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Meet the workers capitalism calls disposable

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:37:29 +0000

Meet the workers capitalism calls disposable Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/12/2026 - 11:37

Cody DeBos

CU 91��Ҹ� researcher Shae Frydenlund raises questions about a system that profits when workers are left behind

Even before the sun rises over the wholesale food markets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the work is unending. Produce and poultry move fast, destined for the city’s restaurants and grocers, to be part of meals served in a few short hours.

During the summer months and around holidays, the workers who make this daily cycle happen are mostly stateless Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. They often work for weeks without taking a day off from the back-breaking labor. Doing so risks one being blackmailed.

When fall arrives and business slows, the same workers who were indispensable just weeks earlier are let go without warning. Sometimes the layoff lasts a day, other times for multiple weeks. Left with no other options, these Rohingya workers are put in an unthinkable predicament, unable to provide for their families or plan for life’s tomorrows.

Shae Frydenlund, an assistant teaching professor in CU 91��Ҹ�'s Center for Asian Studies, asks in her research, "What does it mean to be left behind by capitalism?"

This is the world Shae Frydenlund moved into for nine months, living alongside Rohingya day laborers just north of the city. The stories she heard posit a foundational question about the politics driving both the local and global economy: What does it mean to be left behind by capitalism?

From the mountains to the market

Frydenlund, an assistant teaching professor in the 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� Center for Asian Studies, arrived at her most recent research with a decade of expertise. After graduating from Colgate University in 2010, she spent a year as an IBM Thomas J. Watson Fellow, traveling between the Tibetan Plateau, the Andes and the Amazon to study global trade in high-value medicinal plants and animal products.

After a brief skiing detour in Vail, her passion for research brought her back to academia.

“My master’s thesis focused on labor relations, ethnicity and race in Nepal’s Everest industry,” she says. “My PhD dissertation was a study of how Rohingyas, ethnic minorities violently displaced from the Chittagong Hill Tract region of what is today northwest Myanmar, became invaluable to industrial manufacturing and meatpacking sectors in Colorado.”

Her most recent paper, published in New Political Economy, grew directly from this work.

“The paper we are talking about is based on a chapter of my dissertation, which theorizes the relationship between refugee labor and the accumulation of capital more broadly,” says Frydenlund.

A new way of thinking about surplus

The heart of Frydenlund’s research is a concept she calls “dialectical disposability.”

“To put it simply, the idea of ‘dialectical disposability’ is about recognizing the constant movement and change that shape experiences of work—including unemployment,” she says.

For many years, scholars have used the idea of “surplus population” to describe groups who are unemployed and largely shut out of the formal economy. This includes refugees, stateless people, and indigenous communities. Embedded in this term is an assumption that these are people capitalism has passed over and left behind.

Frydenlund pushes back on this, drawing on Marxian political economic theory and nine months of on-the-ground ethnographic research. She argues that reality is both more dynamic and more nefarious.

“Not only are unemployed people valuable to ‘the economy,’ I suggest that this value is created from the process of jerking people in and out of the so-called surplus population,” she says, adding, “People who are deemed economically useless are far from it.”

In other words, instability created by employers is the game. Indeed, those who need labor for market work in Kuala Lumpur and industrial jobs in the U.S. alike depend on this cycle of hiring and firing workers who are easy to exploit.

The constant threat of dismissal keeps workers compliant, says CU 91��Ҹ� researcher Shae Freydenlund. (Photo: Rohingya Creative Production/Pexels)

The constant threat of dismissal keeps workers compliant. After all, there is always someone willing to take your place.

This system also suppresses wages and keeps labor costs flexible enough to absorb the shocks of a volatile food market. However, it’s the workers who pay the price.

Levers of exploitation

Understanding how the system works requires a look at the structures that make it possible. Frydenlund is direct about what those levers are.

“Exploitation requires the production of difference. This is at the heart of theorizations of racial capitalism,” she says.

In Malaysia, that difference is manufactured through a combination of racial hierarchy, statelessness and immigration enforcement.

Rohingya workers—most of whom lack official documentation—are racially profiled, publicly framed as threats to the economy and denied the legal protections afforded to even low-wage Malaysian workers. This leaves them with little-to-no leverage.

“Immigration enforcement is vital for maintaining an apartheid labor system that separates workers based on citizenship status and nationality. Employers also offload the costs of immigration violations onto workers themselves, leveraging the risk of employer-paid fines as justification for paying lower wages,” Frydenlund says.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same mechanics are at work in the United States, where Frydenlund’s earlier research followed Rohingya refugees into meatpacking and industrial manufacturing jobs in cities like Denver and Greeley.

“I found that the refugee resettlement system acts as a labor broker, supplying firms with cheap, supposedly docile workers,” she says.

The theft of time

In her fieldwork, Frydenlund witnessed the human cost of this system up close. In households where unpredictable, weeks-long unemployment is the norm, families struggle to pay the bills and plan for the future. The question of when work might return hangs like a dark shadow over everything.

“I would describe the impacts of precarity as a form of psychological torture that makes people frantic. I think of the insecure and temporary employment that has become so common now, from platform work to Amazon warehouse work, as a system of organized crime that steals future time from people,” Frydenlund says.

The consequences are far reaching.

"We can’t fully understand exploitation, uneven development or climate change without detailed attention to places and people."

“Being chronically unable to plan for future purchases, rent, hospital bills, childcare, food, vacation (because we all deserve to rest and play), it’s a form of physical and psychological violence,” she says.

Repairing the system

Giving refugees the legal right to work is a common policy response to the type of labor exploitation Frydenlund studies. She understands the appeal but rejects this “fix” as insufficient.

Legalizing access to formal labor markets, she argues, leaves the underlying structure of racialized inequality untouched. Malaysian food markets, like American meatpacking centers, are embedded within systems of racial hierarchy and economic exploitation that aren’t fixed by issuing a work permit.

What Frydenlund observed in the field, however, offers some hope. In Kuala Lumpur’s markets and beyond, she documented communities building solidarity outside the formal economy. From coalition work to engagement with unions and everyday acts of mutual care, these communities are slowly unifying.

“This is solidarity in unpaid social reproduction work, and it’s magnificent,” she says.

It’s a reminder that the workers at the center of her research are more than data points in a global economic behemoth. They are people. Paying close attention to them, Frydenlund argues, is the only way to understand the abstract forces shaping all our lives.

“We can’t fully understand exploitation, uneven development or climate change without detailed attention to places and people,” she says.

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CU 91��Ҹ� researcher Shae Frydenlund raises questions about a system that profits when workers are left behind.

