Offered a hard-to-refuse early retirement package, several of the college’s longest serving teachers and researchers moved to new adventures last spring.At the other end of the career path, a new “freshman class” of assistant professors joined the college bringing their own research questions, teaching methods, and service priorities. Here, Diane Noel profiles three new UI faculty members at the frontier of their careers.

MARKUS TULLER
JUAN MANUEL ALVAREZ
LEE FORTUNATO

Markus Tuller, a soil physicist, has over the past year won research grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U. S. Geological Survey, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Although Tuller describes much of his work in soil physics as “theoretical,” its applications are clearly practical.

Tuller has been revising our fundamental understandings of how liquids move through porous media: pesticides through agricultural soils, for example, or leachate through the clay liner of a landfill, or nutrients through artificial soil that might support plant life in space.

“Soil is complex,”said Tuller.“Due to current limitations in computational power and measurement resolution it is not possible to describe this complexity mathematically. You always end up with some simplifying assumptions.”

Most scientists who want to describe how water behaves and moves in soils fit mathematical equations to measurements of water retention,hydraulic conductivity, and other properties. From those empirical equations they hope to predict how water will move at larger scales.

Tuller and his colleague, Dani Or of the University of Connecticut, take a new approach, one that starts with the physical properties of soil pores.Their model describes soil pores as angular spaces, and it applies to them the laws of physics. And, it turns out, their models are doing a better job of predicting what goes on in real soils than the empirical ones do.

Tuller and Or continue to refine their model,and they are extending it to clay soils,which swell and shrink,such as those at proposed sites for nuclear waste burial in Europe and in some agricultural fields.

NASA, meanwhile, is seeking Tuller’s expertise in developing substrates to support plant growth during space flights. And on northern Idaho’s Palouse,Tuller is studying how freezing and thawing of agricultural soils affect runoff and pollution of surface waters.

Tuller received his M.Sc.in civil engineering and water management and his Ph.D. in soil physics and water management from the University of Agricultural Sciences in Vienna, Austria, before coming to the United States to do post-doctoral research at Utah State University in 1997.“I think in America you have much more scientific freedom to do research,” Tuller said, explaining that in European universities senior faculty members often dictate research agendas to their juniors.

He is free, for example, to help a student at Moscow Junior High to conduct experiments on the angle of repose of Martian dust. Their data should help Mars Lander designers to orient solar panels so that the dust of Mars sloughs off them rather than settling.

When entomologist Juan Manuel Alvarez arrived at the Aberdeen Research and Extension Center in 2001 to help Idaho’s grain and potato growers subdue their insect pests, one of the first things he did was examine the insects in the state’s potato fields. In almost every field he looked at,except for those treated with “hard”insecticides,he found a ground beetle that preys on Colorado potato beetles. Moreover, Colorado potato beetle damage appeared to be less severe in the fields where “softer” insecticides had spared the predaceous ground beetles.

To a biological control expert, this was very good news.“If we can combine the effects of soft chemistries with the effects of predators, for sure we’re going to encourage predators,” he said. “Hopefully, less insecticide will be needed.”

Alvarez’s interest in reducing pesticide use stretches back to his childhood farm in Colombia. “My dad was always interested in different ways to kill the insects without using insecticides,” he said.

Alvarez himself farmed barley and potatoes for a while.Then, still in his early 20s and fresh from an undergraduate degree at the National University of Colombia, he lead a research team at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture that worked out biocontrol of a major cassava pest in Africa.

He has also worked on biocontrol of ornamental plant pests at the University of Massachusetts, where he received his master’s degree, and on integrated pest management of citrus pests in Florida. His Ph.D. research at the University of Florida pioneered the use of molecular techniques to distinguish among “cryptic” biocontrol species—ones that look exactly alike but provide very different levels of control.

Having worked in so many different agricultural systems and seen the effectiveness of biological control in each, Alvarez has concluded that reducing insecticide use and adopting biological approaches boosts farm productivity and even brings higher farm income.

In Idaho, so far, he has discovered that nightshade, a weed common in potato crops, attracts the green peach aphids that transmit potato leafroll virus to potatoes and that nightshade itself harbors the virus. Now, besides advising aphid control with insecticides, he is counseling better control of nightshade, an “integrated”approach.

“I am aware that I will never solve the problem of potato viruses with biological control,” he said.But he does expect to develop solutions requiring less insecticide.

In Idaho’s Swan Valley, meanwhile, Alvarez and colleagues at Montana State University have released parasitoids of the wheatstem sawfly. The parasitoids appear to have settled in, and next season, Alvarez hopes to find out whether they can relieve Swan Valley wheat farmers of their sawfly problem.

Human Cytomegalovirus, a virus in the herpes family, is the leading viral cause of birth defects.One to two percent of babies are born with HCMV infections, and 5 to 10 percent of those infected newborns come into the world deaf, blind, mentally retarded, or with other nervous system disorders.Another 10 to 15 percent of infected babies develop problems by age 10.These statistics are known, but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery.

This year, Lee Fortunato, a cellular virologist, received a $1.3 million, fiveyear grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore her ideas about how the virus does its damage.

Fortunato started studying HCMV several years ago while a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, where she also received her Ph.D. degree. She was working in a lab focused on the interactions between HCMV and the cells it infects.“I started on a tangent of looking at interactions with the DNA itself,” she said, “and it paid off in spades.”

She discovered that HCMV damages the host cell’s DNA by breaking it at very specific points. Subsequently she showed that the virus, which uses the host cell’s reproductive apparatus to multiply itself, also “corrals” within its viral replication centers certain host cell proteins that are “key players” in the host cell’s ability to maintain and repair its own DNA. Moreover, the virus appears able to wall off some of those proteins so that the host cell can’t use them.

“If the virus is taking away the ability of cellular DNA to be repaired, it may be part of the reason we’re developing these birth defects over time,” Fortunato said.

Fortunato’s work to this point has been in epithelial, or surface, cells. She plans now to move her studies into nerve cells, where the birth defects occur, but which are “very hard to culture, very temperamental.”

Although her NIH grant will allow her to hire trained assistants, she has so far staffed her lab with UI undergraduates.“One thing I really enjoy is taking on students who are psyched about doing science,” she says. “I think it’s incredibly important for them to get in there and get their hands wet.”

Fortunato got her own hands wet in various scientists’laboratories at M.I.T., where she majored in life sciences. “I’m very grateful to my mentors,” she said, for introducing her to “real science,” in which experiments take unexpected and surprising turns. “You hardly ever get the answer you think you might get,” she said. “That’s the fun.”