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KU names new executive director of Center for Technology Commercialization
LAWRENCE — Cliff Michaels will become the new executive director of the KU Center for Technology Commercialization, which assists University of Kansas researchers across all campuses in commercializing their discoveries. He will begin his position Jan. 17. Since 2019, Michaels has served as an assistant vice president for research and the director of Georgia State University’s Office of Technology Transfer & Commercialization.
Using fungi, researchers convert ocean plastic into ingredients for drug industry
LAWRENCE — Research on fungi underway at the University of Kansas has helped transform tough-to-recycle plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean into key components for making pharmaceuticals. The chemical–biological approach for converting polyethylene uses an everyday soil fungus called Aspergillus nidulans that has been genetically altered.
Study shows SMART Recovery holds potential to help LGBTQ population with alcohol, substance use
LAWRENCE — Members of the LGBTQ community often face barriers to engaging in traditional treatment programs for alcohol and substance use. A trial by University of Kansas researchers has found that SMART Recovery, a cognitive-behavioral mutual help group for addictive behaviors, holds potential for addressing LGBTQ-specific concerns with treatment and may be an effective part of recovery, though improvements can still be made.
Authors put Langston Hughes in a family context
LAWRENCE – A century after he first rose to prominence as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, autobiographer and satirist, Langston Hughes continues to attract attention from researchers seeking to shed new light on his life and work. Two scholars with ties to the University of Kansas have contributed a chapter to a new book, “Langston Hughes in Context” (Cambridge University Press). The KU authors focus on Langston Hughes’ strained relationship with his mother and how it affected his life and writing.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Vince Munoz, Office of Research, 785-864-2254, [email protected], @ResearchAtKU
KU names new executive director of Center for Technology Commercialization
LAWRENCE — Cliff Michaels will become the new executive director of the KU Center for Technology Commercialization, which assists University of Kansas researchers across all campuses in commercializing their discoveries. He will begin his position Jan. 17.
Since 2019, Michaels has served as an assistant vice president for research and the director of Georgia State University’s Office of Technology Transfer & Commercialization. During his time at Georgia State, Michaels spearheaded the creation and implementation of a new strategic vision to foster innovation and improve engagement with the GSU research community. He previously worked in Emory University’s Office of Technology Transfer, including as its interim executive director.
“Cliff’s extensive experience helping researchers commercialize their innovations and his highly collaborative style of management make him a fantastic person to lead our KUCTC team,” said David Vranicar, KU vice chancellor of technology commercialization and chief financial & business officer at KU Medical Center. “I welcome Cliff to KU and am excited to have him on board.”
The KU Center for Technology Commercialization collaborates with researchers on the Lawrence and medical center campuses to obtain intellectual property protection and commercial partnerships that enable KU discoveries to generate commercial impact. Typically, such commercialization occurs when KUCTC licenses KU-developed intellectual property to external for-profit entities (startups or established companies) that then further develop the technology into commercial products. When commercially successful, KU receives financial value in the form of royalties and other payments from the commercial entity.
Michaels is an active member of both the Association of University Technology Managers and the University Industry Demonstration Partnership. He is also a board member of Southeast Life Sciences. He earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Emory University and a bachelor’s degree in the same field from Lafayette College.
“I am tremendously enthused to be joining KU, an institution with a long history of high-caliber research and innovation,” Michaels said. “KUCTC has a strong foundation for supporting KU innovators, and I look forward to working with our faculty, administrators and other stakeholders to use that foundation as a springboard for the future.”
With KUCTC assistance, KU researchers have disclosed 305 inventions and received 149 U.S. patents in the past five years. In 2022, there were 45 active companies commercializing KU discoveries, 53% of which were located in Kansas.
Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research on KU’s Lawrence campus, has served as interim executive director of KUCTC since August 2020.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Using fungi, researchers convert ocean plastic into ingredients for drug industry
LAWRENCE — Research on fungi underway at the University of Kansas has helped transform tough-to-recycle plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean into key components for making pharmaceuticals.
