Blacks are more likely than both Hispanics and whites to believe race was a factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager. And blacks also are more likely than whites to follow the court case closely. Hispanics are less likely than all groups to follow the case closely.

These are among the conclusions found in the study published in the Journal of Crime and Justice, just as the criminal case against Zimmerman begins.

University of Central Florida associate professor Kareem Jordan and Penn State professor Shaun L. Gabbidon conducted the study with data from a 2012 USA Today/Gallup Poll. They analyzed the data to address three questions: Did you perceive that race played a role in the shooting? Had the victim been white, do you perceive the suspect would have been arrested sooner? And how closely will you be following the case?

“The study shows that the racial divide in public opinion is alive and well,” Jordan said. “Blacks continue to feel the greatest sense of criminal injustice, followed by Hispanics and whites. But in certain instances, the views of blacks and Hispanics can be different. Some things we found we anticipated, but others were a bit surprising.”

Jordan studies crime and race — specifically the African-American community’s perception of race in the juvenile justice system. He began this particular study in April 2012, two months after Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, and before Zimmerman was arrested.

Zimmerman is accused of fatally shooting 17-year-old Martin while Zimmerman was patrolling a Sanford neighborhood as a member of his neighborhood watch. Zimmerman was not immediately arrested, and protests followed. The case has drawn international media attention, and courthouse grounds have been crowded with news trucks as jury selection continues.

“Blacks believe there is racial injustice at the hands of the criminal justice system based on centuries of history,” Jordan said. “This is a reason why some blacks are suspicious of situations that involve crime and justice. In this case, blacks immediately viewed the shooting as further evidence of ongoing racial injustice.”

Unlike some previous studies examining crime and race, Hispanics didn’t overwhelmingly perceive that race played a role in the shooting. Their perceptions were more in line with whites.

As for why Hispanics differed when past studies have indicated they tend to align more with perceptions of blacks, Jordan wasn’t sure.

“It certainly is an area ripe for more research,” Jordan said. “The current immigration crisis may add to the perception of criminal injustice. Over time, that may lead to a decreased sense of procedural justice. If this happens, it is likely that Hispanic perceptions on killings such as Martin’s will become closer to the views of blacks. Only time will tell.”

According to the data, the more educated respondents, regardless of their ethnicity, perceived that race played a role in the shooting and subsequent arrest. Wealthier respondents were less likely to believe that race was involved at all.

The 2013 MLB Racial and Gender Report Card (MLB RGRC) reports the MLB earned a solid A with improvement on gender hiring practices and raised the overall grade to a B+. One of the key questions asked during the report is whether or not a player has a chance to play or work for a team despite race or gender. The League’s Office also scored high for hiring people of color (B+/A-).

“The front office of the teams should continue to make an effort to create a work force that mirrors America,” says Lapchick. He also believes that the release of the movie “42” was a big factor in the MLB’s good scores. “The release of the movie helped increase focus as the 2013 MLB season began.”

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport is part of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program in the University of Central Florida’s College of Business Administration. This landmark program focuses on business skills necessary for graduates to conduct successful careers in the rapidly changing and dynamic sports industry while also emphasizing diversity, community service and sport and social issues.

The result of the team’s work appears in today’s online edition of Nature.

Peijun Zhang, an associate professor in the department of Structural Biology at the University of Pittsburgh led the team. Others are: Gongpu Zhao, Xin Meng, Jiying Nig, Jinwoo Ahn and Angela Gronenborn also from the University of Pittsburg;  Juan R. Perilla and Klaus Schulten from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ernest L. Yufenyuy and Christopher Aiken from Vanderbilt University and UCF physics professor Bo Chen.

Zhang has been working with cryo-electron microscopy to figure out how the HIV-1 virus creates its capsid, the protective armor around the viral genome materials, which corrupt a host cells DNA and turns them against the body.

The integrity of capsids is critical to viral infection and propagation, but their structure has remained elusive because of how different each capsid can be, said UCF’s Chen. That complexity is compounded because the assembly process necessary to create large protective shells includes thousands of individual proteins joining together in assembly, all of which only takes a few seconds to minutes to complete.

“The speed makes it difficult to track and analyze experimentally, and even more challenging to simulate theoretically, because it involves a large amount of molecules and extends the time scale far too long for current computation resources,” Chen said.  He came up with an advanced simulation model that captures the overall structure of the capsid protein that forms the shell without slowing down the speed, and can simulate how hundreds of capsid proteins assemble at the same time. It doesn’t capture the whole system, but it is a big leap in the right direction, he said.