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Top image: Rohingya man U Kyaw Win Chay prepares netting (Photo: Myanmar Now/Wikimedia Commons)

When climate change threatens sacred sites

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:05:02 +0000

When climate change threatens sacred sites Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/11/2026 - 16:05

Tiffany Plate

CU 91��Ҹ� PhD candidate Chilton Tippin assesses how a warming climate is affecting not just humans, but also our archaeological record

In southwestern Colorado, just north of Mesa Verde National Park, sits the scenic—and historic—Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, or CANM. The sprawling monument spans more than 175,000 acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands, salt-desert scrub, big sagebrush plantations and riparian zones.

CANM also happens to be home to critical pieces of Southwest history, including an estimated 30,000 habitation sites, field houses, kivas, shrines, artifact scatters, sacred springs and masonry towers that date as far back as the Paleo-Indian period (10,000–14,500 years ago).

CU 91��Ҹ� PhD candidate Chilton Tippin (left) spent months with farmers whose livelihoods depend on the Rio Conchos, a tributary of the Rio Grande in Chihuahua, Mexico. (Photo: Eduardo "Lalo" Talamantes)

But the monument’s location in the high desert makes the landscape, and these historical sites, especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In the summer of 2025, Chilton Tippin, a 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� anthropology PhD candidate, helped map out exactly how warmer weather and heavy rainstorms could impact these culturally significant structures.

The resulting Climate Change Impact Assessment, which was done with Cooperative Institute for 91��Ҹ� in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) colleagues Kira Clark-Wolf and Christy Miller Hesed, was published in January 2026. The project was funded through the Rapid Climate Assessment Program from CU 91��Ҹ�’s North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center.

The assessment laid out projections for CANM’s climate future—including many more days with temperatures above 90°F, more days of drought that could lead to increased wildfire risk and more intense and frequent extreme-rainfall events that can cause flooding and erosion.

“This is kind of the initial stepping stone that will hopefully catalyze discussions between the Bureau of Land Management and tribal partners to begin the long planning process for how they're going to adapt the landscape to absorb shocks from climate change,” says Tippin.

Projections and partnerships

To create the projections in the report, Tippin worked from information provided by archaeologists at CANM that pinpointed the exact location of known historical sites. He then used Climate Toolbox to produce climate projections from 20 different 91��Ҹ�. He compared those projections to literature covering similar projections to come up with general metrics such as how much daily temperatures might increase and how many days the area might go without rain (thus increasing wildfire potential).

At CANM, climate projections show that heat indices will register above 90°F an average of 35 days per year in the 2050s (up from 6 days in the 1990s). (Graphic: climatetoolbox.org)

“We found that most of the stone towers are embedded in pinyon-juniper habitats,” says Tippin. If the climate 91��Ҹ� and the literature are all saying that the pinyon-juniper forests will be more vulnerable to fire, he says, then they have a better idea of the threats those towers are likely to be facing over the next 50 to 100 years.

“Then CANM can make climate adaptation and forest management decisions so that they can fulfill their mission of protecting not just stone towers, but the kivas, and wiki-ups, and room blocks, too.”

Those decisions would not be made, however, without meaningful input from CANM’s 26 tribal partners whose ancestral presence is reflected in thousands of habitation sites across the landscape.

In cases like these, that knowledge is imperative to take into account. “These are places where their ancestors dwell,” says Tippin. “These heritage sites are part of this living cultural landscape.”

In fact, in the Pueblo worldview, these structures are also deeply spiritual places. “For many Pueblo people, the towers themselves, as well as the materials and rocks within them, are imbued with sentience,” says Tippin. “They're alive, and they themselves have spirit. And the natural course of things is for them to go through processes of decay and reintegration into the ecology.” As a result, a Pueblo person whom Tippin consulted suggested that adapting the habitats in which structures are embedded would be a more culturally appropriate approach than directly shoring up the structures themselves.

Exploring climate-caused conflict

Tippin was tapped to lead the CANM assessment not just for his social science research skills but also for his previous work with indigenous people in the Southwest—much of which he did for his dissertation (completed Spring 2026).

While Tippin’s PhD research is not directly focused on the climate change impacts of historical sites, it still very much explores its impacts on humans, especially in relation to water insecurity. His interest in water interactions stemmed from his childhood in El Paso, Texas, where he spent a lot of time playing in the Rio Grande. Tippin’s experiences with the river and other natural landscapes inspired a lifelong desire to examine, and tell stories, about human interactions with nature.

Chilton Tippin spent several days touring Canyons of the Ancients National Monument’s significant historical sites, including Moose Tower, which was built by Ancestral Puebloans in the late 1200s. In 2020, an extreme rainfall event caused the tower’s west wall (not pictured) to collapse. The storm’s timing and intensity are characteristic of convective rainfall, a type of extreme weather event increasingly linked to climate change in the Southwest. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

Tippin spent his first few post-college years doing just that, working as a reporter in Wyoming after earning his undergraduate degree in journalism. “For the longest time, I've wanted to tell stories about people and how they interact with the environment, with a specific lens on environmental disputes and conflict,” he says.

So, for his doctoral research, Tippin returned to the Rio Grande and its watershed. The river now sees markedly less flow—thanks in part to a warming climate and diminishing snowpack in the Rocky Mountains—and he wanted to explore the ways those low flows are affecting people who rely on it in one way or another.

To do so Tippin spent a year at three field sites that are all hydrologically connected to the Rio Grande. He first spent several months in Taos, NM, where he teamed up with Puebloans working to protect their traditional uses of water.

Next was El Paso and Juárez, Mexico, where the Rio Grande has become completely militarized. He spent time with the people of the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo who have a ceremonial relationship with the river, as well as first responders helping deliver water to migrants. “That piece of the dissertation looked at the juxtaposition of this river, which is the bringer of hope and life to the desert and a ceremonial site for the Tigua people,” Tippin says. “How is this same river also the site of widespread, racialized migrant death and violence?”

The final months he spent with farmers along the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the river sustains farmers’ agricultural output. In this final site, specifically, Tippin saw how drought and climate change are already causing civil unrest.

In 2020 a rebellion arose among farmers there who were protesting a 1944 treaty that requires Mexico to deliver a certain amount of water from the Rio Conchos to Texas.

“I was in Chihuahua amid that backdrop and came to understand how this megadrought is insinuating itself into people's day-to-day lives,” he says. It was amazing to see how these farmers could mobilize themselves to protect their agricultural water, he says.

Continuing the work

Tippin’s next steps will be to pursue his interest in the human dimensions of climate change through a postdoctoral appointment with the U.S. Geological Survey. He’ll work closely again with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center on applied climate-adaptation social science projects.

Part of this postdoctoral work will be to assess how past research projects have been executed in the field; another part is to help ensure agencies like the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife have access to the latest climate science when they’re making decisions about land and water management.

In the meantime, he hopes that the climate assessment he performed at CANM can be used to help evaluate similar natural and historic sites.

“It's a niche area within the world of climate change adaptation research,” he says. “But it's just another indication of how climate change is this all-encompassing threat multiplier that affects a lot of things that people find to be valuable.”  

