Save Our Seas Foundation celebrates 20 years and announces a record 75 grants for 2023

In its 20th anniversary year, SOSF welcomes grant recipients working on the most pressing issues for sharks and rays. From raising the profile of rays to tackling climate change, its project leaders are leading the conservation charge.

Grant and Award Announcement

SAVE OUR SEAS FOUNDATION

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IMAGE: THIS YEAR, THE DIVERSE BUT OFTEN THREATENED COUSINS OF SHARKS - THE RAYS - WERE A FOCUS FOR MANY FUNDED PROJECTS, AND ENDANGERED SPECIES REMAIN A PRIORITY FOR ACTION. view more 

CREDIT: ARTWORK BY JOSIE THORNE | © SAVE OUR SEAS FOUNDATION

It’s a milestone year for the Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF). Twenty years has seen considerable changes in the shark and ray conservation sector, and many challenges remain to be tackled. As we’ve learnt more, we’ve realised just how complex our oceans are and just how deep we need to delve into the details if we’re going to ensure a sustainable and equitable future on this planet. But every year, the SOSF is heartened by the growing number of funding applications and the unflagging commitment of researchers and educators around the world to shark and ray conservation. If anything could ensure staying power beyond two decades for an organisation, it’s the energy provided by seeing the growth in the number and diversity of project leaders, project areas and innovative ideas. This year, several key themes have emerged as priorities that merit attention: young researchers, new coastlines, poorly understood species and under-funded regions New projects are diving into understanding and protecting the species-rich and highly threatened group called rays (sharks’ flattened relatives). Other projects are getting a handle on the scale of our human footprint, from the impact of undersea electromagnetic noise on the US coastline to gathering information about fisheries in Tunisia and India, and measuring how warmer and more acidic seas will affect the reproduction and growth of sharks. 

The local knowledge and historical anecdotes of fishing communities on the Kenyan coast are critical to the work of Victor Alati, a Small Grant recipient for 2023. Victor hopes to track how populations of the Critically Endangered halavi guitarfish have changed over time, gleaning information that will compare where they used to be found with their current abundance and distribution. Cyrus Rumisha, another grant recipient, is building capacity for local Kenyan and Tanzanian communities to identify and protect endangered mobulids (the manta and devil rays). Besides visiting markets and the sites where sharks are caught and brought ashore, Cyrus will be hosting training workshops, meetings and traditional dances to best engage and incorporate community participation. 

As our oceans warm and their chemistry changes, scientists are growing increasingly concerned about understanding how this will affect sharks and rays. Their thinking? We need to prepare to adapt conservation plans that are future-fit. Noémie Coulon is testing the impact of a warming and acidifying ocean, focusing on the developing embryos of small-spotted catsharks in the north-eastern Atlantic, from where she is based in Brittany, France. Alice Rogers is exploring how even in some of the most remote reaches of our planet, like Fiordland in the south-western corner of Aotearoa, New Zealand, the impact of climate change will still be felt. She is looking at how broadnose sevengill sharks might respond to changing salinity and temperatures, hoping to give these sharks the best shot at survival.  

The proliferation in applications to research the more frequently ignored ‘flat sharks’ is also an exciting development for 2023. Cynthia Awruch has a mystery to solve in Macquarie Harbour, Tasmania. Here, the endemic (found nowhere else on earth) Maugean skate is disappearing – and she is determined to understand how the impacts of mining, aquaculture and pollution might be affecting its reproduction. Filmmaker Danny Copeland is getting creative for angel sharks, producing a long-form documentary that celebrates the incredible work of researchers and conservationists who are bringing three species of these camouflaged rays back from the brink in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic. 

‘The range of projects supported this year spans such a diversity of important themes,’ says Dr James Lea, the SOSF’s chief executive officer. ‘It is exciting to see what growth and change can happen in 20 years, and the projects funded for 2023 are well placed to build on a solid legacy of conservation innovation.’

