Dr. Judith Van Houten coordinates a statewide network, manages a multi-million-dollar budget, and oversees the development of new facilities across the state that are inspiring a growing list of Vermont researchers. Director Judith Van Houten, the George H. Perkins Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont (UVM), has shepherded the Vermont Genetics Network (VGN) since its inception nearly ten years ago. VGN nurtures and connects what Van Houten calls “a culture of research” at seven partnered colleges. It also funds student researchers at the BA level—where budding women scientists are most often found.

The VGN is part of a National Institutes of Health initiative called IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE). The network’s design,“a pipeline for biomedical researchers,” Van Houten explains, intends “to bring diverse people into the fold, so that Vermont has the workforce it needs in biomedical technologies.”

UVM serves as the lead institution,linking partners at seven Baccalaureate Partner Institutions (or BPIs): Castleton, Johnson and Lyndon State Colleges; Middlebury College; Norwich University; Saint Michael's College and Green Mountain College. From beginning to end, VGN helps faculty and students, as they design research projects, submit proposals, carry out the projects, and present their results.

VGN furthersVermont researchers’ careers in science and science education. For the purpose of VGN funding, “biomedical” can mean any research that has implications for human health. “The main thing, Van Houten explains, is that “we fund people who have really good ideas and the potential to get their own funding” once their research is off the ground.

Data Is Key

One of those people is Dr. Elizabeth Dolci, a biology professor at Johnson State College, who, with VGN support, has involved 14 students in fieldwork, laboratory work, and data analysis of the microbial community at a former asbestos mine. That work could help determine whether extreme conditions like those at the mine serve as a reservoir for the development of antibiotic resistance in bacterial communities—a key concern for human disease treatment.

Dolci, who is also BPI Coordinator for the VGN at Johnson State, points out that “for undergraduate science education today, the research experience is absolutely critical. This is where students really learn the nature of science. We have an obligation to provide that experience to our students.”

That practice, she believes, must include faculty mentorship at every stage, from review of the literature to presenting results at conferences. This year, for example, she brought four students to the American Society for Microbiology annual meeting in Boston.

One of Dolci’s students, Erika English, says her work with Dolci has turned her curiosities into career goals. “After my first week in the lab, I knew this experience would open me to a whole new perspective on the world of research,” she says.“[I could] see the application of scientific theories, and appreciate the magic of moments where things learned in a classroom suddenly became a reality.” This is just the kind of transformation that Van Houten hopes the VGN is encouraging statewide.

Amazing Range

In addition to the VGN, Dr. Van Houten also directs the Vermont National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Research) grant that builds science and engineering infrastructure in Vermont. She also serves on the National EPSCoR Foundation Board, which helps craft policy for the national EPSCoR program. And she directs the EPSCoR Streams Project, which collects and shares data from streams of the Lake Champlain Watershed to try to find solutions to the pollution issues in Vermont's waterways.

How does she manage all this, in addition to her own research in cell biology,while teaching and advising students?
“The world’s best staff,” she laughs, and clearly she has recruited talented and dedicated staff to help facilitate these many responsibilities. But her own accomplishments have earned her many commendations and awards. In 2008 she was inducted into the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering, and into the AAAS that same year, where she was recognized for her "distinguished contributions to the field of chemosensory signal transduction and to the development of research infrastructure and pre-baccalaureate education throughout the state of Vermont.”

In 2009 she was named University Distinguished Professor at UVM, alifetime appointment, and one of only six such recognized faculty. In 2010, Dr. Van Houten was elected as a Fellow to the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mentors for the Mentor

Van Houten credits several important women mentors who supported her in her career, citing their example. Dr. Edith Hendley, a faculty member in the physiology department at UVM, “always had time to talk and just be supportive of junior faculty,” she says.

In 1985, Van Houten was a recipient of an EPSCoRE grant, and was able to meet the project administrator, Ruth Farrell, another important influence. She helped Van Houten realize that once funded, she could branch off in creative and interesting directions. Farrell helped fuel her interest in grant writing for larger infrastructure projects such as the VGN.

“Most people yawn when they hear the word ‘infrastructure,’” Van Houten acknowledges. “But what we have done is build facilities that will be useful for many years to come, and will have a big impact on developing more knowledgeable students, and more knowledgeable lay people.”

She emphasizes that the VGN has also helped UVM become a welcoming place, and a resource for people outside the university.