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CU 91��Ҹ� PhD candidate Chilton Tippin assesses how a warming climate is affecting not just humans, but also our archaeological record.

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Top image: Bureau of Land Management

Scholar exercised science muscles in the gym

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:36:25 +0000

Scholar exercised science muscles in the gym Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/11/2026 - 10:36

Cody DeBos

In new memoir, senior aging researcher Doug Seals chronicles the work of science when conditions aren’t ideal

Imagine a biomedical research laboratory. Chances are, visions of gleaming equipment, climate-controlled rooms, and the hum of precision instruments come to mind.

But what if that lab was really a century-old gymnasium plagued by electrical outages, noise and temperatures that swing with the seasons? Those are just some of the challenges Doug Seals faced while establishing one of the most productive aging research programs in the country.

Seals, a distinguished professor in the 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� Department of Integrative Physiology, recently published a memoir chronicling more than four decades in biomedical research. In his own words, the book isn’t all about the science; it’s also about what it takes to succeed when conditions aren’t in your favor.

Doug Seals, a distinguished professor in the CU 91��Ҹ� Department of Integrative Physiology, recently published a memoir chronicling more than four decades in biomedical research.

An unlikely scientist

Seals grew up in an under-educated family, his parents having only elementary school educations, and was the first in his extended family to attend college. As an undergraduate, he majored in education and business administration hoping to coach football.

A research career wasn’t on his radar.

“However, the program had a mandatory requirement to perform a research thesis, and I discovered that I really liked the research process,” Seals says.

That discovery set him on the path to where he is today.

Seals went on to earn his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then completed his postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and at the University of Iowa before landing his first faculty position. He would eventually join CU 91��Ҹ�’s Department of Integrative Physiology (the Department of Kinesiology at the time) in 1992.

“Each stop along the journey provides a learning opportunity, and you take the new tool and add it to your toolbox,” he reflects.

Seals’ new memoir details the unique trajectory of his career and how little of it was the byproduct of elite circumstances.

“I had no conventional mentoring in graduate school (I did not belong to a ‘laboratory’), so I learned how to work on my own, independently,” he says, “which turned out to be helpful later.”

Bringing science to the gym

The title of Seals’ memoir, A Life of Science—In Gyms, isn’t a metaphor. For 30 years, Seals and a small group of colleagues ran NIH -funded research programs out of Carlson Gymnasium on the CU 91��Ҹ� campus before moving out in 2020. The building, constructed in the 1920s, was never designed with biomedical research in mind.

Yet Seals and the other faculty found a way to make it work.

His idea for the book grew out of a period of reflection during the pandemic.

“As I was writing a series of personal commentaries during and post-pandemic, I began to think about penning a memoir of my unusual life of science in gyms,” he says.

He started by authoring a historical scientific article about the Carlson years, then realized the story was bigger than could be told in a journal piece.

“I decided to expand that story to include my earlier life and more details about the challenges I have overcome, which necessitated the longer narrative format of a memoir.”

The stories he chose to include during the writing process are, by his own account, the ones readers may find most compelling, particularly how Seals and his colleagues built a top academic research department at CU 91��Ҹ�.

“For example, I share how I obtained the funds to start the first research seminar series in the department . . . the challenges we faced performing NIH-funded research in an old gym designed for sport and how I eventually took matters into my own hands to upgrade our research facilities when the campus did not do so,” he says.

In his memoir, Doug Seals details the "challenges we faced performing NIH-funded research in an old gym designed for sport."

Despite the conditions, his lab secured continuous NIH funding, produced more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and trained more than 300 scientists across career stages from undergraduate to junior faculty.

Living long and living well

Woven through the memoir’s recap of institutional challenges is the science Seals has dedicated his career to. His lab’s central focus is the concept of extending “healthspan”—not just how long we live, but how long we live well.

“In biomedical aging research, ‘healthspan’ generally refers to the period of life that you retain good physical and cognitive function and are free of serious disease, whereas ‘lifespan’ is the entire period of life,” Seals explains.

He notes the two don’t always align. A long life shadowed by disability or chronic disease is a far different proposition than one that stays healthy into its final decades.

Seals has spent 40 years researching what tips the scale in favor of the latter.

Seals has clear advice for those seeking to improve their healthspan: “If I could recommend that people do only one thing, it would be to exercise regularly—to be physically active. No other strategy comes close to exerting the health benefits of regular exercise on physical and cognitive function and prevention of chronic diseases,” he says.

Diet, not smoking, and other factors matter.

“But the effects of regular exercise cannot be fully mimicked by any other lifestyle behavior or pill,” Seals adds.

In control of your fate

One of the more challenging aspects of writing the memoir, Seals admits, was choosing what to talk about.

“The most difficult challenge was trying to make the book compelling to both scientists and non-scientists. I wanted to provide a lot of ‘insider insight’ for the layperson, while not boring academics reading the story,” he says.

Through his careful curation of stories, the message he hopes to land is straightforward.

“The main message of the memoir is that you don’t need to come from the most educated family background, attend the most elite institutes of higher education, join the faculty of a top-ranked department or have the best research facilities to achieve and sustain success in your profession,” he says.

“You are the ‘master of your fate,’ not your environment. Your determination, creativity and resilience are much more important to the outcome than external factors,” Seals adds.

Seals lived this lesson before ever writing it down. Sitting atop the resume of a 41-year career built, improbably, in a gymnasium, he fears the perspective that has carried him through it all is going out of fashion.

“I worry that more recent generations may not fully understand this simple point of view,” he says.

The memoir is his attempt to make sure they do.

For anyone who has ever felt that the odds are stacked against them, Seals offers one last reminder: “Your personal agency is much more important in achieving your life goals than your immediate environment.”

A preview of A Life of Science—In Gyms! can be accessed at Physiology.org.

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In new memoir, CU 91��Ҹ� senior aging researcher Doug Seals chronicles the work of science when conditions aren’t ideal.

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Top image: Carlson Gymnasium

Come for the beer, stay for the science

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:07:52 +0000

Come for the beer, stay for the science Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 18:07

Rachel Sauer

The May 11 Earth on Tap event at Rayback Collective in 91��Ҹ�, open to all, invites scientists and non-scientists to gather for discussions of climate research

It started, as good things often do, with CAKE. In this case, that’s the Climate Action Knowledge Exchange, a group formed by 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� atmospheric and oceanic sciences (ATOC) graduate students Max Elling, Dora Shlosberg and Josh Gooch. They noticed, the further they progressed in their studies, that there are “a lot of different people working in climate, but not necessarily working together,” explains Shlosberg, a PhD student.

If you go

What: Earth on Tap

When: 5:45-7:30 p.m. Monday, May 11

Where: Rayback Collective, 2775 Valmont Road in 91��Ҹ�

Who: All are invited

Learn more

So, they formed an interdisciplinary outreach group, CAKE, to break down silos and build partnerships between scholars, industry professionals and community members. From there, CAKE began collaborating with ATOC’s existing Outreach Committee, a group dedicated to educating the public on Earth science through engaging and interactive learning. Outreach teaches children through their SEEDS program, bringing live demonstrations on Earth-system science to local elementary schools.