The Foundation continues to fund the SOSF D’Arros Research Centre in Seychelles, the SOSF Shark Education Centre in South Africa and the SOSF Shark Research Center in the USA. Its long-standing partners, the Bimini Biological Field Station Foundation, Manta Trust, North Coast Cetacean Society, Shark Spotters and The Acoustic Tracking Array Platform, all received renewed funding. Continuity, long-term monitoring and collaboration remain at the core of these relationships. 

‘Ensuring that a new generation of scientists, conservationists and educators are supported is essential to the longevity of the good work taking place across our oceans,’ says the Founder of the SOSF, His Excellency Abdulmohsen Abdulmalik Al-Sheikh. ‘Funding their work, especially when they are asking important questions about our future, is made more poignant in reflecting on our anniversary year.’

From searching for ‘lost sharks’ to gathering environmental DNA from sawfishes on the Amazon coast, understanding Indonesia’s thresher shark populations and saving the ‘rhino rays’ of Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, the 2023 project leader cohort is one to watch. To learn more and follow project news, visit the Project Leader story section here and follow the SOSF on social media. 

Fostering the next generation of conservation leaders means supporting early career scientists, and young educators and conservation practitioners from a variety of countries around the world.

Working in under-resourced and developing nations, and promoting work on challenging coastlines and often-ignored deeper reaches, has been a primary objective when looking at funding projects for 2023.

CREDIT

Artwork by Josie Thorne | © Save Our Seas Foundation

Family tree of ‘boring’ butterflies reveals they’re anything but

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

 

IMAGE: EVEN DISTANTLY RELATED EUPTYCHIINES CAN LOOK NEARLY IDENTICAL, WHICH HAS LED TO SEVERAL CASES OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY THAT HAVE ONLY JUST RECENTLY BEEN RESOLVED WITH THE HELP OF DNA ANALYSIS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY KEITH WILLMOTT

Walk a short distance through the Amazon Rainforest, and you might witness what look like dead leaves launch from the ground and fly off into the understory. These masters of disguise are euptychiines, one of the most diverse and least understood groups of butterflies in the American Tropics.

There are as many as 100 co-occurring euptychiine species in the rainforests of Peru and Brazil, but even the most seasoned butterfly experts have a hard time telling them apart.  

“They’re one of the groups that often get called ‘brown, boring butterflies,’” said André Freitas, a biology professor at the State University of Campinas in Brazil. “They aren’t very attractive to collectors or researchers, and even distantly related species can look very similar. The early naturalists had no way to accurately classify them.”

Freitas is a co-author on a new study that adds some much-needed definition to what has remained, up until now, a black hole of butterfly diversity. The German entomologist Jacob Hübner was the first to describe the group in the early 1800s, when he lumped the few species then known into a handful genera based on similar appearance.

Using DNA, Freitas and his colleagues show there are at least 70 Euptychiina genera, containing more than 500 species. Their results also suggest there are at least 130 unnamed species in the group awaiting scientific description.

The study is the result of a project more than a decade in the making, initially conceived by Keith Willmott, director of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History. In 2009, Willmott reached out to Freitas and other researchers who’d taken a stab at individually sorting through euptychiine butterflies piecemeal and proposed they instead combine their efforts.

Before researchers could make heads or tails of euptychiine diversity, they first needed a sense of just how many groups there were and how they were related to each other.

“The way people would typically work on this kind of problem would be to divide and conquer, but that doesn’t work for euptychiines, because there are very few unifying features among species that you can use to define groups,” Willmott said.

Instead, a coalition of international researchers focused on studying as many euptychiine species as they could lay their hands on. They examined more than 60,000 specimens from museums in Europe and North and South America and collected euptychiine butterflies throughout their range, from the foothills of the Andes in Ecuador to the Atlantic Forest in Southeastern Brazil.

In the process, they discovered more than 100 new species, many of which were hiding in plain sight, concealed by their close resemblance to each other.

“A recent example is a large butterfly that used to be known as Pseudodebis celia from western Ecuador, which turned out to be four separate species,” Willmott said. “These are big butterflies. It’s hard to imagine these kinds of species are still escaping detection.”

