Seven Professors Join Science Faculty

The College has welcomed seven new science and math professors in the last two years.
This year’s new professors are Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Amanda Crocker, Assistant Professor of Biology Jill Mikucki and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Albert Kim. Professors who came to Middlebury in the 2014-15 school year include Assistant Professor of Physics Michael Durst, Assistant Professors of Psychology Mike Dash and Robert Moeller and Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Lesley-Ann Giddings.

The hiring spree reflects a growing student interest in the sciences. Science enrollment increased by 6.9 percent between 2001 and 2012, and has continued to grow since then.

These new professors bring their unique research interests to the College, which include everything from medical technology to advanced ice drills.

Durst is developing the use of two photon lasers for biomedical imagery. This technique, which he describes as a much more advanced microscope, can produce extremely high resolution 3D images of tissue in real time. In a demonstration, he produced a real time 3D image of brain activity in a live mouse’s brain at a depth of one millimeter. Though the device is currently limited to depths on the order of a few millimeters, Durst hopes to improve the depth penetration through changing the shape of the lasers’ pulse and through incorporating nonlinear optics.

His use of light and lasers for biomedical imaging follows in the vein of the team who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who used a different technique, called “super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” to perform biomedical imaging. Durst says that he is able to get a deeper and better resolution image with his technique than the Nobel Prize winners, but that each one of his images takes a considerable period of time to produce. He is therefore working on combining his research with a novel technique called temporal focus-setting, which he hopes will greatly reduce the time needed per image. Instead of capturing point images, this technique would allow the device to record activity in slices of tissue. As a long term goal, Durst and his team of student researchers aim to miniaturize their device (which currently takes up a several square meter table) to the size of a probe that can be inserted into the body. Colin Laurence ’17, who worked in Durst’s lab during the summer of 2015, asserts claims that this would be a “revolutionary” advance in imaging technology.

His research is extremely interdisciplinary, both within physics and with other sciences. Within physics, his work combines elements of optics, electromagnetism and quantum physics. He also brings in chemistry, biology and genetics. According to Laurence, most of this interdisciplinary collaboration will “happen later on, as right now [Durst] is just creating the tool.” He also draws on disciplines outside of the liberal arts, particularly engineering and computer programming. He and his research team build much of their equipment themselves, mainly for cost saving reasons.

Mikucki’s research is in the field of microbiology, with special focus on microbiology in bodies of water underneath Antarctic ice-sheets (called subglacial environments). She has spent 12 field seasons in Antarctica. This includes multiple years on the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, the first project to confirm the existence of active microbial life underneath the Antarctic ice sheets.

In addition, she was the first to cleanly sample a sub-glacial lake (to sample a lake without introducing biological or chemical contaminants), a feat also achieved in the WISSARD project. Mikucki and her teams have devoted a great deal of their effort to avoiding contaminating the Antarctic environments that they work in.

“We want to collect our samples in a mindful way, as we know that we can potentially change the ecosystem just by sampling, so we want to figure out how we can be the most mindful, minimize our impact and make our impact transient,” Mikucki said. “I really want to know what is happening under the ice sheets and I do not want to accidentally see something that came from under my fingernail. So we spend a lot of time figuring out best practices for cleaning our instruments and samples.”

Though her drive to avoid contamination is partially to do with needs directly relevant to her research, it also relates to her long-term goals, namely to find life beyond Earth. Many researchers, including Mikucki, see Antarctic research as a staging ground for extraterrestrial research. The applicability of Antarctic research to the search for extraterrestrial microbial life in the solar system was what first got Mikucki interested in her field of research.

“I think this work lends itself to the search for life on other planets, as Antarctica is an analogue in some important ways for places like Enceladus, Europa and even the ice caps of Mars in that they are cold and potentially really salty,” Mikucki said. “The other thing is that the mindfulness approach [to avoiding contamination of the local ecosystem] is even more important on other planets, as NASA recognizes. My belief is that we have to be able to pull off clean sampling in Antarctica before we can send a probe or especially a manned mission to these other places.”

She also hopes that understanding what enables microbes to live in the cold, dark and often salty environments of subglacial waters will help space agencies narrow their searches for extraterrestrial life. However, she is careful to note that we may be surprised by the adaptability of extraterrestrial microbes to live in situations that Earthly microbes could not tolerate.

“We’d like to figure out how these microbes are able to deal with these extreme conditions, because that will help us inform our search for extraterrestrial life in ice-covered oceans,” Mikucki said. “It would be nice to have some clue of what we might be looking for so we can narrow our search.”

Indeed, Mikucki has personally collaborated directly with numerous space agencies. Her graduate work was funded by NASA, and she continues to work closely with NASA, including by working with some of their scientists in the field. She has also used ice drills designed by the German space agency, in large part to test their designs before they are deployed on extraterrestrial probes.

She has worked in several other projects across Antarctica, including at Blood Falls in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (so named because of the iron oxide that colors the waterfall bright red) and on the Antarctic Peninsula. She stresses that Antarctica is an extremely diverse continent, very much unlike the stereotype of it being a homogenous frozen wasteland.

“Antarctica’s a big continent; it is the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined,“ Mukucki said. “And there’s not just one type of lake in America, so we should expect a diversity of water systems below the ice sheets. For example, Blood Falls is really salty, and the water there is -7° Celsius, while Whillans is closer to fresh water.”

Not all of the new professors come from the traditional professorial backgrounds of academia and scientific research. Kim, for example, was a data scientist at Google before entering academia. He worked in Google’s ads department, analyzing which types of ad campaigns and ads worked most effectively. Working with Google’s data presented unique statistical problems, as Google’s datasets are far larger than datasets that most statisticians work with.

“Google’s data set is so big that you cannot fit it on one set of servers; you have multiple sets of servers spread out all over the place,” Kim said. “So that definitely led to challenges to analyzing our data; we had to modify traditional statistical methods to work on multiple servers.”

He continues to apply statistics and data science knowledge similar to what he used at Google in his research. His research is in the field of spatial epidemiology – the study of disease across geography – and he is devising methods to detect cancer clusters (locations with abnormally high cancer rates), including using advanced statistical techniques like Bayesian modeling.

However, he cautions that one should not infer from his research that certain locations are more cancer-prone because of geographical factors like contaminated water supply or proximity to power lines. A confounding variable, such as  low socio-economic class and inaccessibility to health care, could be influencing cancer rates.

“There’s two valid ways we can interpret these data,” Kim said. “We could use this as a way to target public health interventions. Or we could control for the things that we already know cause spikes in the cancer rate and see if we maybe find some new unexplained trend that we can investigate.”

Professors have many different reasons for choosing to come to Middlebury. Both Durst and Kim emphasized the teaching-centric nature of positions at the College as the main factor in their decisions to teach here.

“When I was a grad student I really enjoyed teaching; I taught my own class even though that wasn’t a requirement of grad students,” Kim said. “My plan was to work for a little while to get a little experience then to come back and teach. I was always aiming for a liberal arts college, not some big research institution.”

Professors are also excited by Middlebury’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Durst, whose research is inherently interdisciplinary, is one example of this. Mikucki was also particularly excited by the prospect of interdisciplinary collaboration, citing it as a main reason for choosing to come to Middlebury.

“I found myself in my research working across disciplines; and the more diverse and farther reaching the collaboration was, and the more difficult it was, the more rewarding it has always been,” Mikucki said. “Being new to Middlebury, my outward impression is that this is a place that really works on interdisciplinary collaboration. I felt like Middlebury was a place where you could really press the limits of conventional interdisciplinary studies, and really reach out beyond the sciences and also do some creative and risky science.”