Chen has been able to create simulations based on the general information understood by researcher to date. Compared to many other models, his simulation model is able to capture the structure information of the molecule to high fidelity without sacrificing the simulation speed. By working with Peijun, he was able to use the detailed structural information of HIV-1 she has discovered.

“The mechanism is challenging to study and simulate,” said Chen, who specializes in complex biomolecular computer simulations also known as multiscale theory and coarse-grained model simulation. “It involves hundreds and in some cases thousands of molecules working at the same time to assemble and construct new structures. And with our technology we’ve had limited success previously. But the cryoEM structure model from Dr. Zhang’s group developed has greatly inspired our simulation work.”

The simulation gives Zhang a picture of how the process works, adding a new perspective as she tries to uncover how individual capsid proteins come together to form the large protective shell.

Unlike sci-fi computers that simulate and predict how complicated organisms will react to any given stimulus in seconds, today’s technology isn’t quite there yet.

“Even with the world’s biggest supercomputers, we can’t do a simulation that keeps pace with the complexities involved in self assembly for more than a few microseconds,” Chen said. One microsecond is one millionth of a second. “And most of these processes take up to several seconds to minutes. In time, I think we’ll get there, but right now, we’re limited by our current technology. Even so, our advances are helping scientists understand how it all works.

Chen isn’t a patient researcher, which is why he switched from more fundamental condensed physics to applied physics in the area of biomedical sciences, in hope of seeing quicker impacts of his research to society.  Despite hardware limitations, he said progress in this area of research is likely to produce benefits to mankind in his lifetime.

“I wanted to see my work impact people,” he said. “I’m hoping the use of my simulations will help us learn about the processes and to predict outcomes as a way to help prevent adverse health issues. While my work is focused on HIV-1 at the moment, we can apply this model to other proteins that are keys to other diseases. There’s still work to do, but there is good promise here.”

Chen joined UCF in 2011. Previously he was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health for four years. In 2013 he was awarded the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award. Previously, his work has been reported in journals such as Nature Physics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Biochemistry, among others. Chen has a Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Beijing University. He is the father of two young children is a strong advocate of teaching science to youth. He has several graduate and undergraduate students in his lab and he mentors children at an elementary school.

Shortly after, the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, and around the same time I had a conversation with the leader of an important crime-fighting program in Central Florida. That person lamented the difficulty in attracting funding for a program that does not serve what I term the “cute and cuddly.”

The cost of our justice system is tremendous, but the funding for research into effective crime-fighting programs and hardware is minimal.

The budget for the Florida Department of Corrections is about $2 billion. In 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau put the cost of the total justice system (police, judicial and corrections sectors) at $697 per person in Florida. The national average was $633.

In 2011, the National Institute of Justice, the research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, awarded 387 grants totaling about $207 million. In 2012, the NIJ reduced its grants to 363, totaling about $168 million.

By the way, UCF has been very successful in obtaining direct NIJ grants in the area of criminal-justice technology, receiving $711,000 in 2011, and $2.3 million in 2012. Among those 2012 grants, Dr. Jacinta Gau and I received $250,000, which is considered a “large” social science grant for the NIJ, to study the impact of Florida’s “pill mill” legislation.

NASA’s $10 million to be awarded to Engineering over each of the next five years would equate to a considerable chunk of the total amount of grant funding from the DOJ for research. Of all the dollars coming to UCF, only a small portion goes to the social science of studying crime and crime reduction. To be sure, other funded research in the areas of substance abuse and mental health touch on crime. I suspect those are also small in comparison to what Engineering, computing and other physical sciences attract in a given year.

This catalog of funding amounts ties back to the lament of the local law enforcement leader in that many of us in the social and helping sciences must rely on partnerships with local government agencies and community-  and faith-based organizations to seek funding to conduct our research and pay our graduate students. Our partners, in turn, are looking for ways to increase the amount of grant funds they can spend on programs or personnel to deliver what they need to ameliorate or eliminate the problems they are addressing. That means there is often little money left over for the partnership with academic-based evaluators and researchers.

We tend to work in a fundamentally nonprofit world as we research the impact of crime prevention and intervention programs, substance-abuse prevention, mental-health treatment, child- and family-welfare interventions, and so forth. It is doubtful that social science researchers will ever see the types of commercial applications and profits of the innovations from space research or simulation technology.

