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Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) / 2020 / Archives for February 2020

Archives for February 2020

Professor Sue Johnson awarded prestigious Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Visual Arts Fellowship

Sue Johnson, professor of art, is one of ten artists who have been awarded a VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship in the professional category for 2020-21. This is an $8,000 award to be used by the artist to support their creative practice, and also includes opportunities for fellowship recipients to exhibit their work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and other museum sites. Veronica Roberts, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas was the juror for the professional fellowship entries. A private reception honoring this year’s fellows will be held on March 6, 2020 at the museum.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Program is a vital source of funding for the visual arts and art history in Virginia. The VMFA is committed to supporting professional artists as well as art and art history students who demonstrate exceptional creative ability in their chosen discipline and, as such, has awarded nearly $5.8 million in Fellowships to Virginians. “The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Program is proud to support student and professional artists working across the Commonwealth,” said Alex Nyerges, VMFA director and CEO. “We offer one of the largest fellowship programs of its kind in the United States and recognize this effort as a core part of our mission.” The Fellowship Program was established in 1940 through a generous contribution made by the late John Lee Pratt of Fredericksburg. Offered through VMFA Statewide, Fellowships are still largely funded through the Pratt endowment, supplemented by gifts from the Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation and the J. Warwick McClintock Jr. Scholarship Fund.

Johnson plans to use the award to support material expenses needed to create new works, pursue new exhibition opportunities, and hire a studio assistant.

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Documenting Chesapeake History

The region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay is rich in history. Originally settled by Native American tribes, the area is also home to the United States’ earliest English colonial settlements and the beginnings of American slavery. Since 2001, Julia King and a consortium of researchers have been advancing the archaeological study of the region through digital methods, collections-based research, and more traditional field excavations. Their work has made archaeological data more accessible to researchers and students and yielded new insights into colonial and pre-colonial history. It has also had an impact on Native American tribes who still live in the region.

As the first director of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, King was charged with organizing and relocating archaeological collections from across the state to one central location. NEH grants helped preserve and electronically catalog records documenting more than 1-million objects from archaeological sites located throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, making them more broadly accessible to researchers. NEH funding also supported two comparative studies of English, Indigenous, and African culture in the Chesapeake. A consortium of researchers from around the region worked on these projects, contributing and digitizing their archaeological catalogs.

Through this work, archaeologists came to see nuances in interactions between Native Americans and English settlers, as evidenced through objects found in excavated sites. For instance, between 1660 and 1680, the colorful beads Native Americans traded changed from blue and white to black and red, indicating a growing antipathy for the settlers: among Native people, the color black was often closely associated with death. Beyond these insights, the funding resulted in two websites: ChesapeakeArchaeology.org and ColonialEncounters.org. These continue to be used by students and researchers as they explore the region’s history.

Now a professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, King has continued her work in the region’s archeology and history through an NEH grant to excavate and analyze Indigenous sites along the lower Rappahannock River in Virginia. Throughout the project, King has worked closely with Rappahannock people who live in the area and whose ancestors settled the river valley. The excavations and GIS work associated with the project have proven crucial to helping the Rappahannock Tribe verify the accuracy of some of their oral traditions. More than subtle changes in historical interpretation and their echoes in museum exhibitions in classrooms, outcomes like these have been among the most significant in King’s career. All of this work, with its focus on Indigenous sites, has helped boost the efforts of Native tribes seeking recognition. As King states, “10 or 15 years ago, many people wouldn’t believe there were Native Americans here. They thought they were long gone, when in fact they are still here.”

This article first appeared on the National Humanties Alliance NEH for ALL webpage. This project has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Assistant Professor Gurbisz Awarded Maryland Sea Grant

Cassie Gurbisz, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, recently received her second grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Maryland Sea Grant program (Federal Award Number NA18OAR4170070). The $71,023 grant will fund a two-year project titled: Effects of Oyster Aquaculture on Submersed Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) Habitat. Dr. Gurbisz is working with co-Principal Investigators Jeremy Testa and Dong Liang from UMCES Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

After decades of ambitious habitat restoration and species recovery attempts in the Chesapeake Bay, we are now seeing some signs of success including, most notably, the recovery of bay grasses, or “SAV”. Although populations of the native oyster—another iconic Chesapeake Bay species—are still at an all-time low, the Maryland oyster aquaculture industry is rapidly growing. SAV recovery and oyster aquaculture growth are both good-news stories because both are valued for their ability to provide habitat, process pollutants, and protect shorelines. Furthermore, aquaculture is an important source of income for thousands of Maryland residents.

