News about awards and events from around the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
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Around the College: December
News from Geological Sciences
The Department of Geological Sciences was well represented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. Held November 4 - 7, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina, 10 faculty members, six post-doctoral fellows, 17 graduate students, and 11 undergraduate students from the department and the Florida Museum of Natural History attended. The group made a total of at least 24 presentations. During the meeting, Ph.D. candidates Amy Brown and Mitra Khadka, who are students of Professor Jonathan Martin, were presented with 2012 Geological Society of America Hydrogeology Division Student Research Awards. Announced earlier, these awards recognize them as two of the top hydrogeology students in the larger GSA grant application pool. Only four such awards were given by GSA this year.
News of Faculty
An article by Department of Geological Sciences Professor Paul Mueller, Professor David Foster, and collaborators was published in Volume 20, Issue 12 (2012) of Yellowstone Science, a Yellowstone National Park publication highlighting scientific research conducted there. Entitled Origins of a Continent: Evidence from a Research Experience for Undergraduates Program in Yellowstone, it documents a two-year research project to characterize the types, compositions, structures, and ages of rocks found in Yellowstone National Park. The research is part of an on-going collaborative effort between Montana State University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Florida. The article discusses rock compositions for a range of areas within the northern section of the park, outlines analytical methods used by the students, and interprets the Park's very early history more than 2.5 billion years ago.
Two groups of 12 students each from colleges and universities across the country did geologic mapping and sample collection in the summers of 2010 and 2011. During the following academic year, they followed up with laboratory analysis of the collected samples for specific research topics. A majority of the students chose the laboratory experience at UF in the department's Center for Isotope Geoscience. Here they conducted U-Pb radiometric dating of rocks and minerals, trace element analyses of rocks, and used electron imaging to characterize minerals important for the dating experiments. The research was supported through a grant from the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.
News from Geography
News of Faculty
Researchers, Ian Kracalik and Jason Blackburn, from the Spatial Epidemiology & Ecology Research Laboratory (SEER Lab) and members of UF's Emerging Pathogens Institute, have co-authored a paper in the Journal Geospatial Health on the spatial patterns of livestock anthrax in Kazakhstan.
SEER Lab partnered with the Kazakh Science Center for Quarantine and Zoonotic Diseases and the Scientific and Practical Center of Sanitary and Epidemiological Expertise and Monitoring, both within the Kazakh Ministry of Health in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
As part of this study, the team developed predictions of areas at high risk for anthrax outbreaks in cattle. These calculations combine environmental predictions and data on the spatial clustering - or local geographic concentrations - of livestock outbreaks. Previous work from SEER Lab has focused on predicting the geographic potential for Bacillus anthracis, the pathogen causing anthrax, by using ecological niche models in the US and Kazakhstan. Ecological niche models predict the geographic potential of the pathogen based on environmental conditions. By the nature of niche modeling, they expect those predictions to be broader than where they find the disease to be clustering, as those patterns will be driven by local conditions and agricultural practices.
In this paper, the modeling was limited to ecological variables, but was designed to predict disease clustering.
This is one of the first and few studies to define high risk areas for this disease. While the disease is infamous as a biological weapon, anthrax is a regularly occurring livestock disease in many parts of the world with frequent spillover into humans across Central Asia. Because of this, surveillance is critical in providing estimates of where to expect disease to provide the first step in better directing resources for monitoring and control. Endemic anthrax is a summertime disease in the mid northern latitudes, and livestock control is achieved through regular and timely vaccination.
These results can be used to inform any veterinary public health in Kazakhstan, to identify key areas for vaccine intervention during spring time months ahead of summer outbreaks.
This research was supported by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Cooperative Biological Engagement Program. For more information on this study, contact Jason Blackburn at 352-273-9374 or jkblackburn@ufl.edu.
October
News from Geological Sciences
News of Faculty
A paper co-authored by Jason Curtis, Senior Associate-In Geochemistry and Stable Isotope Mass Spec Lab Manager, former Professor David Hodell (now at University of Cambridge), and eight others was published September 30 online in Nature Geoscience. Entitled "North Atlantic forcing of Amazonian precipitation during the last ice age," it discusses Amazonian precipitation during the last glacial period based on an oxygen isotopic record from a speleothem (cave calcite formation) from Equador. Curtis was responsible for analyzing all 1,787 isotope samples.