The Tennessee Association of Broadcasters sees its support of MTSU’s new media center as an investment in its own future.

A 2011 study by Woods & Poole Economics Inc. of Washington, D.C., found that $1.17 trillion of U.S. annual GDP (gross domestic product) originates in the commercial local radio and television industry. The study also found that 2.52 million jobs are attributable to the local radio and television industry annually. Direct employment is estimated at more than 300,000 jobs nationwide.

“That’s why MTSU’s new Center for Innovation in Media—and its students and graduates—have such a bright future ahead,” says Whit Adamson (‘71), president of the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters (TAB).

From its beginnings, TAB has also been a focal point for learning and teaching for the industry—a commitment evidenced once again through its generous Cornerstone donation to the MTSU media center project.

According to Adamson, MTSU students will benefit greatly from working in the center, given the ever-increasing demand for fluency across the digital broadcasting spectrum.

“The technology and consumer choices that are being created today, from multicasting to mobile TV to other high-quality programming, will be well served by these MTSU graduates,” Adamson says. “This center will provide the education and content development opportunities graduates will find necessary to serve America’s news innovations.”

Adamson also believes the new center, which houses MTSU’s television and radio enterprises under one roof, puts MTSU in a leadership role in the multidirectional broadcast news industry in Tennessee.

“MTSU students are educated in a real-world environment, employing all facets of electronic media and utilizing a skilled mix of professional and academic resources,” he says. “The cosmopolitan vibe of a major TV market like Nashville also exposes them to everything they are likely to encounter in their careers. It’s a perfect match.”

Any archeologist would have jumped at the opportunity to excavate “a late Ice Age elephant barbeque,” says Aaron Deter-Wolf, but it was six MTSU students who helped unearth the 14,000-year-old bones of a mastodon, plus the tools used to butcher it, found in a Franklin, Tenn., backyard.

The dig, part of an ongoing collaboration between the University and the state Division of Archeology, was a win-win, Deter-Wolf says.

He got help excavating a 14-foot hole, and Tanya Peres and her students, mostly undergraduates, got to analyze one of the few known sites of late Ice Age human/animal interaction.

“I will never get another chance at a site that old and that cool,” Deter-Wolf says. “For Tanya’s students to get a chance to do it—that’s amazing.”

Peres invited Joey Keasler to work the mastodon site after he had spent long days on the Cumberland River, helping her team document flood and subsequent looting damage to archaic burial sites. He went on to intern with Deter-Wolf at the division.

Keasler had enrolled at MTSU after 20 years in the custom automotive business. After that market was hit hard by the recession, he says, “I took the opportunity to do something that had always been of interest to me and to do something with the rest of my life that I was going to really enjoy.”

He says he’s still wrapping his brain around the whirlwind of opportunities he’s had so far. It was, after all, one heck of a freshman year.

Two MTSU scholars study the importance of coping and recovery among local law enforcement

by Gina K. Logue

After a workday of trying to find a lost kid, negotiating a road-rage-fueled feud between drivers involved in a fender-bender, pursuing speeders, and handling a domestic violence dispute, how would you unwind and relax?

Good Medicine: Offers Amy Noreville and Adem Wade ('07) exercise together using a medicine ball in the basement gym located at Murfreesboro Police headqurters

Drs. Mark Anshel and Dana Umscheid of the Department of Health and Human Performance wanted to find out if a coping skills program, implemented in combination with a 10-week wellness program, would help officers and dispatchers at the Murfreesboro Police Department deal better with the unique pressures of their jobs.

“One of the things I learned in working with law enforcement and with emergency dispatchers, as well, is they do not have very good recovery strategies,” Anshel says.

Participants, including Chief Glenn Chrisman, were divided into three groups for the study, which was conducted over the spring and summer of 2010.

One group received only instruction on coping skills. Another received coping instruction in conjunction with a wellness program that included fitness coaching from graduate students in MTSU’s Exercise Science program and nutrition coaching from adjunct Human Sciences instructor Ginny Brogle. The third group received only written materials on coping skills—nothing more.

The upshot of the study is that the second group made more progress.

