“To understand the root causes of this disparity and potential solutions, UH faculty, staff and students approached this problem through the lens of voyagers, examining the past course of history of the peoples of the Pacific and attempts to make headwinds in programs focused on increasing participation in ocean sciences,” said co-author Rosie Alegado, associate professor in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

The article highlights programs in SOEST that are aimed at reducing barriers for Native Hawaiians in the geosciences — including summer bridge programs, internships, and other professional development programs. And, in better defining the persistent, systemic, and collective barriers that NHPI face within the western society and the academy, the authors identify gaps that conventional professional development programs aimed at minoritized groups in the geosciences have been unsuccessful in filling.

“One of the biggest gaps that we found related to Native Hawaiian-serving programs within the ocean sciences is that while many may be culturally based, few are Native Hawaiian led,” said lead author Haunani Kane, SOEST assistant professor. “Native Hawaiians are often overlooked in the development and leadership of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander-serving programs. Programs led by Native Hawaiian scientists and community members ensure that they are culturally centered safe spaces for students to collectively grow their identities as both Native Hawaiians and scientists.”

Importantly, the authors shared lessons learned from building two waʻa (canoes)-programs specifically designed to carry students forward toward futures that center oceanic ways of knowing.

SOEST Maile Mentoring Bridge

The SOEST Maile Mentoring Bridge program (Maile) was founded in 2013 with the goal of attracting and retaining more NHPIs into geoscience degree programs and careers. The foundation of Maile was to build and foster robust partnerships with neighboring community colleges within the UH system. Maile mentees are carefully paired with experienced mentors — SOEST graduate students, postdocs, or recent graduates.

“Looking back on the last 10 years of my life, the Maile Mentoring program has made such a huge impact,” said Diamond Tachera, study co-author and alumni and co-director of Maile. “As an undergraduate student, it was so important for me to see people, especially wāhine (women), who looked like me working and thriving in their scientific fields. Being part of the Maile ʻohana as a graduate student mentor also helped me to build confidence in myself as I continued to struggle to find my place and identity in academia. I will be forever grateful for the support and aloha that comes with being part of the Maile ʻohana.”

“I believe the Maile Mentoring program has been successful because it places an emphasis on meeting the needs of the whole student, not just their research endeavors,” said Alegado. “In focusing on creating a nurturing environment in SOEST, we place a stronger emphasis on retention of students, not just recruitment, which increases completion and graduation rates for NHPI.”

The MEGA Lab

To overcome traditional barriers related to retention of NHPIs in the ocean sciences, the multiscale environmental graphical analysis (MEGA) Lab, a predominantly Native Hawaiian-led lab and nonprofit physically located in Hilo, Hawai’i, developed a research program that prioritizes inclusive research experiences. Foundational to their success has been incorporating community members and cultural values into research projects, and creating global partnerships that value Native Hawaiian research.

As a way to creatively explore what Native science and kuleana (responsibility) could look like if research and cultural priorities were equally weighted in all aspects of the research design, the MEGA Lab assembled a Native Hawaiian research team to embark on a 15-day voyage to Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

“That trip inspired me to re-imagine what research looks like when it’s grounded in our ʻōiwi perspectives and how I can contribute to create more room for that to happen,” said Kainalu Steward, graduate student in the SOEST Department of Earth Sciences. “That experience helped me find kuleana in this collective work at the monument and reinforced my interest in pursuing higher education.”

Looking to the horizon

“Moving forward, we believe that in order to make progress in the representation, retainment, and success of Native Hawaiians and Pacific islanders in STEM, we must first address the historical and ongoing traumas of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders through active engagement in reclamation of cultural identities and knowledge,” said Kane. “We also believe student success requires building community support systems both within and beyond UH where students can safely explore their whole identity as Indigenous scientists.”

The MEGA Lab founders are also calling for a culture change in academia and their “experiment to disrupt the hierarchical and stereotypical structures that exist in science and act as barriers to inclusion,” as they write in a second article in the special issue of Oceanography, provides a template. “Our goal was to create an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional lab that promotes an inclusive, equitable, and uplifting team environment where everyone can thrive in a fun and productive workspace.”

“All of the work we do to support Native Hawaiians, women, and other underrepresented groups (the fish) can only have limited success given our current toxic workplace culture (the fishbowl),” said Barbara Bruno, faculty specialist at SOEST and co-author of the first article. “The fishbowl — ​not the fish — ​ needs to change.”