Not all euptychiines have evolved to blend in. Several species have bright blue scales or blazing orange eyespots, which might seem like it’d make them easy to classify. But closer inspection reveals these color patterns can be deceptive as well. Results of the study’s genetic analysis show, for example, that multiple, Euptychiines have transformed their wings into blue frescoes, making them appear superficially similar.

Mimicry is often the primary suspect when unrelated butterflies have a similar appearance. Predators learn to avoid species with toxic, bitter-tasting compounds, like Monarchs (Danaus plexippus). With a little false advertising, species that lack these compounds can still deter predators by copying the colors and patterns of genuinely toxic butterflies.

But according to Willmott, this likely isn’t the case for euptychiines. “As far as we know, they’re not unpalatable or protected against predators in any way. It looks like mimicry, but there’s really no basis for it. It's a fascinating mystery that needs study.”

Blue euptychiines can play further tricks on butterfly experts – sometimes, the color is only present in some individuals of a given species.

“In most cases, the males are colorful, and the females are brown,” said Marianne Espelend, a curator at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity and lead author on the study.

This mismatch has led to several cases of mistaken identity. A brown species from French Guiana described in 2012 was later determined to be the incognito female half of a well-known species discovered a century earlier. This triggered inspection of other blue species, and discovery of similar problems.

The new classification provided by this study will help researchers pin down the exact identity of familiar euptychiines and shorten the long queue of species in the group that have yet to be given a scientific name.

It also sets the stage for scientific forays into other aspects of euptychiine biology that experts are just now beginning to understand, said Freitas, reciting a litany of unknowns that can now be thoroughly investigated.

“We know that several species have scales that release scents to attract females, but we have no idea what types of chemicals are involved; the males of some species make an audible clicking sound, but we don’t know how they do it; and I can count on my hand the number of times I’ve been able to find euptychiine caterpillars in the wild, of which we know very little.”

According to Espeland, the study is a rough but robust sketch of butterflies that are among the Amazon’s most abundant and overlooked inhabitants. “They’ve been largely ignored because people didn’t think they were interesting, historically, but I find them really beautiful. We now have a framework we can use to learn more about them.”

The authors published their study in the journal Systematic Entomology.

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JOURNAL

Systematic Entomology

DOI

10.1111/syen.12590 

ARTICLE TITLE

Combining target enrichment and Sanger sequencing data to clarify the systematics of the diverse Neotropical butterfly subtribe Euptychiina (Nymphalidae, Satyrinae)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Apr-2023

Cancer-causing chemicals detected in toys and headphones

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GREEN SCIENCE POLICY INSTITUTE

Cancer-causing chlorinated paraffins are still used in a wide range of everyday products sold in North America despite their known health harm and being banned in Canada for a decade, according to a new peer-reviewed study in Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts. The researchers detected short-chain chlorinated paraffins in more than 85 percent of products tested, including headphones, plastic toys, clothing, personal care products, and indoor paints purchased in Canada.

“We were astonished to find chlorinated paraffins in these types of products. Any parent would shudder at the thought of their baby chewing on a toy filled with cancer-causing chemicals,” said co-author Hui Peng, an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. “We need to protect our children and the wider public from these harmful substances.” 

Short-chain chlorinated paraffins cause cancer in laboratory rats and mice–specifically targeting the liver, thyroid, and kidney. Though there are no human studies, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies them as possible human carcinogens. They also build up in our bodies, food webs, and environment. 

In 2012, the Government of Canada determined that “all chlorinated paraffins are considered harmful with respect to human health” and banned their manufacture, new use, and import. In 2017, short-chain chlorinated paraffins were listed for elimination under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.

Nonetheless, their total global production is huge– more than 1 million tons per year– and is increasing.  These toxic chemicals are used in everyday products as flame retardants, plasticizers and lubricants. Until now, many of their specific uses in products were not known to scientists and the public. 

The highest concentrations of chlorinated paraffins in this study were detected in headphones and computer wires. The next highest concentrations were in toys and toy packaging. These uses can lead to human exposure through direct hand contact, mouthing of products by young children, and through contaminated dust making its way from hands to mouths. 

