Archives for September 26, 2021

Not a Lecture Hall

September 26, 2021 by Robb Crouch

UNK’s STEM Building Encourages Collaboration and Discovery

By Kristin Howard

“Do you know what a flip phone is?”

University of Nebraska at Kearney student Uriel Anchondo loves discovery and being connected.

For him, the flip phone is more than just an artifact of his childhood; it’s a symbol of his academic and career goals.

“I was 8 or 9 years old, always on my mom’s flip phone, changing the settings, finding interesting information, showing her that I could change the language to Spanish,” said the first-generation college student from Grand Island, Nebraska. “I loved figuring it all out.”

This curiosity — along with a supportive family, scholarships and motivation to succeed academically — has propelled Anchondo on what he calls “an incredible path.”

An applied computer science major with a minor in finance, Anchondo spends much of his time in UNK’s Discovery Hall. The state-of-the-art STEM facility is home to the construction management, industrial distribution, interior and product design, aviation, cyber systems, mathematics and statistics, physics, astronomy and engineering programs. The hall opened in August 2020, replacing the Otto C. Olsen industrial arts building.

Located on UNK’s west campus, Discovery Hall was designed specifically for the programs that will drive economic growth in greater Nebraska.

“The name Discovery Hall is so appropriate,” said UNK Chancellor Doug Kristensen at the facility’s ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2020. “This building is not a lecture hall. This building is all about discovering new things and having people work together. Truly, there will be lots discovered in this building, and it’s going to benefit our students and our state.”

This first-class facility, he said, will change Nebraska by offering opportunities for current and future students that “we’ve never dreamed of before.”

For Tim Jares, Ph.D., dean of the UNK College of Business and Technology, Discovery Hall is a special place.

“Students and visitors are engaged in the learning environment from the minute they walk in the door,” he said. “The lab spaces are specially designed to facilitate experiential learning. Learning by doing means our students will retain much more of what they learn and will be much better equipped to make informed career decisions.”

Anchondo’s goal is to work for a big tech company, and he said he had a vision of his future when he entered Discovery Hall for the first time.

“There was glass everywhere, sleek furniture and workspaces … and we get to learn there!” he said.

Discovery Hall’s open floor plan was intended to promote collaboration and innovation across different academic departments. Anchondo discovered this collegiality extends throughout the university.

“My favorite part about UNK is that I have discovered other communities and groups on campus that have allowed me to branch out and connect,” he said.

After graduating from UNK, Anchondo would like to work as a computer or business systems analyst.

“UNK is helping me achieve this goal by providing resources and networking opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t be possible,” he said. “My family is so grateful; I am so grateful. I want to travel the world and explore everything.”

And his analogy takes it full circle: “Before, it was just a flip phone. Now we’re all connected.”

“This building is not a lecture hall. This building is all about discovering new things and having people work together. Truly, there will be lots discovered in this building, and it’s going to benefit our students and our state.”

Doug Kristensen, UNK Chancellor

A New Home for Treatments, Therapies and Joy

September 26, 2021 by Robb Crouch

Munroe-Meyer Institute Provides Hope for Families

By Ed Rider

Christine Tran wasn’t certain how her son Joseph, 7, would respond to seeing the new 215,882-square-foot, state-of-the-art Munroe-Meyer Institute (MMI) building for the first time.

For more than five years, the familiar yellow canopy on the campus of the University of Nebraska Medical Center had signaled to Joseph his arrival at MMI. Seeing that yellow awning, Tran said, always gave Joseph a boost of energy.

“This place is truly amazing. Joseph’s eyes lit up when he saw that playground,” Tran said of the new facility. “And the size provides so many possibilities for the growth of programs into adulthood. MMI has been an important part of his life. We hope we never have to stop coming here.”

The environment of the facility appeals to clients across the lifespan and their families, where children, teens and adults can feel like they belong and can be successful.

