“Many lakes in Maine are clear and have relatively small amounts of nutrients coming in from outside,” says Holly Ewing, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College.

“Those of us who like to live on clear lakes, take drinking water from them and use them for recreation want to see them remain clear,” Ewing says. But a process called lake eutrophication is spoiling clearwater lakes in Maine and elsewhere as higher levels of nutrients encourage blooms of algae and bacteria, many of which form scums or mats on lakes.

When these organisms die and decompose, their decomposition can use up the oxygen in the water — bad news for fish and other organisms that need oxygen.

Now, thanks to National Science Foundation funding awarded this fall, Ewing and a team of collaborators are investigating lake eutrophication and especially the role of a particular cyanobacterium. In September, the NSF awarded Ewing $367,046 over three years to research Gloeotrichia echinulata, nicknamed Gloeo. This cyanobacterium, Ewing and her collaborators hypothesize, could help make nutrients more available for other undesirable organisms in eutrophying lakes.

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“One of the exciting things about this project is its collaborative nature,” Ewing says. “It brings together undergraduate students from Bates and Dartmouth, graduate students from Dartmouth and Cornell, established researchers from Bates, Dartmouth and the Cary Institute, and managers from the Lake Sunapee Protective Association.”

“Students are involved as research assistants during the school year and in the summer, and several are completing theses on projects related to our big study.”

Known for its large size and spherical structure, Gloeo is a nuisance cyanobacterium commonly found in lakes where high levels of nutrients occur naturally. Yet during the past 30 years, it has bloomed in formerly pristine bodies of water and in some of these, it appears that Gloeo may have become more common.

Human activity, such as deforestation, agriculture and residential development in the watershed and particularly along lake shores, is a prime cause of elevated nutrient levels in water. The researchers want to know if the cyanobacterium’s ability to free up nutrients from its environment — nitrogen from the atmosphere and phosphorous from lake-bottom sediment — also plays a significant role in the early phases of lake eutrophication.

Gloeo blooms have been reported in at least 20 low-nutrient lakes across northern New England during the past decade. Most of these lakes are important for recreation, and at least two are major sources of drinking water.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the NSF grant will fund a host of research operations. “We’ll be making field measurements, collecting samples to analyze for their chemical and biological constituents, completing experiments, collecting sediment cores to look at changes over time and modeling the dynamics of these systems,” Ewing says.

Thomas Wenzel, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at Bates, has received a grant worth nearly $100,000 to support a curriculum development project in analytical chemistry.

The National Science Foundation awarded Wenzel a $99,278 “Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement” grant for a project titled “Collaborative Research: Development of Contextual E-Learning Modules for Analytical Chemistry.”

Working with professor Cynthia Larive of the University of California, Riverside, Wenzel is developing an entire online undergraduate curriculum in analytical chemistry that will be disseminated via the Analytical Sciences Digital Library.

The Analytical Sciences Digital Library is a NSF-funded digital resource that collects and publishes discovery materials pertinent to curricular innovations and technical resources in the analytical sciences. Wenzel has been involved with the ASDL since its inception and is a member of its advisory board. Larive is a managing director of the library.

The key to the curriculum “is the use of collaborative learning in place of a lecture mode of instruction,” Wenzel says, “and problem-based or project-based labs in place of the traditional ‘cookbook labs’ that tend to characterize chemistry courses.”

The collaborative learning model means that topics will be developed through small-group activities in class, with instructors serving as facilitators to help students work through the problems.

The lab component will eschew a traditional approach that favors prescribed, step-by-step confirmation of predetermined outcomes. Instead, the lab work will comprise real chemical analysis problems for which students will have to design and implement their own measurement techniques and methods.

Wenzel, a 1999 recipient of the American Chemical Society’s National Analytical Chemistry Education Award, already employs collaborative learning and project-based labs in his courses.

The NSF grant is a so-called Phase 1 award. If the foundation deems the development and progress of this project successful, Wenzel, Larive and their collaborators may request a Phase 2 award for an additional $500,000 in two years.

That funding will enable them to continue developing topical units included within an analytical chemistry curriculum. “What I will do is expand my materials to fulfill the breadth of topics taught across the spectrum of analytical chemistry courses,” Wenzel explains. He’ll also write instructor manuals for the material.

