From labs to impact: FIU’s latest innovations in research and discovery

WATER POLLUTION
Flower power

Rain washes phosphorus, nitrogen and other chemicals from farms, lawns and even septic tanks into lakes, rivers, bays and other marine ecosystems. Flowers may help remove some of these harmful pollutants from the water. Inspired by traditional floating farm practices such as the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida’s tree island settlements, Institute of Environment researchers Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez and Krishnaswamy Jayachandran grew flowers on inexpensive mats designed to float on the water’s surface. Large marigolds were most successful at filtering pollutants, removing 52% more phosphorus and 33% more nitrogen than would naturally be removed from the water. Locke-Rodriguez is exploring ways to bring this research to market and scale up floating farms in South Florida. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation funded this research.

CRIMINOLOGY
Where there’s gold, there’s violence

Illegal  gold mining has ravaged the Amazon, wreaking havoc on the environment and contaminating waterways. Conservation crime scientist Stephen Pires and criminology professor Rob Guerette from the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs are connecting the dots to find out if it has also led to a rise in murders in the region.

With prices skyrocketing, gold has become a lucrative business — even surpassing the price of cocaine. Criminal organizations and illegally armed groups want to control production. Although it’s well known illegally armed groups are willing to fight and kill for access to precious resources, there’s been few studies to make a clear connection. Pires’s data is the first to show that areas with greater amounts of gold mining and coca production are directly associated with homicide hot spots in Colombia.

NATIONAL SECURITY
Data making a difference

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) official was on a mission to locate illegal fishing vessels in Latin America. So, he used FIU’s Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported Fishing (IUUF) dashboard, successfully honing in on specific vessels that “went dark” or turned off systems that transmit a ship’s position — an indicator of illegal activity. This is an example of the real-world impact resulting from a series of Department of Defense-funded dashboards created by the Security Research Hub — part of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy.

Drawing from over 400 data sets, each dashboard highlights different Latin American and Caribbean security issues. Current dashboards track China’s activities in Latin America and the Caribbean; arms seizures and thefts across Latin America; kidnappings in Haiti and more. To date, the dashboards have been used as a valuable resource for students, researchers, policymakers, journalists and more.

SUSTAINABILITY
Advertising > consumerism > climate change

Don’t buy this jacket. That was the message of Patagonia’s Black Friday ad. Unconventional, especially on a day when the goal is to encourage shopping. This kind of unconventionality might be what our planet’s future needs, though, according to communication scholar David Park’s research. Park, a professor in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, has studied the connection between mass communication and climate change. Through close examinations, he’s uncovered how advertising, including digital and social media ads, as well as the news media benefit from overconsumption and perpetuate the ongoing climate crisis. In his book Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future, Park lays out a new path rooted in sustainability for these industries that helps address and mitigate climate change rather than perpetuate the problem.

FORENSICS
How your body odor reveals who you are

Picture it: A law enforcement officer at a crime scene collecting a scent sample in the hope it will match back to a suspect. This could be the future of forensics. For the first time, a person’s biological sex was confirmed by their hand odor in the lab with 96% accuracy. Kenneth G. Furton, executive director of the Global Forensic and Justice Center, and a team of researchers studied hand odor samples from 60 volunteers. Volatile organic compounds, VOCs — chemicals responsible for an individual’s scent — were examined using a combination of instruments commonly found in forensic toxicology and chemistry labs, such as gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, and a machine learning model. This novel approach demonstrates odor may hold important clues to help investigators build stronger cases and bring justice to victims.

ALZHEIMER'S
Break on through

The Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute are using non-invasive, low intensity-focused ultrasound that could revolutionize care for Alzheimer’s patients.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) precisely guides ultrasound waves to disrupt the blood-brain barrier and disturb clumps of beta-amyloid protein plaques that block communication between brain cells, leading to cognitive decline. High-intensity ultrasound technology has offered promise for Parkinson’s patients. The hope is similar results will be seen with low-intensity ultrasound in Alzheimer’s patients. Dr. Patricia Junquera, chair of psychiatry and behavioral health, and Dr. Michael McDermott, chief of the neuroscience division and chief medical executive of Baptist's Miami Neuroscience Institute, are co-PIs of this FDA-approved clinical trial, part of the Florida Brain State Program in collaboration with Insightec.   

CYBERSECURITY
Your car is watching you

Modern cars present a potential privacy nightmare. Many are equipped with advanced sensors and cameras that track where you go and capture your face, voice and fingerprint. This personal information can then be stored on cloud servers to help AI algorithms “teach” cars how to keep drivers safe.  Hadi Amini, a cybersecurity researcher in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, investigates new tools to protect drivers’ privacy. He’s searching for ways cars can analyze data but only send suggestions — not the actual data — to the server. Amini also leads investigations into AI as part of the U.S. Department of Transportation-funded National Center for Transportation Cybersecurity and Resiliency that aims to safeguard transportation systems from cyberattacks.

HIV
CBD may help HIV-infected brain cells

After HIV hijacks immune cells in the bloodstream, it breaks through the heavily guarded blood-brain barrier and targets the brain’s immune cells. These cells then enter a hibernation period. Neuroinflammation can reactivate them, perpetuating a vicious cycle where HIV spreads out of the brain and into the body’s bloodstream.