“Our officers are some of the most well-trained in the Southeast,” Chrisman says; however, he notes, “This project illuminated the need for more stress management and physical agility training.”

It was important to Anshel and Umscheid that dispatchers were included in the study. Anshel characterizes them as “unsung heroes in our community” for handling calls that range from tragic emergencies to frustrating inanities.

Umscheid observed that the dispatchers’ jobs are so sedentary that they must get up and take advantage of exercise opportunities even when they’d rather not do so. Now dispatchers are taking the stairs to the fitness room and working out with weights or on a treadmill during 10–15 minute breaks.

Another frustration faced by dispatchers and officers alike is the lack of opportunity to talk about their stress levels.

“Most of us have friends and family we can vent to when our job is frustrating,” Umscheid says. “In many ways, our colleagues are the only ones who understand what the job is like, day in and day out.”

Anshel and Umscheid’s research was presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in August, but the scholars found the opportunity to give back to the community and the men and women who protect it even more rewarding than the academic kudos.

“We hope this study will help bring light to the need for police stress management training, resulting in a healthy police force nationwide,” Chrisman says.

Just a handful of people are thought to be responsible for incalculable damage to archeological sites along the Cumberland River.

One, believed to claim Native American heritage, leaves tobacco offerings at the graves he robs. (“Such a strange way to placate your karma,” muses Aaron Deter-Wolf.) Some are actually known by name, but there are few resources to prosecute them.

The looters’ methods, though, are similar: They spend their days on the water, they use specialized tools, and they’re savvy. “They’re [selling] mostly through private collections, antique stores, artifact shows—things like that—so it’s really hard to police from a digital perspective,” Deter-Wolf says.

The rise in methamphetamine use, especially in rural areas, has added a new twist to the very old problem of grave robbing, Tanya Peres notes. In the Southwest, looters now trade Native American artifacts for drugs, she says.

While no definitive link between looting and meth has been established in middle Tennessee, “we’ve been told that a number of these guys are tweakers—but that’s anecdotal,” Deter-Wolf says. “From an objective perspective, looting is a black-market economy, and only certain things move in that economy, drugs and weapons being two of them.”

Whatever their motivation, Peres says, looters share culpability with collectors who willfully ignore the source of their coveted artifacts—and make grave robbing big business.

Two MTSU professors take different paths to the same gasoline-free conclusion

by Randy Weiler

A RetroFit Future

Dr. Charles Perry and his Engineering Technology team invent a way to make every car a hybrid Prolific patent recipient Dr. Charles Perry’s latest invention, the Plug-In Hybrid RetroFit Kit, could save America 120 million gallons of fuel daily.

Perry (B.S. Chemistry ’66 and M.S. ’69) is the holder of the Robert E. and Georgianna West Russell Chair of Manufacturing Excellence in the Department of Engineering Technology at MTSU. He spearheads an eight-member team collaborating on this patent-pending, wheel-hub motor project. The team includes Paul Martin III, an automotive engineering technology expert, co-patent holder, and the grandson of Paul W. Martin Sr., for whom MTSU’s University Honors College is named.

Perry says that 80 percent of U.S. drivers make daily trips of 30 miles or less driving 40 mph or less. Those trips can be made with his 10- to 15-horsepower electric motors powered by extra batteries installed in the car’s trunk. The hybrid retrofit kit is installed in the space between the brake mechanism and the hub, generating more electricity while the vehicle is driven.

A former IBM electrical engineer who was awarded 40 patents during his career there, Perry says he believes the kits could be developed into a product selling for between $3,000 and $5,000.

Under Martin’s mechanical guidance, a prototype vehicle recently hit the streets, allowing the Perry team the opportunity to prove its fuel mileage savings and system reliability. The next step will be to fund a fleet of independently manufactured cars that will be retrofitted with the kit and which will fully enable Perry and crew to test the product’s efficiency and durability.

