All in the Family

“My homework was in English, so she couldn’t sit down and help me,” recalls Lora Medina, whose father passed away in his native Dominican Republic. “She was an involved parent in my education, but that was taken away from her.

“Still, she would always tell us whenever she got out of work, ‘make sure you are eating the books.’” 

Lora Medina moved from New Jersey to Providence, from Highlander Charter School to the Community College of Rhode Island, all while improving his English skills and working towards a life as a scientific researcher. 

“I went into ninth grade not knowing any English at all, but by the next grade I was having conversations,” he recalls. “By the time I graduated, there were still some skills missing, particularly in math and science. CCRI was the only option, but I spent two years there for free and I did it.” 

While at URI, Lora Medina began one of his first research experiences through the Consortium’s  Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship , working with  Dr. Anabela Maia , associate professor of Biology,  Dr. Sally Hamouda , formerly assistant professor of Computer Science and Information Systems, and  Anna Cano-Morales , interim vice president of External Relations & Diversity Equity and Inclusion, all at Rhode Island College.

The then undergraduate chose to examine the prevalence of bullying in STEM fields throughout higher education, familiarizing himself with the inner workings of academia and how merit-based systems exclude minoritized groups from developing science knowledge.

“I first had to understand how academia worked as a sector,” he says.” What’s the difference between an associate and assistant professor? What does a dean do? Then, I had to learn the more granular aspects of how abusive work environments can happen.

“Working with Dr. Maia, I was being asked to think, and that does a lot for a student. My time at RIC was critical in developing my research voice and understanding how to conduct research in a systematic way.” 

Now, Lora Medina is working with  Dr. Jannelle Couret , assistant professor of Biological Sciences at URI, to examine the inclusivity of case studies created by the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (NCCST). The peer-reviewed case studies are used by high school and university teachers in STEM fields to convey basic scientific concepts and how they can apply to real-world situations. 

But are these open-access materials representing minoritized groups in an asset-based light? According to Lora Medina’s research so far, not often. 

“We’ve found that there’s not only a lack of representation, but folks of color were often depicted as stereotypes,” he explains. “I remember a case study about farming. Farmers in the U.S. were depicted as performing an honorable job versus Latino farmers in Brazil who were described as peasants.” 

Lora Medina and Couret developed a coding program by which they could quantitatively examine NTSA’s entire library of over 800 case studies. They hope to publish a manuscript on their findings sometime this summer. 

“These materials are used by everyone,” Lora Medina says. “Just imagine the indoctrinating effect they can have by introducing bias to emerging scientific sectors and simply not analyzing the ways in which these biases manifest themselves in the Western World.

“We are the first ones doing this kind of rigorous analysis of these materials and will come up with findings that are extremely problematic. My internal fear is that reviewers argue some kind of internal bias because I am a racial minority, but the numbers speak for themselves.” 

In the meantime, Lora Medina and Couret’s team are also researching safer and less labor-intensive ways to control populations of Culiseta melanura, a local mosquito species found throughout the East Coast and Midwest. Municipalities across New England traditionally control mosquitos, and the deadly viruses they carry, by spraying insecticides in areas where the pests breed, namely marshes or ponds.

For Lora Medina, the research is especially important as family members in the Dominican Republic have suffered from Dengue, a mosquito-borne virus that infects up to 400 million people worldwide every year. 

“I grew up in Moca, a little rural area outside of Santiago, and I had a bunch of family members constantly being reinfected,” he says. “Every time reinfection happened a person would just get worse and worse.” 

Ultimately, Lora Medina credits Couret and Maia for sustaining his desire to mentor students from underrepresented groups as they pursue degrees in STEM fields. 

“When Dr. Couret first approached me to become a graduate student, I rejected it,” he says. “We often feel like we have to be overqualified, and I didn’t think I could do it. But she laid out the work I did as an undergraduate and said, ‘you’re already doing this at a graduate level.’

“I hope to be that figure in higher education that allows everyone the opportunity to think and be problem solvers.”

“We are not a big fishing family, and it had easily been a decade since my dad Ben went last,” says Cote, who’s conducting her work under Dr. Anabela Maia, associate professor of Biology at Rhode Island College. “They didn’t know what fish to look for, so I was mainly explaining what fish to catch and getting frustrated when we caught the wrong species.

“They became my fishing buddies.” 

Cote is focusing on two species: Scup, a commercially available fish landed in ports throughout the Eastern Seaboard, and Atlantic silverside, a tiny forager that is often a meal for bigger fish. Why? To see if these fish will either migrate or die decline in the face of rising water temperatures, or simply adjust. 

“These planktivorous fish are such a huge part of Rhode Island ecosystems,” says Cote, a North Smithfield, RI native. “With global ocean temperatures projected to increase up to two degrees Celsius over the next decade, it is important to see how that would affect us locally.” 

Fish like scup and silverside are ectothermic, meaning the temperature of the water in which they live regulates their own body temperature, and thus the energy they will expend at any given time to survive. Fish acclimated to colder waters, for example, slow down during winter months, but do not die. 

Any change in water temperature, however, could alter species’ natural habitats, potentially forcing fish like scup and silverside farther north if waters in the bay are too warm on average. 

After catching them at locations throughout Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island’s south shore, Cote transported her fish to Maia’s aquatic lab at RIC for testing via a process called respirometry, a technique by which scientists measure how much oxygen a marine species consumes in response to environmental changes. 

A fish consuming more oxygen than normal might be working harder to support basic life functions, leading to a change in their habitat. But how does one know if species such as Scup or Atlantic silverside are adapting or just barely hanging on? Measure their resting metabolism versus the maximum in a given water temperature. 

“With higher temperatures, you would expect to see higher metabolism rates because the fish are spending more energy doing basic life processes,” says Cote. “Then they can’t do much of anything else.” 

In the Maia lab, Cote acclimatized the fish in tanks filled with ocean water at both 18 and 22 degrees Celsius. Then, Cote placed them in a giant green tub to measure their oxygen levels as well as metabolic rates. In order to test their maximum metabolism, the RIC graduate student had to “exercise” the scup and silverside. 

“Exercising is to get them going to get the maximum metabolic rate,” she says. “I chase them with a net, so you do feel a bit bad.” 

Cote ultimately found that both species had trouble adjusting to the increased water temperatures, presenting her findings at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology’s annual meeting this past January. Now, the focus is finishing her thesis for graduation later this year. 

She thinks, however, that her family will keep fishing. 

“My dad keeps saying now, ‘I’m going to go fishing and get my recreational permit,’ so I think [the research experience] was worth it in the end.”