“Academia can often be reluctant to change, which is unfortunate as much of the workplace culture can serve as barriers to inclusion in STEM,” said John Burns, lead author of the second article and associate professor at UH Hilo. “We must embrace open-mindedness and be ready to transform the very culture of science in order to enhance diversity. Diverse perspectives and ideas not only foster a healthy work environment but can also serve as our most powerful asset, fueling the drive for new discoveries.”

The variant, located in a mitochondrial microprotein dubbed SHLP2, was found to be highly protective against Parkinson’s disease; individuals with this mutation are half as likely to develop the disease as those who do not carry it. The variant form of the protein is relatively rare and is found primarily in people of European descent.

The findings appear on January 3, 2024, in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

First discovered by Pinchas Cohen at the USC Leonard Davis School in 2016, SHLP2 is made within the cell’s mitochondria. Previous research from the Cohen Lab established that SHLP2 is associated with protection from aging-related diseases including cancer and that levels of the microprotein change in patients with Parkinson’s disease; they rise as the body attempts to counteract the pathology of Parkinson’s disease but often fail to mount additional production as the disease progresses.

This latest finding builds upon the USC team’s prior mitochondrial research and represents an advance at the intersection of longevity science, precision health, and microprotein discovery.

“This study advances our understanding of why people might get Parkinson’s and how we might develop new therapies for this devastating disease,” said Cohen, professor of gerontology, medicine and biological sciences and senior author of the study. “Also, because most research is done on well-established protein-coding genes in the nucleus, it underscores the relevance of exploring mitochondrial-derived microproteins as a new approach to the prevention and treatment of diseases of aging.”

For this study, first author Su-Jeong Kim, an adjunct research assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School, led a series of experiments that leveraged the Lab-developed microprotein discovery pipeline that begins with a big data-driven analysis to identify variants involved in disease. Thousands of human study subjects from the Health & Retirement Study, Cardiovascular Health Study, and Framingham Heart Study were screened for the SHLP2 variant. By comparing genetic variants in the mitochondrial DNA in patients with Parkinson’s disease and in controls, researchers found a highly protective variant found in 1% of Europeans, that reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease by twofold, to 50% of average.

Next, they demonstrated that this naturally occurring variant results in a change to the amino acid sequence and protein structure of SHLP2. The mutation — a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or a change to a single letter of the protein’s genetic code — is essentially a “gain-of-function” variant that is associated with higher expression of SHLP2 and also makes the microprotein more stable. According to their findings, the SHLP2 variant has high stability compared to the more common type and provides enhanced protection against mitochondrial dysfunction.

The research team was able to use targeted mass spectrometry techniques to identify the tiny peptide’s presence in neurons and found that SHLP2 specifically binds to an enzyme in mitochondria called mitochondrial complex 1. This enzyme is essential for life, and declines in its function have been linked not only to Parkinson’s disease but also to strokes and heart attacks.

The increased stability of the SHLP2 variant means that the microprotein binds to mitochondrial complex 1 more stably, prevents the decline of the enzyme’s activity, and thus reduces mitochondrial dysfunction. The benefits of the mutant form of SHLP2 were observed in both in vitro experiments in human tissue samples as well as in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease, according to the study.

“Our data highlights the biological effects of a particular gene variant and the potential molecular mechanisms by which this mutation may reduce the risk for Parkinson’s disease,” said Kim. “These findings may guide the development of therapies and provide a roadmap for understanding other mutations found in mitochondrial microproteins.”

Coauthors included Brendan Miller, Nicolas G. Hartel, Ricardo Ramirez II, Regina Gonzalez Braniff, Naphada Leelaprachakul, Amy Huang, Yuzhu Wang, Thalida Em Arpawong, Eileen M. Crimmins, Kelvin Yen, Giselle M. Petzinger, Michael W. Jakowec, and Nicholas A. Graham of USC; Penglong Wang and Chunyu Liu of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health; and Xianbang Sun and Daniel Levy of Boston University.

This work was supported by Department of Defense grant W81XWH2110625 to Kim and by NIH grants P01AG034906, R01AG068405 and P30AG068345 to Cohen. Pinchas Cohen is a consultant of CohBar Inc.

In the study, published in the November issue of the journal Applied Spectroscopy, researchers from DRI and the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center teamed up with the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake to take a close look at the litter. First, scientists broke it down into categories based on use (such as food containers and water bottles), followed by the chemical composition of the plastic. The knowledge gained can help scientists better understand the source of large pieces of litter in the lake, as well as whether they’re a significant source of microplastics as larger pieces break down and degrade. Previous research found that the waters of Lake Tahoe contain high levels of microplastics, defined as plastics smaller than a pencil eraser.