“The expansion of topics and the manuals will facilitate the adoption of these methods and materials by other instructors throughout the country and the world.”

By Catherine Green ’10

Peter Wong, a professor of mathematics at Bates, has received a grant of nearly $110,000 to support his research in topology.

Topology is the branch of mathematics studying the properties of a space that are preserved under continuous deformations. A common example is a clay “doughnut” that is reshaped into a coffee cup: The hole in the handle, corresponding to that in the doughnut, is preserved during the reshaping.

Wong‘s particular research, supported by the $107,226 National Science Foundation grant, is in fixed-point topology — a concept better explained with sheets of paper than coffee mugs and doughnuts.

“If you crumple a piece of paper and then compare it to the space the paper originally occupied, fixed-point theory says that somewhere there’s a point on the crumpled piece of paper that will be in the exact same space it originally occupied,” Wong explains.

Paper is one tool for visualizing the complex mathematics in Wong’s field. Fixed-point theory generated much research in algebraic topology in the first half of the 20th century. Wong is using that classical algebraic topology — but with a twist, so to speak. To address the problem of finding the minimum number of fixed points a given transformation can have, he is comparing a geometric method with an algebraic method.

This interest in the overlap of algebraic and geometric methods is an example of Wong’s eye for connections, and may have given him an edge in winning the highly competitive NSF grant.

“Grants usually focus more on current topics, but because I am connecting algebraic topology with more ‘fashionable’ areas in mathematics, I’m showing that it’s still useful,” he says.

Wong also speculates that the NSF considered his grant proposal favorably because of his success in using topology to involve undergraduates in mathematics. “Some problems in topology don’t require highly technical training, so with some help from me, students have been very involved in research,” he says.

Interest in fixed-point theory extends beyond the offices of a few math experts scattered around the world. While his own work is highly theoretical, Wong explains, in general “this kind of mathematics has real applications for economics” — for example, in determining equilibriums, or states when opposing economic forces are in balance.

Wong earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and Ph.D. in algebraic topology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at Bates for 20 years.

Michael J. Retelle, a professor of geology at Bates, is one of 13 scientists across the nation to share nearly $1,500,000 in National Science Foundation funding for Arctic research related to global climate change.

The NSF funds, awarded for a four-year period beginning March 1, support an ongoing project to create a 2,000-year climatic history of the North American Arctic. The researchers are analyzing layers of sediment deposited annually upon Arctic lake beds for clues to climatic conditions during the past two millennia, clues such as sediment thickness and chemical composition.

The NSF grant totals $1,476,442, of which Retelle’s share is $50,190. That money will defray costs of analyzing six lake-floor core samples that Retelle collected in 2003 from lakes on Devon, Cornwallis and Bathurst islands, near Greenland in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. Retelle and three students (including Dan Frost, a senior from Farmington, Maine) will process the samples this summer.

Titled “Collaborative Research: A Synthesis of the Last 2,000 Years of Climatic Variability from Arctic Lakes,” the NSF-funded project is intended to provide a context for better understanding of current climatic trends. “It’s important to try to put the recent climatic warming in a longer-term perspective, and to try to tease out whether what we’re looking at is part of the range of natural variability or, indeed, if it’s a result of human alteration of the atmosphere,” Retelle explains.

“The further we can go back and see how the natural system works, the better we can put this recent warming into context and try to understand what’s controlling it.”

Analyzing core samples from 30 lakes across a region of the North American Arctic from Alaska to the northwest Atlantic, the researchers will integrate their results of their work and, they hope, be able to announce findings by 2007. The project extends a 400-year Arctic climatic history project whose results were widely publicized in 1997.

Retelle explains that, as records (or “proxies,” in scientific parlance) of the weather from year to year, layers of lake sediment can be likened to tree-growth rings. Thicker layers can signify warmer summers that promoted plant growth in the lake or rainstorms that washed soil into the lake. Also informative are levels of carbon, nitrogen and substances like biogenic silica, a hard remnant of algae.

Retelle and his assistants will analyze the samples through a variety of means, including an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy system at the University of Laval, Quebec.

Climate is a central theme of Retelle’s work, and in nearly 30 years’ worth of visits to the Arctic, he has seen climate-related changes that he calls “actually frightening.” He points to Ellesmere Island, 480 miles from the North Pole, where floating coastal ice shelves have receded dramatically and lake ice that once persisted year-round is now seasonal. “There are radical changes,” he says.

