Research

Scholar explores the intersection of household labor and sexual desire

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Scholar explores the intersection of household labor and sexual desire Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/12/2026 - 07:00

Megan Clancy

In recently published research, ��ñ�� graduate student Alexandra Liepmann finds that unequal division of household labor can lead to lower sexual desire in women

Alexandra Liepmann, a clinical graduate student in ��ñ�� Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, has spent the better part of her academic career studying human sexuality and the psychology behind romantic relationships. In her recent paper, “Division of Household Labor and Sexual Desire: The Role of Gender and Benevolent Sexism,” Liepmann looks at the connection between these two areas by exploring how the unequal division of household labor can lead to lower sexual desire in women.

“There’s a lot of research on factors related to lower sexual desire, and those have really focused on hormones. You hear a lot about biology and testosterone, and then you also hear about personal factors like stress or being in an unsatisfying relationship contributing to low sexual desire,” says Liepmann. “It became clear that one of the areas that has been neglected in previous research has been the kinds of micro cultures in relationships that are really influenced by societal norms and expectations, like gender roles.”

Alexandra Liepmann is a clinical graduate student in ��ñ�� Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Liepmann began her studies in psychology as an undergrad at the University of Ottawa, Canada, becoming instantly hooked on her area of research after taking Psychology of Intimate Relationships and working in the school’s sexuality research lab. She then went on to earn her master’s in social psychology at York University, Canada, studying romantic relationships and sexuality under the supervision of one of her current collaborators and co-authors, Amy Muise.

“I loved the research, but I felt like there was a piece that was missing. Specifically, the ability to implement the research findings that I was seeing and talk to people about challenges in their relationship and their sex life,” says Liepmann. “So, after my master’s, I started looking at clinical psychology programs.”

Liepmann was drawn to ��ñ�� by the presence of her now supervisors, Chelsea Kilimnik, who studies sexuality through the lens of sexual trauma and how that’s related to sexual outcomes, and Mark Whisman, who explores relationship functioning in couples. She felt it was the perfect fit, having such strong guidance in the two areas she wanted to combine. She was also excited by Boulder’s scientist practitioner model in clinical psychology, which would allow her to explore her focus areas.

Sexual desire and the division of household labor

This combination of people and process opened the door for Liepmann’s current research. From a young age, she was always intrigued by relationships and how people come together to form romantic connections and attachments. In this most recent paper, she uses this lifelong fascination, combined with her sexuality studies, to explore how the functioning of a relationship, when it comes to household labor, can affect sexual desire.

“We know that women often report lower sexual desire in long-term relationships when they’re with men. And we also know that in woman-man relationships, women tend to be taking on more of the household labor,” says Liepmann. “Oftentimes, these women are working full-time jobs and they’re still responsible for all the household labor when they come home. Previous research has started exploring the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire, which suggests that structural gender inequities that ascribe men and women different roles in mixed-gender relationships may contribute to women reporting low sexual desire.”

But Liepmann and her co-authors, Muise and Emily J. Cross, decided to take a very specific look at this issue. They turned their research to look at the division of household duties and the role of women’s own gender role beliefs, assessing benevolent sexism – the view that prescribes traditional gender roles and praises women who adhere to the role of the caregiver and homemaker.

“We found that when women endorsed less of these views, so what we think of as more egalitarian gender roles and were doing more of the household work than their partner, they were reporting the lowest level of sexual desire,” Liepmann says. “But when they were splitting the chores equally, they were actually reporting the highest level of sexual desire.”

"Couples should be having honest and open conversations about division of household chores and be aware that this has implications elsewhere in the relationship,” says ��ñ�� researcher Alexandra Liepmann. (Photo: Vitaly Gariev/Unsplash)

The team conducted their research in two studies, recruiting participants through online platforms and performing thorough screening of the couples and their living situations. In the first study, they had 163 couples that participated in a baseline survey and three weeks of being observed. In the second, they replicated their work with 617 individuals who were in relationships. With this group, the team assessed the division of household labor using 59 questions, getting extremely granular with what went into running a household.

“We measured what people typically think of, like cleaning and cooking, but then we also measured tasks that people don’t often think about, like childcare development, like encouraging your child and asking them how their day was, as well as social planning, like planning date nights and social gatherings,” says Liepmann. “We definitely got into the nitty gritty, and we had a lot of women commenting after our study, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how much I was doing.’”

Egalitarian beliefs vs. benevolent sexism in gender roles

Through these studies, Liepmann and her co-authors found that women who held egalitarian beliefs when it came to gender roles had lower sexual desire when taking on more of the household labor. Women who held beliefs more in line with benevolent sexism, however, did not show this decline.

“Sexual functioning and relationship functioning are very highly correlated,” says Liepmann. “So, these are important issues, not just for sex, but also for the broader relationship. Couples should be having honest and open conversations about division of household chores and be aware that this has implications elsewhere in the relationship.”

As for the next steps of the research, Liepmann is looking at how these findings can be used to assist couples in having the kinds of conversations that help them align on issues of household labor in order to strengthen the relationship overall.

“Right now, my collaborators and I are working on assessing how couples are having conversations about division of chores and aiming to do an intervention study to see if intentionally assigning each member of the couple chores can make it more equitable,” she says. “I think this is a newer area of research and we need a lot more work in this area because there are so many important implications. The fact that this article is getting so much media attention, I think really demonstrates that people are resonating with this. I’m really excited about what’s going to come from here.”

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In recently published research, ��ñ�� graduate student Alexandra Liepmann finds that unequal division of household labor can lead to lower sexual desire in women.

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Remembering the summit that almost ended the Cold War

Kylie Clarke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:16:27 +0000

Remembering the summit that almost ended the Cold War Kylie Clarke Thu, 10/08/2026 - 11:16

Expectations at the outset of the Reykjavik summit were modest. However, Reagan and Gorbachev each made major proposals for reducing nuclear weapons during the talks, which ultimately collapsed over disagreements over the U.S. SDI missile-defense system. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Bradley Worrell

Forty years after President Reagan and Soviet Premier Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, ��ñ�� historian Tom Zeiler sees the meeting as both a missed opportunity and an early step toward meaningful arms control

By all accounts, expectations were low in October 1986, when President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Reykjavik, Iceland, for informal discussions on stalled nuclear weapons negotiations.

At the time, the East and West were locked in a Cold War, and relations between Washington and Moscow remained frosty, says ��ñ�� Department of History Professor Tom Zeiler, whose expertise is in U.S. diplomatic relations.

Just a few years earlier, the Soviet Union’s military buildup, aggressive foreign policies and invasion of Afghanistan sparked alarm in the West. The U.S. countered with its own military buildup, support for anti-communist movements globally and aggressive rhetoric from the president, with Reagan referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

Tom Zeiler, ��ñ�� history professor whose expertise is in U.S. diplomatic relations, sees the Reykjavik summit as both a missed opportunity for meaningful arms control negotiations and an important turning point in Cold War relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“Many historians see the early Reagan years as a third major reignition of Cold War tensions,” Zeiler says.

Still, the idea that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were headed for nuclear confrontation leading up to the Reykjavik summit, as popularized in advertisements for the new movie The Brink of War, seems a bit overblown, Zeiler says.

“I think that’s an exaggeration,” he says. “The fear surrounding Ronald Reagan’s (hardline rhetoric) hadn’t completely passed, but the real fear that the Cold War had restarted peaked around 1983, about three years prior to the summit.”

It was in 1983 that the Cold War nearly turned hot, resulting from failed communications between the two sides during the NATO military drill Able Archer. The U.S. failed to sufficiently inform their Soviet counterparts they were conducting nuclear exercises with their European allies, Zeiler says, leading the Soviets to ready their own arsenal for launch, believing war might be imminent. He calls that incident perhaps the greatest risk of a nuclear exchange after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

By 1986, however, circumstances were changing.