“There’s very little work on submerged plastic litter in lakes,” said Monica Arienzo, Ph.D., associate research professor of hydrology at DRI and one of the study’s lead authors. “And I think that’s a real issue, because when we think about how plastics may be moving in freshwater systems, there’s a good chance that they’ll end up in a lake.”

To collect the litter, research divers swam transects along the lakebed near Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park and Zephyr Cove, covering 9.3 kilometers. They found an average of 83 pieces of plastic litter per kilometer, with the lakebed near Hidden Beach and South Sand Harbor showing significantly more (140 items/km and 124 items/km, respectively). No stretches of the lakebed surveyed were free of plastic litter.

The most common plastic litter categories were food containers, bottles, plastic bags, and toys, along with many items that couldn’t be categorized.

“There’s a lot of education we can do, as well as continuing to work on reducing the use of those plastics,” Arienzo says. “Because we have to start thinking about turning that plastic pipe off.”

Arienzo and co-author Julia Davidson, then an undergraduate student working in Arienzo’s lab, also identified the types of plastic that made up 516 of the litter samples. Using an instrument that uses infrared light to fingerprint and identify the material, they found that the six most common plastics were polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene, polyester/polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyamide. Collecting this information can contribute to Arienzo’s ongoing microplastics research in the region, helping to identify the sources of the small plastic fragments.

“When we study microplastics, we only have the chemical information, or the plastic type,” Davidson says. “We don’t know where it came from — a plastic bag, toy, or otherwise — because it’s just a tiny piece of plastic. But now we can use this litter data to point to the dominant types of plastics and compare them to microplastic data.”

The study can help inform efforts by Tahoe-area communities to address plastic litter, such as South Lake Tahoe’s 2022 ban on single-use plastic bottles and Truckee’s ban on single-use food containers. The research also highlights ways that scientists can work with nonprofits to collect data that can address local environmental concerns.

“I think one of the things that’s really cool about this project is the collaboration between DRI, Clean Up the Lake, and UC Davis at Tahoe,” Arienzo says. “It demonstrates the power of bringing together a nonprofit that really wants to clean up Tahoe, while collecting data in the process that can help answer scientific questions.”

Professor Seung-Ki Min and Dr. Minkyu Lee, from the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), have used a high-resolution climate model to conduct a pioneering quantitative analysis of the impact of global warming on typhoons making landfall on the Korean Peninsula. This research has been recently published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

Notably, global warming is giving way to a surge in more powerful typhoons which maintain its intensity longer and thereby cause stronger damage. Accurate typhoon prediction and damage reduction necessitate better understanding of the global warming influences, for which climate model simulations with a km-scale resolution are eccential. However, studies quantifying the anthropogenic warming contribution to typhoons affecting Korea, especially research into the rainfall extremes accompanying typhoons, remain scant.

To overcome this, the research team designed a 3 km high-resolution regional climate model simulation to investigate the impact of global warming on typhoon intensity and extreme precipitation. Four extremely strong typhoons that made landfall on the Korean Peninsula between 2011 and 2020 were chosen for simulation under current climate condition and counterfactual condition without human-induced warming. To reduce the uncertainties in regional sea surface temperature changes due to global warming, they utilized diverse ocean warming patterns estimated from CMIP6multiple climate models.

The findings show that accounting for global warming from human activities augmented overall typhoon intensity and precipitation. The research team observed that the impact of warming was pronounced more strongly at maximum typhoon intensity than the average intensity. This implies more frequent occurrences of powerful super typhoons over East Asia in the future. Additionally, the area exposed to extreme rainfall generated by typhoons expanded 16 to 37 percent due to warmer climate conditions. Further, the expansion of extreme precipitation area is attributed to the strengthening of upward motion near the typhoon center and the increase in atmospheric water vapor due to the ocean surface warming.

Professor Min explained, “Our results from high-resolution climate model simulations provide conclusive evidence that global warming has amplified the strength of recent typhoons making landfall on the Korean Peninsula. Continued escalation of global warming could lead to stronger typhoons and more extensive occurrences of rainfall extremes, demanding heightened sector-specific preparedness measures.”

This study received support from the Mid-Career Researcher Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program on Climate and Climate Change Monitoring and Prediction Information Application Technology.