There is a lot for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families to absorb the first time they visit the new MMI, adjacent to the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Scott Campus. From Nancy’s Place — the aquatic center — to Aspen’s Playground to the Holland Foundation Early Intervention Wing, the new MMI building is more than double the size of its former home of more than 60 years. It affords world-class providers more space for teaching, research, clinical and community engagement, as well as the accessibility individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities require.

Early intervention for autism spectrum disorders is essential for developing long-term skills and outcomes. The Holland Foundation Early Intervention Wing encompasses nearly half of the new building’s second level and includes six classrooms and 35 treatment rooms. The Maker Space provides room for tools needed by MMI staff to create nearly any assistive device, such as orthotics, to assist in the performance of daily activities by MMI clients. Being located near the University of Nebraska’s Peter Kiewit Institute allows MMI faculty to collaborate with engineering students and faculty on new technologies that could lead to innovative treatments and therapies.

Researchers work side by side with clinicians and families in the Sensorimotor Lab to identify ways to improve the function and fitness of individuals with sensorimotor challenges, such as cerebral palsy. The lab allows for the rapid identification of key ingredients for expanding an individual’s ability to participate in engaging activities and leads to the availability of cutting-edge services for MMI clients. Its proximity to a nearby biking and walking trail allows for additional recreational and physical therapy options for clients.

And for clients and their families, the location offers an abundance of convenient and accessible parking.

EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS

Familiar surroundings are a comfort to many with intellectual and development disabilities. So, when MMI announced that it would be moving from its former home, not everyone shared in the excitement.

Denise Gehringer has been intimately involved with MMI for years. Her son, Jake, 25, has been attending programs at MMI since he was 2. Another son, James Gehringer, Ph.D., is a research assistant professor in the department of physical therapy who oversees the new Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab. The lab brings together researchers and clinicians to create new computer programs that immerse clients into virtual environments and allow them to acquire new skills while having fun.

As the former president of the MMI Board of Directors, Denise Gehringer was excited about the nearly $91 million project and its possibilities for new and expanded programs. Jake, however, was hesitant about the move.

“Jake was a little irritated,” she said. “He wasn’t ready to leave. We were all a little sentimental about leaving a place that we had been a part of for so long. He doesn’t feel that way anymore. Jake has a little more pep in his step now.”

She said the new building exceeded all expectations. “It’s very welcoming and friendly. You get pulled right in.”

Bob and Vicky Vandervort’s son Michael, 34, was born with a rare condition that requires him to use a wheelchair and limits his ability to communicate. The couple recalled how Michael, then 10, cried after his first day at Camp Munroe, a recreational day camp program for children and adolescents with disabilities established in 1982 and funded by the Hattie B. Munroe Foundation. While they considered not finishing the week of camp, the Vandervorts soon realized that Michael wept because he did not want to leave. He was having so much fun, they said.

“Michael looks forward to going to MMI. Outside of family, it’s the number one thing that Michael loves,” Bob Vandervort said. “The activities provide him with a level of independence from us.”

“The pool area is unbelievable,” Vicky Vandervort said. “I had no idea it was going to be that nice. It’s Michael’s favorite thing to do.”

FULFILLING THE MISSION

Károly Mirnics, M.D., Ph.D., director of MMI, said the transition is less about the building and more about providing MMI’s innovative and creative staff the space to establish new programs, to expand existing programs and to fulfill MMI’s mission to be world leaders in transforming the lives of all individuals with disabilities and complex medical conditions.

“Our amazing new building is a vessel for services,” Mirnics said. “I am in awe of the possibilities, but also aware of the expectations placed upon us.

“It took a community to make this happen, and I am very proud to be part of this community, which cares so deeply about the people and families MMI serves. Most importantly, our new home allows us to provide the best, most comprehensive, supremely integrated family-centric services in the world.”

Philanthropic support was crucial to the new building’s transformation. Private gifts to the University of Nebraska Foundation, coupled with $10 million in state bonds, provided funding for the project.

Jennifer Read and her family relocated from North Platte, Nebraska, seven years ago to access services at MMI. Her son Tucker, 11, had shown signs of being on the autism spectrum, but services offered through his school in North Platte were limited.

