Rachel Cox spent the tail end of her biology for non-majors class delving into the intricacies of global climate change. Cox, a sophomore, wrapped up the course taught by senior biology lecturer Dan Johnson with a final presentation this week.

While many students have taken Johnson’s course before, Cox’s experience this spring was unique. She was one of a handful of students asked to test out a new kind of e-textbook as the sole take-home educational resource for a semester.

BioBook is an electronic learning tool that offers content in an unconventional way. Unlike the thick and convoluted textbook of old, BioBook is accessible by smart-phone, tablet or computer. Developed by Wake Forest researchers, it breaks down complex and lengthy topics into small, manageable chunks of knowledge that can be changed and updated as educators see fit. It also provides students instant access to multimedia from national research organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in addition to traditional text, class lectures and practice quizzes.

“If a page uses an unfamiliar word, there’s usually a hyperlink on the word that will lead to its definition,” Cox said. “Features like this make it better than many of the textbooks I’ve used in the past.”

Within three years, the approximately $30 BioBook is expected to replace the $200+ paper textbooks of up to 1,200 students taking general biology at Wake Forest and Forsyth Technical Community College. More students and schools are expected join the initiative as well, said Johnson, BioBook’s principal developer.

The new collaborative initiative officially kicked off this semester. It will be incorporated into a multi-state $15 million Department of Labor initiative (led by Forsyth Tech) to help displaced workers find a new home in the 21st century workforce.

“We particularly appreciate that BioBook can be offered to students at little to no cost,” said Michael Ayers, dean of Forsyth Tech’s Math Science and Technology Division. “This is important because many students struggle to purchase science books that may cost hundreds of dollars.”

Ayers said the new initiative is part of a longstanding relationship between Wake Forest and Forsyth Tech. For example, Forsyth Tech’s nanotechnology students learn how to work with electron microscopes at Wake Forest.

“We hope to continue to strengthen our partnership by helping to improve BioBook and by working together to produce other science books,” Ayers said.

Johnson said BioBook takes material and content developed in a biology for non-majors class and puts it into a malleable and easy-to-access format so that educators, regardless of institution, can use the material and evaluate it as they see fit. “So rather than constantly reinventing the wheel,” he said. “If something works, it is already in a sharing and ready to go format.”

Johnson and Jim Curran, chair of Department of Biology at Wake Forest, both used BioBook as the sole resource for their biology for non-majors classes. Slides, lecture notes, and supplemental material were added to the book’s data bank as the semester went on, giving students a wealth of new information to choose from, Curran said. “It is something I think students find very helpful and I plan on using in future classes.”

Perhaps the most useful aspect of BioBook will be its adaptability. Johnson said it will enable both teachers and researchers to track what learning tools worked for students at the end of the semester. Educators can then use this data to hone future lesson plans based on what is most effective for their particular brand of student.

“The BioBook by definition is a big data set generator,” Johnson said. “If you see that a particular resource isn’t working or doesn’t fit the way a particular group of students likes to learn, then you can change it.”

Johnson said BioBook has the potential to tackle some of the big questions emerging around the 21st century classroom-like whether or not to incorporate social media as a learning tool. “The data is going to allow us to ask these really interesting questions that will help to improve electronic learning materials in the classroom,” he said.

As for Cox, she said she would like to see more reading intensive classes adopt a similar platform in the future. She said it would not only be useful from an academic standpoint but would also save her some cash. “The total cost of my textbooks would be under $100 if some of my other classes did this; last semester it would’ve been almost cut in half.”

Wake Forest University’s Sean Hannah and a team of researchers have found measuring activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain can help assess that person’s potential for leadership –which could have a big impact on how future leaders are tested and trained.

“This study represents a fusion of the leadership and neuroscience fields, and this fusion can revolutionize approaches to assessing and developing leaders,” says Hannah, the Tylee Wilson Chair in business ethics and professor of management at the Wake Forest University School of Business. Hannah is lead author of the paper in the May 2013 Journal of Applied Psychology titled, “The Psychological and Neurological Bases of Leader Self-Complexity and Effects on Adaptive Decision-Making.”