The grant is the latest in a series of NSF awards that Retelle has received for Arctic lake-bed study and for bringing students into this research. (More than 20 of Retelle’s students have conducted research in the Canadian Arctic for senior thesis projects.) He has done geological research in the Arctic since 1976, when he worked as a field geologist and engineer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Retelle, of Monmouth, has worked at Bates since 1987. His teaching and research are focused on geological events of the past 1,600,000 years — called the Quaternary Period — and specifically ancient environmental records from glacial, lake and marine sediments in Maine as well as the Canadian arctic.

Here in Maine, with Thomas Weddle of the Maine Geological Survey, Retelle has published findings from an ongoing survey on the impacts of the retreat from Maine of Ice Age glaciers, including changes in sea level. He also works with students in assessing seasonal effects of weather at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, Phippsburg.

Retelle is a senior researcher for the Svalbard Research Experience for Undergraduates, a summer project funded by the NSF and hosted by Mount Holyoke College, that brings six students to the Norwegian Arctic to research the effects of climate change upon high-latitude glaciers, melt-water streams and sedimentation in lakes and fjords.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in earth sciences from Salem (Mass.) State College, and earned graduate degrees in geology at the University of Massachusetts.

Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, a professor of chemistry at Bates College is bringing four Lewiston High School students to the college to help investigate the biochemistry of a particular category of viruses. Professor T. Glen Lawson and LHS biology teacher Jason Fuller are working together on this project that brings four advanced-placement students to Bates today through June 25. Mentored by two of Lawson’s research students, the young people from LHS will help prepare cloned RNA from the encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) for use in experiments examining how the virus’s RNA is replicated.

The four are Andrew Boulanger, Tyson Morgan, Sarah Chandonnet and Tracy Bradley.

The project is a pilot program that, if successful, Lawson hopes to expand to include 16 AP biology students from LHS. A three-year NSF grant for $265,000, awarded to Lawson in 2002 for his viral research, is funding the project.

Lawson says that it’s increasingly common for colleges and universities to support science education in secondary schools. High schools often lack the facilities or resources to bring their science education beyond a certain level, however motivated science teachers may be.

“The best way to teach students, both high school and undergraduate, what science is and how it is done is to give them the opportunity to do it with their own hands,” says Lawson.

The long-term objective of projects such as this, he explains, “is to encourage more young people to consider science as a career, to allow them to discover if it’s something they find satisfying, and to build and maintain a population of professional scientists that is crucial for the ongoing health of the national educational system and economy.”

Lawson and his students are involved in an ongoing exploration of the workings of protein destruction in viruses. The specific question that the LHS students will help clarify is whether a particular EMCV protein binds to the genomic RNA as part of the RNA replication process.

At the high school, AP biology students are required to do some sort of summer project prior to taking the senior AP biology course, a requirement satisfied by Lawson’s project. The LHS students will present their research to their class in the fall.

Lawson, who serves on a grants advisory panel for the NSF, adds that the agency frequently provides funding to support research experiences for undergraduates and high school students and views these experiences as important vehicles for science education.

Professor T. Glen Lawson and LHS biology teacher Jason Fuller are working together on this project that brings four advanced-placement students to Bates today through June 25. Mentored by two of Lawson’s research students, the young people from LHS will help prepare cloned RNA from the encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) for use in experiments examining how the virus’s RNA is replicated.

The four are Andrew Boulanger, Tyson Morgan, Sarah Chandonnet and Tracy Bradley.

The project is a pilot program that, if successful, Lawson hopes to expand to include 16 AP biology students from LHS. A three-year NSF grant for $265,000, awarded to Lawson in 2002 for his viral research, is funding the project.

Lawson says that it’s increasingly common for colleges and universities to support science education in secondary schools. High schools often lack the facilities or resources to bring their science education beyond a certain level, however motivated science teachers may be.

“The best way to teach students, both high school and undergraduate, what science is and how it is done is to give them the opportunity to do it with their own hands,” says Lawson.

The long-term objective of projects such as this, he explains, “is to encourage more young people to consider science as a career, to allow them to discover if it’s something they find satisfying, and to build and maintain a population of professional scientists that is crucial for the ongoing health of the national educational system and economy.”