“I did some research and knew we had to get him here,” Read said. “He loves coming to camp. We see a completely different Tucker on his days at MMI.”

Read was especially excited about the new programs now available through MMI.

The Caring for Champions Program was established to provide equitable access to quality health care, education and services to individuals with intellectual and development disabilities. Providers from UNMC’s College of Dentistry, Truhlsen Eye Institute and MMI’s nutrition services provide access to vision, oral health and wellness services that are tailored to the patients’ unique situations.

“People on the spectrum often struggle to get services like eye and dental care,” Read said. “Having providers who know how to work with people on the spectrum helps to make the experience more pleasant. There are so many exciting things going on here.”

DELIVERING ON THE PROMISE

While the new facility received rave reviews, parents noted that the building would mean little without the staff who deliver the services.

“It’s a world-class facility, but it’s the people who make the difference,” Bob Vandervort said. “This staff is so creative and imaginative … to turn them loose in a facility like this, they will take things to a whole new level.”

Noah Farho, a senior biology major at UNO, is one of those people. He began volunteering at MMI in 2015 to obtain service hours for school but fell in love with the program. He has been a member of the recreation therapy staff since 2017. It’s the joy he gets from the relationships that he has built with the program’s participants and staff that keeps him coming back.

Farho said he was “blown away” by the size and features of the new location. However, being able to experience his clients’ reactions to the pool and playground for the first time has been his favorite part of the new facility.

“It’s wonderful to be able to provide our program participants with the type of building and the features they deserve,” Farho said. “The new facility expands the number and the quality of programs we are able to provide.”

In the end, what happens inside the building is what matters most.

“I always worry about leaving him (Tucker) places,” Read said, “but not here. Tucker loves coming here. He feels comfortable and safe. We have people here who know him and love him.”

Tran agreed.

“It’s like dropping him (Joseph) off at his grandparents’ house. We don’t have to worry. We know that he’s going to be OK,” she said. “We are so grateful to have something like this in our community that celebrates our children.”

“This place is truly amazing. Joseph’s eyes lit up when he saw that playground. And the size provides so many possibilities for the growth of programs into adulthood. MMI has been an important part of his life. We hope we never have to stop coming here."

Christine Tran

Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts is Where Storytelling Becomes Reality

September 26, 2021 by Robb Crouch

Story by Robyn Murray | Video by Lance Schwartz

More than a year after COVID-19 put the world on lockdown, a lot has changed. Many are wondering what the post-pandemic world will look like. What will stay — the transformed workplace, the virtual connections and work-life balance, the amount of time spent outside?

The uncertainty is leading to creation. It’s an opportunity to discover and create a new world — and elements of that new world are being designed here in Nebraska.

“We’re right at the nexus of creativity and technology on the cusp of the future,” said Megan Elliott, director of the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “We’re always attuned and listening to the incoming of the other, if you will, because that’s how you bring the future into being.”

The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts opened in the fall of 2019 with a new building and renewed momentum. The center’s vision is to prepare students for a media environment transformed by emerging technologies, such as animation, virtual and augmented reality, interactive media and gaming.

Elliott says the Carson Center is where storytelling becomes reality.

“What we see in our movies is what we design in our future,” she said.

Referring to a conversation between science-fiction author Douglas Adams and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Elliott said Adams questioned Kubrick about what robots would look like in the future, and Kubrick answered, “Whatever we make them look like now!”

“We wield something very powerful as the people who get to design these images and put them into the future,” Elliott said. “We don’t just discover the future; we influence how it’s going to unfurl.”

Carson Center students can take classes in filmmaking, game design, special effects, augmented reality, experience design, virtual reality and animation. They are learning technologies that are quickly expanding in application to other industries. The Carson Center, per its website, is a collaborative hub where physicists may collaborate with artists “to create an immersive world that shows what happens when atoms collide” or where biomedical faculty work with film students “to create simulations of the human body.”

In the class of Ash Eliza Smith, an assistant professor of emerging media arts, students have partnered with Jason Griffiths, an associate professor in the College of Architecture, to reimagine spaces that were underutilized due to the pandemic.