Since the tested products were largely manufactured for an international market, chlorinated paraffins are likely also found in similar products in the U.S., Europe, and beyond.

“Chlorinated paraffins are very harmful and widespread in everyday products, but they are flying under the radar,” said co-author Arlene Blum, executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute. “Many of their uses are unnecessary and should be stopped immediately for healthier people and ecosystems.”

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JOURNAL

Environmental Science Processes & Impacts

DOI

10.1039/D2EM00494A 

ARTICLE TITLE

Widespread presence of chlorinated paraffins in consumer products

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

11-Apr-2023

New findings that map the universe’s cosmic growth support Einstein’s theory of gravity

Research by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration has culminated in a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of the universe.

Reports and Proceedings

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS USED THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE TO CREATE THIS NEW MAP OF THE DARK MATTER. THE ORANGE REGIONS SHOW WHERE THERE IS MORE MASS; PURPLE WHERE THERE IS LESS OR NONE. THE TYPICAL FEATURES ARE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF LIGHT YEARS ACROSS. THE WHITISH BAND SHOWS WHERE CONTAMINATING LIGHT FROM DUST IN OUR MILKY WAY GALAXY, MEASURED BY THE PLANCK SATELLITE, OBSCURES A DEEPER VIEW. THE NEW MAP USES LIGHT FROM THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND (CMB) ESSENTIALLY AS A BACKLIGHT TO SILHOUETTE ALL THE MATTER BETWEEN US AND THE BIG BANG. “IT’S A BIT LIKE SILHOUETTING, BUT INSTEAD OF JUST HAVING BLACK IN THE SILHOUETTE, YOU HAVE TEXTURE AND LUMPS OF DARK MATTER, AS IF THE LIGHT WERE STREAMING THROUGH A FABRIC CURTAIN THAT HAD LOTS OF KNOTS AND BUMPS IN IT,” SAID SUZANNE STAGGS, DIRECTOR OF ACT AND PRINCETON'S HENRY DEWOLF SMYTH PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS. “THE FAMOUS BLUE AND YELLOW CMB IMAGE IS A SNAPSHOT OF WHAT THE UNIVERSE WAS LIKE IN A SINGLE EPOCH, ABOUT 13 BILLION YEARS AGO, AND NOW THIS IS GIVING US THE INFORMATION ABOUT ALL THE EPOCHS SINCE.” view more 

CREDIT: ACT COLLABORATION

For millennia, humans have been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos.

Unlike ancient philosophers imagining the universe’s origins, modern cosmologists use quantitative tools to gain insights into the universe’s evolution and structure. Modern cosmology dates back to the early 20th century, with the development of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Now, researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration have created a groundbreaking new image that reveals the most detailed map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky, extending deep into the cosmos. What’s more, it confirms Einstein’s theory of how massive structures grow and bend light, over the entire 14-billion-year life span of the universe. 

“We have mapped the invisible dark matter across the sky to the largest distances, and clearly see features of this invisible world that are hundreds of millions of light-years across, says Blake Sherwin, professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a group of ACT researchers. “It looks just as our theories predict.”

Despite making up 85% of the universe and influencing its evolution, dark matter has been hard to detect because it doesn’t interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. As far as we know dark matter only interacts with gravity. 

To track it down, the more than 160 collaborators who have built and gathered data from the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the high Chilean Andes observe light emanating following the dawn of the universe’s formation, the Big Bang—when the universe was only 380,000 years old. Cosmologists often refer to this diffuse light that fills our entire universe as the “baby picture of the universe,” but formally, it is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

The team tracks how the gravitational pull of large, heavy structures including dark matter warps the CMB on its 14-billion-year journey to us, like how a magnifying glass bends light as it passes through its lens.

“We’ve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang,” says Mathew Madhavacheril, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe, and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what you’d expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einstein's theory of gravity.” 

Sherwin adds, “our results also provide new insights into an ongoing debate some have called ‘The Crisis in Cosmology,’”explaining that this crisis stems from recent measurements that use a different background light, one emitted from stars in galaxies rather than the CMB. These have produced results that suggest the dark matter was not lumpy enough under the standard model of cosmology and led to concerns that the model may be broken. However, the team’s latest results from ACT were able to precisely assess that the vast lumps seen in this image are the exact right size. 

