Research

UMass Boston students study and work with distinguished faculty, as well as with the staff of the dozens of our centers and institutes, to continuously provide science and social science research that works for the betterment of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and beyond.

• Oceanographer Meng Zhou associate professor in UMass Boston's Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences Department and three university colleagues and graduate students recently joined fellow-scientists from other institutions aboard the Laurence M. Gould for six weeks of ecosystem research off the coast of the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Zhou calls it "the worst seas in the world." Their overall goal is to increase understanding of circulation processes in the waters above the Antarctic continental shelf, particularly as these processes affect the formation of sea ice and the distribution of krill - small, shrimp-like crustaceans that thrive by the thousands of billions in the Southern Ocean, serving as critical links in the chain of life.

• These days, a description of the laser technology landscape can sound like something out of a war diary: The more commonplace lasers become, the greater the risk that a stray beam will hit an unintended target--a human eye, for instance. And yet the usefulness of lasers and their reputation for precision have effectively disarmed calls for better safety measures. The work of Professor Gopal Rao, and his team of seven students ranging from undergraduates to postdoctoral researchers, have made it their business to slash those odds. They have developed a system that contains a thin film of azobenzene--an organic material that transmits ordinary and eye-safe laser light but clamps to preset levels any beam that exceeds a certain intensity. The system, which was described in the August 2003 issue of Applied Optics, has been hailed as a photonics breakthrough.

• Some people follow the sun. UMass Boston's Bill Hagar followed the storms--to learn more about the effects of acid rain. Hagar typically does his research with undergraduate and graduate students at South Shore sites such as Furnace Pond in Pembroke and Maquan Pond in Hanson, but he just returned from a stay as a visiting Fulbright scholar at the University of New Brunswick. Why Canada? "They've always said that Canada sends us ice hockey players and we send them acid rain," quips Hagar, who explains that the storms that cause the most acid rain damage for Massachusetts and for Canada are those that are blown up from a major North American rust belt. New Brunswick is itself a waypoint at the northern terminus of that belt, which, says Hagar, is "a huge consideration in explaining transient changes in the acidity of local water systems produced by springtime snowmelt and other natural events."

• A new study by UMass Boston researchers has found that the number of immigrants from Central and South America living in the Boston area has increased significantly during the 1990s, transforming the Latino population and providing significant settlement challenges to social service agencies. Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Colombians came to Massachusetts in record numbers during the 1990s, according to the study by students and faculty in UMass Boston's PhD Program in Public Policy in collaboration with Centro Presente, a Boston non-profit group that serves new Latino immigrants and the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy.

• Assisted by some talented undergraduate and graduate students, Dr. Adan Colon-Carmona of the UMass Boston Biology Department is attempting to isolate genes in the model wetland plant Arabidopsis thaliana in an effort to counter the effects of pollution. He hopes to use this gene-mapping procedure to identify plants that can degrade and render harmless pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--pervasive environmental toxins that are by-products of oil-based energy-production and manufacturing processes.

• Schizophrenia seems to create an altered state of consciousness," says UMass Boston's Paul Nestor, winner of the 2003 Chancellor's Distinguished Scholarship award. "It leads me to think about what consciousness is, and how the brain creates consciousness. What does schizophrenia say about our brains?" A clinical neuropsychologist, Nestor is known nationally for his answers to this question. His research has focused on attention and semantic disturbances in the devastating mental illness of schizophrenia. He is known as one of the first to demonstrate a significant link between brain abnormalities detected through magnetic resonance brain imaging (MRI) and neuropsychological disturbances in people with schizophrenia. Nestor has worked at UMass Boston in the Psychology Department since 1996. He teaches undergraduate and graduate students, some of whom work with him on his studies examining brain imaging and schizophrenia in his lab.

• The Integrated Coastal Observation System, otherwise known as ICOS, has recently been acquired through a grant from the Defense University Research Instrument Program through the Office of Naval Research to Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences (ECOS) faculty Bob Chen, Meng Zhou, Bernie Gardner, and Juanita Urban-Rich. Essentially a sea-going lab, this 8-by-8-by-20-foot unit is a specially equipped container that can be loaded by crane onto research vessels. The ICOS serves as an instant lab complete with everything ECOS" scientists need, to investigate chromophoric (colored) dissolved organic matter, zooplankton, and phytoplankton in coastal areas. Chen and his fellow researchers have been working frenetically to prepare this new lab for deployment on a June research cruise to the Hudson River and New York--New Jersey shelf area.

• Thanks to an $80,000 grant from the medical foundation Charles H. Farnsworth Trust, Nina Silverstein, College of Public and Community Service professor and Gerontology Institute senior fellow, is studying ways of prolonging the safe-driving years of seniors.