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Study demonstrates adding complex component of milk to infant formula confers long-term cognitive benefits
LAWRENCE — For decades, researchers have sought to create a viable complement or alternative to breast milk to give children their best start for healthy development. New research out of the University of Kansas has shown how a complex component of milk that can be added to infant formula has been shown to confer long-term cognitive benefits, including measures of intelligence and executive function in children. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, shows that feeding infants formula supplemented with MFGM and lactoferrin for 12 months raised IQ by 5 points at 5 ½ years of age.
Author outlines AI in education ‘Bill of Rights’
LAWRENCE — Universities could be leaders in calling for the responsible use of generative artificial intelligence, according to one University of Kansas professor with a new article to be published in the journal Critical AI. Kathryn Conrad wrote “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in Education,” with protections for both educators and students.
Dole Institute of Politics awards 2023 archival research grants
LAWRENCE — The Dole Archives Research Fellowship and Travel Grant allow visiting scholars to explore the Dole Archives, a key repository showing how public policy and legislation are developed and telling the diverse stories of Americans. Michael Fortner, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, has been selected for the Dole Archives Research Fellowship, and Raina Hackett, graduate student in sociology at George Washington University, has been awarded a Travel Grant.
KU welcomes 12 international Fulbright students and teaching assistants
LAWRENCE — This academic year the University of Kansas welcomed eight international students as part of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program and four Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants. From Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, the Fulbright students and teaching assistants are joining programs in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the schools of Business, Education & Human Sciences and Engineering.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jen Humphrey, Life Span Institute, 785-864-6621, [email protected], @kulifespan
Study demonstrates adding complex component of milk to infant formula confers long-term cognitive benefits
LAWRENCE — Breast milk is widely acknowledged as the most beneficial nutrition for infants, but many families face medical or logistical challenges in breastfeeding. In the U.S., just 45% of infants continue to be exclusively breastfed at 3 months of age, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
For decades, researchers have sought to create a viable complement or alternative to breast milk to give children their best start for healthy development. New research out of the University of Kansas has shown how a complex component of milk that can be added to infant formula has been shown to confer long-term cognitive benefits, including measures of intelligence and executive function in children.
The research by John Colombo, KU Life Span Institute director and investigator, along with colleagues at Mead Johnson Nutrition and in Shanghai, China, adds to the growing scientific support for the importance of ingredients found in milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) in early human development.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Pediatrics, showed that feeding infants formula supplemented with MFGM and lactoferrin for 12 months raised IQ by 5 points at 5 ½ years of age. The effects were most evident in tests of children’s speed of processing information and visual-spatial skills. Significant differences were also seen in children’s performance on tests of executive function, which are complex skills involving rule learning and inhibition.
All forms of mammalian milk contain large fat globules that are surrounded by a membrane composed of a variety of nutrients important to human nutrition and brain development, Colombo said. When milk-based infant formula is manufactured, the membrane has typically been removed during processing.
“No one thought much about this membrane,” Colombo said, “until chemical analyses showed that it’s remarkably complex and full of components that potentially contribute to health and brain development.”
The 2023 study was a follow-up to one that Colombo also co-wrote with colleagues in Shanghai, China, published in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2019. That study showed that babies who were fed formula with added bovine MFGM and lactoferrin had higher scores on neurodevelopmental tests during the first year and on some aspects of language at 18 months of age.
The global nutrition research community has been looking at MFGM for about a decade, Colombo said. Because the membrane is made up of several different components, it isn’t known whether one of the components is responsible for these benefits, or whether the entire package of nutrients act together to improve brain and behavioral development.
These benefits were seen in children long after the end of formula feeding at 12 months of age.
“This is consistent with the idea that early exposure to these nutritional components contribute to the long-term structure and function of the brain,” said Colombo, who has spent much of his career researching the importance of early experience in shaping later development.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Author outlines AI in education ‘Bill of Rights’
LAWRENCE – Because ignoring the artificial intelligence elephant in the room is no longer feasible, the author of a new “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in Education” has proposed some principles for dealing with it.
The editors of the new journal Critical AI published the article, written by Kathryn Conrad, University of Kansas professor of English, online in July as a sneak preview of their February 2024 issue because they “were keen to get it out so that it could be helpful as people had conversations about the place of AI in education,” Conrad said.
Conrad’s scholarly work has centered on intersections of technology and culture, usually in the context of turn-of-the-20th-century Irish modernism.
Since November 2022, when the private company OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a large language model chatbot that generates written responses to questions posed by users, leaders in any number of fields have pondered its implications.
After exploring the capabilities of the technology and related research, Conrad said she concluded that universities could be leaders calling for the responsible use of generative AI.