The chemical–biological approach for converting polyethylene uses an everyday soil fungus called Aspergillus nidulans that has been genetically altered. The results were reported recently in the paper “Conversion of Polyethylenes into Fungal Secondary Metabolites” published in Angewandte Chemie, a journal of the German Chemical Society.
“What we’ve done in this paper is to first digest polyethylenes using oxygen and some metal catalysts — things that are not particularly harmful or expensive — and this breaks the plastics into diacids,” said co-author Berl Oakley, Irving S. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology at KU.
Next, long chains of carbon atoms resulting from the decomposed plastics were fed to genetically modified Aspergillus fungi. The fungi, as designed, metabolized them into an array of pharmacologically active compounds, including commercially viable yields of asperbenzaldehyde, citreoviridin and mutilin.
Unlike previous approaches, Oakley said the fungi digested the plastic products quickly, like “fast food.”
“The thing that’s different about this approach is it’s two things — it’s chemical, and it’s fungal,” he said. “But it’s also relatively fast. With a lot of these attempts, the fungus can digest the material, but it takes months because the plastics are so hard to break down. But this breaks the plastics down fast. Within a week you can have the final product.”
The KU researcher added the new approach was “bizarrely” efficient.
“Of the mass of diacids that goes into the culture, 42% comes back as the final compound,” he said. “If our technique was a car, it would be doing 200 miles per hour, getting 60 miles per gallon, and would run on reclaimed cooking oil.”
Previously, Oakley has worked with corresponding author Clay Wang of the University of Southern California to produce about a hundred secondary metabolites of fungi for a variety of purposes.
“It turns out that fungi make a lot of chemical compounds, and they are useful to the fungus in that they inhibit the growth of other organisms — penicillin is the canonical example,” Oakley said. “These compounds aren’t required for the growth of the organism, but they help either protect it from, or compete with, other organisms.”
For a time, scientists thought they’d fully exploited the potential of fungi to produce these compounds. But Oakley said the age of genome sequencing has unlocked new possibilities for using secondary metabolites to benefit humanity and the environment.
“There was a realization there were lots and lots of clusters of genes that made secondary metabolites that nobody had discovered — and there are millions of species of fungi,” Oakley said. “A lot of companies have done good work over the years, but it was very much incomplete, because they were just growing things in the incubator and examining them for production of new compounds — but 95 percent of the gene clusters were just silent since they are not ‘turned on’ until needed. They weren’t doing anything. So, there are lots more things to discover.”
Oakley’s lab at KU has honed gene-targeting procedures to change the expression of genes in Aspergillus nidulans and other fungi, producing new compounds.
“We’ve sequenced the genomes of a bunch of fungi now, and we can recognize the signatures of groups of genes that make chemical compounds,” he said. “We can change the expression of genes; we can remove them from the genome; we can do all kinds of things to them. We could see there were lots of these secondary metabolite gene clusters there and our gene-targeting procedures allowed us, at least in principle, to turn some of those clusters on.”
Oakley and Wang’s co-authors were Chris Rabot, Yuhao Chen, Swati Bijlani, Yi-Ming Chiang and Travis Williams of USC, and Elizabeth Oakley of KU.
The researchers focused on developing secondary metabolites to digest polyethylene plastics because those plastics are so hard to recycle. For this project, they harvested polyethylenes from the Pacific Ocean that had collected in Catalina Harbor on Santa Catalina Island, California.
“There’ve been a lot of attempts to recycle plastic, and some of it is recycled,” Oakley said. “A lot of it is basically melted and spun into fabric and goes into various other plastic things. Polyethylenes are not recycled so much, even though they’re a major plastic.”
The KU investigator said the long-term goal of the research is to develop procedures to break down all plastics into products that can be used as food by fungi, eliminating the need to sort them during recycling. He added the work is emblematic of KU’s Earth, Energy + Environment research theme, geared toward “increasing understanding to help sustain the life of our planet and its inhabitants.”
“I think everybody knows that plastics are a problem,” Oakley said. “They’re accumulating in our environment. There’s a big area in the North Pacific where they tend to accumulate. But also you see plastic bags blowing around — they’re in the rivers and stuck in the trees. The squirrels around my house have even learned to line their nest with plastic bags. One thing that’s needed is to somehow get rid of the plastic economically, and if one can make something useful from it at a reasonable price, then that makes it more economically viable.”
