(bright music) - I wanted to become a professor because this would give me the opportunity to work with people that they are motivated and that they want to grow ultimately because they want to pursue the same career path.

(bright music) I grew up in a farm and the family had animals, also they were producing tomato in this farm.

This was beautiful.

And I thought that there is so much that we can do by protecting plants and making them more productive for humankind.

(bright music) I was blessed because I was with my father in the field, and I learned so much about country life and respect for nature.

(bright music) Growing up and then going to college, I realized that with molecular biology, you could really change the makeup of a plant to the benefit of mankind and establish tools that farmers can use to increase their crop production, crop productivity, and the value of the crops.

So I think that was my moment, I need to work with plants.

(bright music) For all our studies we use plant molecular biology.

We intend to understand how the plant cell works and how we can modify it.

So you went to the microscope yesterday?

- Yes, I did.

I got some interesting images here.

- [Federica] Show me, show me.

- [Student] For the chloroplasts.

- In our lab, we are interested in understanding the plant cells.

So really the basic unit of an organism.

That unit has lot of compartments inside.

So we trying to understand how these organelles manage to produce building blocks for the cell.

(bright music) I think my philosophy is really to try to make an environment where people feel that they can be heard and not judged.

It's very important to empower the next generation of scientists in having a highly diverse community.

Hopefully, as things progress, more tools are also provided to women like daycare.

(bright music) I had two children at MSU and I managed well.

So I think that speaks for the place, it is a place that empowers women.

(bright music) - I actually came to plant pathology when I was an undergraduate.

I was a closet microbiologist at that time.

I was geeked out on bacteria and kind of understanding at the genetic level, what they're doing to cause disease.

(bright music) I work with a bacterial disease of apple and pear trees called Erwinia amylovora, and this pathogen causes a significant disease on these trees called fire blight.

Hi, Rashni, how's it going?

- Good, how are you, George?

- I'm good.

We work both at the lab and field levels for this disease.

In the lab, we study the genetics of the interactions with the host.

So how does this bacterial pathogen reprogram the host to cause disease?

And then in the field, we study the biology of the pathogen, how does this pathogen grow on plants.

This pathogen can infect through apple flowers.

It eventually just migrates down through the tree to the roots where it kills the roots and kills the tree.

(bright music) The work we do is important on many levels.

This disease occurs in almost all apple growing, pear growing regions of the world.

So that's a huge impact.

It's not only killing trees, it's affecting a grower's livelihood.

The fire blight is ravaging through the farm.

They're losing thousands of trees.

It's always devastating to me to see the look on the grower's face when we're looking at their trees and you can see hundreds of trees and I'm going to tell them they have to remove them and there's just no recovery for the tree.

That's the worst part of my job, but it's also a part of the job where I get a one-on-one with growers and we can talk about solutions.

(bright music) - [Rashni] This is an E.coli and the rest are Erwinia.

- I teach a graduate student class and I enjoy teaching because I just enjoy imparting what I know about plant bacteriology to students, an area that I'm really interested in and to see them get interested in that topic, I really enjoy that.

That makes a difference to me.

(bright music) - Change, especially rapid change always has two aspects, a upside and a downside, winners and losers, and the more you're ready for the change and not letting it blindside you, the more apt you are to be one of the winners.

(bright music) I work on food markets in developing countries, which is mainly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

And that involves looking at food supply chains.

How food goes from farms through wholesale markets and logistics firms and retailers to consumers.

(bright music) To really understand a society at any given stage, it's very important to put yourself into their shoes.

I was of the generation where my mother, she gave me some Pop-Tarts and she said, Momma's little helper.

Here, just heat these up.

And I saw then, from the eyes of the people that are undergoing change, sometimes things that later we can criticize, getting processed food and you know, where you don't have to spend 42 hours a week cooking looked pretty good.

(bright music) The normal mentality of the countries that I've been working in in the past 20, 30 years, they are in the stage where they want to get affordable food, supermarkets, fast food.

A lot of times, these changes are really hard on those that aren't prepared.

You come to a certain point where you're in a second generation of problems.

There's nutritional problems.

There's pollution.

And so, a lot of my work was to show how rapidly things were changing, where they were going to help governments to prepare people for the changes.

(bright music) I feel like the developing countries can pursue that with efficiencies and things that we research and learn from the mistakes of the richer countries to try to make it more sustainable.

(bright music) Everybody knows that Michigan State is among the leading internationally-oriented agriculture and food universities in the world.