“This wasn’t the case when we started,” she says, “but now people think of UVM and our facilities differently. They want to come here and interact with us. We’re a positive and helpful place. So that’s been very important,” she notes.

Faculty and students who have used UVM resources through the VGN confirm that perception. And although the VGN is not specifically aimed at supporting women faculty and students, Van Houten points out that the BPIs “are where many women scientists go to develop their careers, because research-intensive institutions [like UVM] can be problematic for women if they want to have a family. At the baccalaureate institutions, you find a better gender balance. So they’re there. And it’s so pleasing to be able to help them make research part of their career at their institutions.”

Time for Research

Kathryn Sperry, a psychologist at Castleton State College, is one such young scientist who recently learned she will receive a VGN grant. “I’m very excited. It’s a big relief and will be a huge help,”she says.

This is the first independent grant Sperry has received since the start of her professional career. At first she doubted VGN would support her social science research. But, after serving as a reviewer for VGN projects, and its “human health” criteria for funding, she put in her own proposal.

Her grant will release her from teaching one course; it pays three students for five hours a week, and enables her participation at a professional conference. “In Vermont especially, there’s a high teaching load at the state colleges,” says Sperry, who normally teaches four courses each semester. “We love to teach, but this grant really allows early professionals [like me] the time to put planning into the research, as well as get students on board. It’s going to create much better research, and help me publish as well.”

Sperry was drawn to research because she loves statistics. As an undergraduate, she worked with several professors at California Polytechnic State University; one even paid her out of a grant he’d received.
“I didn’t realize at the time what a big deal that was! He took me to my first conference. I hope that I’m instilling that same excitement in my students as my own mentors did in me.”

Her current work looks at how jurors’ perceptions of rape victims’ credibility might affect the degree of blame juries ascribe to victims, and potentially influence the outcome of these cases. Sperry says research suggests that by “negatively acknowledging” some quality about themselves, victims might reduce a negative evaluation by jurors.

“The ultimate goal would be to have information for attorneys so they might not drop cases where the victim did something that contributed to the events,” Sperry says. “Often these victims are afraid to go to trial for fear they may be blamed. But potentially there may be ways to restore credibility.” Her research could help reduce victims’ depression and post-traumatic stress as they go through the trial process

Switching Gears

Sperry says that in recent years the administration at Castleton State has begun to embrace VGN’s “culture of research.” It is showcasing both faculty and student scholarship. One such student scholar is Ashley Acuna, who graduated from Castleton this past December.

Acuna first majored in architecture at Kent State in Ohio. But there her professors noticed her aptitude for science, and suggested she consider switching majors. Born in Reading, she was homesick for Vermont, so she transferred to Castleton, this time majoring in environmental studies.

At Castleton Acuna connected with Dr. Andrew Vermilyea in the chemistry department. He brought her into his VGN project, examining the rate of decay of bisphenol-A (BPA). As Acuna explains, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) believes BPA may have toxic effects on the brain. BPA-containing products—many plastics, paper receipts, and cans—are ubiquitous, and so BPA is found in many aquatic systems.

Acuna sampled and filtered water from a number of sites, and then used a high-pressure liquid chromatography machine to determine the concentration of BPA in the samples. She says the most interesting aspect of the work was trouble-shooting problems with the equipment and tweaking the experimental protocols.

“I got to do the fieldwork: setting up, problem-solving in the field, that was very fun for me,” she says.“Since I grew up playing outside, it took me back to my childhood. But I was ‘playing’ for an actual purpose.”

Acuna says the VGN grant enabled Castleton to upgrade its equipment, including light bulbs for their laboratory light simulator and quartz glass test tubes that allow UV light to penetrate—all “infrastructure” needs critical to the project’s success. The results were surprising.
Urban waterways have more dissolved organic matter like nitrates from road and lawn chemicals. Preliminary results, says

Acuna, indicate that BPA decays faster in these polluted urban waterways than in more isolated waterways.
This could mean, ironically, that less polluted water systems are actually more BPA-toxic to aquatic species—and the people who consume them.

Acuna says that without Dr. Vermilyea in the picture she wouldn’t have known of the opportunity that VGN offers young researchers. “His support for what I wanted to learn about in the field really pushed me to actually get results from what I was doing.”