“We are reimagining our current shared world,” Smith said. “We asked, ‘How do we spend more time outside and rethink these systems?’”

One project proposed a colorful, pedestrian-friendly boardwalk in downtown Lincoln that offers a permanent space for the city’s popular annual music festival, Lincoln Calling, and encourages other spontaneous performances throughout the year. Another proposed an urban garden constructed on street scaffolding, while another highlighted ecological systems that thrive in undesirable spaces (like weeds in a cracked parking lot).

Smith also conducted a worldbuilding innovation studio with collaborator Alex McDowell, RDI, who sits on the Carson Center’s advisory council and brings Hollywood bona fides as a production designer for films such as “Minority Report” and “Fight Club.” These classes, Smith said, offer a lens through which to envision the future.

“We could use that to reimagine our city … schools … governance … economy,” she said. “There are all these ways we can think about using this as a methodology for civic imagination.”

One element of the new COVID world is fluidity of place. In other words, Carson students may not need to move to Los Angeles or other film and media hubs to pursue their ambitions in creative work. Elliott said several students have secured internships with companies in L.A. and New York that don’t require them to leave Lincoln.

Annie Wang, who is beginning her senior year at the Carson Center, was a finalist for a highly competitive internship in animation at the Television Academy Foundation in Hollywood. The internship is typically based in California but went virtual in the pandemic.

Wang, who loves all aspects of film production, particularly editing and directing, said she considered going out of state to study film. But when she learned more about the Carson Center, she was excited about the opportunities available that were so close to home and affordable.

Wang said she’s developed a network of like-minded creatives at UNL who have become close friends.

“I think I found a very good family here in terms of my cohort,” she said. “I just feel very grateful that I’ve found so many great friends and collaborators … and I have some really great professors that also have my back.”

Wang said she’s hopeful she won’t have to move to L.A. after graduating, at least not at first. She plans to jump-start her career at a local advertising agency or creative firm and said she’s been surprised by how much creative energy she’s discovered in Lincoln.

“It’s kind of cool seeing that there are so many creative people out there that are willing to put in so much to bring things to life,” she said.

Elliott, who came to her position from Australia, where she led the digital media think tank X Media Lab and worked with people all over the world, said she was not surprised by the creativity happening in Nebraska.

“Innovation happens at the margins,” she said. “In this country, the margins happen to be in the middle. So it doesn’t surprise me that in a place which is overlooked by many people, that this is where real innovation is taking place.

“This is where it should be happening, because we’re not saturated. We can be pioneering in our ideas, not just our spirit.”

Smith agrees. She came to UNL from North Carolina and then California, where she taught at the University of California San Diego. She said she thinks Nebraska plays a central role in the transformative issues of our time, including the conservation and production of natural resources, such as water and food.

“The center is the new edge,” Smith said. “This is where things are happening. I think more and more people are paying attention to that.”

Smith added that Nebraska has to do more than offer creative educational opportunities for young people. It has to invest in its communities to entice students to stay there after graduation.

“Students reinvest in the place where they were educated,” Smith said. “So we also have to invest in our communities and our imagination of what those places can be. How can we create something so cool that students want to stay here?”

Done right, a post-pandemic world could mean that Nebraska is the coolest place to be for young, creative professionals. At least that’s the vision.

“You can stay here and work remotely; you can build a business here that has remote clients and workers around the world,” Elliott said. “People can start to rethink the balance of life.”

Elliott said the pandemic merely accelerated changes that were already in motion. Technology is transforming how we live and the world functions. That’s why the Carson Center is devoted to graduating “X-shaped” students, its website explains, who have ownership over their futures and the ability to “thrive in a changing, diverse, global environment.”

Elliott pointed to an essay in the Financial Times by Arundhati Roy, who wrote the pandemic “is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Roy continued: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Elliott said, “When I read that I thought that’s exactly right. It’s an opportunity to really reimagine what it is we want to do when we return to normal … how we learn, how we have internships, how we show up for each other and how we support each other … and that’s something that’s really exciting.”