But that does not mean we do not have value. Regrettably, perhaps, often the value we social science researchers add to our community is most evident in its invisibility.

As in Boston, when the types of research we do with law enforcement combating violence fail, they fail in plain sight. When our crime-reduction research partnerships lead to lower jail and prison populations, the exceptional failure dooms our success to oblivion. 

We tend to deal with the dark side of our nature; the sorts of behaviors people don’t like to discuss, but which lead the local news. Success is generally noted in the absence of behaviors, rarely in the positive behaviors of those with whom we intervene. But, this is not necessarily how it has to be.

Some of my acquaintances at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as public servants at the Washington State Institute of Public Policy, have developed ways of figuring out the value of prevention and intervention in these areas. The CDC folks term their approach “Prevention Effectiveness,” the “systematic assessment of the impact of public…policies, programs, and practices” on programs addressing health and other public-interest areas.

The successes of the research partnerships we develop are measured in victims averted, second children not born to unwed teens, families that maintain housing for more than a few weeks, and so forth. The value of those activities can be monetized for policy analysis, but that is not truly the value to the community. The value to the community is the creation with our community partners of the conditions that make my home state a great place to live, develop business opportunities, and generally enjoy life.

When my partner in public safety says it is difficult to attract supporters to a cause that addresses the side of life no convention/visitor’s bureau or chamber of commerce wants to acknowledge – it is true. Regrettably, we have similar issues: Doing what we do for little profit and with little visibility – beyond educating the next generation of social researchers. Sometimes it is barely even noticed on campus or in the Legislature.

Perhaps we need to do a better job of “selling” the benefits we provide. We could better highlight the cost reductions of behaviors and situations that effective university social/behavioral research and community partnerships address, things such as crime victimization, substance abuse, and child and partner abuse. Those are the kinds of behaviors that are usually mentioned only when a failure occurs.

Sometimes what you don’t see is the result of a great deal of work by people and organizations who work for relatively little and in the shadows cast by the dark side of our social world.

Those benefits may not be on the nightly news, but they are a key part of developing a great community.

UCF Forum columnist Roberto Hugh Potter is a sociologist, professor and director of Research Partnerships in the University of Central Florida’s Department of Criminal Justice. He can be reached at rhpotter@ucf.edu.

The NIH provided the total $1.2 million grant for four years. RO1 or Research Project Grants provide support for health-related research by a sole investigator that addresses a public health need with an innovative approach. Only about 12 percent of new investigator RO1 applications are actually funded, making the grants highly competitive.

Dr. Deborah German, vice president for medical affairs and dean of the College of Medicine, applauded Dr. Jewett’s accomplishment. “Research is the heart of academic medicine because medical research is an invisible safety net for all of us,” she said. “This grant is an exciting and well-deserved validation of Dr. Jewett’s research and the spirit of discovery that she models.

Dr. Jewett’s research focuses on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, and ways to diagnosis the disease earlier and better. Lyme disease is the most commonly reported vector-borne illness in the United States and is on the rise nationwide, yet definitive diagnosis of the disease remains a challenge. That means sufferers can go untreated – increasing their chances for lifelong complications, including joint inflammation, heart and brain/nervous system problems.

Lyme disease results from a bacterial infection spread through the bite of a blacklegged tick but because the ticks are so tiny, many sufferers never notice they had been bitten. Tick bites and infection can occur when people are participating in popular outdoor activities, including gardening, hunting and hiking. You also can get Lyme disease from walking in high grasses or having a pet that may carry ticks into your home.

Dr. Jewett likes to use a fishing analogy to explain her research. She has used magnetic beads to “fish” for specific antibodies that people produce after they are infected. The RO1 grant will fund new innovative efforts to “fish” for the unique genetic components of the Borrelia burgdorferi important during an infection.  This research is especially important because compared to other bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi “flies under the radar,” without obvious toxic or virulent properties that make it difficult to understand how it makes people sick, Dr. Jewett said.

Dr. Jewett called the RO1 “the pinnacle of my career thus far. It’s a life changer.”

The NIH grant is the latest recognition of her work by the public and the research funding community. In February, Dr. Jewett presented her research at the College of Medicine’s first Luminary Series Lecture of 2013. Days after the Luminary Series, the National Research Fund for Tick-Borne Diseases (NRFTD) announced she had received a $60,000 grant to further her research into mechanisms of Borrelia burgdorferi gene regulation, and how the bacteria functions during an infection.