“When I first saw them, our measurements were in such good agreement with the underlying theory that it took me a moment to process the results,” says Cambridge Ph.D. student Frank Qu, part of the research team. “It will be interesting to see how this possible discrepancy between different measurements will be resolved.”

“The CMB lensing data rivals more conventional surveys of the visible light from galaxies in their ability to trace the sum of what is out there,” says Suzanne Staggs, director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. “Together, the CMB lensing and the best optical surveys are clarifying the evolution of all the mass in the universe.” 

“When we proposed this experiment in 2003, we had no idea the full extent of information that could be extracted from our telescope,” says Mark Devlin, the Reese Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and the deputy director of ACT. “We owe this to the cleverness of the theorists, the many people who built new instruments to make our telescope more sensitive, and the new analysis techniques our team came up with.”

ACT, which operated for 15 years, was decommissioned in September 2022. Nevertheless, more papers presenting results from the final set of observations are expected to be submitted soon, and the Simons Observatory will conduct future observations at the same site, with a new telescope slated to begin operations in 2024. This new instrument will be capable of mapping the sky almost 10 times faster than ACT.

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Northern Chile, supported by the National Science Foundation, operated from 2007-2022. The project is led by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania -- Director Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, Deputy Director Mark Devlin at Penn -- with 160 collaborators at 47 institutions.

CREDIT

Mark Devlin, Deputy Director of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Reese Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania

Research by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration has culminated in a groundbreaking new map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky, reaching deep into the cosmos. Findings provide further support to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which has been the foundation of the standard model of cosmology for more than a century, and offer new methods to demystify dark matter.

CREDIT

Debra Kellner

Research by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration has culminated in a groundbreaking new map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky, reaching deep into the cosmos. Findings provide further support to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which has been the foundation of the standard model of cosmology for more than a century, and offer new methods to demystify dark matter.

CREDIT

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda, Simons Foundation

Learn more at https://act.princeton.edu/. This research will be presented at "Future Science with CMB x LSS," a conference running from April 10-14 at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (AST-0408698, AST-0965625 and AST-1440226 for the ACT project, as well as awards PHY-0355328, PHY-0855887 and PHY-1214379), Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a Canada Foundation for Innovation award. Team members at the University of Cambridge were supported by the European Research Council.

From National Magazine Award-winning writer Richard Conniff: "Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion"

How scientists saved humanity from the deadliest infectious diseases— and what we can do to prepare ourselves for future epidemics.

Book Announcement

THE MIT PRESS

 

IMAGE: COVER ART TO ENDING EPIDEMICS. view more 

CREDIT: THE MIT PRESS. 2023.

How scientists saved humanity from the deadliest infectious diseases—and what we can do to prepare ourselves for future epidemics.

After the unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be hard to imagine a time not so long ago when deadly diseases were a routine part of life. It is harder still to fathom that the best medical thinking at that time blamed
these diseases on noxious miasmas, bodily humors, and divine dyspepsia. This all began to change on a day in April 1676, when a little-known Dutch merchant described bacteria for the first time. Beginning on that day in Delft and ending on the day in 1978 when the smallpox virus claimed its last known victim, Ending Epidemics explains how we came to understand and prevent many of our worst infectious diseases—and double average life expectancy.

Ending Epidemics tells the story behind “the mortality revolution,” the dramatic transformation not just in our longevity, but in the character of childhood, family life, and human society. Richard Conniff recounts the moments of inspiration and innovation, decades of dogged persistence, and, of course, periods of terrible suffering that stir individuals, institutions, and governments to act in the name of public health. Stars of medical science feature in this drama, but lesser-known figures also play a critical role. And while the history of germ theory is central to this story, Ending Epidemics also describes the
importance of everything from sanitation improvements and the discovery of antibiotics to the development of the microscope and the syringe—technologies we now take for granted.