Then, last semester, they began discussing what more they could be doing to involve adults in science, particularly those who aren’t professional scientists but are science curious.

Earth on Tap organizers express that there has been a lot of misinformation spread about science, and there is sometimes an element of mystery among the public as to what it is local scientists do. Earth on Tap aims to break down these barriers and connect people of all backgrounds to the science being done in their own backyard.

The key is to make it fun, says ATOC PhD student Maggie Scholer. But how?

The answer: Beer.

Not to make the science go down easier, but as a tool to bring science out of the lab and field research sites and into spaces where all are welcome, where community grows, where learning can happen with a chocolate stout and a shared plate of sliders. So, that’s how Earth on Tap came to be.

An event at which all ages are welcome—though you’ll have to show ID if you want that beer—Earth on Tap features climate scientists discussing their research with a focus on how it applies to and affects the broader community.

The second Earth on Tap will be from 5:45-7:30 p.m. Monday, May 11, at the Rayback Collective in 91��Ҹ�. Kyle Manley, an interdisciplinary climate scientist, and Molly Wieringa, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Center for Atmospheric research, will discuss fires and public land recreation as well as sea ice and polar climate engineering.

Telling science stories

Monday’s Earth on Tap topic is especially timely, Josh Gooch says, because he and his ATOC colleagues frequently discuss how “to communicate how abnormal this winter has been and contextualize it to the future. Each week we have a weather discussion that one of our professors leads, and we get these branching discussions of, ‘If we make up the precipitation deficit in the future, what does that mean in terms of more fuel for wildfires?’ So, one of our goals (with Earth on Tap) is to set the context of what current weather events that are occurring on the Front Range may lead to in future seasons. That’s a concern that a lot of people share.”

Max Elling, an ATOC PhD student and researcher in the Oceans and Climate Lab, notes that the 91��Ҹ� area is interesting because of its large population of scientists as well as its population of non-scientists, who are nevertheless involved in Earth science, yet there still can be a disconnect between the research that’s happening in this area and what community members know about it.

“With Earth on Tap, we’re learning more about what people are curious about,” Elling says, adding that he and his colleagues are learning to better understand their audiences and tailor their outreach style accordingly.

“We have an inherent language that we use as scientists, certain acronyms, and we’re taught to present at conferences where everyone is aware of this language,” Gooch says. “We need to be more aware of situations where an audience member might not be as familiar because they don’t interface with these things every day.”

Jonah Shaw, a post-doctoral associate at the Cooperative Institute for 91��Ҹ� in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) who spoke at the inaugural Earth on Tap in January, adds that all of his communication training in graduate school was in a conference environment, which doesn’t necessarily translate to climate discussions over beers at the Rayback.

“Something that I think is really important when you’re communicating within a scientific field is a story, but it becomes even more important when you’re communicating with the general public,” Shaw says. “It’s meeting people where they are, so for me, instead of talking about what I do on a day-to-day basis, I talked about a satellite mission I worked on, the story of that mission. I was talking about the narrative aspects and connecting with people’s experiences, and I was incredibly excited to see how well attended it was by non-scientists. Everyone is in their own realm and able to connect (with the science) in their own way.”

Scholer says that Earth on Tap organizers learn from event to event how to better involve audience members in the presentation, including trivia questions with prizes and QR codes that people can scan to submit questions if they’re not inclined to raise their hand. Ideally, she adds, people will come to Earth on Tap and have a great time and be more inclined to take climate action when opportunities arise.

“I think, especially in atmospheric science, ideally the outcome of what we do in the field is actionable for policy makers,” says ATOC PhD student Lucas Howard. “I think having the public more informed about not just the science in terms of outcomes, in terms of uncertainty, but the process of what goes into generating the science, can only have good downstream effects.”

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The May 11 Earth on Tap event at Rayback Collective in 91��Ҹ�, open to all, invites scientists and non-scientists to gather for discussions of climate research.

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Winning films commemorate CU 91��Ҹ� at 150

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:05:12 +0000

Winning films commemorate CU 91��Ҹ� at 150 Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 17:05

Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of CU 91��Ҹ� film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ�--a milestone that is inspiring both reflections on those first 150 years and visions of what the next 150 might bring.

To commemorate and celebrate CU 91��Ҹ�'s first 150 years, the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts issued a challenge to students: Create a film that's three to five minutes long, incorporates archival material from University Colorado Publicity Collections and/or photographs from the CU Campus Building Collections and tells a story from CU 91��Ҹ�'s first 150 years.

The winning films by Doug Conway and Benjamin Albuisson incorporate both historical photos and videos, telling stories of a spot in 91��Ҹ�, Colorado, where communities grew, where ideas flourished and where innovation with potential to change the world happened.

Winning film by Doug Conway

Winning film by Benjamin Albuisson

Honorable mention film

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Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of CU 91��Ҹ� film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history.

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Hot ponds can help amphibians fight infection—or make things worse

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:35:45 +0000

Hot ponds can help amphibians fight infection—or make things worse Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 10:35

Blake Puscher

New research from CU 91��Ҹ� finds that temperature differences between ponds can influence the severity of chytridiomycosis, a deadly fungal disease linked to global amphibian declines

Amphibian populations, including frogs, toads, salamanders and newts, have been declining globally since the 1980s. Many species have even gone extinct.

There are several potential causes for this decline, but one contributor is disease. For example, infection by parasitic flatworms can cause frogs to grow extra limbs, making it harder for them to evade predators. Another prominent amphibian disease called chytridiomycosis has been specifically linked to amphibian declines. It is caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd.

In a study comparing the temperatures of ponds to their level of infection over time, researchers Brendan Hobart and Valerie McKenzie, a 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, discovered that Bd thrives on hosts within a specific range of temperatures and level of temperature variability, above or below which infections are not as severe. This relationship was found to be driven primarily by differences between ponds rather than seasonal differences.

Valerie McKenzie, a 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, worked with PhD graduate Brendan Hobart and other research colleagues to study how temperature affects amphibians' susceptibility to fungal infections.

Hobart worked on the study as a PhD student at CU 91��Ҹ� and has since completed his PhD and moved on to a research scientist position at the University of Wisconsin. Another CU PhD student, Timothy Korpita, was also involved, along with several people from the National Wildlife Health Center. McKenzie is the principal investigator of the McKenzie Lab.

What makes Bd unique?

Fungi grow on substrates, which are surfaces that provide them with the nutrients they need to develop their reproductive structures and release spores. Some of these spores will end up in new substrates, beginning the next generation. Instead of growing on decaying biological material or living plants like many other species of fungi, Bd’s substrate is the skin of a living animal, specifically an amphibian. Additionally, rather than releasing spores that float through the air, Bd propagates using zoospores, which can swim short distances through the water using their whip-like tails.