The issue is that as these important living resources expand, they are increasingly coming into conflict because they both tend to occupy shallow water. Current regulations restrict aquaculture in areas that contain SAV under the assumption that aquaculture will impair SAV growth. This has created a burden for growers who are required to cease operations when SAV spreads into their lease area. However, it is unclear whether aquaculture actually harms SAV. Gurbisz and collaborators’ research aims to address this information gap by 1) analyzing existing spatial datasets to assess the extent of past conflict and predict where future conflicts are likely to arise and 2) conducting a field study to identify how aquaculture alters SAV habitat. The broad goal is to generate scientifically defensible information that can guide a reevaluation of policies that address SAV-aquaculture conflicts to maximize both continued SAV recovery and aquaculture expansion. SMCM student Victoria Lusk has already begun the spatial analysis, and Ellyse Sutliff and Lindsey Stevenson will help conduct the upcoming fieldwork. All three students are Environmental Studies majors.

Gurbisz is a coastal ecosystem ecologist who takes a holistic approach to studying the environment. Her research has been published in journals such as BioScience and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as recently featured in the Baltimore Sun.

Professor Crawford Awarded Whitman Fellowship Award

Karen Crawford, professor of biology, has recently been awarded a Whitman Fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). The award will be used to cover laboratory space and housing at MBL in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Crawford will use the award to continue her sabbatical research project investigating the use of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to knockout specific gene functions in developing embryos.

The title of her proposal is: Beyond Proof of Concept – using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in Doryteuthis pealii embryos to determine: 1) the role of ADAR1 and ADAR2 RNA editing enzymes in development, morphology and behavior; and 2) the impact of Homeobox gene function on embryonic pattern and development.

In addition to the genes mentioned in her proposal title, she will attempt to knock in genes into the cephalopod genome for the first time.

Professor of Biology Karen Crawford Presents “CRISPR-Cas9 Genome Editing in the Cephalopod Doryteuthis (Loligo) pealeii” at the Annual Meeting for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology

Professor of Biology Karen Crawford’s presentation was selected as an oral presentation in a complementary session in the 2020 SICB Symposium “Building Bridges from Genome to Phenome: Molecules, Methods and Models,” held January 3-7, in Austin Texas.

This presentation represents an important breakthrough for her research and impacts the work of many scientists studying the development, neurogenesis and evolutionary relationships of cephalopods, animals including: squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus. It is an important “proof of concept” study demonstrating the first successful use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to employ genome editing in a cephalopod species. In this study, Crawford used the CRISPR-Cas9 system with specific RNA guides to the Tryptophan 2,3 dioxygenase enzyme (TDO) to specifically knock out the first step in the ommochrome pigment pathway in squid embryos. In English, this means that she successfully knocked out one gene to generate completely normal embryos lacking only reddish brown pigmentation. This work is in preparation for publication. Expanding the study of cephalopods to include predictable genome editing, the knocking out and knocking in of specific genes, opens an important door to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that drive normal development, neurogenesis, and behavior in cephalopods; a group of diverse and evolutionarily successful organisms that possess not only a camera like eye similar to our own along with the largest and most complex invertebrate brain on the planet, but also our imagination for their extraordinary life histories and complex cognitive behaviors.

While most of this work is performed at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Massachusetts, students working on their St. Mary’s Projects, often choose to explore fundamental questions of developmental biology of cephalopods by working with preserved embryos in the Crawford laboratory at SMCM. Last year, Sylvia Klein explored the role of Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) on two cephalopod species. As part of her SMP work, Sylvia was the first to observe the conservation of MAPK expression in the Pajama squid embryo, complementing studies Crawford had done with embryos of the long-finned squid, Doryteuthis pealii. Before graduate school, Sylvia, is expanding her experiences as a research assistant in the laboratory of Karen Echeverri at the MBL, where she is studying regeneration in both invertebrate and vertebrate species.

This work has most recently been supported by fellowships from the MBL to Crawford (2018, 2019), as well as a National Science Foundation – Enabling Discovery Through GEnomic Tools (EDGE) Grant to the MBL for which Crawford is a Principle Investigator. That grant supports the Cephalopod Strategic Initiative at the MBL.

Professor Sue Johnson Awarded Fully-Funded Residency Fellowship

Sue Johnson, professor of art, has been awarded a fully-funded residency fellowship by The Millay Colony for the Arts.  The colony is one of the oldest multidisciplinary artist residencies in the world.  Since its inception by Norma Millay in 1973, thousands of writers, poets, visual artists, screenwriters, playwrights, filmmakers, and composers have been invited to come to Steepletop, the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and activist Edna St. Vincent Millay, to reflect, refuel, and create in quiet solitude.

The seven-acre colony is located in the Hudson Valley of New York State in the foothills of the Berkshires. Johnson is one of only 30 visual artists, composers, and writers selected from more than 800 international applicants for this highly competitive fellowship. She will be in residence for the month of June 2020 during which time she will continue work on her project, “Hall of Portraits from The History of Machines.” Works completed during the residency will be part of Johnson’s upcoming one-person exhibition at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland, opening in September 2020.