In the Soviet Union, several old-guard bureaucrats had died in rapid succession, clearing the way for a younger, energetic Gorbachev. More than just a change in personalities, Zeiler says Gorbachev represented a different approach to relations with the West. “The gerontocracy was ending,” he says.

Arriving in chilly Iceland

Gorbachev and Reagan arrived in Iceland with differing priorities.

“For Gorbachev, the goal was probably simpler,” Zeiler says. “He wanted some form of disarmament and strategic parity. He needed to stop the arms race to focus on domestic priorities. His basic message was: ‘Whether it’s 10%, 50% or 75%, let’s move toward disarmament.’”

Reagan arrived in Iceland with his own convictions. Although widely viewed as a hardline anti-communist, Zeiler says the president saw nuclear weapons as evil and a threat to humanity.

Despite coming from opposite political systems, Zeiler says Reagan and Gorbachev shared important similarities. Both were effective communicators, both understood the power of political opinion and both were willing to think beyond traditional diplomatic limits.

As the negotiations progressed over two days (Oct. 11-12), both leaders began making proposals that surprised even their own advisors.

“They both, for lack of a better term, escalated in their negotiations,” Zeiler says. “It became: ‘I can outdo you. You’re serious about a 50 percent reduction? Well, are you serious about wiping out everything?’”

At one point, Zeiler says both sides entertained the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons.

He says the scope of the conversations was not fully understood at the time. Later declassified documents revealed just how close the two leaders came to potentially transformative agreements, he adds.

Forty years ago this month, President Ronald Reagan (left) welcomed Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to Hofdi House outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, for two days of intensive arms control negotiations. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Divided over ‘Star Wars’

Yet one issue repeatedly blocked progress: Reagan’s commitment to the missile-defense system known as Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Its defenders envisioned a technology that could intercept nuclear missiles before they reached American soil. Critics mocked the proposal as unrealistic science fiction, earning it the nickname “Star Wars” after the popular movie.

Zeiler says that, with the passage of time, historians have come to understand the depth of Reagan’s commitment to the program.

“Historians didn’t know it then, but looking back at Reagan now, he deeply, deeply held that this (SDI) was the key to life on Earth by making nuclear weapons obsolete,” he says. “He sincerely thought SDI offered a way out of the nuclear dilemma.”

Zeiler says that belief distinguished Reagan from many of the hawks within his own administration.

“Unlike hardline advisors such as Paul Nitze or Richard Perle, Reagan wasn’t focused solely on strategic advantage,” he says. “He believed, at a fundamental level, that SDI could protect humanity from nuclear war.”

For Gorbachev, however, SDI presented an entirely different problem. Zeiler says the Soviet leader feared that if the United States developed an effective missile shield, it would gain a decisive military advantage, rendering Soviet nuclear weapons irrelevant and upsetting decades of strategic balance.

“Why should I trust that this system is really intended for peace simply because you say so?” Zeiler says, describing the Soviet leader’s perspective. Gorbachev was willing to let the United States continue to develop the technology in a laboratory setting but drew the line at actual deployment of the technology, he says.

Ultimately, negotiations collapsed over the issue, which Zeiler says today is all the more ironic because SDI was nowhere near ready for deployment in 1986 or the years immediately following.

Zeiler says the disappointment following two days of intensive negotiations was tangible. He says Reagan was visibly frustrated and Gorbachev appeared stunned and discouraged. Around the world, observers wondered whether the two leaders had squandered a unique opportunity.

“It did seem at the time like, ‘Wow, this was a big deal’—and then they walked away,” Zeiler recalls. “They had a chance to end things and they gave up.”

Laying new groundwork

However, in retrospect, Zeiler says the summit was not an abject failure. He says it transformed the nature of future U.S.-Soviet negotiations, with both sides recognizing that substantial reductions in nuclear weapons were possible. Zeiler says the discussions that started in Iceland created momentum that continued long after the summit ended.

Within a year, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Additional agreements followed.

Meanwhile, other developments on the world stage would outpace traditional U.S.-Soviet diplomacy. Three years after the Iceland summit, the Berlin Wall fell, leading to a reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. Within five years, the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

Those developments have fueled an enduring debate among historians: Who deserves credit for ending the Cold War?

“Was it Ronald Reagan? Was it Gorbachev? Was it a combination?” Zeiler asks rhetorically. His answer is that both leaders played essential roles.

Gorbachev, in Zeiler’s view, may deserve special recognition because he challenged the very system he led and paid a political price for doing so. However, Reagan’s contributions were also important.

“I think Reagan set the table and made it possible for Gorbachev to do the work,” Zeiler says.

He says the Reykjavik summit also demonstrated something broader about diplomacy: the importance of personal relationships. Historians often focus on ideology and geopolitics, but Zeiler argues that leaders themselves matter. From Roosevelt and Churchill to Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, personal chemistry has often influenced world events.

“They’re human beings,” Zeiler says of politicians. “Some of them just say, ‘I get that guy.’”

He says that dynamic appears to have existed between Reagan and Gorbachev. Despite major disagreements, the two leaders developed a mutual respect for one another. In 1988, Reagan visited Moscow for his fourth and final summit with Gorbachev, where he publicly distanced himself from his earlier description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

1986 as a turning point

Looking back on the October 1986 Reykjavik summit, Zeiler sees it as both a missed opportunity and as an important turning point.

For decades following the end of World War II, the Cold War had been defined by confrontation and suspicion. Zeiler says the Reykjavik summit revealed something new: two adversaries exploring how to move beyond it.

When some people today describe the Reykjavik summit as a moment when the world stood on the brink of war, Zeiler disagrees. “It was the opposite,” he says.

The Reykjavik summit alone did not end the Cold War, but Zeiler says it might have been the moment when leaders from both sides finally began to imagine that it could end.

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Scientists consider an AI-driven approach to generating disaster alerts

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Scientists consider an AI-driven approach to generating disaster alerts Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/08/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Researchers at ��ñ��’s Institute of Behavioral Science and the Natural Hazards Center are finding new ways to personalize alerts that could help people take more timely action in disaster scenarios

Wildfires. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Floods. The increased frequency of natural hazards and disasters cropping up all over the world is staggering—as is the potential loss of human life.

To limit casualties amid these disasters, emergency management organizations use a variety of methods to communicate warnings and evacuation alerts. Whether or not people comply with them is another story.

“We know that many individuals don’t really pay attention to disaster alerts until it's too late to take any kind of action,” says Amir Behzadan, professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and fellow in the Institute of Behavioral Science’s Natural Hazards Center. “We're trying to bridge this gap by ensuring that disaster warnings translate into timely action, particularly among communities, individuals and population groups that may have greater barriers to accessing, processing and responding to this type of risk information.”

��ñ�� scholars Amir Behzadan (left) and Mary Angelica Painter (right) collaborated on research employing generative AI to explore a new approach to getting people to respond more quickly to disaster alerts.

In a new study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Behzadan, Mary Angelica Painter (a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center) and a team of ��ñ�� graduate students employed generative AI to explore a new approach to getting people to take action more quickly.

Leveraging Google’s large language model (LLM), Gemini, the team generated and distributed more personalized alerts—which included reminders about pets, dependents and medications—to sample groups to determine how well they would be received and how they might motivate recipients to take action. Their findings were published in September in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Getting personal

Study participants were first asked a series of questions about their sociodemographic factors (i.e., gender, age, education level, language preference and prior disaster experience). Knowing these factors was key to understanding how people from different walks of life might perceive alerts.

Participants were then asked about personal traits that might impact their needs in a disaster scenario (e.g., whether or not they lived close to family, if they had dependent family members and/or pets, if they used medication and what type of home they lived in). The participants’ ZIP codes were also requested so the messages could be tailored to the types of disasters they would be most likely to experience, given their geographical location.

Their responses were then fed into the LLM, along with examples of the tone the messages should mimic. “The role of AI here was to focus on those personal traits and then try to cater the content and style of the message to the participants that possess those traits,” says Behzadan.

One portion of participants was given the AI-created messages, while another portion was given standard, human-written messages with no personalization.

