CWI Compass Connect - Sept. 19, 2017

The College of Western Idaho (CWI) and Boise State University will share an award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is one of largest competitive awards in CWI’s history and a first for the Department of Biological Sciences!

Dr. Cheryl Jorcyk (Boise State) and Dr. Steve Lysne (CWI) teamed up to draft a proposal to NIH to bring the Bridges to Baccalaureate Program to Idaho; a process that took nearly two years to complete. The final award letter was delivered last week. The $1.5 million award will be distributed over five years and will support students in the Bridges to Baccalaureate program as well as others in courses supported by program funding. CWI laboratories will see new computers, software, and equipment to enhance instruction and support our students’ advanced biomedical research skills.

The Southwest Idaho Bridges to Baccalaureate program (B2B) is a NIH sponsored effort to fuel the biomedical research pipeline beginning with two and four-year colleges and universities. The B2B program does this by specifically recruiting underrepresented students from community colleges and encourages their transfer to a partnering four-year school by way of authentic research experiences in biomedical research laboratories. Underrepresented students, for the purposes of this NIH program, are students coming from ethnic minority backgrounds, rural areas, veterans, or other groups that historically do not follow a course of study leading to a biomedical research career path. Participating students enter the program while at CWI, are mentored, and placed in paid positions in research laboratories during their “bridge” summer and during their first academic year at Boise State.  Students will engage in a variety of professional development opportunities such as social networking and responsible conduct of research training.

Students will meet regularly with faculty advisors and laboratory team members and attend one or more conferences at the end of the program to present their specific contribution to the team’s research. The B2B program is an excellent opportunity for students who might not typically follow a biomedical research career path to experience what it would be like to be a researcher and advance knowledge in an exciting and highly technical field. For more information on the application process or to see if you are eligible for participation, please write to Dr. Steve Lysne at stevelysne@cwi.edu.

This past weekend, on Sept. 2, a small swarm of seismic activity sprang up near Soda Springs, Idaho. The shaking was significant enough to register on our recently acquired seismometer in the College of Western Idaho (CWI) Geology lab. From Sunday to Monday afternoon we measured seven individual events ranging in magnitude from ~3.8 to the largest event of mag. 5.3. We also managed to capture North Korea’s detonation of a hydrogen bomb which was measured at mag. 6.3. Our TS1 seismometer is a very simple version of “research grade” seismometers but will accurately detect local events larger than about mag. 3 and global events higher than mag 6.5 or 7 (depending on distance). Tectonically Soda Springs is within the “Yellowstone seismic parabola” so events such as this come as no surprise to geoscientists. The stresses and geodynamics involved here are not likely capable of producing a massive earthquake, but we might see something similar in magnitude to the 6.9 mag Challis, Idaho earthquake in 1983. We will all be keeping an eye on the seismometer over the next week or so!