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An LSU civil and environmental engineering assistant professor is working with the U.S. Coast Guard to conduct hurricane reconnaissance in an effort to better prepare Louisiana for storms.

Over the past year, LSU assistant professor Navid Jafari has worked alongside the U.S. Coast Guard in New Orleans to leverage drones to facilitate its search and rescue operations immediately after a hurricane.

In early 2020, Jafari received a $180,000 National Science Foundation grant to work with researchers from both Texas A&M University and the LSU Department of Environmental Sciences to find a way to more quickly gather infrastructure data after a natural disaster strikes and help emergency operations centers make data-driven decisions to save lives.

Jafari has found that drones can help lead boat operators to specific locations for rescue, but further research is needed to make improvements such as making the small drones more visible to boat operators and ensuring communication isnt lost the further out the boat goes. Read more about Jafaris research here.

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LSU engineering professor works with Coast Guard on hurricane preparedness - Greater Baton Rouge Business Report

For Baric, that research started in the late 1990s. Coronaviruses were then considered low risk, but Barics studies on the genetics that allowed viruses to enter human cells convinced him that some might be just a few mutations away from jumping the species barrier.

That hunch was confirmed in 200203, when SARS broke out in southern China, infecting 8,000 people. As bad as that was, Baric says, we dodged a bullet with SARS. The disease didnt spread from one person to another until about a day after severe symptoms began to appear, making it easier to corral through quarantines and contact tracing. Only 774 people died in that outbreak, but if it had been transmitted as easily as SARS-CoV-2, we would have had a pandemic with a 10% mortality rate, Baric says. Thats how close humanity came.

As tempting as it was to write off SARS as a one-time event, in 2012 MERS emerged and began infecting people in the Middle East. For me personally, that was a wake-up call that the animal reservoirs must have many, many more strains that are poised for cross-species movement, says Baric.

By then, examples of such dangers were already being discovered by Shis team, which had spent years sampling bats in southern China to locate the origin of SARS. The project was part of a global viral surveillance effort spearheaded by the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The nonprofitwhich has an annual income of over $16 million, more than 90% from government grantshas its office in New York but partners with local research groups in other countries to do field and lab work. The WIV was its crown jewel, and Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, has been a coauthor with Shi on most of her key papers.

By taking thousands of samples from guano, fecal swabs, and bat tissue, and searching those samples for genetic sequences similar to SARS, Shis team began to discover many closely related viruses. In a cave in Yunnan Province in 2011 or 2012, they discovered the two closest, which they named WIV1 and SHC014.

Shi managed to culture WIV1 in her lab from a fecal sample and show that it could directly infect human cells, proving that SARS-like viruses ready to leap straight from bats to humans already lurked in the natural world. This showed, Daszak and Shi argued, that bat coronaviruses were a substantial global threat. Scientists, they said, needed to find them, and study them, before they found us.

Many of the other viruses couldnt be grown, but Barics system provided a way to rapidly test their spikes by engineering them into similar viruses. When the chimera he made using SHC014 proved able to infect human cells in a dish, Daszak told the press that these revelations should move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger.

To others, it was the perfect example of the unnecessary dangers of gain-of-function science. The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk, the Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of such research, told Nature.

To Baric, the situation was more nuanced. Although his creation might be more dangerous than the original mouse-adapted virus hed used as a backbone, it was still wimpy compared with SARScertainly not the supervirus Senator Paul would later suggest.

In the end, the NIH clampdown never had teeth. It included a clause granting exceptions if head of funding agency determines research is urgently necessary to protect public health or national security. Not only were Barics studies allowed to move forward, but so were all studies that applied for exemptions. The funding restrictions were lifted in 2017 and replaced with a more lenient system.

If the NIH was looking for a scientist to make regulators comfortable with gain-of-function research, Baric was the obvious choice. For years hed insisted on extra safety steps, and he took pains to point these out in his 2015 paper, as if modeling the way forward.

The CDC recognizes four levels of biosafety and recommends which pathogens should be studied at which level. Biosafety level 1 is for nonhazardous organisms and requires virtually no precautions: wear a lab coat and gloves as needed. BSL-2 is for moderately hazardous pathogens that are already endemic in the area, and relatively mild interventions are indicated: close the door, wear eye protection, dispose of waste materials in an autoclave. BSL-3 is where things get serious. Its for pathogens that can cause serious disease through respiratory transmission, such as influenza and SARS, and the associated protocols include multiple barriers to escape. Labs are walled off by two sets of self-closing, locking doors; air is filtered; personnel use full PPE and N95 masks and are under medical surveillance. BSL-4 is for the baddest of the baddies, such as Ebola and Marburg: full moon suits and dedicated air systems are added to the arsenal.

There are no enforceable standards of what you should and shouldnt do. Its up to the individual countries, institutions, and scientists.

In Barics lab, the chimeras were studied at BSL-3, enhanced with additional steps like Tyvek suits, double gloves, and powered-air respirators for all workers. Local first-responder teams participated in regular drills to increase their familiarity with the lab. All workers were monitored for infections, and local hospitals had procedures in place to handle incoming scientists. It was probably one of the safest BSL-3 facilities in the world. That still wasnt enough to prevent a handful of errors over the years: some scientists were even bitten by virus-carrying mice. But no infections resulted.

In 2014, the NIH awarded a five-year, $3.75 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk that more bat-borne coronaviruses would emerge in China, using the same kind of techniques Baric had pioneered. Some of that work was to be subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan - MIT Technology Review

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Slava V. Rotkin, Frontier Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics with an appointment in the Materials Research Institute, was named a 2021 fellow of the Electrochemical Society (ECS). He will be honored at the 240th ECS Meeting, held Oct. 10-14 in Orlando, Florida.

Slava Rotkin was named a fellow of the Electrochemical Society for his contributions to research in nanocarbons and two-dimensional materials as well as his service to the society.

IMAGE: Penn State College of Engineering

Fellows are recognized for their technical contribution and involvement in ECS activities. Up to 15 fellows are selected each year from a pool of ECS members nominated by at least three member sponsors.

ECS is delighted to confer the distinction of fellow on Professor Rotkin, said Chris Jannuzzi, chief executive officer of ECS. In addition to his outstanding technical contributions to the theory of nanocarbons and two-dimensional materials and devices, Slava is a tireless advocate for science, ensuring both academic and industrial stakeholders understand, value and support advancements in the field.

Rotkin has been involved with ECS since he was a graduate student studying optoelectronics at Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. As an ECS member, he joined the ECS Nanocarbons (NANO) Division, going on to serve at various points as division secretary, vice chair, chair and treasurer. He has established new symposia series and co-organized 24 society meetings. Most recently, Rotkin served as a member of the ECS Board of Directors, as well as treasurer and senior advancement officer of the NANO Division.

Rotkin has advised more than 60 undergraduate students, 30 graduate students and 10 postdoctoral fellows. Throughout his career, he has aimed to pay forward the guidance of his mentors.

Throughout my education, starting with research work in high school, many important mentors started me down this path, Rotkin said. I cant pay them back, so I mentor others instead. I got a spark of science from those leaders, and I hope to transfer it to the young students in my lab.

Founded in 1902, ECS has a mission to advance theory and practice at the forefront of electrochemical and solid-state science and technology. More than 8,000 members are active in nearly 90 countries.

Last Updated July 01, 2021

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