After reviewing the message, participants were asked to rate it on six different metrics—clarity, trust, relevance, influence, confidence and certainty—that are common parameters known to influence a person’s behavior and decision-making intentions in disaster scenarios.

How AI could level the playing field

The results showed the clearest discrepancy between sociodemographic groups in relation to the standard alerts: women, people with lower education levels and older adults all rated the human-crafted alerts with higher trust and confidence than their counterparts (men, people with higher education levels and younger adults).

Infographic: Amir Behzadan

But that did not hold true among the AI alerts. “Across gender, age and education, what you noticed was that as soon as we introduced AI personalization, those differences tended to diminish,” Behzadan says.

The study also explored how the type of disaster might influence people (e.g., whether a tornado warning might be taken more seriously than a flood warning). “We found that the type of hazard is not that relevant to how people perceive the quality of the alert,” Behzadan says.

While it does seem as though the personalized alerts could engender more trust and inspire more action among all sociodemographic groups, Behzadan’s team does not recommend abandoning the use of conventional messaging formats.

“We're thinking that these two should work together to augment each other,” Behzadan says, adding that future personalized alerts could target specific subgroups within the population that are more likely to trust the customized messages.

Along those lines, Behzadan has already secured additional funding from the Natural Hazards Center and ��ñ��’s Research and Innovation Office (RIO) to pursue work on the potential to use AI to translate disaster alerts into American Sign Language (ASL) for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals.

Given that ASL is a completely different language than English, many people in the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing population would have difficulty reading and understanding disaster alerts transmitted in plain written English (and some may not be able to read it at all), Behzadan says, adding, “And if they can't understand it, they can't act upon it!”

The trust issue

Any broad use of AI is bound to face complications, especially when human lives are at stake.

For this study, the use of AI was not disclosed to participants so the team could gather more realistic reactions to the messaging. “We knew from past research that some people may think that AI-generated content is less legitimate and may have bypassed human agency,” says Behzadan, adding that disclosing the AI use most likely would have skewed people’s perceptions.

But in practice, FEMA and/or state and local disaster agencies would most likely be required to disclose their AI use. So, while personalized alerts could inspire more trust in the short term, the use of AI may inadvertently lead to longer-term distrust of generated alerts, Behzadan says.

Another hurdle in deploying more personalized disaster messaging? The personal information required from recipients.

“There's always a trade-off between privacy and accuracy,” Behzadan says. “If you want a highly accurate AI or technology output that genuinely reflects your specific situation, needs or expectations, you generally have to provide it with some additional context and personal information. Then, the real question is: How much personal information are you willing to give up in exchange for greater accuracy and personalization?”

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Researchers are riding shotgun for science

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Researchers are riding shotgun for science Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/05/2026 - 07:00

Cody DeBos

��ñ�� study shows how a car ride gives scientists new windows into neighborhood health

Many community research interviews last 15 to 30 minutes, taking place either in an interview room or on foot with the researcher and participant walking side-by-side.

As a woman named Mary drove two researchers though her Minneapolis suburb, a few interview questions turned into an hour-long guided tour of her life.

They drove past her current home and two houses where she grew up, the local plant shop where she works, George Floyd Square and a shopping district. There, her voice changed as she recalled the civil unrest and pandemic of 2020 and showed them the shuttered storefronts that remain.

Geography PhD student Mallory Sagehorn (left) and Assistant Professor Jessica Finlay collaborated with University of Minnesota graduate student Grace Savard on research studying how driving interviews might position scientists to learn about people's lives.

That moment is one of dozens captured in a new study co-authored by Mallory Sagehorn, a doctoral student in the ��ñ�� Department of Geography, alongside lead author Grace Savard and ��ñ�� Assistant Professor Jessica Finlay.

Published in SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, their research asks a simple but underexplored question about neighborhood research: How might a driving interview position you to learn about someone's life?

Meeting people how they move

“A lot of what we care about in neighborhood and health research is how people actually interact with the people and places around them—and that’s really hard to get at when someone’s just sitting across from you describing it after the fact,” Sagehorn says.

Conversations conducted while walking with a participant through their neighborhood have given researchers a way to study how people interact with their surroundings. These “go-along” interviews allow for organic interactions that don’t rely on memory alone.

“When you’re moving through the same spaces you’re talking about, participants notice things in real time they might never have thought to mention otherwise,” she adds.

However, in America, walking isn’t how most people move through the world. Whether it’s a car, a bike, a bus or a scooter, reliance on wheeled transportation is the norm for the majority.

Sagehorn and her colleagues wanted to know if conducting go -along interviews—not by walking, but by meeting people how they move—would be more effective.

“It really depends on matching the mode of mobility to how people actually move through a given community,” the researchers say. “If you’re working in a walkable neighborhood, walking interviews make sense. If people primarily get around by car, a ride-along is going to give you more authentic, comfortable data.”

Finlay, who leads a broader research program on how neighborhoods shape health and cognitive aging, says one participant even asked to conduct their interview by skateboard.

“The value of this method is that it flexes to whatever is most comfortable and authentic for our interviewees,” Finlay notes.

A private room on wheels

Of nine participants who chose a car-based interview for the study, their reasons for doing so varied. Many lived in car-dependent suburbs, while others had mobility limitations or didn’t feel safe walking their own streets.

“Part of why we do mobile interviews at all is to observe how people actually interact with their environment, and the bubble changes the nature of that interaction by making it, at times, more indirect,” says researcher Mallory Sagehorn.

The researchers anticipated driving interviews would differ from walking, but they didn’t expect just how much the car itself would reshape the conversation.

“A car-based interview feels like being invited into a private, personal space that moves—almost like stepping into a room of someone’s house,” Savard says.

That intimacy led to what the researchers would dub the “bubble effect.”

“We had folks drive us down streets they said they’d never walk down, simply because being in a car gave them a sense of security and access they wouldn’t otherwise have,” says Savard.

They found that when placing people inside their own vehicle, the bubble it creates allowed them to engage more deeply both on an environmental level and a personal one. It also matters for accessibility. Interviewing in the car lets researchers work around outside factors like mobility limitations, bad weather and physical barriers.

Still, those benefits come at a cost.

Savard says you might not get to experience a participant’s daily routine the same way you might on foot. They may stop for a casual chat with a neighbor when walking but won’t roll down the window when driving with a researcher.

The team acknowledges the limitations of driving interviews, but as science isn’t a zero-sum game, they’re still excited about the methodology.

“There is data you just can’t get from inside a car. But that’s also why we see walking and driving as complements rather than competitors,” Sagehorn says.

Who sits where?

Seating position also mattered a great deal in the team’s study, perhaps to an unexpected degree. Participants were always positioned in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat, while researchers split roles between conversation in the opposite front seat or note-taking in the back.

“It was important that they felt like they were the one guiding us through their community, setting the pace, the speed and the direction we traveled in,” Sagehorn says.

A car-based interview feels like being invited into a private, personal space that moves—almost like stepping into a room of someone’s house.”

The psychology of seat positions during interviews has been explored in other studies, and it’s been shown that being side-by-side can put participants at ease. In the car, it goes a step further. They can focus on the road and their surroundings rather than forcing eye contact, leaving the mind free to engage.

“That can take a lot of the intimidation out of the conversation and make people more comfortable opening up,” Sagehorn says.

Seating arrangements aside, even the clutter of a car can become a storytelling device to an observant researcher.

Whether it’s a scooter in the back seat or flyers for community events tucked into a visor, these artifacts give researchers a glimpse into a participant’s way of life in a way other interview modalities can’t capture.

“People carry pieces of their lives around in their cars, and that becomes a window into their routines, interests and how they move through the world that a walking interview just wouldn’t show us,” says Sagehorn.

Whose voice gets heard

For Sagehorn, Savard and Finlay, the implications of meeting participants at their preferred method of transportation for go-along interviews are important to remember.

The methodology allows people to take part in neighborhood research who otherwise couldn’t if walking was the only option.