The Tennessee Technology Development Council (TTDC), a state agency that offers grants designed to help Tennessee inventors take their innovations from the lab to the marketplace, awarded the kit first place in a recent competition that included applications from Vanderbilt University, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, and Oak Ridge National Lab. It’s the latest proof that the right infusion of capital is just the thing to make Perry and crew’s kit a significant tech transfer success story at MTSU, a success that will no doubt pave the way for future successes coming out of the University’s Department of Engineering Technology.

Drive to Succeed

Dr. Cliff Ricketts embarks on a 2,800-mile road trip on 1.87 gallons of gas

Last fall, Dr. Cliff Ricketts made national headlines when he drove the length of the state of Tennessee using only sun and water to power his vehicle.

The latest step in Ricketts’s lifetime of alternative fuel research was a planned 2,800-mile cross-country drive in October using less than two gallons of gas.

At press time, the longtime MTSU School of Agribusiness and Agriscience faculty member was in final preparations for his proposed drive in a modified 2008 Toyota Prius from Wilmington, N.C., to a Pacific Ocean beach near Los Angeles. Besides a few drops of gas, his fuel consisted of various hybrid sources, including sunlight and hydrogen from water.

The journey required about 3.75 tanks to achieve 750 miles per fill-up or charge (100 miles with solar electric, 250 miles with hydrogen, 350 miles with 95 percent switchgrass ethanol and 5 percent gas, and 100 miles with on-board regeneration, a unit similar in theory to the device created by MTSU professor Charles Perry. See companion story on opposite page.

Ricketts planned to make the drive using only 1.87 gallons of gas. The only reason gas was involved at all is because federal regulations mandate ethanol fuel have at least 5 percent gasoline in it.

“My whole passion is sun and water,” says Ricketts, who considers himself a modern-day Davy Crockett, “a frontiersman with energy” who has “blazed a trail with ethanol, blazed a trail with hydrogen, and blazed a trail with sun and water.”

Will he make it? He says he’s 95 percent sure he will. “This is research, after all,” he cautions.

And what’s next for Ricketts? He’s planning a coast-to-coast trip powered exclusively by sun and water in the fall of 2012.

By Drew Ruble

Dr. John Wallin hones and harnesses the computing power of scientists and citizens alike

Eye in the Sky: John Wallin, seen here with MTSU’s telescope, harnesses the power of students and citizens alike to map galaxies.

An astrophysicist who studies interacting galaxies and the gravitational force of objects at the edge of our solar system, Dr. John Wallin has a passion for applying the power of computing to astronomy.

The director of MTSU’s new Ph.D. program in Computational Science, Wallin also serves a pivotal role in the study of an online suite of citizen-science projects, called Zooniverse, intended to help determine the implications of public involvement in large-scale scientific activities.

Zooniverse projects range from an effort to track solar explosions to work on understanding how galaxies merge—a Wallin specialty. Essentially, as technology has increased the flow of new information in fields like astronomy, Wallin has embraced the opportunity to use “citizen scientists” to unlock the data.

According to Wallin, the goal is to “build a partnership between machine analysis and human volunteers.” And it’s working. To date, Zooniverse has over a half-million volunteers who have contributed nearly 60 million classifications. Such data is used to help train computers to make the same detailed observations and categorizations.

Citizen science has already led to the development of two new classes of astronomical objects, including the new galaxy classification known as “green peas,” or clusters of stars that resemble fuzzy, bright green spheres.

Wallin spent the 2011 spring semester at Oxford, splitting time between being a visiting scientist in the Department of Astronomy and being a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, the nexus of the Zooniverse project. A new project he began work on while there (and later at the University of Minnesota) is the “Ancient Lives” project, created to decode a set of Greek papyri by enlisting volunteers from around the world to help transcribe ancient Greek manuscripts from the Oxyrhincus collection of the Ashmolean Library. These ancient papyri were recovered by British archeologists in the early 1900s and date back to between AD 300 and 700. Since they were recovered, only about 15 percent of the manuscripts have been transcribed.

However, in this collection, papyrologists have found early copies of books of the Bible, ancient Greek plays, and even mathematical texts.

Wallin is involved in creating the analysis software that will be used to help identify these newly transcribed manuscripts. He’s simultaneously working with collaborators (including NASA) on a challenge project to determine how effectively citizen science data can be used to train computers.