“They are microscopic,” McKenzie says, “and they will attach themselves to a skin cell, then penetrate and go inside. They use amphibian skin cells as a place to replicate themselves, rupture that skin cell and let out more zoospores that can go on to infect nearby skin cells or go in the water and infect other individuals.”

Bd’s ability to spread from one pond to another is still something of a mystery, however.

“We still do not understand all the mechanisms by which it is getting spread,” McKenzie says. “People have made guesses that it could be birds that land in the pond water picking up some of these zoospores in their feathers and then fly off and land in another pond.” Even their ability to infect different hosts is surprising, considering that the zoospores can swim only one or two centimeters, but they are able to chemically target molecules found on amphibian skin to make the most of this short range.

Regardless of how the fungus gets around, its strategy is clearly effective, as it has infected a large number of diverse amphibians. According to McKenzie, there are something like 8,000 species of amphibians, which is only slightly fewer than the number of mammalian species.

“This one fungal pathogen is causing declines, or is predicted to cause declines, in maybe a third of amphibians. Imagine if COVID, for example, was causing massive die-offs of not only humans, but all kinds of mammals, like squirrels, whales, wolves, cats, dogs. That is sort of what is happening to amphibians with this fungus. It is unprecedented for what one pathogen can do.”

Bd is dangerous for amphibians because it targets their skin, which they rely on for many purposes, like balancing hydration. According to McKenzie, disruption to the skin can result in secondary organ failure. The disease can be more or less severe for different species, but there are many species that have been seriously affected worldwide. Bd is currently most prominent in the Americas—particularly the Central and South American tropics—eastern Australia and east Africa, but may spread to other parts of the world over time.

How temperature influences infections

Previous research into Bd has singled out thermal conditions, meaning the temperature of the habitats that hosts live in, as key drivers of host outcomes. Particularly, the variability of temperatures and the mean (average) temperature are important variables. “Temperature is the ultimate determinant of most or all biological processes,” Hobart says.

“It is especially relevant to ectotherms”—cold-blooded animals do not produce their own heat—"and their pathogens because their body temperature largely fluctuates with the environment,” Hobart says.

Salamander populations, along with other amphibian populations, have been in decline since the 1980s. Among the causes for these declines is the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd. (Photo: Iuliu Illes/Unsplash)

This study is directed toward exploring the relationship between temperature and infections further, particularly by separating changes in temperature into seasonal and among-site components. To do this, the researchers measured temperatures and Bd infections of eastern newt populations across 20 ponds in Wisconsin over the course of two years.

“All of these ponds were within a few miles,” Hobart says. “From a broad scale perspective, they all have the same climate. If you were to look up a weather forecast on an app, it would be the same for all the ponds, but the actual conditions are very different depending on things like how much tree cover there is over the pond, how clear the water is, how much stuff is floating on the surface, all these different biotic and abiotic factors.”

These differences lead to significant variation in pond-to-pond water temperature, and they are what the study covered rather than gradients in temperature within a given pond.

When the researchers looked at the temperature variability and average temperature, they found that both changed at the same time, or in other words, covaried. According to Hobart, this is because the ponds with the most variable temperature also tended to be the warmest. For this reason, the two variables were combined into a thermal mean and variability index (MVI), which ranged from cool and stable to hot and variable temperatures. When combined with infection data obtained by capturing, swabbing and releasing newts, this index was shown to have a non-linear relationship with infection load (meaning not only whether the fungal disease was present but also how much was on the animals’ skin).

Considering thermal variation both over time and between ponds, infection load was highest at middling MVI values, declining similarly when the index either increased or decreased from there.

“It is this primary hump-shaped relationship,” Hobart says. When the variations over time and space were separated out, the spatial variation resembled the overall relationship very closely, while the temporal variation looked different. “That is what produced this finding that variation from site to site was driving the overall pattern.”

“This one fungal pathogen is causing declines, or is predicted to cause declines, in maybe a third of amphibians ... It is unprecedented for what one pathogen can do.”

Implications for conservation

Considering how severe the effect of Bd has been on amphibian populations, anything people can do to reduce infections is of interest. The results from this study suggest that changing the temperature of a pond could be an effective way of doing this, but it is not as simple as it sounds.

Like many fungi, Bd does best within a limited range of temperatures, which is about 23–28 degrees Celsius or 73–82 Fahrenheit, according to the researchers. At middling MVI values, the temperature is right for Bd, and there is even some evidence that Bd handles temperature variability better than its hosts, giving it an additional advantage.

However, once the temperature increases out of Bd’s ideal range, the benefits of variability cannot counteract the unfavorable heat, especially because amphibian immune responses often increase in strength at these temperatures. On the other hand, when the temperature is low, Bd does not get any advantage from variability and is also outside of its ideal temperature range.

This means that, depending on the starting conditions, the severity of Bd infections in a pond might be diminished by either increasing or decreasing the temperature, but in some cases, changing the temperature would only make things worse.

“It has been suggested,” Hobart says, “that one could cut down trees around a pond to let more light in and make that pond hot. In principle, that seems like a fine idea.” However, “if you did not know where you were on that index, and you cut down a bunch of trees, you could inadvertently increase infection.”

In other words, if a pond’s temperature is middling, increasing it could help with infections, but if the pond is cooler to begin with, it could bring the thermal MVI into the range where Bd thrives.

“There have been a lot of studies looking at the relationship between temperature and this amphibian pathogen,” McKenzie says. For example, there was recently a study that involved building masonry brick “saunas” that frogs can crawl into to heat up and kill off the Bd. “I think what this study shows is that what works for one site may not be applicable for another site, even if that site is relatively close and similar.”

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New research from CU 91��Ҹ� finds that temperature differences between ponds can influence the severity of chytridiomycosis, a deadly fungal disease linked to global amphibian declines.

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Politicians talk climate change on X

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:54:02 +0000

Politicians talk climate change on X Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/05/2026 - 10:54

Bradley Worrell

Study by CU 91��Ҹ� scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site

For members of Congress, the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has become one of the most direct ways to communicate with constituents about their thoughts on climate change, allowing them to choose how to address the issue in an unfiltered way.

“X allows politicians to communicate directly and informally with the public, and posts occur much more frequently than polished press releases, so it provides a unique window into how politicians frame climate change in direct engagement with constituents in real time,” explains Meaghan Daly, a climate communications scholar in the 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

In a new study, Daly and her co-authors analyze posts on X by members of Congress, finding that while few U.S. lawmakers now reject the science of climate change outright, conservative members tend to frame the issue in ways that discourage or delay meaningful action. Rather than denying the problem, their messages emphasize economic costs, question the feasibility or redirect responsibilities to other countries, Daly says.