“If there is one thing we hope policymakers take away from this work, it’s the importance of centering participants and their lived experiences and that driving mobile methods are really about expanding who gets to participate in research in the first place,” Sagehorn says. “Methodology is not neutral, and the format you choose can determine whose voice actually gets heard.”

That idea continues to shape the team’s outlook.

“Ultimately, we think the biggest takeaway is that if we want policy that actually reflects people’s realities, we need research methods that get us out into those realities,” they say.

As studies on equality and accessibility pave the way for a better life for everyone, go-along interviews on wheels are one more tool researchers can use to gather the most realistic data.

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��ñ�� study shows how a car ride gives scientists new windows into neighborhood health.

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How timing shapes one of the hardest conversations in medicine

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

How timing shapes one of the hardest conversations in medicine Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/01/2026 - 07:00

Cody DeBos

New research shows that a different kind of breast cancer awareness starts with better communication

A newly diagnosed breast cancer patient sits across from her surgeon to discuss her course of treatment. Moments after the surgeon starts laying out the options, she cuts in to say, “I want both breasts off.”

Surgical guidelines actively discourage this treatment for early-stage, one-sided breast cancer patients with no family history or genetic mutations related to breast cancer. In these cases, removing a healthy breast doesn’t improve survival odds and can raise complication risks.

But it’s also, unmistakably, what this patient wants.

Chase Raymond (left), a ��ñ�� associate professor of linguistics and a member of the clinical faculty in Family Medicine at CU Anschutz, and Virginia Teas Gill (right), professor of sociology emerita at Illinois State University, collaborated on research studying how surgeons and breast cancer patients communicate.

In that moment, the surgeon faces a dilemma. Follow the evidence and risk overriding the patient’s autonomy or honor her request and allow her to forego the treatment option backed by decades of medical research: lumpectomy plus radiation therapy.

This tension plays out in exam rooms around the world every day for breast cancer patients in need of life-saving care. It is also at the center of new research from Chase Raymond, a ��ñ�� associate professor of linguistics and a member of the clinical faculty in Family Medicine at CU Anschutz, and Virginia Teas Gill, professor of sociology emerita at Illinois State University.

October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is a fitting time to examine that push-and-pull through a new lens.

“Our approach is to look at real recordings of actual consultations, with prior consent, of course, and then we can see what surgeons and patients are really doing,” Raymond says.

In studying the moment-by-moment mechanics of how doctors and patients reach treatment decisions, their paper sparks valuable discussions about patient advocacy and how providers can navigate the balancing act between competing mandates.

A black box, finally opened

Raymond and Gill’s approach relies on Conversation Analysis (CA), a tool used for uncovering the interactional structures that underpin every ordinary conversation.

“This is language and social life—the interactional mechanics that we use to get the activities of everyday life accomplished with one another,” Raymond says.

Gill was drawn to breast cancer surgical consultations for this study because of a historical trend concerning that patient population.

“Historically, breast cancer patients did not have a say in how they were treated. Really, through the 1970s in the United States, this was a decision that was made by physicians,” she says.

For years, radical mastectomy (removal of the breast[s], chest muscles and nearby lymph nodes) was standard treatment even for small tumors.

Today, researchers understand more about what factors influence a patient’s long-term outcomes and which treatment modalities represent the best chance for remission. Treatment options have expanded, giving patients many more choices for their care, including the option to have less-extensive surgery. However, many early-stage patients are now expressing a desire to have both breasts removed.

Yet, what happens between patient and provider in the exam room has largely remained a mystery.

“What goes on when the surgeon and patient talk to each other has been kind of a black box,” Gill says.

“The challenge at issue is, how can patient preferences be balanced with best practice guidelines in this setting?” asks researcher Virginia Teas Gill. (Photo: Unsplash)

She and Raymond wanted to open it.

“We want to understand this process of how surgical treatment options are presented and negotiated, and Conversation Analysis gives us the tools to do that,” Gill adds.

Two mandates

The challenge for physicians isn’t simply whether to make a recommendation for a particular course of treatment. Gill and Raymond note that doing so is often medically necessary.

“The challenge at issue is, how can patient preferences be balanced with best practice guidelines in this setting?” Gill says.

In cases where surgeons and patients may have different perspectives, “both sides are looking for the right thing to do, but figuring out what exactly that is doesn’t happen in an instant. The surgeon and the patient are going to take turns back and forth to ultimately arrive at a decision,” Raymond says. “The sequencing and the ordering of the parts of this conversation are incredibly important.”

‘OK, then you need to hear me out’

In one consultation Raymond and Gill studied, a surgeon walks this tightrope on the record. When the patient asks for both breasts to be removed before being presented with complete information about her options, the surgeon neither grants nor denies the request.

She instead asks the patient to wait and hear the full picture first, including the survival and recurrence statistics associated with all her options.

Gill and Raymond use this example to illustrate how this surgeon works to help the patient make not just her own decision, but a decision that is informed by medical evidence.

“Before granting the request, the surgeon asks the patient to first listen to information that she might not know,” Gill adds.

The duo likens the interaction between patient and provider to stocking a metaphorical pond.

They note that every patient enters the room with “their life experience, their preferences, their values, what they’ve heard from other people and all kinds of media sources.”

Physicians have their own pond filled with information, and the two don’t always fully overlap.

Before a final decision is made, Gill says, the surgeon’s job is to close this information gap. In this case, that means presenting clinical trial data on survival and recurrence, so that the patient has access to the information in their pond. It also means giving the patient an opportunity to ask for more information and express her concerns to complete the surgeon’s picture of what matters to the patient.

That’s why understanding these conversations is so important. There’s a lot at stake, and everyone is trying to achieve the best outcome."

Raymond says, “The patient is thereby reassured that the decision is hers, and will remain hers, but some additional information will be shared before that final decision is made.”

Working both ways

Patients, Gill says, can use the same strategy in reverse, asking to hear more information before accepting a surgeon’s recommendation, or before any medical decision is made.

Raymond notes that physicians are given a limited window of time to convey a tremendous amount of information, with patient satisfaction and complication risks on the line. But no outcome feels good if a patient goes through with a treatment they later regret or leaves the office without understanding all their options.

“That’s why understanding these conversations is so important. There’s a lot at stake, and everyone is trying to achieve the best outcome,” Raymond says.

Conversation Analysis is one way researchers can peek behind the curtain and identify patterns that can help both sides communicate more effectively.

The researchers believe the observations made in their study are important for negotiations beyond the surgical consult room, too.

“This is a dynamic that happens in a lot of contexts. It’s a balancing act that plays out in many different settings, both in and out of medicine,” Gill says.

In the exam room or elsewhere, timing matters. If information can be given before final decisions are made, these priorities don’t have to be in competition. For Gill and Raymond, the study is also a reminder that how patients and doctors talk to each other still matters.

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New research shows that a different kind of breast cancer awareness starts with better communication.

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Research hears the quiet power of Afro-Italian podcasting

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Research hears the quiet power of Afro-Italian podcasting Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/29/2026 - 07:00

“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” says ��ñ�� scholar Michela Ardizzoni. (Photo: ConvertKit/Unsplash)

Cody DeBos

��ñ�� scholar Michela Ardizzoni describes how podcasting is reshaping Italy’s conversations about race

On an episode of the podcast The Chronicles of a Black Italian Woman, hosted by Benedicta Djumpah, well-known art curator and historian Mistura Allison reflects on growing up in Italy.

The daughter of a Nigerian-born immigrant who had lived in Italy since the age of 14, Allison said during the interview, “I didn’t have to chiedere il permesso di soggiorno, I never had to ask permission to exist.”

While acknowledging the privilege her Italian citizenship offered, and the challenges she faced when briefly moving to another country, Allison goes on to describe how her background helped shape her layered view of identity and why it’s okay to not fit into society’s predefined labels.

Michela Ardizzoni is an associate professor in the ��ñ�� Department of French and Italian.