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Study shows SMART Recovery holds potential to help LGBTQ population with alcohol, substance use
LAWRENCE — People looking for help in reducing their alcohol and other substance use often turn to 12-step programs. But while research shows that LGBTQ individuals are more likely to struggle with substance use issues than their peers, they also often face barriers to engaging in traditional treatment programs. A trial by University of Kansas researchers has found that SMART Recovery, a cognitive-behavioral mutual help group for addictive behaviors, holds potential for addressing LGBTQ-specific concerns with treatment and may be an effective part of recovery, though improvements can still be made.
KU researchers held several 12-session-long cohorts of SMART Recovery online with individuals who identify as LGBTQ. Following completion, they conducted in-depth interviews with 16 participants to learn more about their experiences and concerns. They found many appreciated taking part in an LGBTQ-specific treatment group and participating online, but they also noted there could be benefits to addressing additional challenges that are relevant to recovery, particularly emotion regulation and coping with unique challenges that LGBTQ people experience as members of stigmatized groups.
The study, led by Briana McGeough, assistant professor of social welfare at KU, was published in the journal Families in Society. It was written with co-authors M. Greenwood, social welfare student; Nicole Cohen, doctoral candidate in psychology, both at KU; and Angie Wootton of the University of California. The publication also won the Families in Society Best Practice Note award.
“Past research suggests that although some LGBTQ individuals participate in 12-step groups, many LGBTQ individuals experience barriers to successful involvement in 12-step groups, such as tensions between the religious messaging in 12-step programs and their identities as LGBTQ individuals, and discrimination targeting their sexual orientations and gender identities,” McGeough wrote in the study.
To better understand those barriers, McGeough, who conducts research in how LGBTQ individuals experience mental health and substance abuse treatment, wanted to better understand how the population experienced SMART Recovery. The original plan was to conduct the study in person, but the pandemic forced trials to move online.
“There were some real perks,” McGeough said of conducting the trials virtually. “We were able to recruit nationally, and people were able to travel and still join the meetings. We were also able to reach more rural areas, and there was more anonymity for people. The goal in these groups is that people support each other, and that did happen. Many said they really appreciated being in an LGBTQ-specific group.”
Some participants, however, said they would rather not focus on issues of sexual orientation or gender identity and simply discuss alcohol and substance use and recovery. The results also showed people experienced difficulty remembering some of the cognitive and behavioral tools discussed in the meetings and how they could apply them in their lives after the sessions concluded. That is consistent with other studies examining barriers to successful treatment, McGeough said, but can also be a concern as SMART Recovery is designed to have an end point and there is no expectation that people continue to attend meetings indefinitely.
Participants often had depression, anxiety, trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder, or they wanted to discuss strategies for regulating the difficult emotions that emerge from these mental health challenges. That was especially salient, McGeough said, as those issues often influenced an individual’s alcohol or substance consumption or could be exacerbated by substance use as well.
Finally, participants noted challenges they faced coping with discrimination or stigma in their daily lives because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Those were often closely related to individuals’ struggles with alcohol and other substances.
Better understanding how the LGBTQ community experiences SMART Recovery can help improve how the program serves individuals who use it as part of their recovery. While the program can be effective, the shortcomings participants noted illustrate the need for mental health professionals to use it as part of a larger approach to well-being, McGeough said.
“I don’t know if all of those concerns can be addressed by one mutual support group, particularly since these groups are typically not facilitated by mental health professionals, so I think people using SMART Recovery should consider supplementing SMART with therapy or another mental health resource, particularly if they are experiencing mental health symptoms, like depression or anxiety. Therapists should potentially consider if SMART Recovery could serve as a piece of treatment, alongside therapy, for LGBTQ clients experiencing challenges with substance use,” McGeough said.