“We could use that to reimagine our city … schools … governance … economy,” she said. “There are all these ways we can think about using this as a methodology for civic imagination.”

Ash Eliza Smith

UNO’s Mark Gilbert explores the healing power of art

September 26, 2021 by Robb Crouch

Story by Robyn Murray | Video by Lance Schwartz

The surgery wasn’t the hardest part.

The worst was squeezing his face into a tightly fitted plastic mask and lying down on a cold, metal table. Every day, he endured the same waves of claustrophobia as he kept his body still while the nurses secured him to the table and the sickening stench of his burning skin washed over him.

“I saw the experience turn a gentle, lovely man into someone who was being violent,” said Mark Gilbert, Ph.D., an artist and medical humanities professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Gilbert met the man, Roland S., when he was undergoing radiation treatment for cancer of the upper jaw. Gilbert painted Roland’s portrait during the process — sitting with him during his surgery and radiation treatments and spending hours with him in his studio.

“It takes courage at the best of times to have somebody looking at you while they’re drawing you,” Gilbert said. “I took confidence in the fact that he had confidence in me. He trusted me to do justice to this part of his story.”

Roland’s portrait was part of “Saving Faces,” a project conceived by a surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, who commissioned Gilbert to paint portraits of patients undergoing facial reconstructive surgeries. The hope was the process of being painted would help them heal and adjust to their facial deformities.

While not a new idea, it has gained significant traction in recent years: the power of art and humanities to heal.

“Humanities aren’t just a pleasant distraction,” said Gilbert, who has conducted numerous studies on the impact of art on well-being. “They can allow us to engage with what we’ve found most challenging in a way that can be healing.”

“Saving Faces” was exhibited at UNO in 2006 through a partnership with the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That led to a 15-year relationship that resulted in Gilbert’s joint appointment as professor of studio art and medical humanities in 2020. Gilbert’s position is part of UNO’s medical humanities program, an interdisciplinary partnership that was established as a major in 2019.

The program is directed by Steve Langan, a poet and writing teacher with a background in public health administration. Langan came to the position after his experience as founder of the Seven Doctors Project, which paired doctors with writers and aimed to provide a creative outlet for physicians to
relieve stress and burnout. Langan said the impact was profound.

“Humanities and the arts are, in my experience, life-altering,” Langan said, “and that’s not an exaggeration.”

UNO’s medical humanities major has grown to include 80 students, who hail from various backgrounds and have a range of career goals.

It includes a long list of participating professors from UNO and UNMC in fields as varied as sociology and anthropology, philosophy, English, communication and social work. It is highly collaborative and involves organizations across the country, including New York City’s Theater for
Social Change.

As the program grows, Langan says it will not only focus on helping patients heal through engagement with the arts, but it will also aim to improve wellness among health care workers. Langan says the program is currently focused on tackling burnout, a problem exacerbated by the pandemic.

“We recognize the sky-high burnout numbers, sky-high suicide numbers. Physicians are at the top of that terrible list,” Langan said. “We believe that what we bring to the table helps alleviate the stress, suffering, the pain of not thinking about and talking about what ails us. We’re not trained therapists. But our specialties contain that inoculation.”

For Roland S., the process of sitting with Gilbert through one of the most challenging periods of his life and seeing the portrait of his face — the scars, the fear in his eyes — helped him turn his pain into something he could confront, and even into something beautiful.

“He turned something that was deeply upsetting into something that was powerful,” Gilbert said.

In August 2022, Gilbert’s work will be exhibited at the UNO Art Gallery alongside drawings by his late father, Norman Gilbert. For more information, contact Gilbert at 402-554-2420 or [email protected].

“It’s been well known for a long time that various types of art — written art, literature, poetry, graphic arts, music — have had a dramatic effect on how people heal, particularly for serious and chronic diseases,”

Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., UNMC Chancellor

When Bees Become Canaries

September 26, 2021 by Robb Crouch

UNL Research Leads To Important Discoveries

By Jennifer Overkamp

It’s a tale of two sites for discovery. Since 2018, in Kimmel Orchard outside of Nebraska City, Nebraska, beehives have flourished in a meadow surrounded by apple, cherry and pear trees. At the Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center (ENREC) near Mead, Nebraska, seeping, invisible toxins caused dead bees to spill out of hives for three summers, halting promising research and mystifying scientists.

