Nika Carlson's Portfolio

They don’t look like much: a few fuzzy, transparent circles on a Mars-red landscape.

Pull back a few feet, take in the $30,000 microscope, the bright new walls and smooth black counters, the rows of flasks and beakers, and it’s apparent these fuzzy dots are worth a lot more than they look.

They are human lung cells and they are part of a $12 million study that looks to put Keene State College on the scientific research map.

The lab belongs to Melinda D. Treadwell, an assistant professor in the technology, design and safety department at Keene State. She’s a junior researcher in the multimillion-dollar lung disease study, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health. It’s a collaboration among Keene State, Dartmouth College in Hanover, Dartmouth Medical School, and the N.H. Department of Environmental Services.

The study aims to figure out why people in New Hampshire get lung disease by examining lung tissue at its most basic levels: cells and the proteins that make cells work.

Researchers have a few core questions they want answered.

How do the cells of a healthy lung and a lung with cystic fibrosis work differently?

What’s going on with all the proteins inside these cells?

What effect do certain environmental factors in New Hampshire’s air have on lung health?

“What we haven’t had so far is a linkage between what we observe and how we understand how these things work at the molecular level and what we see in the effect on people’s health,” said Joshua W. Hamilton, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Dartmouth Medical School and one of the project’s leaders.

Lung disease is the third most common cause of death in the U.S., taking 361,000 lives annually, according to the project’s Web site. An additional 25 million Americans have chronic lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis and asthma.

It is these statistics that are the ultimate push behind the research, with the hope of eventually influencing public policy.

“One of the biggest challenges facing policy makers or public health officials today is understanding which chemical or which compound they should worry about the most,” Treadwell said. “Common sense may dictate one thing, but in the end — especially if money is involved — the proof is in the science.

“At the end, if we’re successful, we will identify those metals that are most toxic, then we can focus on those areas and say, ‘What can we do to decrease the risk?’ ”

Making a statement

Over the next three years, Treadwell, her staff, and a handful of undergraduate students will focus on how metals commonly found in the air in workplaces affect lungs — one of five studies in the project.

For the past two years, Treadwell has been examining 10 years of data the state has collected on levels of metals in different locations.

But with a large investment from Keene State on a new lab and $200,000 worth of equipment, among other things, Treadwell can get started on developing her own data.

Using samples Treadwell and her students have collected, they will figure out at what levels of toxicity cells begin to die.

It is slow, careful, often tedious work, Treadwell said. It requires three years of growing cells, infecting them with arsenic, nickel, and other airborne metals, and watching them die.

The project, however, is not just about research. The money comes through the National Institutes of Health’s Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence, established to strengthen the research capabilities of small, rural states and their young college faculty.

“When Dartmouth was interested in writing one of these grants, the thought was to link our research to a smaller institution,” Hamilton said. “We thought it would be a good way to develop ties with Keene and help them develop a greater research presence ... I’m very impressed with Keene State and the support that they’ve given to science.”

The college, in fact, made a bold statement about its research ambitions this past year with a $23 million renovation of its science center.

“They’ve traditionally been a teaching institution and they decided they really wanted to boost their research activities and bring them into the classroom,” Hamilton said.

In the end, all this investment in research, science and technology is for the students, school officials said.

“We’ve wanted to provide more hands-on instruction for our students, because we felt that was lacking,” Keene State President Stanley J. Yarosewick said. With the grant, Treadwell will be able to do just that, he said.

Both Yarosewick and Treadwell said on-campus research allows students to deal with real-world problems, to think creatively, and be better prepared to enter the workforce.

‘Can I be a part of that?’

Undergraduates will begin working with Treadwell over the summer, she said. Eventually, she will build a senior seminar class around the study and even incorporate results from her work into her regular safety-studies curriculum.

She said showing real-world research applications is especially important in the slow-moving and technical world of science.

“It’s showing through example,” she said. “Sometimes when we show these things in class, students get very excited and they ask, ‘Can I be a part of that?’ ”

One of those students is Jaime K. Ingalls, Treadwell’s research assistant and a 2001 graduate of Keene State’s safety-studies program.

“This is pretty exciting because it allows me to take some of the things I’ve learned about and take them further, realize why standards are set the way they are and maybe help set future standards,” she said. “It’s working toward a solution to the problem instead of just monitoring it.”

Fostering enthusiasm like Ingalls’ is Treadwell’s ultimate goal.

“Informing teaching through research is what I’m really interested in,” she said. “It just makes the learning real to me, and for those students that think like me, it’ll make it more real for them, too.”

Placement: A1