Hannah and four colleagues tested 103 young military leaders between the ranks of officer cadet and major at a U.S. Army base on the east coast. They administered psychological exams to assess the complexity of leaders’ identities, and neurological exams to assess the complexity of soldiers’ brain activity. For the brain tests, the researchers attached quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) electrodes to 19 areas of the soldier’s scalp.

Hannah and his fellow researchers wanted to know if great leaders had more complex brains – measured by the electrodes which reported which parts of the brain were firing together at the same time. A low complex brain shows more areas of the brain operating at the same time at the same electrical amplitude and frequency – which suggests those areas converge to process the same task leaving fewer brain resources for other tasks and processes. It’s a process called “phase lock.”

But in high complex brains, the activity patterns are much more different and varied – which suggests more of the brains resources are available at any one time to handle other situations or tasks.

“Think of it as a single core versus a multicore computer’s central processing unit (CPU),” Hannah says. “A multicore CPU can multitask because one core can process a task while the other CPU cores remain free to process new tasks. More complex brains are also more efficient in locking together only the brain resources needed to process a task and then efficiently releasing them when no longer needed.”

The study showed the high complex brains of the great leaders had a different “landscape.” The scans showed more differentiated activation patterns in the frontal and prefrontal lobes of leaders who demonstrated greater decisiveness, adaptive thinking and positive action orientation in the experiment.

“Further, individuals who have developed richer and more elaborate self-concepts as leaders were found to be more complex and adaptable,” Hannah says. “These findings have important implications for identifying and developing leaders who can lead effectively in today’s changing, dynamic, and often volatile organizational contexts.”

The researcher team suggests that once they validate neurological profiles of leaders with high complex brains, they will be able to use established techniques like neuro-feedback to enhance these leadership skills in others. Neuro-feedback has been successfully used with elite athletes, concert musicians and financial traders in their training. These profiles can also be used to assess leaders and track their development over time.

These findings have relevance to the WFU Schools of Business’ new student development framework, which focuses on developing practical wisdom, strategic thinking and critical thinking skills, along with the ability to embrace complexity and ambiguity.

Hannah’s co-authors include Pierre Balthazard, dean of the School of Business at Saint Bonaventure University; David A. Waldman, professor of business at Arizona State University; Peter L. Jennings, of the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic at West Point; and Robert W. Thatcher of the University of South Florida.

This research team is at the forefront of applying neuroscience to study effective leadership. The team previously published a 2012 paper in the Leadership Quarterly, which identified unique brain functioning in leaders who are seen by their followers as highly inspirational and charismatic.

Choose your character, write spells, map the dungeon and move up levels. It sounds like Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s not. It’s Latin class.

Each student plays a hero from Graeco-Roman myth with a backstory, personality and actions determined largely by the student. Over the semester-long journey the players face obstacles, challenges and opportunities both independently and as a group.

And they learn to write Latin.

Game theory for teaching languages

“The best way to learn a language is by immersing yourself in it,” says Ted Gellar-Goad, a post doc teacher-scholar in Wake Forest’s classical languages department who teaches the class. “And it’s even more fun in a world not quite our own, in time, place or nature.”

The first day of Latin prose composition class, the most challenging required course for Latin majors and often the dullest, the 12 students chose a character to guide through the 20 levels of the course.

Sophomore Amy Templin chose Ariadne as her play character (PC) — the princess of Crete who clandestinely helps Theseus slay the mythological Minotaur. “My PC tends to help solve riddles and puzzles,” says Templin. “She matches my actual personality nicely.”

Students in Ted Gellar-Goad’s class ‘map dungeons’ while learning to write in Latin.

Templin says generally other women in the class were more hesitant to embrace role-playing than the men, something Gellar-Goad expected might happen. “But the class is not a video game, it’s a paper-based role-playing game, and its extrinsic value is to create increased engagement in the class. Something I think we’ve definitely accomplished,” he says.

“I look forward to the class, and I’m not constantly checking the clock,” says Templin. “Though I was initially intimidated by the set up, especially starting the class at level zero, I’ve noticed so much growth in my abilities. I’m looking at the dictionary less and less. That we craft our sentences according to our character and the motivations of game players is a big challenge, but so much more fun than translating the vanilla sentences someone else wrote from a 1940s textbook.”