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer for Smithsonian magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications, and a past Guggenheim Fellow. Among his many books are The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth; Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals; The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide; and, most recently, House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth. Conniff has been a commentator on NPR's Marketplace and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Some interesting facts taken from the book:
• Infectious disease prevention is the main reason our average lifespan has doubled since the 1800s. This is, as one historian recently put it, “arguably the most important single historical change of the last two hundred years,” and also the least recognized.

• The catch-22 of vaccines and, in truth, of all infectious disease discoveries is that they save us from diseases—and then cause us to forget the diseases from which they have saved us. And when we forget, we become casual about prevention.

• Two women, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, underpaid, working in their spare time, and in the face of skepticism from male counterparts, developed the first successful vaccine against whooping cough, a disease that was then killing 4000 American children on average per year. Their work has largely been forgotten—but it continues to save tens of thousands of lives a year.

• The original description of a bacteria and a virus—the two leading causes of infectious disease—both occurred, at an interval of 200 years, in Delft, a small Dutch city otherwise best known as the home of Johannes Vermeer.

• The campaign against infectious disease isn’t just about developed nations, nor is it just a story in the past tense. In recent decades, global public health programs have boosted uptake of six basic childhood vaccines from less than 5 percent of children in many countries to 86 percent or better in almost all countries, with a corresponding reduction in disease.
 

Endorsements:

“A taut interrogation of the centuries of labor that protected us from pathogens, a bitter lament for how
quickly we abandoned our awareness of risk, and a stirring call for a new generation of disease fighters
to take up the battle. Ending Epidemics drives home the post-COVID lesson of the peril of
complacency.”--Maryn McKenna, author of Big Chicken, Superbug and Beating Back the Devil; Senior Fellow, Center
for the Study of Human Health, Emory University

“Ending Epidemics is an important book, deeply and lovingly researched, written with precision and
elegance, a sweeping story of centuries of human battle with infectious disease. Conniff is a brilliant
historian with a jeweler's eye for detail. I think the book is a masterpiece.”--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer

“A timely and highly readable account of humanity's struggles and progress in the fight against
infectious disease. Set across three centuries, from the birth of immunology to the antibiotic revolution,
Conniff draws on the personal stories behind these great medical and scientific leaps. A fascinating
read with powerful lessons for tackling today's—and indeed future—epidemics.”--Peter Piot, Former Director and Handa Professor of Global Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; author of No Time to Lose and AIDS: Between Science and Politics

“A dramatic, page-turning account of the grim, never-ending war waged by infections on humankind.
And how we fought back, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.”--Paul A. Offit, Professor of Pediatrics, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; author of You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccinations, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

Unique statewide survey provides insight into cancer-related knowledge, beliefs and behaviors of Hispanic residents

Analysis provides guidance for future tailored cancer screening messaging and prevention strategies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

REGENSTRIEF INSTITUTE

INDIANAPOLIS – Cancer is the leading cause of death for Hispanics in the U.S. and in the state of Indiana. Funded by the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, a survey of adult Hispanic Indiana residents, conducted by researchers from Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University, presents a snapshot of Hispanics' cancer-related knowledge, beliefs and behaviors, providing guidance for the future development of tailored cancer screening messaging and prevention strategies.

Several survey findings were unexpected, and the researchers believe merit further exploration. These include:  

• Urban and rural Hispanic residents did not differ in their cancer knowledge, beliefs or behaviors. 
• U.S.-born Hispanic individuals with higher income and education more often believed they were likely to develop cancer and to worry about getting cancer. 
• While educational level was positively associated with knowledge, it did not correlate with adherence to screening guidelines, with the exception of cervical cancer. 
• Most survey respondents were unable to accurately identify ages to begin screening for breast, colorectal, or lung cancer, which also has been observed in non-Hispanic populations. 

“Our findings could help guide both future research and public health outreach targeting high-risk groups, in this case Hispanics,” said Regenstrief Institute Center for Health Services Research Director David Haggstrom, M.D., MAS, corresponding and senior author of the new study. “We want to reach all age groups in the Hispanic community with cancer screening approaches to reduce the burden of disease. Given that cancer is of greater incidence and prevalence among older individuals, this is an audience that we especially want to learn more about, so we can promote cancer screening among them.”

