E X P L O R E T H E G L O B A L L A B O R AT O R Y

A World of Possibilities Await at

SUNY Oswego graduate Sherrifa Bailey with a map outlining climate conditions.

Deborah F. StanleyPresident

The Global Laboratory is an innovative undergraduate research experience offering students hands-on, immersive problem-solving opportunities in international laboratories in the most promising fields of study—science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The Global Laboratory combines the international connections of SUNY Oswego faculty with the scientific talents, research proficiency, and intellectual curiosity of undergraduates to advance scientific knowledge, design solutions to the many intractable challenges of our time, and to improve the quality of life for humans worldwide.

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“An investment in undergraduate research is also an investment in our

common future. The Global Laboratory will produce a new generation of

scientifically and internationally skilled problem solvers, empowered to meet the

challenges before us.”

SUNY Oswego’s Possibility Scholarship program provides resources for underrepresented and financially disadvantaged students to participate in the global research experience as they pursue a high quality college education in the STEM fields.

The Possibility Scholarship offers donors the opportunity to change the world, one life at a time. To find out more about supporting the Possibility Scholarship, contact the SUNY Oswego Office of Development at 315-312-3003 or www.oswego.edu/possibility.

From SUNY Oswego’s campus you can explore the world

Rendering of SUNY Oswego’s new 235,000 square-foot, $118 million Science Complex. Designed to be the gold standard of green buildings, it will become the new high-tech home for future scientists.

This pioneering laboratory empowers and uplifts students through the knowledge they gain and the life-changing experiences they encounter. Qualifying undergraduates spend two to ten weeks on any of the world’s seven continents conducting community-based research with leading scientists on projects designed to discover solutions to pressing global problems while promoting international understanding.

To learn more about the Global Laboratory, or for information about becoming a partnering institution, visit www.oswego.edu/globallaboratory

Dr. Amy Welsh, assistant professor of biological sciences at SUNY Oswego, taking

samples of fish eggs to determine their genetics, a generation at a time.

Saving Sturgeon

North America4

from the beautiful waters that surround our campus

It’s no fish tale: lake sturgeon and many other freshwater and diadromous fish (those that migrate between fresh and salt water) are in danger. Destruction of aquatic habitat, overfishing, damming, and disease caused by invasive species are among the many factors causing a decline in North American fish, threatening their survival.

That’s where researchers like Oswego’s Amy Welsh come in. Under a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Welsh and her students lead an effort to find sturgeon with enough genetic diversity to help the future of the species.

Studying sturgeon in the Oswego River Basin, they hope to identify fish with the right genetic markers strong enough to produce offspring to repopulate other regions and bring lake sturgeon back from threatened status. Findings from this work may impact other threatened aquatic organisms as well, such as freshwater mussels, crayfish and snails.

North America’s Great Lakes Region is a vulnerable ecosystem with high numbers of imperiled fish, but other areas in the Southeastern United States, the mid-Pacific Coast, the Rio Grande, and coastal basins of Mexico exhibit similar or even greater levels of

decline and extinction. Welsh’s work at SUNY Oswego, including the study of the genetic diversity among sturgeon of the Great Lakes, is important to natural resource managers across the globe, allowing them to make better and more informed decisions that impact the delicate balance of aquatic environments.

Uplifting a population of fish is a huge undertaking, but the lessons learned from this imperiled species-focused Global Laboratory could one day help unify nations in successful species survival programs.

Today’s science and innovation can turn current problems into solutions for a better tomorrow.

PreservingHabitats

Students interacting with native species while charting the ecological future of the region. Handling snakes are

Brazilian professor and herpetologist Vanda Ferreira and SUNY Oswego zoology graduate Kyle Pursel. South America6

save the planet, one country at a time

How much development is too much? Environmental advocates can point to Florida’s Everglades, where unchecked human activity has overrun a fragile ecosystem. A similar decision brews over Brazil’s Pantanal region, the largest contiguous wetland on earth.

Oswego students, led by professor Cleane Medeiros, heed the call for researchers to study the region’s diverse population of flora and fauna as the Brazilian government ponders whether to open the Pantanal to development. This vast, flat region, as large as California, hosts an amazing array of more than 4,000 species of mammals, reptiles and amphibians, birds, and plants.

The primary threat to this region’s rich biodiversity is habitat destruction. The biology-focused Global Laboratory equips students with wader boots, shovels, small traps, scales and other measurement tools needed to fight for the survival of highly prized environments – while powering multinational passion for preserving diminishing world habitats.