The episode’s honest vulnerability is part of what drew Michela Ardizzoni, an associate professor of Italian at the ��ñ��, into the growing wave of Afro-Italian podcasting.

In her latest research, Ardizzoni examines how shows like Chronicles are reshaping Italy’s cultural conversations about race, identity and belonging.

“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” Ardizzoni says.

Following identity across media

Ardizzoni’s interest in the politics of Italian identity is as personal as it is professional.

“I grew up in Italy, but I never experienced it as a single, uniform place. Different stages of my life took me from northern Italy to Sardinia, and later to different regions in the U.S.,” she says.

“Those experiences made me increasingly interested in the relationship between media, place, and identity, and in the ways cultural narratives shape our understanding of belonging.”

Ardizzoni spent her early years of scholarship examining how Italian television and film help define who “counts” as Italian. Podcasting, she says, is a refreshing departure from more institutional forms of media.

“Podcasts offer a comparatively more open space for experimentation. They are less constrained by editorial conventions and more conducive to conversations that develop on the speakers’ own terms,” she explains.

By giving creators greater freedom of expression, podcasts have opened new lines of dialogue about what it means to be Italian from one’s own perspective.

“Rather than responding to questions framed by mainstream media, they [podcast hosts and guests] establish the agenda themselves, decide what deserves attention and shape the language through which their experiences are understood,” Ardizzoni says.

A conversation without borders

One misconception Ardizzoni often hears from American audiences is that Blackness in Italy is a new phenomenon tied to recent immigration.

“There are now multiple generations of Black Italians who were born and raised in Italy, whose cultural and linguistic lives are deeply rooted in the country,” she explains.

Djumpah’s podcast offers a view that better reflects the real world. Recorded almost entirely in English, the show regularly features guests who discuss their Italian upbringings and their connections to the wider diaspora across Africa, the U.K. and the U.S.

“The decision to record in English is an important part of that vision. English allows the podcast to reach audiences well beyond Italy and creates a common space for dialogue among people connected by diaspora rather than nationality alone,” Ardizzoni says.

The result is conversations that refuse to treat being Italian as disconnected from broader dialogue about race.

“It challenges the tendency to think about Italy as an exceptional or self-contained case and instead places Afro-Italian voices within the wider intellectual and cultural networks of the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean,” Ardizzoni says.

Making space for quiet

To make sense of what Djumpah and her guests are doing, Ardizzoni draws on scholar Kevin Quashie’s concept of “quiet.”

“Quashie's work has been influential because it places Black interiority at the center of how we understand Black life,” Ardizzoni explains.

He encourages a more holistic approach to understanding the human experience, including the emotional, imaginative and reflective dimensions each of us shares.

Ardizzoni adds that these “interior worlds” shouldn’t be relegated to the side stages behind political life. Rather, they are what give us meaning and agency with which to imagine ourselves and our futures.

“Black subjectivity, in this sense, encompasses far more than public resistance. It also resides in the ordinary, intimate and deeply personal aspects of everyday life,” she adds.

This idea of “quiet” also shapes how a show like Chronicles can be understood. It isn’t a platform built to counter racism through acts of resistance or protest but rather by giving guests a space where they are simply allowed to be whole.

That dynamic is evident when listening to an episode.

“[Djumpah’s] conversations move fluidly among family, friendship, artistic practice, spirituality, work, music and memory. Listeners encounter guests as artists, daughters, friends, professionals and thinkers whose lives unfold across many registers at once,” Ardizzoni says.

Look closely, and you’ll see the same thread running through Allison’s reflection on never needing to ask permission to exist. Chronicles doesn’t ask guests to justify their belonging. It gives them a platform to make their voices and experiences heard.

Podcasts offer a comparatively more open space for experimentation. They are less constrained by editorial conventions and more conducive to conversations that develop on the speakers’ own terms."

That act of acceptance, Ardizzoni argues, is what makes the show so radical in a media landscape unaccustomed to letting Black lives simply exist.

Refusing the status quo

Ardizzoni’s latest research is one piece of a much larger exploration of contemporary Afro-Italian women artists across literature, film, photography and digital media.

“This article is part of a broader research project that culminates in my forthcoming book, Archives of Futurity: Afro-Italian Women's Imaginaries and Poetics of Refusal (2027), which will be published by Liverpool University Press in its Transnational Italian Cultures series,” she says.

At the heart of her writing is a concept she calls refusal—not just pushing back against dominant, sometimes harmful narratives, but building something new and better in their place.

“The artists I study refuse inherited ways of seeing and classifying people and identities; instead, they create spaces for different narratives, relationships and ways of belonging,” Ardizzoni says.

That sense of possibility also aligns with Ardizzoni’s hopes for how Italian media will grow in the years ahead.

“I hope we’ll move beyond thinking of diversity as a topic that surfaces only in moments of crisis or political debate,” she says. “The most interesting work being produced today (in scholarship as well as in the arts) is showing that race is a necessary lens through which we can better understand contemporary Italy.”

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Top photo: Luther Yonel/Unsplash

Scholar studies animals through the love in their hearts

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:27:04 +0000

Scholar studies animals through the love in their hearts Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/28/2026 - 21:27

Rachel Sauer

In new book for younger readers, ��ñ�� Professor Emeritus Marc Bekoff advocates for increasing humanity’s ‘compassion footprint’

Zebras, it turns out, are bro huggers.

In Namibia’s Etosha National Park, behavioral ecologist Caitlin O’Connell observed that male zebra leaders “wrap necks, nip and sniff one another around the head and sometimes the genitals. Then they exhibit an exaggerated chewing behavior with their teeth bared and the corners of their lips drawn up as if smiling or laughing with necks extended and ears directed forward. It really looks like they are enjoying a hilarious joke together.”

And then everyone does their business on “a communal dung pile.”

Marc Bekoff is a ��ñ�� professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology.

For a long time, conventional wisdom—and even scientific observation—would have asserted that this is merely instinctual mammalian behavior, nothing more than complex evolutionary responses to environmental and inter-group stimuli. They’re animals, after all; surely they aren’t exhibiting joy, playfulness or love?

Not so, says Marc Bekoff, a ��ñ�� professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology. In his recently published book for younger readers, Love in their Hearts: A Celebration of Animal Emotions and a Guide to Compassionate Action, written with longtime collaborator Jeff Campbell, Bekoff advocates for increasing humanity’s “compassion footprint.”

“The message is to be nicer to humans, be nicer to non-humans, treat all living things with respect,” Bekoff explains. “We are never too young to hear that message and learn that lesson.”

‘Animals have thoughts and feelings’

Bekoff began learning that lesson, which became the work of his lifetime, when he felt sorry for a goldfish. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, “everyone had the requisite goldfish in an aquarium on the kitchen counter, including my family, and I used to feel so sorry for that goldfish,” he recalls.

He also spent hours riding his tricycle around the neighborhood, talking to all the animals he saw, and rather than being worried, his parents were supportive. “I used to tell my parents I could feel the emotions of the dogs and cats and mice and birds, I would tell them that animals have thoughts and feelings, and my parents supported it because why not?” he says.

When he was 6, he and his family moved from Brooklyn to Lynbrook on Long Island, which at the time had swaths of woods to explore. Bekoff was a good athlete and a mediocre student, but he nevertheless knew that he had to at least try to get to college if he wanted to continue building a scientific foundation beneath his observations of animals.

Jane Goodall, who would become Bekoff’s dear friend and professional collaborator, “used to say it felt wrong to harm animals and it felt right to try to learn about them, so I went to college and then I got a master’s in neurobiology, then I spent two years in a PhD/MD program disliking every day of it,” Bekoff says.

It was around that time, in the late 1960s, that famed researcher and animal behaviorist Michael Fox joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Fox, a Royal Veterinary College-trained veterinarian who also held a Doctor of Science in ethology and animal behavior, was doing exactly the sort of work that Bekoff wanted to do: non-invasive, observational science focused on animal behavior.

