Period poverty is an important, yet often ignored, public health crisis. The social shame and steep cost of menstrual products often push low-income people to adopt unhygienic practices during menstruation, negatively impacting their health, education, and dignity. Specifically, period poverty significantly impacts young menstruators in universities. The lack of access to menstrual hygiene products forces many students to resort to rags, paper towels, toilet paper, and other substitutes, increasing the risk of several reproductive health issues. According to a study conducted by Days for Girls, about 25% of menstruating students struggle to afford menstrual products. The emotional toll from the deep-rooted stigma surrounding menstruation along with the inaccessibility of menstrual products negatively impacts the self-perception and mental health of students. BMC Women’s Health estimated that 68% of college students who experience period poverty also experience moderate to severe depression. Nupur and Harsna worked with the Department of Epidemiology and MSU College of Human Medicine Public Health professors to create and roll-out a survey identifying demographic factors, accessibility factors, and perceptions on menstruation of Michigan State menstruators. Their results confirmed the need and benefit for an increased accessibility to free menstrual products at Michigan State University. Mission Menstruation X MSU successfully communicated these findings to MSU Administration, securing over 200 university-funded free menstrual dispensers across campus in women’s and gender-neutral restrooms. If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Alyssa studies the reproductive biology of African electric fish, called mormyrids, with a focus on their sperm and eggs. These freshwater fishes are found throughout lakes and river throughout the African continent and are used by research laboratories across the globe to study questions in evolution, neuroscience, behavior, and other biological disciplines. Besides their amazing ability to produce electricity, these fishes are also unique in that their sperm cells lack tails. Almost all animal sperm cells have a tail that allows them to swim to eggs to achieve fertilization, but the sperm of these fish do not! This is the only known case of tailless sperm evolving within a vertebrate lineage (it has evolved within 35 other lineages, but all of them are invertebrates). It is unknown what caused mormyrid sperm to lose its tail and how their sperm is still able to travel to and fertilize eggs. Furthermore, the morphology of mormyrid sperm has been known since the 1970s, but very little is known about mormyrid eggs. Alyssa's work aims to understand how mormyrid sperm lost its tail, how their sperm is still able to fertilize eggs, and to characterize the morphology of the previously ignored female gametes.If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Ben is a graduate student in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Michigan State University. His research interests include understanding how species adapt to changing environments, especially thermal stress and conservation of coldwater fishes. Ben uses genomic tools to improve our understanding of species conservation by examining adaptive potential and genetic health in wild trout populations. If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On the first episode with the new hosts of The Sci-Files, Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph interview Megan McGrath. Interacting with the world relies on our ability to take in information and stimuli from our environment and integrate it into a cohesive explanation of what it happening around us. But the world is full of constant, unending stimuli...so how do we know what to pay attention to? If we were consciously aware of everything that was happening in the world, we would never be able to function, so our brains have a built in "gain function", aka the thalamus. This brain structure allows us to fine tune what sensory information actually makes it up to our cortex for conscious processing so that we can get an accurate picture of the world without becoming overwhelmed. But what happens when this goes wrong? And what can that teach us about how to utilize this system to our advantage? That is Megan's main interest in her research. An aspiring anesthesiologist and consciousness researcher, Megan is interested in the networks necessary for arousal and attention and how sensory input is essential to the conscious experience. Her research focuses on the physiologic underpinnings of thalamic disruption and understanding how small differences in these networks lead to large changes in behavior, pushing to the extreme end of disruption; unconsciousness and anesthesia. She hopes that by gaining a more complete picture of thalamic networks and the spectrum of sensory processing disorders, she can begin to develop a more complete picture of consciousness.If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this episode of The Sci-Files, Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph interviewed Chelsie Boodoo and Daniel Puentes about their research. Daniel Puentes graduated from Michigan State University with a Ph.D. in Physics. His work focused on using experimental information to inform nuclear astrophysical simulations describing the creation of elements in space. Daniel also developed a first-generation beam stopper dedicated to dissociating molecules to improve low-energy rare isotope measurements. Daniel co-founded and co-hosted The Sci-Files with Chelsie Boodoo in 2019. Chelsie Boodoo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering. She creates biosensors using gold and magnetic nanoparticles to detect African Swine Fever Virus. She also uses this technology to detect foodborne pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus.  If you want to discuss your MSU research on the radio or nominate a student, please email [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

Chelsie and Daniel visited the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. For their final interview, they spoke with Dimitri Joseph and Mari Dowling, the new hosts of The Sci-Files. Dimitri Joseph is a 4th-year DO-PhD student in the Pharmacology and Toxicology department. He uses bioinformatics to study disparities in cancer. Mari Dowling is a 4th-year DO-PhD student in the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Department of Anthropology. Her graduate work is in medical anthropology, and her research interests are in exploring how drug policy in the United States impacts peoples’ healthcare decision-making.If you want to discuss your MSU research on the radio or nominate a student, please email [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

Chelsie and Daniel visited the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. They continued to interview students briefly about their research. Listen to them speak with Jamily Ramos De Lima and Betul Kara.If you want to discuss your MSU research on the radio or nominate a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Chelsie and Daniel visit the COGS Graduate Academic Conference (GAC) for the last time. They interviewed students briefly about their research. Listen to them speak with Debkumar Debnath, Sam Weiser and Daniel Marri. This will be a three-part series as Daniel and Chelsie say bye and welcome the new hosts of The Sci-Files soon.  If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brett Volment. Heart diseases represent the leading causes of death worldwide. Researchers commonly use cellular and animal models to investigate and study cardiovascular disease and other diseases. However, these models do not provide the best representation of human physiology. To this end, Brett’s work focuses on growing and creating miniature 3D human hearts, termed “heart organoids” that allow more faithful insight toward heart development, disease mechanisms and effective treatments for heart disease. Brett creates these mini hearts using human stem cells and mimics the environment present in the fetus to advance their maturity. In doing so, he elicits 3D hearts with all major cell types found in the human heart, internal chambers representing atria and ventricles, and a dynamic vessel network. This system represents a powerful tool that researchers can use to investigate human heart development and to screen for disease therapeutics, and ultimately, serves as a major stepping stone towards generating fully synthetic human hearts from stem cells.If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Joshua Kaste. Joshua is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University, and he works in the Shachar-Hill laboratory. His work focuses on building and analyzing mathematical models that describe the rates of all the chemical reactions going on in a living cell or whole organism. If you think of all the chemical compounds and the chemical reactions between them as a sort of road map, these models are like the traffic heat map showing where there's congestion, where there's not much activity, etc. This kind of work gets used for basic biological research, but it can also be used by biological engineers since a lot of projects require modifying an organism so that it makes more of a chemical compound. This kind of analysis can be very helpful for figuring out how exactly to accomplish that. In particular, Joshua’s work focuses on the oilseed crop Camelina sativa, which is cultivated for its oil, which can be used as fuel. By modeling its metabolism, we may be able to improve the oil yield farmers get from it, improving its viability as an alternative to fossil fuels.If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!