UCSB Professor Receives Federal Grant to Apply Bone Repair Advances to Coral Reefs
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – A UC Santa Barbara assistant professor plans to use recent discoveries in human bone repair to improve global coral reef restoration using a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
"We're delighted that the NSF [National Science Foundation] is recognizing Marley Dewey's extensive research on this critical ecosystem and her commitment to making science accessible and meaningful to the community," said Catherine Klapperich, professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara's Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. "Art and science are overlapping and complementary disciplines, and the [Faculty Early Career Development Program] CAREER award is an affirmation of her creativity in research, outreach, and dissemination."
The National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant is the organization's most prestigious award supporting early-career faculty members.
Awards are based on the performance of the academic's innovative research and the impact of their studies on the community explained the independent federal agency established by Congress in 1950.
That latter requirement is something that UC Santa Barbara's Dr. Marley Dewey is uniquely suited to do.
The local academic intends to show the community how her research can be used to repair coral through local exhibits on reefs, helping graduate students communicate about their research, and setting up area schools with a curriculum that integrates science and art by using her notable love of art and passion for bioengineering.
"My goal is to get broader participation in STEM by integrating art and science, forming a bridge between some of these complex concepts around coral and something accessible like art, which everyone can understand and appreciate," explained UC Santa Barbara Assistant Professor Marley Dewey.
Dr. Dewey's academic studies focus on extracellular vesicles, an important biomolecule that is naturally released by cells and carry biological messages that can trigger a body to repair injuries, combat cancer, and maintain homeostasis.
She received a five-year, $2.1 million investment from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year to study the extracellular matrix that transmits these signals across a body at the aptly named Dewey Lab at UC Santa Barbara.
"These tiny nanoparticles have information...and they send those messages off to another cell to use that information," explained Professor Dewey. "Stem cells can turn into all these different cell types to help with repair, but they are also huge signalers during that repair scenario. And one of the ways they do that is by secreting these extracellular vesicles."
"It's unlikely that a single type of vesicle can direct this complex repair process," Dr. Dewey added. "[The earlier NIH-funded] project involves identifying and defining different vesicle populations that might be able to guide these very specific repair processes in different aspects of wound repair, whether the body is repairing vasculature, cartilage or fat or bone, and then putting them into a material that could help deliver those signals at specific times and locations."
That pioneering research into bone repair systems within the human body is now being applied to coral reef restoration in Dr. Dewey's latest research award.
Much like the bones in our body, coral reefs are made up of minerals rich in calcium and use small holes, known as pores, on their surface to allow nutrients to move from one cell to another.
Advances in imaging technology have allowed researchers to learn more than ever before about the role that this micro-architecture plays in bone health.
Understanding how signals and systems in our own body can restore and repair our bones could be used to help restore coral reefs around the world.
The impact of the size and placement of those pores on our understanding of human bone health is something Dr. Dewey believes could improve our understanding of coral restoration.
"Pore alignment and pore size are really important for human health," Dr. Dewey noted. "Different cells have different responses to pore size, and it seems like a universal property that cells can sense and understand porosity."
The need for understanding how to effectively bring back coral reefs has only grown in the modern era.
Since the 1950s, more than half of all reefs have died off because of overfishing as well as rising ocean temperatures, acidity, and weather system impacts due to climate change.
The calcium carbonate that makes up coral reefs is secreted by coral polyps over the course of their life cycles.
Now, the question of how pore size and location impacts coral polyps is something Dr. Dewey is looking to answer in an attempt to discover new global strategies to support coral growth.
"For most of my life, I was doing art," Dr. Dewey explained. "Sometimes when my mom would tell friends' parents that I went into engineering, they were shocked."
While working at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign then-graduate student Marley Dewey began to recolor images of collagen materials captured by an electron microscope using Photoshop.
Her fusion of art and scientific research earned her several "Art of Science" competitions and she intends to use her skills creating images to generate 3D-printed diagrams of coral and bone, "so that students can physically touch these materials and see how similar these two materials actually are".
Locals will be able to see these upcoming interactive exhibits showing Dr. Dewey's research at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum and UC Santa Barbara's Research and Education Facility.
"I'm not just solving equations or on my computer or mixing chemicals together. There's an art that comes with what we do in the lab," Dr. Dewey shared. "Some students don't realize that there's this other side of science."