Meaghan Daly is a climate communications scholar in the 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

Drawing from more than 13,000 climate-related messages in 2021 from members of Congress on X, the study co-authors found a spectrum of political climate communication that ranges from active obstruction to concrete advocacy, with a large “murky middle.”

“This research challenges the idea that climate communication is just pro-climate or anti-climate,” Daly says. “It’s more complex than that, and those nuances matter when we’re trying to understand why action does or doesn’t happen.”

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Daly talks about why X offers a uniquely powerful lens for studying political climate communication and how these messaging strategies differ by party. Her remarks have been lightly edited for style and grammar and condensed for space.

Question:How did this paper come together?

Daly: I’m a member of the Media and Climate Change Observatory, headed by Max Boykoff in the Department of Environmental Studies. We’ve been doing global monitoring of media coverage of climate change for about 15 years now across newsprint, radio and television.

One of my co-authors, Lucy McAllister (assistant professor at Denison University and a research associate with the Department of Environmental Studies at CU 91��Ҹ�), is also part of that group. We’ve worked on several projects over the years, including media coverage in legacy news outlets across five countries over time. Our other co-author, Siddharth Vedula (associate professor at Miami University), has also been a long-time collaborator. All three of us received our doctorates from CU 91��Ҹ�, and the team brought together a strong mix of qualitative and quantitative research backgrounds.

For this paper, we noted in our 2021 study on newspaper coverage that, while climate denial used to be common, more recently fewer people deny climate change outright. Instead, there’s been a shift toward questioning the feasibility of taking action.

About six years ago, a group of scholars published a paper about what they called ‘discourses of delay.’ That paper was preliminary, and in our 2021 study we noted the need to follow up and examine these discourses in greater detail—particularly how they interface with the public in the political sphere. There hadn’t been a comprehensive study of how U.S. politicians communicate about climate change on social media, so we wanted to see how these discourses of delay manifest in political communication.

But we then expanded that framework because we didn't want to just look at how is climate action being delayed, but also how is climate action being advanced, by U.S. politicians. We wanted to have this entire spectrum, looking from delay to action and everything in between, and how politicians are approaching this issue and communicating with the public about it.

Question:Why did you choose to focus on the January to December 2021 timeframe for members of Congress posting on X about climate change?

Daly: We chose 2021 because a lot was happening. The Biden Administration had recently rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, and multiple major pieces of legislation—what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as Build Back Better—were being actively discussed. That gave us a rich dataset and a good microcosm for understanding how climate conversations were being framed and the range of communication strategies being used.

Question:You collected more than 13,000 posts from politicians on X that were related to climate change but then focused on a much smaller subset. How confident are you that the smaller sample represents the broader dataset?

Daly: We started with about 600,000 posts and used an initial screening with established search terms from prior research to ensure they were actually about climate change, which produced a sample of about 13,000 posts. From there, we applied a randomized sampling method stratified by month, since discussion topics ebb and flow over time.

We also conducted six rounds of pilot testing to refine the codebook. Throughout, we ran randomized spot checks and maintained over 80% inter-coder agreement. The final randomized sample had 1,075 posts. Across the pilot and final analysis, we coded a total of 2,844 posts, or 21% of the total sample, which for a qualitative study is quite comprehensive and gives a detailed understanding of communication strategies.

Question:It sounds like the discussion about climate change has moved beyond whether the science is accurate to whether it is feasible to take action to address the issue?

Daly: Yes, absolutely. We saw very few posts questioning the existence of climate change or the science itself. Instead, many posts emphasized downsides—potential economic damage, harm to the fossil fuel industry or job losses. Others redirected responsibility, asking why the U.S. should act if other countries aren’t doing so. Why should we have to be the ones who are taking the lead or paying to implement some of these policies when the rest of the world isn't doing the same?

We also saw a lot of posts pushing non-transformative solutions—unproven technologies, ‘clean coal’ or these fossil fuel–based approaches that are ostensibly less polluting but, in practice, typically aren’t.

Also, we saw postings that we should only rely on things like incentives rather than government regulation or policy mandates that we act on climate change. Basically, arguing we should only have voluntary approaches to addressing climate change, rather than requiring action. So, solutions that aren’t at the scale needed to address climate change.

Question: If a conservative politician talks about job losses or other potential downsides of addressing climate change on X, how do you differentiate between them raising valid questions versus engaging in what could be considered delaying tactics?

Daly: We do know that there are always trade-offs in climate policy. We’re not trying to say that we don’t need to acknowledge those trade-offs.

For example, in making the argument that, as we shift away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy technologies, we need to make sure that those people who were working in those industries and relied on it for their livelihoods are not left behind. That’s something that I think is very important to acknowledge and that can get lost in this conversation.

We need to make sure that this is a fair transition, and that those people are connected with jobs and new opportunities in these emerging sectors that are going to create new types of jobs. That comes along with other policy components like retraining, and that’s not treated as a bad thing in our codebook.

"This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action," says Meaghan Daly. "One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable." (Photo: iStock)

The way we addressed this is: If people are talking about these downsides, but they are not acknowledging the gravity of climate change at the same time—because it is this massive problem that is going to affect us all in really deep ways that are integral to how we live—that’s when we felt it qualified as delaying rather than simply acknowledging there are trade-offs in all climate policies.

Question:For those members of Congress who have been proponents of taking action on climate change, what kinds of messages did they post?

Daly: Posts promoting climate action emphasized benefits and co-benefits—health, ecosystems and quality of life. Many argued that because the U.S. has historically contributed the most to the problem, it should lead globally, especially as the country rejoined the Paris Climate Accord. There were also many posts highlighting legislation being passed or developed, budget allocations and building systems and structures for action. We describe this as ‘grounded optimism’—linking climate discussion to concrete legislative or on-the-ground action, rather than vague future hope.

Question:Do you know whether some arguments were more effective than others, either on the pro-action or delay-action side?

Daly: I think that’s a great question. This study didn’t address effectiveness in terms of public response, but I think that’s an important next step for future research.

Question:Did you find differences among members of Congress by age, race or ethnicity when it came to posting on X about climate change?

Daly: Yes. Politicians of color were more likely to post about climate change, likely because they represent constituencies on the front lines of climate impacts. Older politicians were also more likely to post about climate action, possibly because their longer tenure gives them more leeway to address controversial issues.

Question:You say in the paper that climate obstructionism can be intentional or unintentional. What do you mean by that?

Daly: One key contribution of the study is identifying what we call the ‘murky middle.’ Some communication strategies can support action or delay depending on context. For example, ‘all talk, little action’ was previously categorized as a delay (tactic), but talking about climate change does raise issue salience. However, simply talking isn’t enough—if it’s not paired with concrete strategies, people may feel overwhelmed and disengage. Posts in this category acknowledged climate change but weren’t attached to pathways for action, which can inadvertently contribute to delay.

Question:Are you planning follow-up work on this topic?