And time is of the essence – more than half of the Earth’s terrestrial surface has been altered by human activity resulting in deforestation, biodiversity loss, and extinction. Altering a natural habitat, even slightly, can have a domino effect that harms the entire ecosystem. An integrated approach to land use and management based on scientific knowledge is needed to protect and restore the health of ecosystems in areas like the Pantanal, jeopardized by habitat and species loss.

Through monitoring and reporting habitat gains and losses, students become empowered citizens fusing science, cultural studies, political science, history and economics in hands-on practice to save, protect, and preserve worlds large and small.

Present Day Pantanal

Present Day Everglades

DefeatingDiabetes

Professor Kestas Bendinskas, Oswego graduate Mike Kiley, and Professor Webe Kadima. Africa8

Even with extraordinary advances in medicine, diabetes remains one of the most crippling diseases besetting people around the world. It is epidemic by all measures. More than 24 million people in the United States – 8 percent of Americans – and 400 million worldwide suffer from this progressive disease which still eludes cure.

Students working with Kestas Bendinskas and Webe Kadima of Oswego’s biochemistry program hope to change that – and are going to great lengths to do so. Deep in the heart of African Congo, the Oswego team and local researchers are examining a plant called Psidium guajava to see if it holds the key to unlocking an inexpensive available treatment for this killer.

Their research bridges traditional remedies used by healers in the African nation with conventional knowledge in pharmacy, chemistry and medicine to discover a cost-effective, self-administered therapy for diabetes that may one day provide a viable treatment option to millions currently lacking access to life-saving medicines.

A problem of this magnitude shared by people worldwide requires convergence of ideas, cutting-edge technologies and new attitudes. The biochemistry-focused Global Laboratory teaches students the scientific and technical skills necessary to prepare and test the efficacy of treatments, but the project also aims to develop a dialectic between the global and the local, one that advances our basic understanding of medical science and improves the health of humankind.

The defeating diabetes project is a way of merging the old and new that mirrors SUNY Oswego and the Global Laboratory program. At Oswego, long-established strengths in education, social justice and cultivating curiosity blend with ground-breaking research and global opportunities.

save the planet, one person at a time

Psidium Guajava Plant critical in

diabetes research

Professor Damian Schofield is working with students on such platforms as Google’s modeling technology, which is at the heart of investigating

potential real-world disaster scenarios.

EngineeringJustice

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to picking up knowledge Down Under

The fight for justice behind the scenes includes computer simulations, gaming, 3D reconstructions, and innovative thinking to help combat crime, prosecute villains, and offer great potential in the field of forensic science.

Damian Schofield of Oswego’s human-computer interaction program is among those whose main weapons are a computer, advanced software and creativity. His role in a large multinational research project based in Australia offers students the opportunity to join the justice crusade where virtual software seen in video games helps defeat real-life criminals.

The digital age has brought an abundance of new evidence presentation to crime. Courtrooms, once the last bastions of the oral tradition, have rapidly become cinematic display theatres. Students working with Schofield are at the forefront of understanding the effects of this high-tech world of dispute resolution and justice.

As part of an international team, Schofield’s work includes the ambitious Juries and Interactive Visual Evidence (JIVE) Project, creating vivid virtual re-enactments of massive terrorist attacks to see how the use of such reconstructions impacts jurors in courtrooms. Schofield partners with the Australian Federal Police, University of New South Wales, University of Canberra, Institute of Judicial Administration, and the Australian Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions to offer his students the opportunity to examine how theory relates to practice and computer environments to our real neighborhoods.

By studying ahead of the curve, students make a straight line toward improving the way work gets done in the global crime-fighting enterprise.

Game Images Copyright School of Creative Media, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

SUNY Oswego offers a wealth of courses in Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI. HCI will be fundamental in making digital products more successful, safe, useful, functional and, in the long run, more pleasurable for the user. SUNY Oswego is using game modeling to simulate potential problems and their solutions.

Rendering of a transport hub in order to explore solutions to potential attacks.

CombatingKiller Cells

Professors at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore assist in unraveling the mysteries of disease.

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unraveling the mystery killers of our species

HIV/AIDS remains a killer, ravaging world populations, still at large with no known cure. The borderless world of infectious diseases requires an international army of molecular biologists superbly trained and fiercely committed to finding a way to neutralize this and other potent pathogens.

Oswego researchers have joined the vital effort toward production of a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. Ground zero for this biologically focused Global Laboratory is the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore where the daily battle focuses on understanding the behavior of HIV, the causative agent of AIDS.

Conventional approaches to controlling infectious diseases use inactivated or weakened virus vaccines to stimulate the production of neutralizing antibodies that prevent infection. Unfortunately, protein molecules on the surface of HIV undergo frequent mutations, and are highly unstable, thus preventing the immune system from producing neutralizing antibodies. This presents a key scientific challenge to the goal of producing an effective and globally accessible HIV vaccine.

