2023-24 CRF Family Research Scholars Announced

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The Center for Research on Families (CRF) has announced its faculty cohort of 2023-24 Family Research Scholars. The six scholars representing five UMass Amherst colleges were selected based on their promising work in family-related research and represent a wide range of disciplines and research interests.

This year’s scholars are:

Achsah Dorsey, assistant professor of anthropology, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dorsey focuses on how child health and development is shaped by global and local frameworks. She structures her work within health research by focusing on mechanisms that link wider contexts to health proposed in evolutionary models through analyses of social and physical environments and biological outcomes. Dorsey incorporates an interdisciplinary perspective and uses mixed methods in her work to help build a holistic understanding of wellbeing. Her recent research explores the biological, environmental and cultural links between anemia and infection, the gut microbiome and home environment in families living in peri-urban communities within Lima, Peru.

CRF Project: Intestinal Microbiota and Immune Activation Impacts on Efficacy of Child Iron Supplementation

Research investigating the relationships between the intestinal microbiome ecosystem and human health outcomes is a new, rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field. Dorsey engages with this emerging field by applying evolutionary medicine and embodiment theory to advance scientific understanding of our integrated environmental and physiological systems. She is expanding her research in Peru by examining the relationship between anemia, inflammation status and household precarity. More specifically, Dorsey is investigating the association between iron status, pathogenic exposure and microbiota composition to explore when anemia is a disorder or defense and the adaptive potential of the host and microbiome within different environmental contexts.
 

Jungwoo Lee, associate professor of chemical engineering, College of Engineering

Lee earned his B.E. in Chemical Engineering from Korea University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. After completing his postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee began focusing his research on bone marrow tissue engineering and cancer metastasis. He has received numerous accolades, including the Junior Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, the President Young Investigator Award from the Korean Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Early Career Investigator Award from the METAvivor Foundation, the Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health.

CRF Project: Bioengineered 3D Human Bone and Marrow Mechanoculture Models to promote Healthy Skeletal Aging and Metastasis-free survivorship.

Lee’s research is centered on developing bioengineered bone marrow where bone and blood biology are functionally integrated, for basic and translational research purposes. These models strive to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of bone marrow development, aging and metastasis, ultimately leading to targeted anti-aging and anti-metastasis pharmacological strategies. The successful creation of humanized bone and marrow models holds significant potential for impacting bone marrow transplantation and living bone grafts. To reproduce the unique complexity of bone marrow, which consists of the hardest (bone) and softest (marrow) tissues, Lee employs advanced biomaterials, stem cell biology and various mechanoculture techniques. This approach enables him to replicate the biophysical and biochemical intricacies of the human body in microphysiological bone marrow tissue models. Lee aims to establish, validate and apply human bone marrow models in the realms of aging and cancer research.
 

Karine Fénelon, assistant professor of biology, College of Natural Sciences

Fénelon is a trained neurophysiologist. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at McGill University where she studied the effect of hypoxia on the circadian oscillations of body temperature and oxygen consumption. Her master’s in muscle physiology and biophysics focused on the cellular mechanisms underlying excitation-contraction coupling, using frog cut skeletal muscle fibers. She completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience during which she worked on understanding the control of locomotion by brainstem neurons, using lampreys as an experimental system. She completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University Medical Center and worked with mouse models of schizophrenia to understand how psychiatric disorders affect the function of the central nervous system. Her lab focuses on understanding the brainstem mechanisms underlying sensorimotor gating, a fundamental brain mechanism.

CRF Project: Functional investigation of Brain Mechanisms underlying Sensorimotor Gating altered by Psychiatric Disorders

Fenelon’s team will investigate the brain circuits and cellular mechanisms by which sensorimotor gating occurs. Sensorimotor gating is a fundamental brain mechanism that, if reduced, is associated with and often predictive of attention impairment, cognitive overload and motor problems. In humans and translational models, the behavioral test to study sensorimotor gating is called prepulse inhibition (PPI). PPI occurs when a weak stimulus is presented prior to an alarming stimulus reduces the startle response to this alarming stimulus. Reduced PPI is a hallmark of schizophrenia but is also seen in other neurological and psychiatric disorders. Therefore, PPI is a behavioral paradigm that can indicate impairment of sensorimotor gating associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders. Results for these experiments will lead to the identification of brain cells and pathways underlying PPI deficits linked to neurological diseases as promising drug targets that could be stimulated in patients that are unresponsive to current pharmaceuticals.
 