And so, that's a real calling card.

That also gives me the pleasure and the linkages and the network and the familyhood of Michigan State University.

I'm excited about the life I've lived in doing this field research and thank you very much.

(bright music) - I was always interested as a kid in airplanes, how things fly.

(plane roaring) In class, I was always drawing pictures of unusual shapes of airfoils or even weird spacecraft looking things.

You know, like, oh, this would look nice if somebody could make this.

(bright music) (plane roaring) If you look at how airplanes fly, you have flow of air over wings that generate the lift.

So that's aerodynamics and there's always a flow air involved.

So that's a part of fluid flow.

(bright music) We study fluid flow phenomenon and the reasons we study them because we like to understand it well enough so we can alter their behavior deliberately.

So we make models of these things, a wing, for example, and we put 'em in a water tunnel.

We look at its flow characteristics.

We look at its forces, lift, drag, we move it, we pitch it, and we see what happens to the flow around it.

The forces, how do they change?

Why do they change that way?

Why is that important?

Cause you learn how to fish propel themselves.

How do birds propel themselves?

How do they navigate themselves?

The discovery is really what drives us, like you're always asking why does it do this?

(bright music) David, on the digital delay generator, what parameters did you set for the frame rate?

When it comes to research in our lab, I typically have a very hands-off approach with my students.

I want them to make the discoveries on their own.

- The rep rate is at 20 Hertz with a delay time of 13 milliseconds.

- All of my students, I call them my academic children.

So it's like having your own kids being successful.

You're proud of them.

(bright music) Right now, we're working with researchers and collaborators at NASA Glenn to find a way to measure the temperature in this very volatile liquid cause the mechanism of heat transfer in space when you have micro gravity is fundamentally different compared to earth.

(bright music) For space travel, if you wanna go long mission, long distance, long duration in space, you need to solve this problem of storage tanks of these kind of fluids.

(bright music) I think my younger son has inherited some of my curiosity toward these aerospace systems.

He used to draw these intricate detailed drawings of aircraft.

And when he finished high school, he said that he wants to become an aerospace engineer.

(bright music) My goal is to have the new generation be better than me.

I want them to grow as a result of that process themselves and become mature researchers on their own.

It's very nice people at the MSU are recognize the efforts that I've made, which is great.

(bright music) - I grew up living near New York city.

There were a lot of distractions, music, and theater, and so forth.

I went to college with the idea of giving it a year.

If I didn't like college, I was gonna go to culinary school.

I was gonna become a chef.

(bright music) I was very interested in plants.

It was through a combination of learning about biology and chemistry with the help of some wonderful teachers who really thought integratively.

I ended up getting interested in biological chemistry.

(bright music) Plants are really the master chemists of the world.

It's very interesting that my lab ended up working in what we call natural products biochemistry.

So many of the flavors of food come from the metabolism that we're interested in.

The beautiful smells and taste of mint, a hoppy beer.

The flavors come from specialized metabolites.

(bright music) What fascinates me most is seeing the fingerprint of evolution in plant metabolism.

For example, by comparing the metabolism of the cultivated tomato from those that are wild, we can see how humans have cooperated with evolution to take the traits that are helpful to protect the plant from stress, from insects, from pathogenic microbes, and brought in the good flavors of tomato fruit and bred out the things that don't taste so good to human beings.

(bright music) There are a number of things that keep me excited about being at Michigan State.

One is the broad range of people interested in biology and chemistry.

- This is all of my protein that I harvested from yesterday.

- Oh, okay, wow.

This place has trained an enormous cross section of the people who are influential in plant biology.

Hey Jane, what you doing today?

- I am setting new crystal screens to see if we can get this protein to crystallize.

- My teaching philosophy is primarily learning by doing.

That is what experimental science is all about.

- So I have to optimize certain conditions to try to get the crystals to be a little bit bigger and that should facilitate diffraction a little bit more.

- Watching undergraduates decide what they love and pursuing those directions, those really are the things that one remembers and you know, kind of gets you a little misty thinking about it.

And that's just phenomenal.

Biology is amazing.

It is endlessly fascinating.

(bright music) - I think my love for physiology is based on the fact that physiology is how the body functions.

My senior year in college, I was fascinated by the neurophysiology content and I was fascinated by the cardiovascular content.

(bright music) When I got accepted at Loyola, it was at a time when there was gonna be a change from one faculty member to a different faculty member.

One day he put all the files out for admission to the graduate program.