Daly: Yes. Our next step is to apply this typology over a longer timeframe. We’re exploring mixed-methods approaches, including using large language 91��Ҹ� to apply our codebook at scale, because manual coding is extremely time-intensive.

This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action. One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable.

The research also challenges the idea that climate communication is simply pro- or anti-climate. It’s more of a spectrum, which opens up important avenues for future research.

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Study by CU 91��Ҹ� scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site.

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Jennifer Stratford wins 2026 Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:26:06 +0000

Jennifer Stratford wins 2026 Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/04/2026 - 13:26

Stratford, a teaching professor of psychology and neuroscience, is recognized for her warmth, creativity and dedication to making science accessible to every student

Jennifer Stratford, a 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� teaching professor of psychology and neuroscience, has been named the 2026 Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction winner.

The Cogswell Award is named in honor of and supported by a generous donation from Craig Cogswell, a three-time alumnus of CU 91��Ҹ�. It recognizes outstanding instruction in the College of Arts and Sciences, honoring individuals for their inspirational qualities and teaching abilities.

Drawing on her past connections to the Modern Human Anatomy program, Jennifer Stratford is helping to develop accurate, detailed 3-D 91��Ҹ� of the human brain that anyone with an inexpensive 3-D printer can produce.

Stratford earned her MS and PhD degrees at Florida State University, where she researched sex differences in how sweets and fats are detected within the tongue. She then joined the Rocky Mountain Taste and Smell Center at CU Anschutz Medical Campus as a postdoctoral fellow, eventually transitioning to a faculty position in the Modern Human Anatomy program at the CU School of Medicine, where she studied the interplay between taste and post-ingestive (gut) detection of food.

Guided by a lifelong love of teaching, Stratford left the CU School of Medicine in 2016 to pursue a full-time teaching career at CU 91��Ҹ�. Since joining the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, she has taught an unusually broad spectrum of courses, from large lower-division offerings such as General Psychology to advanced upper-level courses such as Clinical Neuroscience, and nearly every required class for the psychology major in between.

Her commitment to teaching also shapes her current research, which focuses on making neuroanatomy accessible to everyone. Drawing on her past connections to the Modern Human Anatomy program, Stratford is helping to develop accurate, detailed 3-D 91��Ҹ� of the human brain that anyone with an inexpensive 3-D printer can produce. While commercial brain 91��Ҹ� can cost hundreds of dollars, the 91��Ҹ� she is helping create can be made for a small fraction of that cost, making high-quality teaching tools more readily available to classrooms, students and curious learners.

In the classroom, Stratford is widely known for her kindness and enthusiasm, with a goal of making every class fun and memorable. For instance, students often comment that seeing and holding a real human brain in one of her courses is among the most memorable experiences of their college careers.

Her teaching philosophy is simple—make learning physical. Complicated biological processes, she believes, are far easier to understand when you can act them out, and she practices what she preaches. In a single day, she might help students mount brain tissue onto glass slides, get on her hands and knees to demonstrate how anatomical terms shift between humans (who walk on two legs) and other animals (who walk on four), and then join an impromptu class dance party to act out how neurons in the brain abnormally synchronize during an epileptic episode.

Above all, Stratford’s goal is to give students the knowledge and skills they need to advocate for themselves and the people they love.

“I'm honored and humbled to receive the Cogswell Award,” Stratford said. “There are so many gifted, devoted educators at CU 91��Ҹ� that any recognition like this is partly a matter of luck, but I hope it draws attention to the care that passionate teachers bring to their work every day. More than anything, I see this award as an acknowledgment of the important, effective work that my students and I share in the classroom."

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Stratford, a teaching professor of psychology and neuroscience, is recognized for her warmth, creativity and dedication to making science accessible to every student.

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Rethinking what fruit flies taught science to ignore

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:52:38 +0000

Rethinking what fruit flies taught science to ignore Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/04/2026 - 10:52

Cody DeBos

CU 91��Ҹ� researcher Donna Goldstein seeks to understand radiation risk through a butterfly’s wings and, yes, the humble fruit fly

In the 1940s, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky flew over a cluster of tropical islands off the coast of Brazil and saw not nature but a laboratory. Trained in the famous “fly rooms” of Columbia University, he released irradiated fruit flies onto those islands and tracked what happened as they reproduced across generations.

What he and his colleagues discovered has shaped the way scientists and regulators view radiation’s genetic effects for nearly eight decades.

Whether that work should still be considered the gold standard is the question 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� anthropologist Donna Goldstein and University of South Carolina anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski are now asking.

Donna Goldstein, CU 91��Ҹ� professor and department chair of anthropology, partnered with colleague Magdalena Stawkowski to trace how the assumptions handed down through decades of fruit fly research have shaped understanding of radiation risk.

Unsettling settled science

Goldstein’s career has taken her from the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro to politically charged pharmaceutical battlegrounds in Argentina. Much of her work stems from a long-standing drive to explore Cold War–era science around radiation and its effects on humans.

Her latest paper, “Of Epistemes and Insects: How Drosophila and Butterflies Shape Our Understanding of Radiation Risk,” co-authored with Magdalena Stawkowski, was published this spring in the Journal of the History of Biology.

“We are basically trying to read into what’s considered settled science and maybe do a little bit of unsettling,” Goldstein says.

“I’m on a charge to understand what we know about the nuclear age, and also to understand the science of that era and what we might have missed in terms of the kinds of studies we were doing around radiation risk and harm to humans.”

Drosophila all the way down

The fruit fly is the go-to organism in genetic research for practical reasons. It is small, breeds fast and shares some 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans.

By the time nuclear weapons became a reality, Drosophila was already the lens through which geneticists saw the world.

“It was Drosophila all the way down,” she says. “All of these scientists, whatever they wound up doing, including human genetics, wound up traveling through the Drosophila laboratories.”

Indeed, researchers trained in Columbia’s fly rooms fanned out across the world. Many sat on committees that wrote the first human radiation safety standards after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Goldstein and Stawkowski’s paper traces how the assumptions handed down through decades of fruit fly research traveled with those scientists.

Thanks to this shared foundation, geneticists have held on to a core assumption through the years. Conventional fruit fly research suggests that populations of organisms exposed to radiation eventually recover and return to equilibrium. It also claims genetic damage is not heritable over generations.

“When we’re saying that Drosophila resilience may have been a little bit exaggerated, we’re not just talking about what we know about Drosophila, but about the scientists who passed through those laboratories and absorbed what it was they were learning about Drosophila,” Goldstein says.

She and Stawkowski call this the “Drosophila bias.”

“That idea of resilience and of recovery and that damage should not be considered genetic really has maybe been a calming mechanism for all of us,” Goldstein says. “That’s what we want to hear.”