Computational Science is a rapidly evolving field. As the design of computers changes and their power increases, new kinds of computer simulations and analyses become possible. That means opportunities abound for MTSU students and faculty as the field of computational science continues to grow. This growth potential has led to the establishment of the Center for Computational Science at MTSU to help promote research on campus in scientific computing. Faculty members in the center will remain in their own departments as teachers but collaborate through the center on their research. The faculty in the center will be working on both scientific simulation and on data-intensive science.

Currently, MTSU has students and faculty working on projects that include automatic identification of tumors using medical imaging; improving the simulation methods used to test new drug design; and “text mining” the scientific literature to find new connections between different areas of research, among others. One of the goals of the program is to form research partnerships with other departments, with local industry, and with government laboratories like Oak Ridge National Laboratory in east Tennessee.

Though the new Computational Science degree may target a different population than the Zooniverse project, both endeavors—and the man in the midst of them—share a common goal: to further scientific knowledge through increased computing efficiency and mastery.

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are already big business for the military, but the commercial side of UAS is ready for takeoff, too. More law enforcement agencies are using drones for surveillance, and, as technology advances, UAS could be used for search-and-rescue operations or even to monitor crops on large farms.

The launch of a UAS program at MTSU could not have come at a better time for students, says program director Kyle Snyder. Those who study UAS now will be ready to go into business selling and operating the systems just as the commercial market emerges.

The program will benefit the government sector and Tennessee’s economy as well, says Snyder.

The Federal Aviation Administration has seen the UAS trend coming, but it needs solid research to determine how to integrate drones into the nation’s airspace.

ISR Group, located in Savannah, Tenn., is a business specializing in UAS field service operations and training for military applications. It wants to tap into the fledgling commercial UAS market, but the FAA currently won’t allow drones in the national airspace unless they are used for law enforcement or research.

A multiyear partnership agreement between MTSU and ISR, signed in February, has something for everyone, Snyder says. MTSU gains access to ISR’s expertise and facilities and gets corporate funding to establish a UAS curriculum. ISR wins entrée into the commercial market through its research with MTSU. And the FAA captures rare data because (unlike UAS programs at most universities, which tend to be located near military bases) MTSU is in unrestricted airspace. In short, MTSU is uniquely positioned to help develop the commercial side of UAS.

And Snyder, who worked for years in aerospace product development, is uniquely positioned to leverage that experience.“I can take my knowledge, all those connections, and say, ‘Hey, you at John Deere, you’re wondering if we can provide an application that tells you when you need to apply nitrogen. Well, we can go do that research. We can fly to MTSU farms and do exactly that.”

Since his hire, Snyder has been busy building a curriculum along with lucrative business partnerships. The Department of Aerospace began offering an introductory UAS course this fall.

Research takes the stage at MTSU

En pointe: This image, depicting “migration,” tells part of the story in the MTSU dance program’s forthcoming ballet, Exodus.

With Exodus, the MTSU dance program takes flight, not due to oppression as the title implies, but toward an emotionally gripping expression of experiential learning and academic research at its most artistic.

Exodus is a concert of modern dance and ballet that examines departures from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives. Its subject matter includes the Underground Railroad, the Holocaust, and Mexican border crossings.

“Every culture has its own exodus story that redefined who they were but also help define who we are currently in the United States,” says Kim Neal Nofsinger, director of the dance program and originator of two pieces of Exodus.

Thorough research into diverse ethnic identities is key to the creation of the work.

“We expect the students to be very immersed in the cultural studies side of this as well as the performance studies side of the work,” Nofsinger says.

Several guest artists will contribute to the production, which is slated to debut in its entirety in January and go on tour throughout the spring semester. Students will audition for the privilege of being part of the company, and only 12–16 will make the cut.

“This is experiential learning at its highest form because it really is about synthesis,” says Nofsinger. “The students have to take all this information, put it together, have their own interpretation of what the content is, and be able to dialogue about that verbally.”

Nofsinger hopes to parlay this contrast of delicacy and power into the creation of an annual or biennial academic dance conference. Ultimately, the goal is to transform MTSU’s dance minor into a major leading to a baccalaureate degree suitable for propelling the dancers’ own exodus into performing and/or teaching.