And while the initial buzz around ChatGPT, and more broadly AI, in education centered on its potential to write term papers for students, Conrad has delved deeply into other issues as well, from its potential to surveil users to its built-in algorithmic biases.
“What I’ve been working on, from both a scholarly and pedagogical standpoint, is critical AI literacy,” Conrad said. “And that means knowing something about how generative AI works as well as the ethics of these models, including the labor and copyright issues they entail, and some of the privacy and surveillance concerns that they raise.”
Conrad said students already know of ChatGPT/AI’s potential and deserve guidance on its proper usage in a university context, just as their teachers do.
“I like to say that for education, AI answered a question that no one was asking,” Conrad said. “Nobody in education asked for chatbots. But ChatGPT and other models came down to us anyway. And, as I mention in the article, they came down from people who are not concerned primarily with education. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a college dropout, and he has been openly hostile, in some cases, to higher education. He has said he’s going to start an OpenAI Academy that’s presumably run by chatbots. So that raises the question of whether or why we might want to adopt these tools. We shouldn’t take for granted that these are specific tools that we have to use, or that we have to use uncritically.”
Conrad said that, far from taking “a technophobic perspective,” her research and that of her colleagues in the new journal “is bringing technologists into conversation with humanists and social scientists to tease out some of the larger, interesting issues around the deployment of these technologies.”
After much reading and many discussions of the subject of AI in education with colleagues, Conrad said of her intervention, “I decided it really needed to be a question of rights — student rights, as well — because we have responsibility as educators to protect them.”
In the article, Conrad acknowledged the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s 2022 “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” and extended it for education.
Educators, she wrote, should have:
Input on institutional decisions to buy and implement AI tools.
Input on policies regarding usage.
Professional development (i.e., training).
Protection of legal rights.
Her proposed rights for students:
Guidance on whether and how AI tools are to be used in class.
Privacy and creative control of their own work.
Appeal rights, if charged with academic misconduct related to AI.
Notice “when an instructor or institution is using an automated process to assess your assignments.”
Protection of legal rights.
It is important, according to Conrad, to understand what the technology can and cannot do. She said that while ChatGPT can, for instance, write an essay or a legal brief, it is not always factual or accurate — often, the chatbot simply fabricates responses.
“It’s an important part of critical AI literacy to explain to users — students in this case, but also faculty — that there is never a guarantee that the output is going to be right,” Conrad said. “It is designed to be plausible, which is a different thing entirely.”
And while she said that educators “cannot ignore” AI, Conrad argued that universities, particularly, with their potential for high-level cross-disciplinary work, could help lead the way to a better future.
“We have the potential to develop technologies that are trained on ethically obtained datasets, that have privacy protections built in, that are ethically deployed. This is a place we could potentially lead,” she said.
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Contact: Maria Fisher, Dole Institute of Politics, 785-864-4900, [email protected]
Dole Institute of Politics awards 2023 archival research grants
LAWRENCE – The Robert and Elizabeth Dole Archive and Special Collections at the Dole Institute of Politics has awarded two 2023 research grants. Michael Fortner has been selected for the Dole Archives Research Fellowship, and Raina Hackett has been awarded a Travel Grant.
The Dole Archives Research Fellowship is an annual $3,000 award to support substantial research projects requiring the use of the Dole Archives. Fortner, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, was selected for his project “Crack Cocaine and Congressional Leadership in the War on Drugs,” which explores the goals and intentions of members of Congress in their drafting of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. His research will further his current book manuscript, “Crack: A Tragedy in Three Acts,” about the origins and consequences of the “crack epidemic” of the late 1980s.
“(My) questions and methodology are not only focused on the U.S. Congress, but explicitly on the actions, views and papers of congressional leaders, particularly Senator Dole, a primary sponsor of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act,” said Fortner, who will visit sometime during the 2023-24 award year to conduct archival research. “Moreover, ‘Crack: A Tragedy in Three Acts’ will advance the public understanding of the U.S. Congress and its role in the ‘war on drugs.’ (This fellowship) will support research… that will fundamentally revise extant accounts of this campaign, while contributing to an ongoing and critical policy debate over crime and public safety.”
Fortner is the author of “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment” (Harvard University Press, 2015), examining the rise of Black anti-crime activism in New York City and its impact on the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws. His scholarly articles on African Americans and crime policy development appear in Studies in American Political Development, Journal of Policy History and Urban Affairs Review. He has also recently been published in The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
“Being able to learn from congressional archive collections is crucial to our democracy,” said Sarah Gard, Dole Institute senior archivist and head of collections. “These collections show how public policy and legislation is developed, tell the diverse stories of Americans and provide insight into how the U.S. Congress works as one of our three branches of government.”