The connection between these two very different places? It was the work of Judy Wu-Smart, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

In the orchard, a collection of white beehives, some decorated by children, hosts thousands of industrious bees waiting to help pollinate delicate, fragrant blossoms each spring. In the summer, rows of trees will be heavy with fruit, and visitors of all ages will harvest the bounty. Add in beekeeping classes and research, and this place buzzes with life.

It’s a favorite spot for Wu-Smart, who enjoys teaching beekeepers at every level, from the beginner to the professional.

“I really love engaging with the stakeholders and translating complicated science into relatable, practical solutions,” said Wu-Smart. “Our applied research feeds into our beekeeper and landowner training programs.”

Bees are not only crucial to the agricultural economy and food stability, but their numbers are also declining, so sharing the latest research is increasingly urgent. Wu-Smart developed a Master Beekeeping certification to help do just that. Beekeepers from local and regional beekeeping organizations in a four-state region take classes to discover what works and then bring back up-to-date information to their local groups, helping more than 800 people become more effective beekeepers.

Kimmel Orchard not only provides space for the Bee Lab’s apiaries (and fruit trees with pollen for those bees), but the Richard P. Kimmel & Laurine Kimmel Charitable Foundation also awarded the lab a $100,000 grant in 2020. Wu-Smart made careful use of that gift, pairing it with funds from her own resources to present a virtual Bee Fun Day, a Girl Scout workshop and, most importantly, fund two graduate students and their research projects.

One of those students is Courtney Brummel. As part of her work toward her master’s degree in entomology, she’s exploring ways to integrate pollinator conservation with education at Kimmel Orchard.

Brummel said that she is “eternally grateful” for the grant.

“Without the Kimmel Foundation, I wouldn’t be getting my master’s,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to take my next steps in my career, but also in my life, because of the self-discovery I’ve had through this journey. I am passionate about food security and the importance of education. And I’m realizing that people want to help — they just don’t know where to start.”

This spring, Brummel and her fellow graduate students planted pollinator gardens with carefully chosen native plants, providing food for bees. Brummel designed signs to share more about bees, the pollinator gardens and conservation practices with visitors. These signs will be installed at the pollinator gardens, which border a walking trail, and also in other places around the orchard. Brummel hopes visitors will see how beautiful native plants are and maybe give some of them a try. It turns out that with bees, what you plant matters.

“People think growing petunias is helping bees because they are flowers, but native bees cannot pull pollen and nectar from a lot of these non-native plants, because they have not coevolved,” Brummel said.

She explained that the shape of the flower and the shape of the pollinator have to match. Some plants are only pollinated by one type of insect, while others aren’t so particular. On the flip side, some pollinators feed only on one type of flower. Brummel is excited to create signage to share information like this with the Kimmel Orchard’s many visitors. It’s one more way Kimmel Orchard can be a place of discovery.

Discovery is not always so joyful, even when it is crucial to the health of people and the local ecosystem. Sixty-four miles away at the extension center, Wu-Smart and her students discovered something grim and unexpected.

The original question Wu-Smart hoped to answer at that site was: Can locating beehives behind windbreaks help protect the bees from wind-borne pesticides? But instead she was faced with a much more pressing question: Why are these bees dying? For three years, while bees thrived at Kimmel Orchard, she couldn’t even keep her colonies alive through the summer
at ENREC.

Wu-Smart knows bees. She’s been studying them since 2006, when she helped with a study of orchid bees in Florida as part of the Student Conservation Association Program through AmeriCorps and all throughout her research in graduate school. She knows exactly what to do to keep them happy and healthy. So why were thousands of dead bees spilling out of her hives?

She did what scientists do: She collected data. To make sure she wasn’t double counting dead bees or losing them in the grass when she wanted them under a microscope, she invented a simple beehive monitoring device that any beekeeper can make with 2x4s and an old sheet or tarp.