Fox accepted Bekoff as a graduate student, and he earned a PhD in animal behavior. After a year as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, he came to ��ñ�� in 1974 to study behavioral ecology and carnivore behavior.

“The message is to be nicer to humans, be nicer to non-humans, treat all living things with respect,” says scientist and author Marc Bekoff.

“So, I got my job here, and down on 30th and Marine on East Campus, back when the Institute for Behavioral Genetics was one of the only buildings down there, I somehow got a grant and convinced the university to put in a chain link fence enclosure so we could study coyotes,” Bekoff says. “We had a few coyotes who had been rescued, and they became this beacon. Everybody went down there to see them, so much that we had to put up signs telling people not to play with them.”

From there, he studied Adélie penguins at Cape Crozier, Ross Island, Antarctica, then initiated a field project studying coyotes in Grand Teton National Park.

“I always was driven to know what animals were thinking and feeling, I knew there was a way to study this scientifically and I was really persistent because I knew I was right,” he says. “Back when I was starting out, the major school of thought was behaviorism—the idea that with animal behavior, everything is a stimulus response, and the brain is a black box that we can’t know anything about.

“I said no, there’s just got to be something going on in animals’ minds, particularly concerning what they’re feeling and what they’re calculating. These are wild animals who have difficult lives; I knew there had to be so much more going on.”

Complex emotional lives

A significant facet of Bekoff’s research has been to systematically and non-invasively observe animal behavior to gain insight into the “black box” of animal minds. In addition to the usual challenges of research, he says, was the resistance he initially encountered in the scientific community, many of whose members equated ethology—or the study of animal minds—with finger waggling and magical thinking.

“The science had to be irrefutable,” Bekoff says. “We didn’t have a choice. Michael Fox, my mentor at Washington University, was one of the first ethologists who practiced the science of watching—slow watching, slow looking, just going out and watching animals. We weren’t putting electrodes in their bodies or cutting out parts of their brains; it was uncontrolled.

“A group of us were just really persistent, getting grants and I published tons in refereed journals and published books, just keeping at it and putting it out there, and slowly but surely we had evidence showing that animals have extremely complex emotional lives.”

That growing body of evidence—gathered by Bekoff, Goodall and a community of scientists around the world—is, in part, what inspired Bekoff to write Love in their Hearts, for which Goodall wrote the foreword.

Bekoff gathered animal stories from colleagues around the globe, including O’Connell’s observations of zebra bro hugging, to embody “the universality of emotions.” The aim is not to prove that animals have emotions—“We know they do,” Bekoff says—but to bring those emotions to life for younger readers who may be interested in science, who may spend hours observing animals or who may simply love their pets and have a sense that their pets love them, too.

Love in Their Hearts also gives young readers actionable steps to help care for both animals and Earth—a compassionate conservation approach that children are never too young to learn, Bekoff says, and that he still teaches in Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots groups.

“It’s the basic principle of the One Health philosophy,” Bekoff says. “What’s good for animals is good for us, and what’s bad for them is bad for us. Let’s change the world for all its inhabitants.”

“What’s good for animals is good for us," says Marc Bekoff, "and what’s bad for them is bad for us. Let’s change the world for all its inhabitants.” (Photo: Dylan Shaw/Unsplash)

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Scientists get a clearer picture of phytoplankton sustaining ocean food webs

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:19:38 +0000

Scientists get a clearer picture of phytoplankton sustaining ocean food webs Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/18/2026 - 13:19

Kaio Kish

��ñ�� researchers develop a tool that can model phytoplankton biomass extremes in the ocean in ways that conventional satellites often can’t

Phytoplankton, the tiny, single-celled organisms that live in oceans, are more important than some realize. They are the base of the marine food web and help countless other species in the oceans thrive and survive.

Satellite technology and its continuous advancements have given the world a better understanding of the oceans and the life within them, specifically phytoplankton. But gaps still remain in what satellites can show about the activity of phytoplankton.

Unfortunately, phytoplankton and the oceans they call home are suffering, says Nicole Lovenduski, a ��ñ�� professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences (ATOC) and director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). “You can think of (phytoplankton) as the grasses of the terrestrial biosphere,” she says. “They’re the things that build the foundation that everything else eats.”

In a recently published study conducted in partnership between ��ñ�� and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Lovenduski and her research colleagues found that despite what can be seen through satellite imagery, a lot of phytoplankton is obscured—often by clouds or low sunlight.

A mixed phytoplankton community. (Image: Stephanie Anderson/University of Rhode Island/NASA)

The researchers set out to discover what the observational limitations were in detecting phytoplankton biomass extremes in the oceans, building a satellite emulator that mimics the same blind spots a real satellite would encounter: sea ice, clouds, low sun angles. This allowed them to compare what the model predicted to what the satellite actually saw, ultimately revealing the gaps between the two. By combining interdisciplinary expertise, they were able to find the holes in detecting these phytoplankton biomass extremes.

"Statistically, by definition, there have to be extremes in everything—you think about a normal distribution (referencing phytoplankton bloom events), the extremes are on the tail of that bell curve, so mathematically they must exist,” Lovenduski explains. “And I found maybe four papers on this, and that was it. Why isn’t anyone writing about this?... And then I had the a-ha moment: It's because no one can see them in the satellite data."

As Lovenduski explains, extremes are important for the ecosystem: “If there's a huge phytoplankton bloom, that's going to have ramifications for the whole ocean ecosystem in that region. Similarly, if blooms fail to occur, that's going to be devastating for the ecosystem.”

These high extremes refer to a higher-than-normal concentration of phytoplankton in one specific region or area. On the other hand, if a bloom is supposed to happen and it doesn’t—a low extreme—marine life in that region that rely on phytoplankton for their diet can be severely affected, which in turn causes a ripple effect across other species in the ocean.

Combining clouds, ocean and ice

To study these issues, Lovenduski worked with ATOC PhD graduates Genevieve Clow and Samuel Mogen, an INSTAAR postdoctoral scholar, as well as ATOC Professor Jennifer Kay and Michael Levy and Keith Lindsay of the NCAR Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory. The researchers aimed to find a better way to visualize these mysterious single-celled organisms that do so much for our marine ecosystem.

To solve the problem of limited visualization of phytoplankton, the team built what they call a satellite emulator within an Earth system model—a tool that allows them to “see” the modeled ocean the same way a satellite does.

"It is an approach that they've used in atmospheric science before to simulate satellite observations of clouds, and we apply that approach to a completely different thing, which is the pigment chlorophyll in the ocean,” Lovenduski says. “Our ability to detect that from space turns out to be a really important limit on our ability to detect extremes.”

Chlorophyll, a green pigment that phytoplankton and plants use to absorb sunlight, plays a similar role in phytoplankton as it does in plants. It is why large phytoplankton clusters and algae appear green. Chlorophyll helps phytoplankton turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into energy while releasing oxygen.

However, because of the limitations caused by cloud coverage blocking satellite imaging of chlorophyll, Kay emphasizes that using field samples as well as satellite imagery is vital to a model: “You can learn so much from the assets that we have in space, and sometimes those assets, while providing an incomplete picture of things, can also provide the space-time perspective that's super important for understanding this change in variability.”

Kay also mentions that a combination of field sampling and the use of satellites are critical to understanding what's going on in the oceans, noting how her group often partners with Boulder-based NCAR scientists to validate Earth system models with data.

As a key part of the research, Clow developed a tool that ran model simulations on a computer. Clow flew a virtual satellite inside the model, sampling the modeled ocean similar to how a real satellite would see the ocean.

Conventional atmospheric satellites wait for reflected light to bounce off the ocean and come back up but, Lovenduski notes, so “if there's a cloud in the way and if the sun angle is really low, there's not enough radiation to come back to the satellite, so we made sure that we included that effect in the model. And if there's sea ice growing on the surface of the ocean, (the satellite) can't see the chlorophyll underneath, but the model still predicts what the chlorophyll is.”