CBD’s anti-inflammatory effects may stop this process. Adriana Yndart Arias, a doctoral student in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work, made this discovery in the lab of Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine distinguished professor Madhavan Nair. She tested CBD on HIV-infected microglia cells, searching for specific markers that exposed whether the cells would activate. CBD-treated cells not only reduced the numbers of inflammatory molecules but also kept infected cells dormant. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"Antiretroviral medicines that keep the virus from replicating cannot effectively cross the blood-brain barrier, and so the brain becomes a repository for HIV."
— Adriana Yndart Arias

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Matchmaking for proteins

Successful matchmaking with protein molecules is like other kinds of matchmaking: The two must click for it to work. Except for proteins — the estimated 200 million molecular building blocks of life — it’s complicated. But knowing which two or more proteins best bond is critically important to designing new medications and vaccines. That’s
why researchers created a machine learning model that outperforms similar state-of-the-art software to predict how protein molecules will join. Their AI-based method, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, uses biological and structural information to score the strength of the bond.

The team included Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences Professor Giri Narasimhan and his doctoral student Vitalii Stebliankin, along with Associate Director of the Biomolecular Sciences Institute Prem Chapagain and molecular biologist Kalai Mathee.

INNOVATION
Aging tech

During the pandemic, older adults relied a lot on technology to stay connected to friends and family. Does this necessarily mean they might be more receptive to agetech, intended to improve quality of life for older adults worldwide? College of Business researchers wanted to find out. Pouyan Esmaeil Zadeh, an associate professor in information systems and business analytics, led two separate studies focused on older adults’ perceptions on two types of agetech: companion robots and smart toilets. Most participants held positive views. However, they also expressed significant concerns regarding privacy, cost and ease of use. These insights are important because they reveal what might be standing in the way of older adults embracing and using these new tools.

AUDIOLOGY
Decreased sound tolerance tool

Chewing or silverware scraping against a plate can really annoy some people. But for children with decreased sound tolerance (DST), especially children with autism, certain sounds can be too loud, scary or even viscerally painful — triggers to be avoided. Today, few valid screening tools exist for children that can identify different DST conditions, like hyperacusis and misophonia. So FIU occupational and speech therapists with expertise in autism spectrum disorders created one that provides early identification for autistic and non-autistic children. Published in the International Journal of Audiology, the questionnaire has already been translated into several languages and is currently being used by audiologists, psychologists and therapists in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Tana Carson and Angela Medina from the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences collaborated with statistician Yuxi Qiu from the College of Arts, Sciences & Education, on this project.

"Awareness is the first step in getting interventions to help quality of life."
— Tana Carson

POPULATION HEALTH
Physician honored for service to NAM and NASEM

Dr. Martín-José Sepúlveda, distinguished university professor at the Office of Research and Economic Development, received the Walsh McDermott Medal from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). The award recognizes a member for distinguished service to the NAM and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine over an extended period. He was elected to NAM in 2014. 

Sepúlveda is chair of the NAM’s Section 12 on Health Services Administration, Research, Education and Policy and the Section 12 Membership Committee. He is also a member of the Culture of Health Program Advisory Committee. Sepúlveda’s expertise lies in creating innovative approaches to individual and population health, health benefits, and workforce and health systems performance. During his more than three-decade career at IBM, he led health and health care process innovations that delivered cost avoidance of more than $1.7 billion.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Benefits of bilingualism

Center for Children and Families research shows speaking more than one language can be beneficial for children born prematurely. And an early intervention strategy to help strengthen preterm-born children's executive functioning (cognitive processes that include paying attention, planning, memory, decision-making and carrying out a task, among others).

The study, led by doctoral student Caroline Gillenson, followed a small group of children, ages 6 to 7, who were born preterm (before 35 weeks) and were either monolingual or spoke English and Spanish. The bilingual group performed better on a cognitive test to measure executive function. Compared to monolingual children, they showed better organization, accuracy and response time — all important skills for academic success. 

IN MEMORIAM
He transformed how we think about ADHD treatment and improved lives worldwide

William E. Pelham Jr. spent his life transforming the lives of countless children and their families across the world. He passed away in October 2023.

For over four decades, the world-renowned child psychologist never stopped challenging popular assumptions or conducting evidence-based research. Pelham entered the field in the ’70s, when the mysteries of ADHD were still being unraveled and by the ’90s medications like Ritalin were being widely used. But could other interventions like behavioral therapy help them before they were given medication? That’s what Pelham devoted his life to finding out. Study after study, he began forming a new ADHD treatment approach where behavior therapy, including training for parents, was the first line of treatment. This led to new clinical guidelines issued by the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics that recommends Pelham’s findings and is the foundation of today’s standard ADHD treatment.

Over his career, Pelham authored nearly 500 peer-reviewed publications, received more than $100 million in grants and collaborated on many more grants as a co-investigator. Among his many awards, Pelham was recognized by the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Science of Clinical Psychology.

Pelham also founded the Summer Treatment Program, a nationally acclaimed comprehensive summer camp program for children with ADHD and related behavioral, emotional and learning challenges. The program has helped thousands of children and their families and has been implemented across the U.S. and Japan.

After joining FIU in 2010, Pelham established the Center for Children and Families. Under his leadership, the center evolved into what is now a world class clinical research center considered one of the largest in the U.S. conducting research on child mental health. Today, the team of 400 researchers, staff and volunteers carry on Pelham’s vision and the center’s mission of advancing the well-being of children and families through research, clinical programs and community engagement.

He was a role model in how to serve the public with science. The impact of his work and the legacy of knowledge he leaves behind will serve the field for many, many years to come. The field of clinical child psychology is a better place because he was a part of it.