Congressional archives are geographically dispersed throughout the country, which makes visiting them more difficult. The intent of Dole Archives Travel Grants is to ease the financial burden of visiting researchers. Hackett received a $1,000 travel grant for her project, “Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and the Expansion of Food Assistance – An Intersectional Analysis of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).”
Hackett is a graduate student in sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., as well as a legislative assistant for U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, covering agriculture and nutrition. Hackett’s project aims to retell and further explore the legislative history of the WIC revealing that a key player has been minimized in the history of the WIC program – Chisholm.
“Currently, the WIC program has been thrust into the political spotlight and has been the target of the intense political polarization our country is facing,” said Hackett, who visited the institute earlier this month. “I will use the archives to not only retell this story of WIC but also to show how Congresswoman Chisholm and Senator Dole – two politicians on the opposite side of the political spectrum – had a bipartisan relationship that confronted one of the greatest stains on our nation’s conscience, hunger.”
The research grants, established in 2010, intend to foster archival research in the Dole Archives among scholars of all professions and disciplines. Support for the Research Fellowship and travel grants is provided by the Friends of the Dole Institute.
There is still travel grant funding available for 2023-24. Visit https://dolearchives.ku.edu/research/grants for more information.
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Don’t miss new episodes of “When Experts Attack!,”
a KU News Service podcast hosted by Kansas Public Radio.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/when-experts-attack
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Contact: Christine Metz Howard, International Affairs, [email protected], @KUintlaffairs
KU welcomes 12 international Fulbright students and teaching assistants
LAWRENCE — This academic year the University of Kansas welcomed eight international students as part of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program and four Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants.
From Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, the Fulbright students and teaching assistants are joining programs in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the schools of Business, Education & Human Sciences and Engineering.
“Every year, our campus is enriched by Fulbright students and language teaching assistants from around the world,” said Rachel Sherman Johnson, director of internationalization and partnerships at KU International Affairs. “While at KU, they will not only pursue their research or teach courses, but they will also contribute to the foundational mission of the Fulbright program: building mutual understanding between nations, advancing knowledge across communities and improving lives around the world.”
The Fulbright Foreign Student Program enables graduate students, young professionals and artists from abroad to research and study in the United States for one year or more at U.S. universities.
The Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program allows young teachers of English as a Foreign Language the chance to improve their teaching skills and learn more about American culture while teaching foreign languages at a U.S. college or university.
The Fulbright Program, the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, offers more than 8,000 grants each year to U.S. and foreign students, scholars, teachers, artists, scientists and professionals.
Fulbright students visiting for the 2023-2024 academic year:
Rocio Arasy Chamorro Jara is a graduate education & social policy student from Paraguay. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature, arts and cultural mediation from Federal University of Latin American Integration in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. She is studying topics of language and cultural diversity in education.
Ina Fendel is a graduate computer science student from Germany. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Free University of Berlin.
Israel Ignacio Herrera Rivera is a graduate petroleum engineering student from Bolivia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in petroleum and natural gas engineering from the Private University of Bolivia. He is researching hydrogen storage.
Moises Ruben Gualapuro Gualapuro is a doctoral computational biology student from Ecuador. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from University San Francisco of Quito and a master’s degree in bioinformatics and systems biology from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He is researching protein features to determine its catalytic activity.
Alexandra Celina Navarro Espinoza is a graduate global & international studies student from Honduras. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law from the Technological University of Honduras. She is researching migration and violence in Central America.
Janaina Reis do Nascimento is a graduate business analytics student from Brazil. She holds degrees in international relations from São Paulo State University and Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. She is researching social and financial systems.
Zenia Patricia Ruiz Utrilla is a doctoral student in ecology & evolutionary biology from Mexico. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla and a master’s degree in natural resources and rural development from the College of the Southern Border. While at KU, she is using information available in repositories, GIS tools, the theory of the ecology of biological invasions and ecological niche modeling to propose a unified framework for prioritizing species and sites for invasive species management.
Andres Felipe Salamanca Saavedra is a doctoral student in geology from Colombia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in geology and master’s degree in geophysics from the National University of Colombia. He is researching groundwater flow and contaminant transport.
Foreign Language Teaching Assistants visiting for the 2023-2024 academic year:
Begüm Çolpan, from Turkey, is teaching Turkish and working for the Center for Russian, Eastern European & Eurasian Studies. She graduated from MEF University in Istanbul.
Saidkhoja Mahmadiev, from Tajikistan, is teaching the Tajik language for the Department of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English language instruction and a master’s degree in linguistics from Tajik National University.
Deniz Tozaraydin, from Turkey, is teaching Turkish for the Department of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English language literature from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
Muwayyid Abu Shaefah Mohammed, from Libya, is teaching Arabic for the Department of African & African-American Studies. He has a master’s degree in English from Tripoli University.
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