A phytoplankton bloom off the coast of Iceland. (Image: NASA)

By being able to account for these discrepancies in the model, Clow says that the main takeaway from this research is that “our observations of phytoplankton are limited, and that we need to combine observations and models in order to gain a complete picture of what's happening with phytoplankton in the ocean."

One of the most significant findings in this research included the fact that globally, satellites can only detect about 10% of daily low extremes and 19% of daily high extremes. Kay explains that clouds “obscure what you can view in the ocean. It's hard to penetrate into it, and from space you're not going to get that kind of information.”

Clow’s idea for an Earth system model study arose from that issue: “Satellites can only see the surface of the ocean, but in some regions, phytoplankton tend to grow much deeper, and so what satellites can see at the surface isn't representative of what's happening throughout the water column,” Clow explains, adding that this is the main issue with being able to visualize the amount of phytoplankton in a given area.

The stressed oceans

Despite the technical advances represented in the model, the researchers express concerns about the state and health of Earth’s oceans.

“There are so many environmental stressors that are hitting the ocean all at once, so it's getting warmer, and that is in turn is causing the ocean to lose oxygen with time,” Lovenduski says. “That also is making it more difficult for nutrients that are below the surface to get up to the surface and fuel this biological productivity that's so important for the marine food web.

“In addition, the ocean is taking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is great for mitigating global warming but actually causing the ocean to become acidic. So, the ecosystems of the ocean are experiencing simultaneous difficult stressors all at once. It doesn't paint a very nice picture."

Phytoplankton observability matters as a sign of what’s happening in our climate, the researchers say. Kay points out that fisheries and other marine-based industries rely on knowledge of extreme events happening in the world. “If we have a heat wave in the atmosphere, we’re kind of miserable,” she says. “So, it can affect life in the ocean as well.”

Kay notes that though Colorado is far from the ocean, residents here still experience similar effects: “I think we can start to expect warmer days and more heat waves and more demand on water resources. I think we all felt that pretty acutely in Colorado this past winter, having 80-degree days in March when we're supposed to have the peak snowpack.”

“Make the model look like reality”

The recently published paper is an important step in continuing research. Clow is beginning a post-doctoral research position at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where she’ll model the impact of fish on the carbon cycle.

Lovenduski’s group is applying the “make the model look like reality” idea to a fleet of ocean floats that “live forever, they don't ever run out of battery like the real world floats, but they also can do a profile every four hours instead of every 10 days.”

This, she says, will allow the team to, “improve the frequency of sampling, and then we can look at what an ideal float configuration in the real world looks like for the thing that you're interested in sampling.”

Kay is working with a newly launched satellite, called EarthCARE, to better understand the water cycle and how the energy budget and resources will be affected by measuring precipitation near the surface.

The researchers note that the experience of developing a tool to model the detectability of phytoplankton biomass extremes in the ocean, as especially the interdisciplinary approach to this work, is informing their further research.

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Top image: A green phytoplankton bloom in the Gulf of Finland. (Photo: NASA)

Students sending a text for help

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:09:51 +0000

Students sending a text for help Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:09

Tiffany Plate

��ñ�� Assistant Professor Tamar Kodish is leveraging modern technology to break down barriers to mental health resources at community colleges

Mental health is a significant topic of concern on many college campuses these days. Recent estimates suggest that approximately one in three students at four-year colleges and universities experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

At community colleges, however, that number could be as high as one in two students.

“Community college students tend to face a lot more contextual stressors,” says Tamar Kodish, assistant professor in the ��ñ�� Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. “There are much higher rates of food insecurity and houselessness. And they are significantly more likely to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, or to be racial and ethnic minorities.”

Psychology and neuroscience Assistant Professor Tamar Kodish used a human-centered approach to design a text messaging strategy to encourage students to use free mental health resources. (Photo courtesy Tamar Kodish)

Through prior research, Kodish became interested in exploring different strategies to encourage community college students to access available mental health resources on campus. She began asking, “What can we do to try to improve engagement in mental health services for people who might be at risk of not getting care that they need?”

That question led to a research study, recently published in the journal JMIR Formative Research, examining how the right text messages, sent to students at the right time, could be key to ensuring valuable mental health resources reach the students who may need it most.

Taking a STAND for mental health

Kodish, who received her PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA, received funding for the pilot project through UCLA’s STAND ALACRITY Center, a research center under the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge (DGC). The Center’s aim is to improve the mental health care available to community college students through a new model called STAND. Center researchers are studying how to improve/optimize STAND through a research program at East Los Angeles College.

STAND—which is short for Screening and Treatment for Anxiety and Depression—is an adaptable, scalable system of care that includes screening, treatment and ongoing monitoring of mood and symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Students who choose to engage with STAND first answer different questions about their mental health through an online assessment; based on their responses, they’re triaged into one of three levels of treatment.

Students who have mild symptoms of depression and anxiety are given a self-guided, online wellness program, while those with moderate symptoms receive a digital mental health program, including peer-to-peer coaching support from certified STAND coaches.

Students with severe symptoms are eligible to get clinical therapy—sometimes with psychiatric support—that’s delivered remotely. DGC researchers are testing new approaches to allocating treatment by creating a data-driven algorithm that accounts not only for symptom severity but also for other social and structural factors, like food and housing security.

An example of a text message Kodish’s team developed—alongside community college students—to help identify the barriers and stigmas around receiving mental health care. Students would then receive tailored responses based on their selection. (Illustration courtesy of Tamar Kodish)

Research has shown that the STAND approach works. In a 2023 study, more than 500 UCLA students who engaged with one of the three levels of care showed measurable improvement in depression and anxiety scores.

Encouraging uptake, increasing engagement

Those 500 students, however, were just a portion of the 3,500-plus students who initially took the online screening.

“We found that only 14% of students who were eligible for STAND services actually got started with treatment, so we were losing tons of people along the way,” says Kodish. That led her and her colleagues to explore new ways of keeping people from falling off the continuum of care.

Kodish was also interested in seeing how this engagement might differ at a community college, since the previous study, like many others, was only conducted at a four-year university. "We don't know nearly as much about community college students,” says Kodish. “They're a super underrepresented, and super diverse, group.”

So Kodish headed to East Los Angeles College (ELAC)—where the STAND at ELAC program had been underway since 2022—armed with a new idea for reaching students where they are. “I got really interested in text messaging as a potential approach based on what I had seen in the literature, and from what I knew from talking to college students.”

She began by inviting students on campus to focus groups and asked open-ended questions about what they saw as barriers to engaging with the STAND resources. The goal was to find ways to communicate with students who either dropped off in the middle of taking the STAND screening or completed the screening but didn’t engage with the resources that were delivered to them.

A blueprint for eye-catching texts

“Overall, students were really enthusiastic about using text messaging,” says Kodish. “They felt like it was feasible, it was easy, it was convenient and it would fit into their lives.”

After the focus groups, she asked a subset of those students—19 in all—to help design the messages themselves. “They definitely wanted something that was multimedia,” says Kodish. “They said, ‘They can't be too long, they can't be too spammy, and they need to have imagery and videos to draw you in and differentiate them from other random messages.’”

Kodish’s team took their directives, drafted the look and content of the messages and then returned them to the students for further input before incorporating them into the STAND protocol.

While the current study doesn’t explore how to keep students engaged once they’re in treatment, Kodish says she believes this initial “uptake” phase of the process is still vitally important. “If you don't get people's foot in the door, then sustainment doesn't even matter,” she says.

Personally, Kodish hopes as many students as possible at least take the online screening offered by the program. “They’re getting really valuable information,” says Kodish. “Even if they have mild symptoms or no symptoms, they're getting some information about their mental health status that they might not otherwise have.”

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��ñ�� Assistant Professor Tamar Kodish is leveraging modern technology to break down barriers to mental health resources at community colleges.