The average age of the Hispanic population surveyed was 53 years. Approximately 11 percent of respondents self-identified as Indigenous or Mestizo, 6 percent as multi-racial and 1.5 percent as Black. Approximately 52 percent of survey respondents were male.

The online survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented in-person recruitment challenges. Prospective survey respondents were recruited via television, social media outreach and the Facebook pages of Hispanic community organizations.

“Using non-traditional approaches, we tapped into a lot of different groups that make up the Hispanic community including first- and second-generation immigrants, a wide distribution of income, education and ages as well as representatives of the approximately one fourth of the Hispanic population that does not appear in usual sampling frameworks like driver’s license lists,” said study co-author Gerardo Maupomé, BDS, MSc, PhD. “Conducting this survey was particularly challenging because we knew that many in the Hispanic community would not be easy to find unless you knew how to get ahold of them.

“Collecting data from hard-to-reach populations within the Hispanic community, we expanded considerably the body of knowledge about what are the risk factors and the beliefs and the behaviors that modify cancer experience.”

Approximately half of the 1,520 respondents completed the survey in Spanish. Survey takers identified their nation of birth as United States (60 percent); Mexico (14 percent), Cuba (7 percent), Puerto Rico (6 percent) or another country (13 percent).

“Hispanics residing in Indiana are somewhat representative of Hispanics residing in the Midwest, although not necessarily representative of Hispanics residing in other areas of the United States due, in part, to variation in immigration patterns,” said Dr. Haggstrom. “To our knowledge, this is the only data collection and analysis of Hispanics residing in the Midwest that enables drilling down on the associations in this population of knowledge and beliefs with behaviors.”

Dr. Maupomé added, “the Midwest and the South have in the past 10 to 15 years become what is called a gateway destination. The number of recent Hispanic arrivals is noticeable because there were not that many to begin with. What we’ve seen in our study of Indiana is the fine-grained stages of the trajectory of integration that occur, distinct from the traditional Hispanic areas of the U.S. – e.g., Southern California, Texas and Florida.”

This study was funded by the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Cancer-related knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors among Hispanic/Latino residents of Indiana” is published in Cancer Medicine. 

Authors:

Manuel R. Espinoza-Gutarra 1, Susan M. Rawl 2 3, Gerardo Maupome 4, Heather A. O'Leary 5, Robin E. Valenzuela 6, Caeli Malloy 3, Lilian Golzarri-Arroyo 7, Erik Parker 7, Laura Haunert 3 8, and David A. Haggstrom 9 10 11. 

Affiliations:

1Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA. 

2Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

3Indiana University School of Nursing, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

4Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

5Northeast Ohio Medical University, Rootstown, Ohio, USA. 

6Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. 

7School of Public Health, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. 

8Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

9Center for Health Services Research, Regenstrief Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

10VA HSR&D Center for Health Information and Communication, Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. 

11Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

About David A. Haggstrom, M.D., MAS

In addition to his role as director of the Regenstrief Institute’s Center for Health Services Research, David A. Haggstrom, M.D., MAS, is a core investigator for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Center for Health Information and Communication, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center. He is also Sam Regenstrief Scholar in Health Sciences Research and an associate professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine and a member of the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.

About Gerardo Maupomé, BDS, MSc, PhD

Gerardo Maupomé, BDS, MSc, PhD, is associate dean of research at IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and a Regenstrief Institute Affiliated Scientist. He is associate director of the Community Health Partnership program within the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He has been recognized as a leader in the Hispanic community by La Plaza, Inc. and the Indiana Latino Institute, the largest Hispanic community organization in Indiana.

About Regenstrief Institute

Founded in 1969 in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Institute is a local, national and global leader dedicated to a world where better information empowers people to end disease and realize true health. A key research partner to Indiana University, Regenstrief and its research scientists are responsible for a growing number of major healthcare innovations and studies. Examples range from the development of global health information technology standards that enable the use and interoperability of electronic health records to improving patient-physician communications, to creating models of care that inform practice and improve the lives of patients around the globe.