And at the very top of that pile was my application and written in red across the first page in very large letters was reject, female problem, but they made the decision, well, we can't use her being a woman as an excuse to not let her in.

Let's go ahead and give her a try.

(bright music) Jump forward, when I was finishing the program, the person who was chair at the time and was one of the people who had said that reject, female problem.

He said, if every woman that applied to this program was a Sue Barman, I would have no problem filling the entire program with her.

(bright music) The very most simple way of describing what my research is is how does the brain control blood pressure?

And my main interest is actually recording the nerves that are controlling your blood pressure, dealing with the actual activity on the nerves going to the blood vessels and heart as opposed to just looking at the blood pressure.

One of the leading causes of death are cardiovascular problems, hypertension, heart disease, heart failure, even though I'm not directly studying disease states, we're studying something that's gonna help inform other people how to develop a new drug to treat this.

(bright music) One of my favorite courses that I've been teaching is a course that is called Neurobiology of Disease.

And I limit the class size.

Welcome to smoking cessation, guys.

The students write about a topic.

They can choose whatever disease they wanna write on.

I have had so many students say to me, this has been my favorite course.

I learned more, yet I never had to take an exam to memorize something.

Name something that might happen if you quit smoking that's gonna be a sign of withdrawal.

I love mentoring junior people.

- Fatigue.

- Irritability.

- You're hungry.

- Increased anxiety.

- Yeah, so that's one of the things, you know, because your body had been used to having a stimulus that made those things all be less.

They learn so much because I'm right there, I'm in their face, but we have a good time in the class.

That's really been a fun part of being here at Michigan State.

What I've always liked is being part of a community and to help.

They're a family to me.

(bright music) Today, if someone came up to me and said, I just saw in my application reject, female problem.

What should I do?

Prove to them that you're a female success.

(bright music) - I was always fascinated by how machines work.

You can program a machine and it could do this job and the other job.

Machines and ideas that work with the machines is what motivated me to become a mechanical engineer.

What would run the machine?

What is behind them that's making them work?

That I was more fascinated with.

(bright music) Computer algorithms are brains of any machine.

Algorithms make machines smarter.

At my lab here, my students are developing different kinds of algorithms.

- So the main idea is when the optimization is done, you can give not only one single solution, but a set of solutions to the decision makers.

- One thing we are working on our lab is to make engine control systems smarter.

When you pressed onto your accelerator, it speeds up, but there are a lot of things that's happening inside.

As a designer, you want your engine to perform in a very efficient way.

If I have so much load on my tire, because I'm going up the hill, how much fuel I should send?

If you do too low, then you are not going to go up with that speed that you want.

If you're just too high, then it's going to reduce the life of your engine.

So finding that nice balance can be achieved through one of our algorithms.

(bright music) So the red ones are simulated data and the blue one is the original data.

- [Student #2] Yes.

- Everybody has a different teaching philosophy.

On the teaching front, there I try to talk more about the reasons why we are doing this versus other way of solving the same problem.

It's really a rewarding profession.

You are building career of young people and you go through that learning process I have been doing for 30 years now, and it's never a boring experience.

(bright music) Being a University Distinguished Professor, I know that there was an external committee outside the College of Engineering who looked at what I've done over the years and thought I'm worthy of this.

That is a huge recognition to me.

(bright music) - Why are we teaching the way that we always taught?

Because it's the way we always taught.

(Joe chuckling) (bell ringing) Historically, teachers have always been upfront telling the students what they're supposed to know.

We're in rows.

You're asking me questions.

I respond.

Rather than students working in groups, trying to figure out something that's meaningful to them.

They actually wanna know what new questions you came up with.

It's a very different way of learning.

Rather than me telling you what you're supposed to know, you're working with other students in your class trying to figure out what's going on here.

This change isn't gonna happen overnight, but when we get students in schools experiencing this kind of learning, and then they see it, not only in K-12, but they also see it in college and they go out and be teachers themselves, this is where we're gonna get classrooms to change.

If we stick with it, we can actually change what the nature of education is, where kids are actually working together, trying to make sense of problems, of phenomena that they're really curious about, that they really wanna understand.

So what we're gonna be doing today is continuing our work on how to support high school students in writing scientific explanations.

I teach secondary science methods, which is a course that prepares students who are interested in teaching science at the middle school level or the high school level.

What really motivates me about working with young people, if it's K-12 students, if it's undergraduates, if it's graduate students?

Well, part of it is that they're young people, right?

