Featured MSU Engaged Scholars
- Jack Harkema, D.V.M., Ph.D., D.A.C.V.P., A.T.S.F.
- University Distinguished Professor
- Albert C. and Lois E. Dehn Endowed Chair in Veterinary Medicine
- Director, Laboratory for Environmental and Toxicological Pathology
- Department of Pathobiology and Diagnostic Investigation
- College of Veterinary Medicine
Mobile Air Research Lab Assists Abandoned Mine Study in Navajo Nation Communities
What you can't see can kill you—or at least can make you really sick—including extremely small-diameter particles in the air we breathe. Jack Harkema, University Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Toxicology in MSU's College of Veterinary Medicine, has been studying these tiny airborne particles (particulate matter) for his entire career. His research focuses on how chronic respiratory, cardiovascular, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases affect an individual's susceptibility to the adverse health effects of particulate air pollutants that are emitted into the air from mobile vehicles, industrial sources, natural sources (wind-blown dusts), or chemically generated in the atmosphere.
"Overall I'm really interested in the concept of 'One Health,' looking at how we can best maintain and improve the health of humans, animals, and the environment," said Harkema. "An important component of One Health is the environment that we all live in and its impact on our health and the health of animals. Throughout my professional career, I have been studying the health effects of environmental exposures to airborne toxicants – air pollutants, like ozone and particulate matter."
In 1998, with funding support from an MSU Strategic Partnership Grant and from the Health Effects Institute in Boston, MA, Harkema, along with his University of Michigan collaborator, Dr. Jerry Keeler, designed and had built one of the first mobile air research laboratories (AirCARE1) in the world ...
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- Carrie Symons, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor
- Department of Teacher Education
- College of Education
Encouraging Welcoming Receptions of Immigrants and Immigration
According to the Refugee Development Center (RDC) in Lansing, Michigan, an average of 600 refugees have historically been resettled in Lansing each year, most of them from Iraq, Bhutan, Burma, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But even once the refugees have found a "home" in Lansing, they still face many hurdles, with language barriers, cultural differences, financial struggles, and sometimes, sadly, negative social perceptions.
Carrie Symons, in collaboration with the RDC, is seeking to address that latter hurdle with what has become a collection of projects centered on the question: How can negative perceptions of immigrants and immigration in the United States be changed? ...
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- Guillermo Delgado, M.F.A.
- Academic Specialist in Community and Socially Engaged Arts
- Residential College in the Arts and Humanities
The Prison Poetry Zine Project
Robert Frost said, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
For those incarcerated, emotion and self-expression can be locked away as much as their physical selves. Guillermo Delgado and his students offer a way to find, articulate, and release those thoughts, through poetry, drawing, and other forms of creative expression.
Guillermo Delgado is an energetic and deeply dedicated artist-educator who believes engaging communities in "creative and empowering processes of art exploration" leads to better things. He applies that message to his work with students at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH), as well as the men in his prison classes ...
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