She also credits a career day that VGN sponsored. At that event, students had the chance to meet a number of professionals and hear them talk about how they’d arrived at their current positions. She talked with one of the education coordinators at the science-oriented Montshire Museum in Norwich, Vermont; his insights were instrumental to Acuna’s new career goals. She plans to work as a natural resources educator, and has already landed a job with Virginia State Parks.

Another student who participated in a VGN career day is Kristina Seitler, a biology major at Green Mountain College. One of her professors, Dr. Natalie Coe, suggested that she present the work she and a few other students were doing at a poster session.

Seitler, a sophomore at the time, says, “It was terrifying. It was my first experience with having someone come and talk to me about my work.” It was a judged session, though Seitler didn’t know that, and she and her friends won an award. “In the end it was a really great experience,” Seitler recalls.

She went on to work with Professor Coe on two projects related to how beech trees develop resistance to a devastating beech bark disease. She extracts proteins from the bark of beech trees and compares the regulation of protein by the DNA in susceptible trees to its regulation in resistant trees.

These projects are not directly funded by the VGN, not meeting their biomedical funding criteria. But Seitler benefited from the VGN Outreach program, which offers teaching modules at the seven BPIs. The modules cover “proteomics,” the study of the structure and function of proteins; “bioinformatics,” the computational analysis of biological data; and “microarray,” technologies to identify gene sequences and functions.

Teaching Teachers

VGN staff comes to the BPI colleges to teach these classes, and also trains faculty to teach them, using VGN-provided equipment that stays at their college. Seitler used what she had learned in all of these classes to design her own experiments for protein analysis.

She recalls a day, while she was working in the lab, when a VGN visitor observed her work and brainstormed with her about problems she had doing her protein extraction. “It’s bigger than the equipment,” Seitler says about her VGN experience. “It’s the people, it’s the network, it’s the support that’s really more important than anything. To have someone say what you’re doing makes sense? It was invaluable.”

Natalie Coe, the BPI Coordinator at GMC, concurs. She says the seven BPI Coordinators meet monthly and discuss common problems. “I can just shoot an email and within 24 hours I get six responses about how it’s done at their institutions. We’re all different, and each has its strengths and challenges, but we complement each other,” she says. The common themes, “of scientists trying to teach and teachers trying to do science,”build camaraderie, she notes.

Seitler will soon be publishing her work as a first author, and is planning to go on to graduate school at Yale. “Right now I have more doors open to me than most people do,” she says, “and I’m grateful for all these options.”

Opening Doors

Coe says that the VGN has helped women in particular because, while female students predominate biology departments as undergraduates, they often don’t go on to graduate school. Or they go to graduate school, but don’t go on to further their careers.

“Those doors have just been thrown wide open for them,” says Coe. “Our job here is to help them get to that next step in their careers. We have a lot of first generation students here. Doing research one-on-one with those students greatly increases their chances of succeeding, of graduating, of going on to graduate school, or other meaningful careers in the sciences.”

Dr. Van Houten notes some challenges working with a range of colleges, each with its own approach to the research-versus-teaching dynamic. Faculty who receive VGN grants spend 50 percent of their time year-round on research: three months of full-time in the summer and 25 percent of their time during teaching semesters. “Some [colleges] embraced it really quickly,” she says, “while others took a while to warm up to it. It can be seen as taking faculty away from the classroom.” Over time, however, as benefits for students and faculty became more clear, “We now have excellent working relationships with the provosts and presidents.”

Daniel Regan, Dean of Academic Affairs at JSC, says faculty researchers “model good inquiry for their students, stay enthusiastic, remain current in their field and there’s a level of excitement and discovery that is clearly conveyed to the students.”

He added that research “nurtures [student] curiosity and helps them develop the ability to gather and weigh evidence.” It pushes them to “ask good questions about the world that will carry them into the future.”

A symbolic and literal representation of VGN’s research connections can be found in a new super-high-speed broadband fiber network Van Houten helped create it through a collaborative grant-writing project involving INBRE directors across five New England states. The fiber network was finished last year, and “Vermont was recognized as pushing the most data [across the network] in one month in the entire country,” said Van Houten.

No doubt many women faculty and students in the VGN were instrumental in pushing that record-amount of research data. And, more importantly, they used it to ask and answer critical questions for human health.

Journalist and professor Dr. Tatiana Schreiber lives in Putney, and regularly contributes to Vermont Woman in the realms of science, environmental and agricultural issues.