Experience points: Level zero to level 20

Students earn experience points, not grades. They gain levels. They learn Latin in a “super-structure of fun,” says Gellar-Goad. This includes:

• Scribing spells (complete translation projects),
• Mapping the dungeon (construct visual representations of Latin grammatical constructions);
• Crafting magic items (produce creative projects); and
• Completing side quests (establish standards of a Latin author’s style, for example).

The idea for the course setup came from a Teaching and Learning Center book group on José Antonio Bowen’s “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning.” Gellar-Goad was most interested in Bowen’s exploration of using games as a useful pedagogical tool. “The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game,” was another useful resource for course design.

Learning through avatars

As game master, Gellar-Goad moderates the class, provides the setting and helps guide both the storytelling and the adventures. Students work as a class to figure our how their player characters will respond to given situations. Gellar-Goad sets up the simulation: We are in a city in ancient Greece and the Mycenean people are rebelling against their queen. The rebels have caught you, and you have two options: Confess you are gathering information on how to defeat the Sphinx or hide your true motives. The group discusses the options and possible outcomes, and then composes sentences in Latin to move the game forward.

“One of the biggest takeaways for me from the class is that Dr. Gellar-Goad’s unique approach is inspiring students in our class who have different ways of learning,” says senior Matt Sherry, an aspiring high school Latin teacher. He encourages creativity and that creativity gives students different ways to approach learning.”

A few years ago, the idea of 3-D printing a major body organ like a kidney was unthinkable, but now scientists eye North Carolina as a national hub for human organs partly due to regenerative medicine research at Wake Forest University.  Medical advances in biotechnology seem to be coming faster than the public can understand them all or even discuss how society should handle ethical, legal and moral considerations.

To spark the national conversation, Wake Forest has partnered with Baylor University to host “After the Genome: The Language of our Biotechnological Future” April 12-13. Fourteen scholars from across North America with expertise in medicine, science, religion and communication will present, including:

• Baylor University President Ken Starr;
• Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine Dr. Anthony Atala;
• Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth Ronald M. Green;
• Ezra E.H. Griffith, Professor of Psychiatry and African-American Studies, Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at Yale School of Medicine 

“There is a rising awareness that the way we talk about science, biotechnology and medical miracles is not neutral, but suggests agendas,” Michael Hyde, Distinguished Professor of Communication Ethics at Wake Forest and conference organizer said. “And this national conversation will help shape public expectations regarding medical science. How far can we stretch science to give us longer or better lives through medical miracles? And if we use the word miracle, should we consider the religious implications of biotechnological advances?”

In many conferences, the papers presented are compiled into a publication afterward, but in this case, the book comes first. Wake Forest and Baylor University Press have worked for nearly two years to produce a book of essays containing the scholarship of the thought leaders who will present at the conference. That book will be available at the conference. 

“Everybody is a moral agent,” said Nancy King, co-director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society. “Academics don’t have any special corner on figuring out what the right thing to do is, but we can help to deepen and broaden public discussion. Science is extremely important and medicine is extremely important, but they’re not going to solve all the world’s problems. What’s going to solve all the world’s problems is how society makes use of science.”

The conference will end with a debate between Wake Forest and Baylor’s collegiate debate teams, using the presentations given over the two-day event as evidence and materials for discussion. Both schools trace their debate team histories back to the 1850s and have national titles under their belts, so it should be a spirited conversation.

Beyond the language, biotechnology has enormous economic implications. North Carolina is third in the nation behind California and Massachusetts when it comes to the life-science industrial sector and it generates $59 billion in economic activity, according to a recent study.

The Office of the Provost, Department of Communications, Humanities Institute and the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society at Wake Forest University, along with the Provost’s Fund, Baylor University Press and the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University have organized the event. 

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but this might not be the case for a honeybee.

Just ask David Hale (’15), a sophomore biology major. Hale has been studying the relationship between brain structure and cognitive function in honeybees since the summer after his freshman year.

He explains that as a honeybee ages, a pair of structures in its brain called mushroom bodies grow larger. Larger mushroom bodies may give older bees an advantage over their younger counterparts when it comes to learning and memorizing new things like the color of certain flowers. In nature, this would help older honeybees remember which flowers have more pollen, making them better foragers for the hive.

Hale went to biology professor and honeybee expert Susan Fahrbach to see if she would help him design a scientific study to investigate the phenomena.