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Top photo: Eugene Chystiakov/Unsplash

Visualizing the brain with 3D-printed models

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:59:07 +0000

Visualizing the brain with 3D-printed models Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/15/2026 - 09:59

Blake Puscher

3D-printed model brains are more accessible and ethical than conventional alternatives, says ��ñ�� researcher Jennifer Stratford

When studying anatomy, students often use models, which recreate the structure of an organ or other part of the body in a form that is easy to study.

Although donor bodies are generally considered the gold standard in higher education because they are the only resource that allows students to directly study real anatomy, the number of donor bodies is limited, making them difficult to access, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Models are somewhat more accessible, but if they are anatomically accurate, similar challenges apply, because they must be based on real donor anatomy to provide educational value. Accurate models are also expensive. However, if educators could 3D print their own models, cost would be less of a barrier, says Jennifer Stratford, a ��ñ�� teaching professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Jennifer Stratford is a ��ñ�� teaching professor of psychology and neuroscience.

In a recent analysis conducted with colleagues in the CU Anschutz Modern Human Anatomy Program as well as other institutions, Stratford details the learning benefits of 3D printing brain models.

Why brain models?

Neuroanatomy, or the anatomy of the brain and other parts of the nervous system, is a challenging yet important area of study, according to Stratford. Clinical specialties like neurology, psychiatry, anesthesiology, radiology, physiotherapy and more rely in part on knowledge of the brain to correctly diagnose and treat patients. However, Stratford explains, “the human brain is much more difficult to understand than other organs.

“If I showed you a model heart, you could make some educated guesses about how the heart works,” she continues. On the other hand, “if I give you a model of a brain, and I asked you how you think it works just by looking at it, it is almost impossible to guess. That makes learning neuroanatomy tricky,” Stratford adds, and it makes resources that can help students learn particularly valuable.

“I think a lot of people do not realize all the effort, expense and ethical considerations that go into a human brain model,” Stratford says. “It can cost hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars to buy that model from a company.” Additionally, “a lot of original brain models were created without asking for permission,” whether from cadavers that a lab had access to or from bodies that were donated without specific consent to make models based on the brain.

While brain models are more accessible than donor brains, they can still be difficult to obtain, especially in large enough numbers for a whole class of students. 3D printing addresses this by giving educators the option to produce anatomical models themselves at a reduced cost, either using brain scans they take themselves or data from open-access repositories like the CU Modern Human Anatomy Hub, which was created by the research team behind the paper. Putting scan data online comes with additional ethical considerations, but the authors provide ways of managing these, such as data anonymization, and online resources make it possible for people all over the world to create their own models.

“What 3D models help us do is to give students, other educators and the public the opportunity to hold some of these specimens in their hands,” Stratford says.

Collecting and processing data

Stratford and her co-authors describe a five-step process that educators can follow to create and use a 3D model, beginning with selecting or acquiring a model of the brain. These models are ready to use, but if an educator wants a custom model, it can be created from patient data or a physical, donated specimen.

A revised Bloom's taxonomy applied to 3D prints of neuroanatomy, explaining learning objectives at each step of the taxonomy. (Infographic courtesy the paper authors)

Patient data includes CT and MRI scans of the brain or other nervous-system structures. A 3D object can be extracted from this data using a process called segmentation.

“All the patient data, at least that we use, is digitally created with a computer, but it does not have all the brain structures picked out,” Stratford says. “It is not very clean, so one of the goals of extraction is to clean up the 3D rendering of the brain, both making it more crisp, but also highlighting different areas.”

This process also can be described as “removing artifacts.” In this context, artifacts are errors introduced by the way information is captured, such as a lens flare in a photograph.

Additionally, the different regions of the brain are not easily distinguishable from raw data, so highlighting some of them can make the final product a better teaching tool. According to Stratford, while some programs can segment data automatically, they are still new and error prone, so most people currently do segmentation by hand, and it can be one of the more labor-intensive parts of the rendering process.

Physical specimens can also be turned into 3D models using scanning technology, including commercial 3D scanners or even digital cameras or smartphones. Scanners make models by measuring the distance between the scanner and the surface of the object, while cameras algorithmically combine a series of photos in a process called photogrammetry. Scanning also introduces some artifacts, so digital editing is necessary either way, and it is considered the second step in the process.

Thirdly, Stratford and her co-authors recommend licensing the model with a Creative Commons license and making it open access online. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has developed free copyright licenses designed to help content owners reserve some rights while waiving others. In this case, a Creative Commons license would allow the owner or owners to retain control over how their work is used while making it free to access. According to open access principles, research literature and especially medical resources should be free so that healthcare providers are not prevented from taking advantage of potentially vital information by paywalls or other such barriers.

An example of 3D brain prints by printing level. (Infographic courtesy of the paper authors)

Printing and using models

The fourth step is to actually 3D print the model. This requires converting data collected in the first step into instructions the printer can use, which is done by software applications called “slicers,” referencing how most 3D printers create physical objects by laying down material in layers or “slices” of the object.

“That’s what we do in 3D printing in general,” Stratford says, “not just for brains. It is like you are printing multiple sheets every time, and each sheet is made of little bumps in different places, and then you push those together to make a 3D rendering.”

This step can vary significantly in terms of cost and complexity depending on the model of printer and type of materials used. To reflect this, Stratford and her colleagues split the printing process into three difficulty levels ranging from beginner to advanced. According to Stratford, while the beginner level is cheapest and requires only a basic 3D printer, it limits the product to a single color.

“They are really cheap and easy to make, so those are the type I typically use when I do outreach. If somebody drops something, I am not worried if they get damaged, and I am not looking for a ton of detail there.

“From there, you can get more sophisticated. Different 3D printer models that are more expensive can print, for instance, in two colors,” she continues, allowing different parts of the brain to be color-coded. “For instance, you could highlight what is called the spinothalamic tract. That is one of the classic pathways in the brain, but anatomically, it is hard to pick out on its own.”

Multiple colors help with this by creating contrast. The most expensive 3D printers allow for the use of more than two colors.

“One of the things we used to 3D print” at Anschutz, Stratford says, “was taste buds from your tongue. In your taste buds, there are lots of different cell types, and so we could make each cell type a different color and then have that printed in the 3D model. It was really cool to see how that looked.”

Besides different colors, printers can use different filaments (the materials the models are made from), some of which are easier to work with than others. A beginner print may use bioplastic (PLA) filament, which is less expensive and does not have a strong odor, but models made from PLA can be brittle. Advanced printing may involve multiple materials or higher-quality materials like resin. However, both require more expensive printers, and liquid resin releases toxic fumes, so personal protective equipment is needed when working with it.

Finally, once the model has been printed, it can be used for education.

“One of the things they are really useful for,” Stratford explains, “is when you want to teach the overall structure of the brain. That is called gross neuroanatomy. Being able to give individual groups of students their own models can be helpful. Because traditional models are so expensive, most classrooms cannot afford to have more than maybe two or three.”

Because 3D-printed models are cheaper, the ratio of models to students can be better. “For instance, in my class of about 45, we had 15 models to work with, so even though people had to triple up, it is much better than having only one or two models for people to look through.

“Another aspect is, you are generating models based on real brains, whereas if you buy an anatomical model from a company, that is more like a cartoon of the brain. So, what is nice is that you can show a student what your brain actually looks like. Students really do identify with that. I will ask students, ‘What is the biggest thing that sticks out in your mind from this semester?’ And many of them will say it is the 3D models, because it seems so personal.”

For example, models can show what different neurological diseases and types of brain damage look like as well as how they differ from each other.

“It addresses so many different needs. It is better from a teaching perspective, the ethics are better compared to past options, and it is just more widely available,” Stratford says. “Growing up and as a young person, I did not have a lot of access to these things, just because they were so expensive. So, I am really excited about the opportunities this provides to people.”

James P. Lister, Andrew Cale, Zach D. Stetter, Jamie E. Cronin, Steven R. Summers, Paul G. McMenamin and Maureen E. Stabio are co-authors of this paper.

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3D-printed model brains are more accessible and ethical than conventional alternatives, says ��ñ�� researcher Jennifer Stratford.

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