Amanda Paluch, assistant professor of kinesiology, School of Public Health & Health Sciences and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS)

Paluch is a physical activity epidemiologist and kinesiologist with a focus on translational research of utilizing technology to monitor and promote health. She applies technology to identify and understand the benefits of physical activity in the setting of observational epidemiologic studies and as a tool for interventions. Her research targets adult populations and the prevention of chronic disease. Paluch’s recent research has focused on the number of steps per day associated with health benefits. Her results have demonstrated health benefits begin earlier than the commonly considered goal of 10,000 steps per day, in outcomes such as mortality and cardiovascular disease risk.

CRF Project: Dose-Response Trial to Identify the Optimal Volume and Intensity of Steps per Day for Cardiovascular Health in Older Adults

Heart disease is a leading health concern and cause of death in older adults. Physical activity is an essential lifestyle component for the prevention of heart disease. The number of steps per day is a simple metric for promotion of physical activity and walking is an activity which most older adults can participate. Despite the clinical and public health utility of steps per day for promoting physical activity, there is no evidence-based step public health recommendation. To advance the field, Paluch will investigate the volume and walking pace of steps per day associated with heart health among older adults. The objective of her study is to identify the total number of steps per day to benefits heart health and determine if walking faster has additional benefits.  This project will also evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of delivering remote wearable technology focused walking interventions to older adults. The long-term goal of her research is to advance clinical and population health promotion of physical activity and establish an easy to implement step-based interventions for longer, healthier lives.
 

Soonkyu Chung, associate professor of nutrition, School of Public Health & Health Sciences

Chung earned her Ph.D. in molecular nutrition in 2006 at the University of North Carolina and received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wake Forest Medical Center. Chung is an adipocyte biologist, and her research interest centers on regulating lipid metabolism, signaling pathways in adipocytes and preventing obesity. Her current projects examine the role of dietary factors in modulating adiposity, innate immunity and brown thermogenesis toward preventing obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Chung has been at the forefront of identifying the role of adipose tissue iron status in regulating metabolic homeostasis and brown thermogenesis. As a key component of her brown fat research, she also has a long-standing interest in developing transplantable-brown fat pads for humans as a therapeutic tool to treat Type 2 diabetes. More recently, Chung’s lab unveiled the novel signaling interaction between dietary fish oil consumption and heat therapy for metabolic improvement.

CRF Project: Establishment of Heat Treatment as a Therapeutic intervention Strategy to Promote Metabolic Health against Aging and Menopause

Menopause is accompanied by a rapid slowdown of metabolism, resulting in an increased risk of obesity and its associated metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes. Hyperthermia therapy, like saunas or hot baths, has long been used to relieve pain and attenuate the risk of metabolic diseases in older adults. However, the scientific evidence on the benefits of hyperthermia therapy has yet to be clearly elucidated. Our preliminary work revealed that hyperthermia treatment significantly reduced diet-induced obesity by increasing energy expenditure in ‘old’ female mice. This proposal aims to investigate the underlying mechanism of hyperthermia and the extent to which it mitigates metabolic slowdown using a rodent model of menopause, which can ultimately be applied to menopausal women.
 

Yuriy Brun, professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences

Brun’s research interests include software fairness, software self-repair and formal verification. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2008 and was then a computing innovation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington.

CRF Project: Engineering Family-Aware Software

Building software to prevent anti-family-friendly behavior is a complex task, but today, software engineers lack the tools necessary to design, implement and validate that software is child- and family-friendly. As a result, social media and software systems often fail to act in family-acceptable ways, even when the software makers explicitly wish to be family-friendly. This project will fill this void in software engineering research by creating methodologies and tools for writing family-friendly software, including methodologies for eliciting family-friendly requirements, architectural principles for designing family-friendly social and software systems, and automated and semi-automated tools for testing and verifying family-friendly properties of built software.