With Fahrbach’s guidance, Hale designed a basic IQ test to see if older bees’ enlarged mushroom bodies make them more adept at associating color with reward.

After collecting bees of different ages and fitting them into a harness fashioned from a drinking straw, Hale exposed his tiny subjects to bursts of blue or green light from a projector to simulate different colored flower patches.

A flash of blue light signaled a sugary reward. A flash of green light signaled no reward. Hale put each bee through 20 trials and then reversed the experiment. His results showed that of the 64 bees that completed the test, older ones proved more capable at associating color with reward. The younger bees, the ones less than 10 days old, weren’t yet ready to learn.

Hale said putting together the experiment under Fahrbach’s guidance was the most challenging aspect of his collegiate career to date. His mentor took an available, yet hands-off approach, which allowed Hale to learn from his own mistakes.

“Instead of telling me what to do, professor Fahrbach told me to think outside of the box and come up with my own solution to the problems at hand,” Hale said.

From Honeybees to Humans: Meeting of the Minds

It is exactly this outside the box thinking that will be showcased at the Eighth Annual ACC Meeting of the Minds Undergraduate Research Conference, taking place April 4-6 at Wake Forest.

The three-day event, funded in large part by revenue from athletic events such as the ACC football championship, will showcase the work of nearly 100 undergraduate researchers from 12 ACC member schools.

“We are breaking down barriers between a group of the nation’s leading universities so that students from across the ACC can learn from one another and grow through shared experience,” said Richard Carmichael, professor of mathematics at Wake Forest and the University’s Faculty Athletic Representative.

Susan Fahrbach in the lab with David Hale.

Undergraduate REsearch and Creative Activities (URECA) Center, the Office of the Dean of the College and the Office of the Provost are organizing and sponsoring the event, which rotates from campus to campus each year.

“We are proud to celebrate the mentored or independent scholarship of such talented students from Wake Forest and other ACC institutions renowned for their commitment to scholarly and creative work and their dedication to outstanding undergraduate education,” said Jacquelyn Fetrow, Dean of Wake Forest College.

The URECA Center provides student grants (summer fellowships include $4,000 plus housing) and an administrative umbrella for mentored, undergraduate research and encourages and supports high-quality programs of great impact. Shannon Mihalko, associate professor of Health and Exercise Science and Co-Director of the URECA Center, said the program supports undergraduate scholars in all disciplines of Wake Forest College.

This year’s “Meeting of the Minds” also represents the first-ever ACC-sponsored event including the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Louisville.

“The expectation for undergraduates to participate in research has become standard for admittance into good graduate schools,” said Dale B. Billingsley, vice provost of Undergraduate Affairs and Enrollment Management at the University of Louisville. “Starting early is a really good thing to do for students who will be participating in research events like this for the rest of their careers.”

Josh Courtney, an English and political science major, will showcase his work analyzing linguistic trends in the writing of first-year Wake Forest students. He said working with his mentor Laura Aull, an assistant professor of English, not only gave him a realistic idea of what it is like to do research but also has him considering a PhD in linguistics after graduation.

“You don’t realize the amount of time and effort that goes into this kind of work until you do it,” Courtney said, adding that professor Aull is helping him to get his work published in an academic journal.

If you are going to attend

A complete schedule of events is available on the conference website. Wake Forest faculty known for their dedication to undergraduate research will give keynote addresses.

Friday’s keynote speaker will be Miles Silman, Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest. A leader in the sustainability movement, Silman has taken dozens of undergraduate students to the Amazon rainforest, where his work centers on understanding species distributions, biodiversity, and the response of forest ecosystems to climate and land use changes over time.

Saturday’s keynote speaker will be Christina Soriano, Associate Professor of Dance. Her mentee, senior Cynthia Huang, will dance to demonstrate their collaborative work on composer John Cage, which Soriano will address in her presentation called “Choreographing Cage: A model for undergraduate scholarship in the arts.”

Whether it’s Owen Wilson on the set of “You Are Here,” or Michael Landon Jr. filming his upcoming movie, “The Ultimate Life,” Winston-Salem has become a hot spot for North Carolina’s thriving film industry. And from a student-run film festival to a graduate program in documentary film to an undergraduate film studies program, Wake Forest is part of the “action.”