Sam Regenstrief, a nationally successful entrepreneur from Connersville, Indiana, founded the institute with the goal of making healthcare more efficient and accessible for everyone. His vision continues to guide the institute’s research mission.

About IU School of Medicine
IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

About Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health 
Located on the IUPUI and Fort Wayne campuses, the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health is committed to advancing the public’s health and well-being through education, innovation and leadership. The Fairbanks School of Public Health is known for its expertise in biostatistics, epidemiology, cancer research, community health, environmental public health, global health, health policy and health services administration. 

 

 

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JOURNAL

Cancer Medicine

DOI

10.1002/cam4.5466 

ARTICLE TITLE

Cancer-related knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors among Hispanic/Latino residents of Indiana

Diverse teams survive longer when facing environmental changes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

As business ventures grow, they must navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by environmental changes. In a new study, researchers examined the interplay of environmental change and the internal and external conditions governing a venture’s founding. For businesses founded in dynamic environments, they found that assembling more functionally diverse founding teams lead to longer survival when facing increasingly uncertain environments, while functionally homogeneous teams — those with relatively few distinct roles and viewpoints — do better when environments become more predictable.

The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Stanford University, and INSEAD. It is published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in a special issue entitled “Environmental Change, Strategic Entrepreneurial Action, and Success.”

“Predicting the course of environmental change is difficult, but entrepreneurs who can synchronize their predictions with their decisions about team composition perform better,” suggests D. Carrington Motley, Entrepreneurship Instructor at CMU’s Tepper School of Business, who led the study.

Prior studies on the effect of environmental change on business ventures have examined the role of the impact of recent events. They have not explored how the relationship between recent environmental change and performance outcomes depends on ventures’ past, including environmental conditions when the firm was founded.

“If environmental conditions at founding have a lasting influence on ventures’ internal processes, and recent environmental conditions determine the effectiveness of these processes, it is crucial for our theories of environmental change to account for both periods,” explains Charles E. Eesley, Associate Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, who coauthored the study.

To address this matter, the study integrated research on the persistence of founding conditions with research on the effects of environmental change. Researchers surveyed more than 140,000 Stanford University alumni to produce a dataset of more than 1,000 entrepreneurs who founded ventures between 1960 and 2011; the ventures represented 19 industries, from agriculture to energy and utilities. Respondents’ self-reported data were verified by cross referencing their information with lists of public and private companies.

The survey assessed the length of time ventures survived and whether ventures achieved positive liquidity events (e.g., underwent an observed initial public offering or a merger or acquisition). It also asked founders about the functional roles present on their founding teams (e.g., sales and marketing, general administration, operations, finance).

Teams that are functionally diverse have members who occupy a range of roles and have a broader focus, attending to such areas as sales, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. They also seek out and exchange large amounts of information and debate a wide range of perspectives because many viewpoints are represented.

The interaction of high environmental dynamism — the degree to which environmental changes are unpredictable for firms’ decision makers — at founding and a functionally diverse founding team helped ventures survive longer when environmental dynamism increased over the lifetime of the venture, the study found. However, the same founding conditions resulted in a decreased likelihood of positive exit when environmental dynamism increased over the lifetime of the venture.

Among the study’s limitations, the authors note that ventures created by Stanford alumni may not be representative of ventures in general. Also, data were collected at one point in time and thus did not follow the ventures contemporaneously. Finally, based on the data used, the study produced only indirect evidence of the relationship between the environmental dynamism at founding and a venture’s internal processes.

“Our findings highlight the importance of firms developing capabilities to enable flexibility in decision-making processes, which are often inflexible, which limits firms’ ability to take advantage of unique opportunities provided by environmental change,” notes Wesley Koo, Assistant Professor of Strategy, who coauthored the study.

The research was funded by Sequoia Capital, the Kauffman Foundation, Stanford University School of Engineering, and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

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JOURNAL

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

DOI

10.1002/sej.1461 

ARTICLE TITLE

Born into chaos: How founding conditions shape whether ventures survive or thrive when experiencing environmental change