They bring new ideas to you as well.

And they also question you.

- Do you wanna us to write like claim, evidence, reasoning?

Or do you want it to be like one thing?

- It's up to you.

And to me that's really exciting because that's the kind of learners I really wanna help develop.

(bright music) Understanding the world we live in is really important if we wanna get all kids really involved in understanding science.

You know, I never sought being a distinguished professor.

It wasn't something that motivated me.

I was always motivated in trying to support kids in, really, learning.

And so, receiving, this something I never thought of, right?

It was always that's that other guy over there.

And so for me, the value in it, I think it really recognizes the importance of the work that I'm trying to do to change education.

But it does show to me a recognition that this work is valuable and important.

And to me, because of that, it's quite an honor to get this distinction from MSU.

(bright music) - I had a science passion very early on.

When I was growing up, you could still get chemistry kits and I did a lot of experiments on my own.

(bright music) We were out in the country, myself and two brothers and a sister.

I was the pond scum kid.

We had these little books on microscopy and I would go down, scoop some pond scum, let it kind of grow and all of a sudden you can see paramecium and amoebas.

It was just teeming with life.

(bright music) My research area is theoretical and computational chemistry with a focus on biological systems and computer aided drug discovery.

One of the fascinations for me is I love math.

I love computers.

I love physics.

I can do all of it with this.

(bright music) We've had a focus for many years on computer aided drug design, and to try to develop methods to facilitate drug discovery.

This is a compound called Crixivan.

This was developed as a first-generation HIV inhibitor.

The ultimate goal is to efficiently and accurately predict compounds that could be good drug candidates.

(bright music) We're involved in quantum chemistry and how small molecules bind to receptors.

But you can talk about the receptors as being kind of a lock and key kind of thing.

So you take a protein target that is known to block the development of HIV disease.

And you can use the computer to try to optimize the interaction of potential drugs for this receptor.

So when you take the pill, it just makes a beeline for that receptor and blocks its ability to carry out the function it needs to propagate the HIV virus.

So then you could have a drug that would inhibit say the development of HIV or COVID-19.

(bright music) - [Lin] Is this a hydrogen bond right here?

- That's right.

Good eye, Lin.

I mean, it probably has the hydrogen bond between those two.

I love doing research and I just, there's nothing better than having a student get their degree.

It's incredibly rewarding and pleasant having 30 or 40 PhDs around the world.

(bright music) MSU, the environment here, infrastructure's really important if you wanna be successful, and MSU's got excellent infrastructure.

I've explored molecules and bio microsystems and I've traveled the world.

To be worthy of the title of University Distinguished Professor is a great honor and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

(bright music) (birds chirping) - I grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin.

So every day after the chores were over or even before, (Randall chuckling) I would run out in the woods and look at leaves, look at plants, (shovel crunching) dig holes in the ground.

(water trickling) When the spring snow melt would come, we would build dams and divert water.

There was always something to learn and to see.

And when you realize at some point later in your life that you can actually make a living studying and learning more about that stuff, it's enlightening and you think, wow, I can do this.

(bright music) It's like playing in the dirt and I'm a soil specialist, so it literally is playing in the dirt.

Every soil looks different.

As a physical geographer specializing in soils, we're interested in soil resources, geologic resources, and where are they?

Everything we have and utilize in our lives is either grown or mined.

If it's grown, we need to know more about soils.

If it's mined, then we need to know where the geologic resources are.

So as a geographer, I'm primarily interested in mapping things.

And because I'm a physical geographer, I'm interested in mapping the physical components of the landscape.

(bright music) (auger crunching) I really enjoy teaching in the field and seeing students really light up when they see something that they've learned about in a book or in class, and actually see it in the field and feel it and smell it, it is rewarding.

That's the typical color of the parent material in this area.

- Okay.

- We go from site to site and we have hand augers.

We can auger down to six or seven feet.

We'll look at the sediments, try to understand how they got there, what they are, how we might utilize them, and how we can recognize them again when we see them somewhere else.

(bright music) I think the most rewarding thing for me, with regard to working with students, is when they come back to me weeks, months, years later, and thank me for what they learned and tell me how what they've learned has enriched their life.

They understand what they're seeing better.

That's really fulfilling for me because it's something that you can carry with you your entire life.

To receive this honor, to receive the title of University Distinguished Professor is a dream come true for me.

I love this place.

So to receive an award from my peers at the place that I love is pretty special.

(Randall sobbing) (bright music)