Scene 1:  The Reynolda Film Festival

Since 2008, the student-run Reynolda Film Festival has evolved into a weeklong series of speakers, panel discussions, workshops and film screenings for aspiring writers, directors, designers, and animators who dream of a career in the film industry.

Ed Burns

The keynote speaker for 2013, Ed Burns, is an Academy Award-winning actor, producer, writer and director. Festival staff chose him for his “dedication to low-budget filmmaking.” His work includes: “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Brothers McMullen” and “The Fitzgerald Family Christmas.”

In addition to Burns, Wake Forest graduate Curt Beech (’94), an Academy Award-winning art director whose credits include “Lincoln,” “The Help” and “The Social Network,” will discuss setting the scene in film.

Screenwriter Josh Olson, known for his work on “A History of Violence,” will discuss the art of storytelling.

The event includes a student film competition. More than 60 films were submitted this year, including films from Spain, Canada, Afghanistan, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Twelve of these films have been named finalists — three films in each of four categories: narrative, animation, experimental and documentary. Finalists were selected by panels of peer and professional judges, and one or more will open each of the feature films and events, giving each filmmaker an opportunity to be shown in front of leading industry professionals. The four winners will be announced and screened on the final day of the festival.

“I’m passionate about creating conversations around the arts,” says senior Rebecca Moberly, who is co-organizer with junior Connor McCarthy.  “And this year promises an amazing group of speakers.”

“For students and members of the Winston-Salem community interested in gaining experience and information about working in the industry the Reynolda Film Festival is a great way to get inspired,” says McCarthy.

The Festival is co-sponsored by WAKE TV, the Department of Communication, the Film Studies Program and the Documentary Film Program.

A complete schedule of films, panel discussions and speakers is available here.

Scene II: The Wake Forest Documentary Film Program

The Documentary Film Program (DFP) expresses Wake Forest’s motto, Pro Humanitate, through passionate storytelling. The program, originally the nationally acclaimed Documentary Institute at the University of Florida, moved to Wake Forest in 2010.

Offering students the option of an MA or MFA in documentary production, the DFP produces award-winning and socially significant documentary films.

DFP students tell local stories and raise awareness about community issues such as the challenges refugees face (“The One Who Builds”), immigration (the “Where are you From” project), and the importance of art as a form of healing for teens (“Ink From My Soul”).

“The DFP has a definite place in the regional community,” says professor Peter Gilbert, whose documentary “Hoop Dreams” was nominated for an Academy Award. “And synergy will continue to develop as students filmmakers tackle tough issues that raise awareness and encourage conversation.”

Regional film festivals like the RiverRun International Film Festival held annually in Winston-Salem, offer DFP filmmakers a unique chance to have their films screened and recognized, if they’re accepted. This year, five DFP student films will be shown in RiverRun’s North Carolina Shorts category. The program features the best short films received from N.C. filmmakers.

Professors in the DFP program continue to make films while they teach, giving students opportunities for hands-on professional work. One example: The Imagination Project. Five teams, each made up of third-year DFP graduate students and an undergraduate student, are making five different films on artists of the Holocaust. “They are gaining the experience of working for a client, Yad Vashem in Israel, and the short films they create will become part of the museum’s exhibit—gaining the students and Wake Forest worldwide attention,” says Gilbert.

Scene III: Film Studies Program

There are 40 students in film studies at Wake Forest. The interdisciplinary program started in 2004 and continues to grow in popularity, as has the number of students in the communication department interested in media studies.

“We seem to increasingly live busy, over scheduled lives. Films become a great escape from those lives, where we set aside two hopefully uninterrupted hours to enjoy a complete, exciting and engaging story,” says Woodrow Hood, director of the film studies program. “We have reactions to watching films, and some of us want to know why we reacted in the way we did. Film studies helps give us answers to that ‘why’ question. Studying film is ultimately a process of self-discovery in many ways.”

Courses from departments and programs across campus including East Asian languages, art, communication, English, humanities, Romance languages, sociology, theatre and dance, and women’s and gender studies offer an interdisciplinary approach to film study. Students work with expert faculty and filmmakers who share their passion for film and production and encourage creative, critical and theoretical thinking about film.

As Congress considers comprehensive immigration reform this spring, new research by assistant professor of sociology Hana Brown shows the language used in the immigration debates can be as important as the legislation and can have long-term effects on other policies.