Lawson and his students are involved in an ongoing exploration of the workings of protein destruction in viruses. The specific question that the LHS students will help clarify is whether a particular EMCV protein binds to the genomic RNA as part of the RNA replication process.

At the high school, AP biology students are required to do some sort of summer project prior to taking the senior AP biology course, a requirement satisfied by Lawson’s project. The LHS students will present their research to their class in the fall.

Lawson, who serves on a grants advisory panel for the NSF, adds that the agency frequently provides funding to support research experiences for undergraduates and high school students and views these experiences as important vehicles for science education.

Paula Schlax, an assistant professor of chemistry at Bates College, has received a National Science Foundation grant for nearly $272,000 to support her research into bacterial responses to environmental stress.

This research, in which Schlax closely involves her students, promises to increase understanding of fundamental principles that govern whether or not genes express biologically active proteins.

Schlax, of Lewiston, will receive $271,840 from the NSF over three years. A member of the Bates faculty since 1998, she is investigating mechanisms through which bacteria respond to changes in their immediate environment.

Specifically, Schlax studies a molecule called RpoS that is common to many bacteria and regulates their stress response. Environmental stresses such as extreme temperatures, acidity or salinity trip a “genetic switch” that results in high RpoS levels. This stimulates the creation of “protector molecules” that toughen the organism against many types of stresses.

Understanding the stress response helps explain how bacteria survive drastic changes in their natural environment and how environmental stresses influence the composition of bacterial species in a natural ecosystem.

Additionally, many disease-causing bacteria undergo this stress response, says Schlax, and that response can influence organisms’ ability to harm human hosts. Understanding this process may provide insight into the mechanisms by which these organisms cause disease.

The NSF award is especially gratifying, Schlax says, because it “recognizes that Bates undergraduate students will participate in increasing fundamental scientific knowledge. It’s a great compliment to our students.”

She says, “Students will participate in all aspects of this research, from designing and carrying out experiments to interpreting data and presenting it to the greater scientific community.”

This work crosses the traditional boundaries of chemistry and molecular biology by investigating the relationship between the structure of RNA molecules and their function in gene expression, Schlax says. A goal is to “map” gene expression networks, which is a small part of the cutting-edge discipline of functional genomics.

Wenzel and May 2000 Bates graduate Jolene Thurston of Post Mills, Vt., have co-authored an article on their chiral resolving agent research that has been published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Organic Chemistry.

With this latest of 12 National Science Foundation awards, Wenzel has received more than $1 million in grant funding since he began teaching at Bates nearly 20 years ago. Wenzel, the past president of the Council on Undergraduate Research, was named the 1997 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Maine Professor of the Year and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Scholar in 1990. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University and doctoral degree from the University of Colorado.

Bates was selected from a field of 76 applicants, each with a strong women’s studies program and an institutional commitment to improving the campus climate and curricular offerings for women in science.

Each selected institution has formed a campus team of six members guided by a team leader to facilitate the project. Math professor Bonnie Shulman leads the Bates faculty team composed of Pam Baker and Sharon Kinsman, biology; Elizabeth Tobin, history; Mark Semon, physics; and Georgia Nigro, psychology.

“It’s quite an honor,” Shulman said. “It was a nationwide competition and the award means that Bates will now be a leader in the movement to improve science education for women.”

Along with other participants, Bates will develop new courses on women and science, incorporate new scholarship on gender and science into the existing curriculum and develop innovative teaching methods for women studying science. The project will produce several publications about the curricular changes developed on these 10 campuses and ways schools can successfully bridge the gender-science gap.

The 10 institutions were chosen by a national panel of leading women science scholars. The Women and Scientific Literacy (WSL) project is directed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Program on the Status and Education of Women (PSEW) with a $857,244 grant from the National Science Foundation.

An annual stipend of $10,000 goes to Bates for the first two years of the project. Other resources available include a national science consultant to guide their projects, bibliographic and curricular resources, access to a moderated e-mail discussion group and participation in two national conferences.

Other participating institutions include: University of Arizona; Barnard College; California State University – Long Beach; Greenfield Community College; University of Illinois at Chicago; Portland State University; University of Rhode Island; Rowan College of New Jersey; and St. Lawrence University.

Founded in 1971, PSEW is one of only two women’s offices in national higher education associations, and the sole one whose central mission is to improve undergraduate education.