It’s a bee trap, and it’s probably one of the cheapest pieces of scientific equipment after the question mark.

With the help of a tenacious graduate student, she collected soil, air and plant samples for analysis. But the lab results made no sense.

“We contested with the lab for two years, because we thought there was a spill,” Wu-Smart said “We’re like, there’s no way milkweeds could have this much pesticide. Check again.”

When the second batch of tests came back again with results among the highest ever collected in field samples, the research team started to look for the source.

It turned out that the bees were part of a larger pattern in the area that included sick humans and dead wildlife. The pattern pointed to AltEn, an ethanol plant that used seeds coated with pesticides to produce ethanol and sold one of the byproducts to farmers for fertilizer. Area residents had complained, but federal and state regulations only covered how pesticides are applied at the factory, not what happens to the seed after it leaves the factory. There are also laws designed to protect bees, about how farmers can spray chemicals on their fields — but these chemicals weren’t being sprayed.

“People have always commented about how bees are the canaries in the coal mine of our environment,” Wu-Smart said. “If they’re not healthy, then there’s something else going on. This is a perfect example where, yes, my bees were the canary.”

Once she confirmed what was happening, Wu-Smart found herself in a role she didn’t expect: testifying before the Nebraska Legislature.

Wu-Smart’s voice joined the chorus of Nebraskans who were and are concerned and upset about AltEn. In April, the Nebraska Legislature passed LB507, prohibiting the use of pesticide-treated seeds in the production of ethanol if the byproducts would be too toxic for use as livestock feed or fertilizer.

Now Wu-Smart and her students have joined forces with the University of Nebraska Medical Center to assess the impact of AltEn. This effort includes assessing the situation holistically, working across disciplines to measure human health impacts as well as the effects on water, soil, animals and insects.

Student research will continue at ENREC. Rogan Tokach, one of the graduate students partially funded by the grant from the Kimmel Foundation, wants to learn more about the impact of pesticides on queen bees. He will use contaminated material from ENREC beehives as a key part of his study, which will eventually become his master’s thesis.

Tokach is grateful for the gift that helped make his studies possible.

“Their donation has allowed me to do this research project, and then hopefully make a career out of working in the honeybee industry,” he said. “I’ve been a beekeeper since I was about 12 years old. And I’ve loved every second of it.”

The honeybees Wu-Smart studies typically travel 1 to 2 miles, maybe 5 in a pinch, looking for lunch for themselves and their hive mates. But her work has a far wider impact. She mentors 10 to 15 UNL students each year through their work at the UNL Bee Lab. Members of the public also benefit through the Bee Lab workshops, which in 2020, despite pandemic restrictions, provided introductory courses to 673 people, some of whom joined the Great Plains Master Beekeepers Program started by Wu-Smart. She and her students do research published in national journals and partner with a wide variety of community organizations and nonprofits, including not only Kimmel Orchard but also Girl Scouts, the University of Nebraska State Museum-Morrill Hall, Pheasants Forever, Nebraska Game and Parks Schramm Education Center, Lauritzen Gardens, the Center for Rural Affairs, Nebraska Beekeepers Association and the Lincoln Children’s Zoo.

Wu-Smart appreciates the donors who help make her work possible and for the Kimmel Foundation’s grant to the Bee Lab.

“I think it’s an incredible, generous offer to help support the bee students,” she said. “It speaks to Kimmel’s commitment to education and training. It’s wonderful the way they have opened up their farm to allow our students to learn how to professionally engage with the public and develop these educational training skills. Having partnerships like Kimmel — it strengthens us all around.”

“Without the Kimmel Foundation, I wouldn't be getting my master's,” she said. “I wouldn't be able to take my next steps in my career, but also in my life, because of the self-discovery I've had through this journey. I am passionate about food security and the importance of education. And I'm realizing that people want to help — they just don't know where to start.”

Judy Wu-Smart, Ph.D.

UNK’s STEM Building Encourages Collaboration and Discovery

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