Opening the Doors of Opportunity
Nick Schuessler knows the ins and outs of finance in the world of professional sports, knowledge that he’s now sharing with current Clemson Football players.
Archive for month: February, 2021
The Dikes of Lake Hartwell
Like almost everything at Clemson, there’s a story behind the dikes.
Covered in Cotton
Tracy Free ’08 and Ty ’07 Woodard are part of a 4,500-acre family farm in Darlington, South Carolina. They’ve taken just 1 percent of the cotton crop and turned it into a growing brand of blankets and throws.
My Clemson: Rebecca Jones MacPherson ’18
Rebecca MacPherson chronicles how she made her passion for teaching a priority while earning her Ph.D. in genetics.
Unmarked Graves Found at Woodland Cemetery
Completed ground-penetrating radar testing of Clemson’s Woodland Cemetery has located more than 600 possible unmarked graves throughout much of the cemetery. Some are at the crest of the hill inside a fenced area, where members of the John C. Calhoun family were buried starting in 1837.
The number of graves coupled with the locations suggest the possibility that some may predate the period when the land was part of Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation from 1830 to 1865. Many of the graves are thought to be those of enslaved people who worked at the plantation and later as sharecroppers and Black laborers, including convicted individuals involved in the construction of Clemson College from 1890 to 1915.
Lawrence Conyers, a published authority on GPR and professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver, reviewed the methodologies of the team hired by Clemson to do the survey work and agreed with their interpretations. The University provided additional technical information to Conyers about soil and rock conditions on the site, as well as GPR readings taken recently for comparison at the African American cemetery at Hopewell, a known burial ground from that era approximately a mile away.
GPR work in late July initially revealed the possible locations of more than 200 unmarked graves in Woodland Cemetery believed to date back more than a century. Subsequent testing in other areas of the cemetery located additional possible grave sites primarily on the western, northwestern and northern slopes, as well as many in an area to the south and southeast previously identified as the “Site of Unknown Burials” and where the school installed fencing.
Clemson has installed additional signage at the cemetery, closed the area to vehicle traffic and restricted public access hours.
Rhondda Thomas, the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson whose research and teaching focuses on early African American literature and culture, is working with the local African American community. She formed a Community Engagement Board with members representing the Clemson/Central, Anderson, Pendleton and Seneca areas to help guide Clemson in the preservation and memorialization of the site. She also is working with the local community to identify family members who may have ancestors buried in the unmarked graves.
University historian Paul Anderson leads the research work. His team’s findings are published to a website Clemson created to document the University’s role in Woodland Cemetery and give voice to the African Americans who are buried there.
New Endowed Chair to Focus on Aging, Cognition
Older adults have become the fastest-growing demographic in the nation, and changes in health care and technology are required to meet the needs of this diverse group. But Lesley A. Ross, Clemson’s new SmartLIFE Endowed Chair in Aging and Cognition, says scholarship and research in the area of older adults can’t just be about a number.
“Longevity is easy to quantify, but older adults don’t focus as much on age as they do on quality of life,” Ross said. “My research, and the work of this position, focuses on keeping older adults happy and independent as long as possible while fighting the negative stereotypes associated with aging.”
The new endowed chair has been created specifically to research aging and its effects on issues related to brain function. Ross, who comes to Clemson from Penn State, will be a tenured faculty member in the Department of Psychology and will work collaboratively across the University on research related to aging and cognition. She will serve as associate director for the Clemson University Institute for Engaged Aging. SmartState centers were formed in 2002 as one of a series of legislative acts intended to accelerate South Carolina’s knowledge economy transformation.
Wastewater Provides Early Warning System
As universities all over the country began scrambling to figure out what campus life would be like in a year of COVID-19, several Clemson professors got busy on parts of that puzzle that related to their own research.
One of those professors was David Freedman, chair of the University’s Department of Envionmental Engineering and Earth Sciences. In the spring of 2020, Freedman began testing coronavirus levels in wastewater on the University’s main campus and in the surrounding community to provide an early warning system that shows how fast the virus is spreading.
Freedman likened the tests to the “canary in the coal mine” that can help administrators make informed decisions about what they need to do to protect the public’s health even before COVID-19 case counts start to rise. In addition to campus, his testing covers the city of Clemson and the town of Pendleton, both home to many University students, faculty and staff.
Studies have shown that the virus starts showing up in wastewater as much as one to two weeks before clinical symptoms are reported.
Clemson City Council unanimously passed an ordinance on June 24 that mandated face coverings after Freedman found surprisingly high virus levels at the city’s Cochran Road wastewater treatment plant. The ordinance cited “elevated levels of virus in the community similar to levels in other cities in which an outbreak of the virus was about to occur or was well underway.”
Previous studies first done in Europe have shown that the virus starts showing up in wastewater as much as one to two weeks before clinical symptoms are reported, said Freedman.
“Even before people are coughing and getting a fever, they’ll start shedding the virus in their feces, and that will show up in the wastewater,” Freedman said. Once or twice a week, Freedman collects wastewater samples from one campus plant and two municipal plants and sends them to a lab in Tennessee. Results from the testing are posted on both the city and the University websites.
Alumni Profile: Elizabeth Steadman ’68
Libby Steadman began her career as a Clemson nursing student and ended it as an Army colonel, a trailblazer in her own right.
App Helps Forensic Teams Determine Time of Death
Katherine Weisensee, chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, has collaborated on a smartphone app to help forensic teams determine times of death. Dubbed geoFOR, the app allows coroners and forensic teams to enter observations when human remains are recovered and then upload photos along with information, such as clothing, location, insect access, scavengers, apparent trauma and decomposition stage. The goal, Weisensee said, is to capture as much information on body decomposition as possible across a variety of geographic areas.
The app automatically factors in information from numerous geographical and environmental databases in order to start building a database on how these specific variables observed on the body overlap with geography and environmental factors.
Ideally, after years of use, the app will have captured enough data on body decomposition from a large enough collection of locations globally to provide a near-instant estimate of time of death. The app is currently being beta tested by multiple South Carolina coroners.
Weisensee is no stranger to the study of human decomposition. She earned master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from the University of Tennessee, and she spent a significant amount of time studying body decomposition on the campus’s body farm. She is also often consulted by law enforcement agencies who find corpses well past the final stage of skeletonization.
Her insights into the condition of skeletons have been instrumental for law enforcement in determining time and cause of death in bodies that have long since decomposed. She said the first question across all these consultations is usually related to time of death, so she’s motivated to get this application in the hands of law enforcement, humanitarian agencies and members of the general public with a strong stomach in order to start answering that question automatically.
“It’s exciting to see just how geospatial information meets forensic science, and how all of this information can be combined to finally start quickly answering a question that has eluded people for so long,” Weisensee said.
Carving It Up
Surfing, pop culture, nostalgia, the ’90s — all are inspiration for custom skateboard maker Bear Walker ’11, whose collaborations include Pokémon Center, Marvel and the NBA.