“Most of our attention is going to be on the laws up for debate,” Brown says.  “My study suggests that we should also pay close attention to the language political leaders use to justify those policies, in particular which groups they say are deserving and undeserving of different rights.”

Brown’s research and her classes bridge the space between politics and sociology.

Her new study, published in the April issue of The American Sociological Review, shows that in Arizona and California during the 1990s, the tenor of earlier immigration debates directly affected welfare reform battles later. “If lawmakers talk about immigration as a racial issue and argue that Hispanics are undeserving, this divisive rhetoric can easily translate into restrictive welfare policies.  On the other hand, if they discuss immigration as an issue of legal status and praise legal immigrants, that language unifies rather than divides diverse groups.  It can spur the development of powerful coalitions that can continue to affect policymaking even after immigration debates have ended.”

Le ’Ron Byrd, a junior sociology and philosophy major from Alaska, took Brown’s introduction to sociology course and then signed up for her political sociology course. He is now working as a research assistant on her next project:  looking at why some states—Alabama and Georgia—have passed restrictive anti-immigrant laws in recent years while others — North Carolina and Mississippi — have not.

“Dr. Brown knew I had an interest in making a difference in communities and in racial issues in the United States,” Byrd said. As part of his work with Brown, he attended a professional conference, The Southeast Summit: Forging a New Consensus on Immigrants and gained insight into the role immigrants and immigration play in the regional economy and how problems in the immigration system affect communities.

Several other students are also working with Brown on her research related to immigration issues and welfare programs.  Dianne Uwayo, a sophomore sociology major from Rwanda, is reviewing Congressional hearings on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the food stamp program and examining potential patterns in legislative arguments for and against the programs.

“I think there is this assumption that once the debates are over, our immigration discussions are done,” said Brown, who will continue exploring how the way arguments are framed, in legal or racial terms, affects support for other policies. “The language that we use now is going to be a resource that people can draw on even after this current legislative debate winds down.”

Byrd admires Brown as a scholar and as a teacher and said Brown’s passion for teaching each student makes her distinctive. “After my third week in her class, I was sure I was her favorite student just by how she reached out to me through e-mail and our discussions during office hours,” he said. “However, I learned very soon after that this was how she interacted with every student.”

With plans for a career in family law, Byrd also credits Brown for encouraging him to become a public engagement fellow at Wake Forest and a Guardian Ad Litem (child advocate) volunteer in Winston-Salem.

Maggie Payne is helping to develop a new generation of flexible electronics.

A junior physics major, Payne is part of a team of researchers at Wake Forest University’s Organic Electronics group studying the relation between the physical structure and electrical properties of organic semiconductor crystals. The team’s work is contributing to advances in organic semiconductor technology that could one day lead to video screens that bend like paper and electronics sewn into clothing.

Payne grows crystals in the lab and applies them to semiconductors to test how well they conduct electricity. She said modeling and theoretical findings predict the compounds she is growing could have a variety of electrical properties ranging from bipolarity to superconductivity.

Payne said she owes her early involvement in cutting edge research to her mentor, Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics and director of the research team. “Dr. Jurchescu has inspired me as a strong female physicist,” Payne said. “Working in her lab group is one of the best experiences I have had at Wake Forest.”

Jurchescu mentors many graduate and undergraduate students like Payne, who are interested in conducting research on organic semiconductors and pursuing careers in science. Her work both in the classroom with students and in the lab was recently recognized with a $400,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the most prestigious national award the NSF offers a few select junior faculty who excel as teacher-scholars. Jurchescu said her team will use the money to elucidate the intrinsic characteristics of single crystals and provide feedback for the development of novel, high-tech electronics and thin film devices.

(From left) Jurchescu with graduate students Jeremy Ward and Katelyn Goetz in the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.

Current technology utilizes inorganic semiconducting materials like silicon, which are expensive and limited in their application because they must be processed in a vacuum at high temperatures. Compared to these materials, organic semiconductors are less expensive, easier to process, and more versatile. “Fast deposition at up to a hundred feet per second may allow their production in large volumes and at low cost per unit area, an introduction of ‘electronics everywhere,” Jurchescu said.

