Research

Nearly a half century after a Case Western Reserve faculty member helped discover the fossil of humankind’s earliest ancestor, Lucy, two more of the university’s scholars have played pivotal roles in identifying the bones of a far older species.

Adjunct Professor Yohannes Haile-Selassie and Armington Professor Beverly Saylor were leaders of international teams involved in the discovery and then dating of Australopithecus anamensis, a species appearing to precede the previously discovered fossil by six centuries.

Haile-Selassie, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, discovered the cranium after a local worker at the site in Ethiopia found a piece of its upper jaw. Saylor’s team, in turn, conducted a range of analyses to determine that the species lived about 3.8 million years ago, in an area that had a lake—and, at times, lava.

Said Saylor: “Incredible exposures and the volcanic layers that episodically blanketed the land surface and lake floor allowed us to map out this varied landscape and how it changed over time.”

Dustin Tyler is on a mission to discover how to make humans more capable—and technology more human.

And the judges of a $10 million global competition want to give him the chance.

His team’s application is one of 77 selected to advance in the Avatar XPrize, an international contest in which participants work to create a system that can convey human presence to another location in real time.

A Case Western Reserve professor of biomedical engineering, Tyler already has led restoration of a sense of touch through a prosthetic hand—and, in turn, perception of pressure. The former allowed a husband to feel his wife’s hand, while the latter gave a grandfather the chance to pick up his granddaughter safely. And, recently, his team’s work allows an individual to control their prosthesis like it is their hand—just by thinking about it.

He’s since formed the university’s Human Fusions Institute, which aims to enable “the human mind to transcend the barriers of the body” via neural interfaces, and now is working to advance to the XPrize’s semifinals, to be announced in April 2021.

No matter the outcome, the institute’s efforts will continue.

"Our capability is no longer limited to the barriers of our skin," Tyler said. "We can extend our sense of self through technology and have shared human experiences at an entirely new level."

After research trips to Cyprus and Ethiopia in the spring, Elizabeth Bolman planned to deliver a lecture in Egypt about her two decades of work at four holy Coptic (Egyptian Christian) sites.

But like so much else in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended her travels and turned her in-person appearance into an online presentation—except hers reached more than 700 people around the world.

Speaking from her Northeast Ohio home, Bolman detailed how the collaboration among Egyptian and U.S. organizations yielded new knowledge and broad appreciation of the small sect’s cultural history and influence.

Their documentation and preservation work “revealed treasures that had not been seen for centuries and were therefore unknown to scholars of the larger medieval world,” explained Bolman, chair of the Department of Art History and Art, which this year received a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its art history doctoral program with Cleveland Museum of Art. “Now, they are making significant contributions to the body of knowledge about medieval art—and adding four jewels of world heritage.”

When Northeast Ohio’s leading researchers came together to attack Alzheimer’s, federal officials took notice.

Defeating the devastating disease requires more than specialists in brain health and aging; it demands experts in data, drug development, education and outreach too.

After all, the disease afflicts one of every 10 people in the U.S. aged 65 or older. And its devastation affects millions more—caregivers battling against relentless mental losses, adult children no longer recognized by their parents, and grandchildren who never know family members as they really were.

But when clinicians and scientists from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, the MetroHealth System and University Hospitals collaborate, the potential for progress soars exponentially.

Leaders at the National Institute for Aging were impressed enough to award a $4.2 million grant, and formal designation as an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. It’s the first in Ohio, and follows joint centers launched with universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

“Alzheimer’s cuts across all ethnicities and all socioeconomic classes,” said Jonathan Haines, chair of the university’s Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and leader of the center’s Data Management and Statistics Core. “[Northeast Ohio’s] diverse urban and rural population, combined with detailed genetic and clinical information, and the wealth of additional data from electronic medical records, means this new Cleveland center is uniquely positioned to contribute significantly to the national research agenda.”

Everyone wins when released prisoners get jobs.

They can contribute to the economy, pay their share of taxes and, perhaps most important, dramatically reduce the likelihood they will be incarcerated again.

But for decades, a single box on application forms served as a boulder-sized obstacle to employment.

It required disclosure of criminal convictions, which often ended consideration of the candidate before the process even began.

Since Hawaii first passed a law to “ban the box” in 1998, another 34 states have followed suit. But the approach never reached the federal level until last year, when Weatherhead School of Management’s Daniel Shoag helped convince Congress of its merits.

Research co-authored by the economics faculty member informed a bill to remove the question from government and government contractor hiring practices—and when academic critics argued against the measure, Shoag and his colleagues wrote directly to lawmakers. The “Fair Chance Act” became law late in 2019—and takes effect in December 2021.

As Shoag said, “This is a great example of how research can inform the legislative process.”

The immediate dangers of lead poisoning for children are well-documented. But university researchers’ deep dive into two decades of Northeast Ohio data now shows that effects extend far into adulthood.

A team from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences’ Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development found these so-called “downstream” consequences for affected individuals include increased involvement in the juvenile justice system, adult incarceration and homelessness.

In addition, the researchers—led by principal investigators Claudia Coulton, a Distinguished University Professor and co-director of the center, and Rob Fischer, an associate professor at the Mandel School—found stark racial and economic disparities among their sample.

Black children were disproportionately more likely to have lead poisoning than their white counterparts, and lead exposure is concentrated in areas of disinvested neighborhoods—those historically tied to segregation, redlining and subprime lending.

“It’s clear,” Coulton said. “Lead poisoning in early childhood can altogether shift the trajectory of a person’s life at key stages of development and leave lasting long-term consequences.”