Finding the concerns LGBTQ individuals have while attending SMART Recovery is a first step, said McGeough, who plans to study the issue further, gauging its effectiveness for the population long-term and recommending strategies and improvements to the program to increase its effectiveness with those who struggle with alcohol and substance use and the unique experience of identifying as LGBTQ.
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Authors put Langston Hughes in a family context
LAWRENCE – A century after he first rose to prominence as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, autobiographer and satirist, Langston Hughes continues to attract attention from scholars seeking to shed new light on his life and work. In this spirit, the editors of the new book “Langston Hughes in Context” (Cambridge University Press) invited two scholars with ties to the University of Kansas to offer their insights.
John Edgar Tidwell, KU professor emeritus of English, and Carmaletta Williams, a KU alumna who is now chief executive officer of Kansas City’s Black Archives of Mid-America, wrote a chapter titled “Love at a Distance in Selected Letters by Langston and Carrie Hughes.” In the new work, they chose to deepen their exploration of a topic undervalued and little explored by most scholars: Langston’s strained relationship with his mother and how it affected his life and writing.
The mother-son dynamic was one of the subjects of their 2013 co-edited book, “My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926–1938” (University of Georgia Press). Tidwell said the co-editors of “Hughes in Context,” Vanderbilt University professors Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed, “were intrigued by our proposition that the emotional and physical distance separating these family members deeply affected Langston. They were also taken with the analytical method we used to conduct our inquiry: psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s family systems theory.”
Tidwell said he and Williams took up the challenge laid down by Arnold Rampersad, author of the definitive, two-volume biography “The Life of Langston Hughes.”
“Rampersad had grown weary of conventional, almost formulaic representations of Black life histories,” Tidwell said. “To encourage new directions, he challenged scholars to think about their subjects in psychological terms. Thus, we responded to his call, although with a twist. The approach he used and implicitly advocated was Freudian in nature. Freud, however, was interested in looking at the makeup of the individual psyche. This pathway would not have served our purpose. A more fruitful approach, we decided, was to look at the individual in the context of the family structure itself, and therefore get a different, a more enhanced vision of what constituted the individual. For ‘Love at a Distance,’ we extrapolated some of the method we used in ‘My Dear Boy’ and delved into aspects of their relationship we did not previously cover.”
Carrie Hughes grew up in Kansas as “the belle of Black Lawrence,” Tidwell said. Her family, with deep roots in the abolitionist tradition, had respect in the community, but little money, he said. Her desire for a career in show business led to what Tidwell called her “wanderlust,” a peripatetic practice that caused young Langston emotional distress. Then her need for money further strained the relationship when her son was an adult.
“She developed a pattern of abandoning and reuniting with him,” Tidwell said. “Consequently, he was never able to bond with her in a healthy way. Her behavior led instead to her efforts to manipulate him into an emotionally dependent relationship. She tried to make him assume adult responsibilities in their relationship. Family systems theory, we felt, was the best model for explaining the nature of this pattern of practice.”
Hughes’ father, James Nathaniel Hughes, is not ignored in this chapter. Early in young Langston’s life, James Hughes moved to Mexico City to escape the persistence of Jim Crow racism that Black Americans experienced. In ruminating about the relationship with his parents, Tidwell said, “Langston was forced to conclude that his father was more stable than his mother. Unlike his mother, who moved frequently, his father stayed in place.”
Nevertheless, for Langston, Tidwell and Williams concluded, home was wherever Carrie ultimately landed. His quest to keep up with Carrie contributed to his own passion for travel, his own wanderlust. This need for movement is aptly captured in the title of his second autobiography: “I Wonder as I Wander.”
“Much of his life is defined in terms of movement,” Tidwell said. “It is not unrealistic to see his travels as an effort to flee from an unrequited relationship with his mother and from her constant importuning for him to provide for her as if he’s a surrogate husband. His movement away from her also reveals his quest for a maternal relationship that would nurture his own needs for a whole, functional family. In searching for family, Langston connected with many different people and experienced diverse cultural expressions. These experiences shaped and informed his conception of art. Unfortunately, they were gained at the expense of a meaningful familial relationship. And distance, both emotional and physical, impeded their ability to achieve a healthy mother and son bond.”
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