Promising international work in microbiology focuses on how to produce protein structures that will stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies that prevent HIV from infecting healthy cells. With opportunities to study the production of such proteins and their ability to elicit an immune response in animal models, students in the microbiology-focused Global Laboratory work toward defeating one of the biggest and deadliest pandemics of our time.

In pursuing research that infuses their own lives with knowledge and meaning, student researchers seek solutions that can save millions of other lives.

Protein folding plays a critical role in unraveling the mysteries of creating a

protective HIV vaccine.

Holding Clues to Our Past

X-raying artifacts like this fossilized sample of dinosaur shoulder armor can reveal information not only about creatures that roamed our planet

millennia ago, but also about those living on it now and in years to come.

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to the species that roamed our planet eons ago

To understand what happens in the worlds of today and tomorrow requires studying yesterday. In Oswego’s Global Laboratory, this can mean looking way back -- long before the beginning of civilization.

Students can meet their distant ancestors and probe pathological problems at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Under the expert tutelage of Neil Gostling of Oswego’s biological sciences faculty, students can use CT scans to better understand the early evolution of mammals, from information learned from examinging the skull of the ancient Morganucodon ohleri.

Additional scanning techniques also examine preserved pterosaur remains to gain more understanding of this extinct group of vertebrates. Through this advanced work, the past literally comes to life and informs current research.

Learning more about evolutionary forerunners can help students understand where humanity came from, and examining similarities and differences among many species can provide knowledge about where we are going -- as a society and as a planet. Oswego’s Global Laboratory seeks answers that span time and space.

3D reconstructions produced by CT scans of a pterosaur skulls.

Artist rendering of a pterosaur in flight.

InvestigatingGlobal Change

Students and researchers measure moisture loss in Antarctica.

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Imagine glaciers melting, coastal cities flooding, countless

species driven or disappearing from their natural habitats. Sounds

like a genre of science fiction requiring a suspension of disbelief?

In fact, it’s the threat scientists see from evolving climate change,

firmly rooted in scientific explanation.

Global Laboratory students will trek to Antarctica to work with

climate scientists learning techniques to study the impact

changing climes have upon glaciers, the melting sentinels on the

front line of this environmental crusade.

Far from the fortress of solitude where people discard possible

threats to the future, researchers chart receding glaciers and

advancing temperatures to understand how naturally recurring

phenomena relate to climate change. This type of hands-on

climate monitoring is critically important to explaining how

increasing carbon emissions and other pollution affect our planet.

Exploration in Antarctica is not bound to the study of a collapsing

45-million-year-old ice pack, however. Students in the Antarctica

Global Laboratory can choose to work with Oswego’s Paul

Tomascak on Paulet Island, where they have a unique opportunity

to study volcanic materials of more recent vintage.

The geography of Paulet Island, the youngest of the James Ross

Island Volcanic Group, exposes students to expanses of lava

flows and volcanic ejecta that can serve as important clues to

understanding proper stratigraphic sequencing caused by sea-

level changes.

For Antarctica Global Laboratory students, the past is critical,

but the future is now. They have opportunities to go places

and do things that open their current world while impacting

forthcoming generations.

to the beautiful waters that surround our planet

Satellite images taken over the past decade showing the rapid disintegration of the Larson ice shelf.

Dr. Shashi Kanbur of SUNY Oswego’s physics department.

Solving UniversalMysteries

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and explore other worlds beyond.

Looking above and beyond our planet is not just the realm of science fiction. By grasping the origins and size of the universe, we can better understand where we come from – and where we may be going.

Oswego’s Shashi Kanbur is an internationally known expert in pulsating stars which have been used to determine the universe’s size and age. Backed by funding from the NSF, Kanbur is helping design an autonomous robotic telescope that will capture target data, allowing researchers to collect night-to-night observations of fleeting phenomena from any place in the world.

Working with ground-based telescopes in Chile and Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope, students will get an up-close look at deep space and will make observations pertinent to cutting-edge astrophysics discussions such as the extra-galactic distance scale.

By taking part in astronomical calculations, student researchers can truly take part in an out-of-this-world experience. Collaborating with talented faculty from the National Center University in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and South Africa, the astrophysics-focused Global Laboratory offers students an opportunity to study issues on the subatomic and cosmological scales.

Tomorrow’s scientific leaders probe our connections to the world around us as well as potential bonds with other worlds.

The Hubble Telescope has been peering into the distant past in order for us to determine our near future.

Lulin Observatory, Taiwan, where students will have a chance to observe deep-space and extra-galactic distance scale.

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www.oswego.edu

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Global solutions in our community, world and beyond