ORISE in the News

Pennsylvania State University sophomore William Hervey, of San Antonio, an ORISE intern assigned to Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) San Antonio’s Biomedical Systems Engineering and Evaluation Department, briefed his research titled “Development of a Trauma Manikin for Test and Evaluation in Extreme Cold Environments” to NAMRU San Antonio researchers and leadership at the Battlefield Health and Trauma Research Institute.

Zac Lamas, postdoctoral fellow at ORISE, inspects bees for the parasitic mite Varroa at a hive in the backyard of University of Maryland bee researcher Nathalie Steinhauer, in College Park, Md. A new survey says America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record. The mites are a factor why bee deaths are on the rise.

In a new study, researchers from North Carolina State University detected elevated PFAS levels in the blood of pet dogs and horses from Gray’s Creek, N.C., including dogs that only drank bottled water. The work establishes horses as an important sentinel species and is a step toward investigating connections between PFAS exposure and liver and kidney function in dogs and horses. Theresa C. Guillette, an ORISE research participant, co-authored the study.

Betty McConn, an ORISE participant at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, is part of a team that recently deployed HotHog, a new smartphone app that predicts heat stress in pigs. HotHog taps into local weather data to predict the relative comfort or heat stress levels of pigs on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. Swine producers can then use this information to take pre-emptive measures, like ensuring plenty of drinking water, cooling the pigs with fans or mists, and limiting transport to early morning hours.

Szarria Thomas loves working with geriatric patients. The Class of 2025 College of Pharmacy student looks forward to a career where she can provide exceptional care and knowledge to the geriatric community, and her pursuit of a pharmacy education is a big step towards that future.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) has highlighted several fellowship projects that will advance food safety and help to inform FSIS decision-making.

Five fellows who are working towards their Ph.D. were selected through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education program. The fellows will work in collaboration with FSIS scientists.

Dottie Stearns is graduating from the CU School of Medicine with an increased enthusiasm for keeping an open mind to possibility. As an Oak Ridge Institute for Science Education (ORISE) fellow in the Air Pollution and Respiratory Health Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she expanded her understanding of how the macro must balance the micro and how “the things we do as individuals are important, but we still have to advocate for policy change at more society-wide levels,” she said.

Ashley Kennedy, Ph.D., BCE, currently serves as the Delaware Tick Biologist in the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, where she focuses on tick surveillance in the state to shed light on which tick species are present, when and where they are most abundant, and their infectivity rate with various pathogens. Ashley earned her Ph.D. at the University of Delaware in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. After her Ph.D., Ashley was an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Postdoctoral Fellow with the Tick-Borne Disease Laboratory at the U.S. Army Public Health Center.

Nathan Howard, research scientist at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), has won the 2019 Nuclear Fusion Award from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for a paper that explains heat losses due to turbulence in the core of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Howard authored the winning paper as a postdoc supported by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE).

A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that smoking in the three months prior to assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment was associated with higher adjusted odds of cycle cancellation resulting in no embryo transfer and cancellations before fresh oocyte retrieval or frozen embryo transfer. Associations between smoking and selected ART clinical outcomes are described in an article published in Journal of Women’s Health.