91��Ҹ� conducted on pale grass blue butterflies collected near the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan showed genetic abnormalities in the first generation that were significantly higher than the control group. Subsequent generations not only bore those same abnormalities but experienced them at increasingly higher rates. (Photo: Milind Bhakare/Wikimedia Commons)

The butterfly effect

Goldstein and Stawkowski’s research challenges the assumption that fruit fly research on radiation safety and the risks it poses accurately carries over to humans.

In 2012, Japanese researchers published findings on butterflies collected near Fukushima’s damaged nuclear power plant. The first generation showed genetic abnormalities significantly higher than the control group. Subsequent generations not only bore those same abnormalities but experienced them at increasingly higher rates.

The mutations defy the logic held as gospel by Drosophila-trained scientists.

“The butterfly findings that are so recent really gave us pause to kind of look back and think about ‘when did this idea that there could be no genetic damage among insects evolve?’” Goldstein says.

The answer, her paper argues, goes back to the humble fruit fly.

“Maybe we’re kind of drowsy from the Drosophila bias,” Goldstein says.

Still, she’s careful not to overstate the claim, citing her background as an anthropologist and historian of science, not a radiobiologist.

“We can’t really say definitively that we know there is genetic damage because we’re not those kinds of scientists. But what we can say is that maybe the certainty we’ve been using as our groundwork and our foundation is possibly less certain than we think,” she adds.

Yet, following the Fukushima butterfly study, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation dismissed the findings as “not consistent with conventional understanding” of radiation biology.

A nice story to tell

The Drosophila bias masks a more complex dilemma. It may explain why we are willing to put our faith in dated science that, as new findings emerge, might not paint an accurate picture.

“Perhaps most of us believe in our hearts in a human exceptionalism, that, in fact, we’re even more resilient than the most resilient organism,” Goldstein says. “Yeah, it’s a nice story to tell.”

Goldstein argues the bias allows us to believe that humans are uniquely resilient, insulated from radiation’s worst effects by our very biology.

But is the story Drosophila tells true?

“We are basically trying to read into what’s considered settled science and maybe do a little bit of unsettling.”

Goldstein urges scientists to take another honest look at the data being published in recent years.

The stakes of finding the right conclusion are high. Nuclear energy is back on the global agenda, and much of the case for it rests in part on the consensus that low-dose radiation causes no heritable genetic damage. Goldstein doesn’t claim that consensus is wrong, but she thinks it does deserve more intense scrutiny.

“The pro-nuclear establishment really relies on the finding that there’s no genetic damage. I’m interested in seeing if that’s really true. We may have, through the Drosophila bias and through the exaggeration of our interest in resilience, exaggerated our calmness about this.”

Taking another look

Goldstein and Stawkowski mean for their paper to be provocative. As for any argument that goes against long-held precedent, there will surely be detractors. Yet, as Goldstein says, feedback is welcome.

“If people out there want to respond or say something about it, they should,” she says.

The butterflies near Fukushima tell a story spanning generations, offering a living record of what radiation did and continues to do. Goldstein says similar studies of other organisms are being carried out in Brazil, Ukraine and several other parts of the world.

Whether the scientific community is prepared to interpret the results on their own terms, rather than through the assumptions of a lab from the 1940s, may be one of the most consequential questions in radiation biology today.

Goldstein’s hope is that more researchers will challenge the allure of accepting supreme human resilience to radiation and examine the evidence against it at face value.

“We have to remember that not just one organism can tell us the full story.”

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CU 91��Ҹ� researcher Donna Goldstein seeks to understand radiation risk through a butterfly’s wings and, yes, the humble fruit fly.

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Top photo: Erik Karits/Pexels

CU 91��Ҹ� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:47:49 +0000

CU 91��Ҹ� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/01/2026 - 14:47

Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research’

Two 91��Ҹ� 91��Ҹ� scientists have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, joining a cohort of more than 140 scholars around the world who are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Lee Niswander, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, join an academy whose members include Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Richard Feynman and Jennifer Doudna, among other scientists.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Lee Niswander is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

Pursuing clinical therapies

Niswander is head of the Niswander Lab, where she and her group investigate mouse 91��Ҹ� of embryonic development to provide insights into fundamental developmental processes, major human birth defects and potential clinical therapies. Her studies have revealed the molecular mechanisms that control formation of the central and peripheral nervous system, as well as lung, limb and neuromuscular development.

Niswander’s current focus is on early brain formation and birth defects that arise when normal brain formation goes awry, like failure of neural tube closure or maintenance of neural progenitor cells, resulting in spina bifida or microcephaly.

The Niswander Lab uses the mouse embryo and human-induced pluripotent stem cells as 91��Ҹ� of human development. The lab’s studies encompass genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors and live imaging to couple molecular insights to cell behaviors. Through collaborative efforts, Niswander Lab researchers are also exploring the genetic causes of neural tube defects in humans.

Niswander recently received the Hazel Barnes Prize, which celebrates the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research. It is the largest and most prestigious award funded by the university. This summer she will be honored with an Edwin G. Conklin Medal, which is awarded annually by the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) to recognize a developmental biologist who has made and is continuing to make extraordinary research contributions to the field and is an excellent mentor, helping train the next generation of outstanding scientists.

Niswander received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from CU 91��Ҹ�, her master’s degree in biochemistry and genetics from 91��Ҹ� Health Sciences Center (now CU Anschutz) and her doctorate in genetics from Case Western University. She performed her postdoctoral training in developmental biology at the University of California San Francisco.

“I am deeply honored to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences,” Niswander says. “I am grateful to the numerous trainees and their research discoveries that provided the foundation of this honor. I am excited to join the Academy in their mission to advise on scientific matters important for human health.”

Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Studying space

Ehlmann is a planetary scientist who, in addition to her roles as director of LASP and professor of geological sciences, holds the faculty roles of Provost’s Chair in the 91��Ҹ� and Innovation Office and affiliate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. Her research focuses on water in the solar system, the evolution of habitable worlds and remote sensing techniques and instruments for planetary missions.

Ehlmann is a science team member of multiple missions, including the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper; the Earth-orbiting EMIT imaging spectrometer; the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover; the Mars2020 Perseverance rover; the ExoMars rover; and orbiting and landed spectrometers for the Artemis lunar program. Previously, she was a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument, the Dawn mission during its exploration of the asteroid Ceres, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and principal investigator of Lunar Trailblazer.

Active in science policy and outreach, Ehlmann is president of the board of directors of The Planetary Society. She served as a member of the National Academies Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey and the National Academies Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science. She is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America, and has authored a children's book, “Dr. E's Super Stellar Solar System,” with National Geographic.

Ehlmann earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington University, where she double majored in earth and planetary sciences and environmental studies with a minor in math; two master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, in environmental change and management and geography; and master’s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University.

“Election to the National Academy of Sciences is an honor,” Ehlmann said. “I’m grateful for this recognition and look forward to supporting the Academy’s mission to guide and advance scientific discovery, especially at a moment when humanity is extending our scientific exploration of the Moon, Mars and other planets.”

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Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.’

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