Upon Further Reflection

by Bill Lewis

Scatter-Brained: MTSU researcher Tibor Koritsansky stands in front of a diffraction image of a protein structure.

MTSU teams up with ORNL to imagine a cutting-edge scientific tool.

Imagine being able to see molecules composed of millions of atoms, a technique that could be used to create new designer medicines or technically important materials such as superconductors or shape-memory substances that have military, medical, and robotic applications.

Those are the possibilities of a research project being led by MTSU’s Dr. Tibor Koritsanszky, who is collaborating with colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) on a project named, appropriately, IMAGINE.

IMAGINE uses neutrons to peer deep inside molecules. As the materials being studied reflect the neutrons and they scatter “just like a compact disc does when sunlight reflects off it,” they form patterns that reveal chemical, physical, and biological structure and function secrets, Koritsanszky says. Another way of describing it is that IMAGINE will identify the “fingerprint” of the molecules, he adds.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, which is why Koritsanszky and his colleagues at ORNL submitted a proposal in January 2009 to the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to obtain the device they now call IMAGINE, which is a single-crystal neutron diffractometer.

In August of that year, they were awarded $2.2 million to purchase the device and carry out research at ORNL. Some of the funding came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, popularly known as stimulus funds. The grant is the third MRI for MTSU’s Department of Chemistry and by far the largest.

“This diffractometer will fill a gap in U.S. neutron diffraction capabilities, since no similar capability or instrumentation is currently available at a neutron reactor source in the United States,” says Koritsanszky, the project’s primary investigator.

IMAGINE, which is compact enough to fit into a small office, is under development about 30 or 40 meters from ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR). Bryan Chakoumakos, ORNL’s group leader for single-crystal neutron diffraction, expects it to be operational in January 2012. The speedy timeline is possible because the device combines off-the-shelf hardware with an optical system being developed at ORNL.

Chakoumakos expects researchers from MTSU, pharmaceutical companies, and other industries to use IMAGINE to examine samples that might be as small as one or two millimeters. The reactor will send neutrons speeding down a mirror-lined tube, called a guide, to IMAGINE. There they will strike the millions of atoms that compose the materials being examined and form intricate patterns of spots as they scatter.

“They can be very beautiful—like a snowflake,” Chakoumakos says.

IMAGINE will record the patterns on cylindrical image plates that surround the sample and can be thought of as reusable film. That, by the way, is how IMAGINE got its name.

“It’s meant to be stimulating and a play on words, since it uses image plates,” Chakoumakos says.

Researchers then will use a laser to read the thousands, even tens of thousands, of images on the plates and create a 3-D picture.

That’s where Koritsanszky’s software tools come in.

Koritsanszky, an expert in X-ray structural analysis and computational modeling, is writing the software that will help make IMAGINE the most powerful instrument of its kind in the world—more efficient than similar devices in Australia, France, and Japan. (The Japanese facility was untouched by the tsunami that ravaged nearby areas along that country’s coastline but was damaged by the earthquake that preceded the onrushing wave.)

IMAGINE will have the power to “collect an unprecedented amount and quality of data on relatively small samples in a short period of time,” Koritsanszky says. “Applications of neutron scattering research span the diverse scientific fields of structural biology, pharmacology, chemistry, condensed matter physics, nano-structured materials, [and] environmental and geological science.”

Koritsanszky has a longstanding relationship with ORNL, where he also collaborates with the facility’s $1.3 billion Spallation Neutron Scattering laboratory. Building on that relationship with the creation of IMAGINE was a natural outcome, giving MTSU the opportunity to win the National Science Foundation grant, which flows through the University, and provides MTSU faculty and students access to ORNL’s world-class facilities. In return, ORNL is able to tap into the University’s talent pool.

“We knew MTSU was starting new Ph.D. programs in computational science, molecular biosciences, and mathematics and science education,” Chakoumakos says. “Tibor’s goal is to use IMAGINE for research he’s interested in and to use it for education at MTSU.”