacharjee said. “It’s different, being in a room together. It’s more efficient. You can build on the work. You aren’t always putting it aside, waiting for an email reply.”

The two plan to continue collaborating and are pursuing grant funding for additional research.

For now, they are communicating mostly via email. Bhattacharjee hopes to have another chance for face-to-face collaboration: The annual conference on Order, Algebra, and Logic will return to Behrend in 2016, and Dube has said he will attend.

DR. PAPIYA BHATTACHARJEE, assis-tant professor of mathematics, is an expert in point-free topology. That’s the study of the properties that allow geometric figures to bend or stretch without breaking. It’s how computers are programmed to make decisions.