Examples of the potential technology include transparent solar cells on building windows, car roofs and bus stations, electronic displays in previously inaccessible spaces, and wearable electronics due to the organic plastics’ thin, lightweight and conformal nature.

The NSF CAREER Award recognizes and encourages excellent teaching, mentorship and community outreach. In line with these objectives, Jurchescu will offer a new course focused on carbon-based materials and devices, tentatively scheduled for the 2014-2015 academic year. She will give demonstrations on nanotechnology to children at Nanodays at Sciworks, a science and environmental center in Winston-Salem, and host research projects in her lab for motivated high school students and students from Forsyth Tech Community College as well.

Additionally, Jurchescu will continue to mentor Wake Forest students like Payne, who said she owes her decision to follow a career path in physics to her mentor.

“She not only has an extensive understanding of the material but is equipped with the skills of communicating her knowledge,” Payne said. “She may or may not know this, but Dr. Jurchescu’s Electronics course was the reason I became a physics major. She is a role model to me a both a woman and a physicist.”

When Jeffrey Katula and his research colleagues set out to determine if they could help prevent patients from developing diabetes using group-based problem solving, he didn’t expect such drastic results.

At the end of the two-year project, called the Healthy Living Partnerships to Prevent Diabetes (HELP PD) Study, the participants had lost about the same amount of weight and produced similar low fasting blood-sugar levels as participants in an earlier benchmark study – which cost nearly three times as much.

The results of the research, “The HELP PD Study: 2-year effects on fasting blood glucose, insulin, and adiposity,” appear online in advance of print publication in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, along with a cost analysis of the program. The project was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Wake Forest University, Wake Forest School of Medicine and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, led by principal investigator Mara Vitolins of the medical school, conducted the research.

“Traditional behavioral weight loss programs rely a lot on education – how to exercise, how to read food labels,” said Katula, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science and lead author of the paper. “Our program decreased the emphasis on didactic education and instead focused on a problem-solving, empowerment-based model. Participants talked about what things were getting in the way of losing weight, then they worked as a group to determine ways to overcome the barriers.”

The end result was that HELP PD participants lost an average of nearly 13 pounds, and kept it off over the two years of the study; weight loss is a key factor in preventing and controlling diabetes.

And because the program was administered at the grass-roots level by community health workers in local recreation centers, the cost of the care was $850 per person. In the benchmark study, the Diabetes Prevention Program, cost of care was $2,631 per person.

“A new, effective, low-cost treatment for diabetics and pre-diabetics would bring the cost down substantially for an enormous threat to U.S. and global public health,” said Michael Lawlor, director of the Health Policy and Administration Program in the Department of Economics and lead author of the HELP PD cost-effectiveness paper.

In early March, the American Diabetes Association estimated the total costs of diagnosed diabetes, including hospital inpatient care, medications, diabetes supplies, physician office visits and nursing facility stays, had risen to $245 billion per year in 2012. The ADA last reported annual costs of diabetes in 2007, when the total was $174 billion.

HELP PD recruited more than 300 participants who were guided through the weight-loss program by community health workers (CHWs) – residents who had a history of healthy lifestyles and well-controlled diabetes. The CHWs were paid a minimal amount – $100 per week to lead weekly group meetings for the first six months, and then $200 a month for the remainder of the study. They were trained by registered dieticians in the community, and had very little contact with researchers or other high-level experts.

“We wanted to harness as much existing community resources and systems as possible, and reduce the role of study resources and study personnel,” Katula said. “We wanted to know, could we accomplish what was accomplished in the original study at a lower cost? Not every community has access to a diabetes investigator – so could we develop a program that could run in any community in the country, even without access to expertise?”

The research team is now testing the program in five county health departments in North Carolina to determine if Medicaid can save money using this model.

“The Medicaid program could be interested in expanding reimbursement for diabetes prevention programs to community health workers,” Katula said. “If we could help more people avoid developing diabetes, it would reduce the need to pay for diabetes care down the line.”

Math professor Sarah Mason teaches sustainability by the numbers. In her first-year seminar — “Counting on Sustainable Energy: Does it Add Up?” — students gain a greater understanding of alternative energy and learn how to critically evaluate claims about the environmental impact of fuel sources. Read more about Mason and how she combines her love of math with her passion for sustainability.