The program, a first-year living and learning community for science, technology, engineering and mathematics students, provides the opportunity for students to live, take courses, and do research together their first year at UCF.

The program aims to increase STEM retention by providing mentoring and academic support, while exposing students to discipline-specific research. Summer research programs are meant to expose students to an intense research experience and expand their preparation for graduate education.

The students who have been accepted this year are:

• Kimberly Cranmore (Environmental Engineering) – NSF Coastal Research in Environmental Science and Technology Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREST-REU) at University of Massachusetts
• Kathryn Ross (Biology) – Committee on Institutional Cooperation Summer Research Opportunities Program (CIC-SROP) at Purdue University
• Kaithlyn Pinnock (Mechanical Engineering) and Andrea Otero (Industrial Engineering) – Explorations in Science Research: An Undergraduate Summer Program at the University of California Berkeley

Additionally, two students from the 2011 cohort were accepted to prestigious programs:

• Andrew Mendez (Computer Engineering) – Massachusetts Institute of Technology Summer Research Program
• Jamar Borland (Biomedical Sciences) – Stanford Summer Research Program, Amgen Scholars Program

Both students form the 2011 cohort also completed summer research experiences last summer at the National Institutes of Health (Borland) and Iowa State University (Mendez). Being accepted for these summer experiences so early in their careers makes them very competitive for graduate education and additional opportunities.

For more information about the LEARN program and other students accomplishments visit: www.our.ucf.edu/learn or contact Dr. Kimberly Schneider at KRS@ucf.edu.

This discovery by the team paves the way for engineering new types of extraordinary nanoscale materials that can be used to develop smaller, lighter and faster electronics, including sensors, cell phones, tablets and laptops.

First predicted by American physicist Douglas Hofstadter in 1976, the butterfly pattern emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional plane and subjected to both a periodic potential energy and a strong magnetic field. The Hofstadter butterfly is a fractal pattern—meaning that it contains shapes that repeat on smaller and smaller size scales. Fractals are common in systems such as fluid mechanics, but rare in the quantum mechanical world. The Hofstadter butterfly is one of the first quantum fractals theoretically discovered in physics but, until now, there has been no direct experimental proof of this spectrum.

Columbia University led the study and also involved scientists from the City University of New York, Tohoku University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. Columbia prepared the sample and the UCF team measured the regular recurrence of the high-fidelity periodic pattern, engineered by inducing nanoscale ripples on graphene, a carbon material. The measured recurrence served as the essential proof that the measured spectrum was indeed the Hofstadter butterfly. The image that captured the evidence was taken in UCF Assistant Professor Masa Ishigami’s laboratory.

The study is published in the advance online publication of Nature .

Jyoti Katoch, Ishigami’s graduate student, used a non-contact atomic force high-resolution microscope to image the ripples, which have the height of only 0.2 angstroms (twenty trillionth of a meter), to confirm that the observed Hofstadter butterfly spectrum indeed matched the theoretical prediction.

“The arrangement of individual atoms, even just one atom can drastically alter properties of nanoscale materials. That is the basis for nanotechnology,” Ishigami said. “Atomic structures must be resolved to understand the properties of nanoscale materials. What we do here at UCF is to explain why nanoscale materials behave so different by resolving their atomic structures. Only when we understand the origin of the extraordinary properties of nanoscale materials, we can propel nanoscience and technology forward. What Jyoti has done here is to image how graphene is rippled to explain the observed Hofstadter spectrum.”

UCF’s laboratory utilizes a novel, the state-of-the-art microscopy technique to simultaneously determine the atomic structure and electronic properties of nanoscale materials such as graphene.

Katoch has been working with Ishigami since 2008, when Ishigami joined UCF. Katoch helped build the laboratory and developed the atomic-resolution capability critical to capturing the picture proof for this study.

Ishigami has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has won multiple awards, including the Intelligence Community postdoctoral fellowship and the Hertz graduate fellowship, and has published more than 30 papers in journals including Science.

The College of Sciences, the Nanoscience technology center, and the office of research and commercialization (through a Presidential Initiative to fund major research equipment) supported the purchase and development of the atomic resolution microscope in the Ishigami lab. This research effort was supported by the National Science Foundation under its Faculty Early Career Development Program.

The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, which is federally-funded at 158 institutions by the U.S. Department of Education, is designed to prepare students for post-baccalaureate degrees by encouraging research and faculty mentorship. The program, which is celebrating its 10^th anniversary at UCF this year, has included 132 scholars.

Melonie Williams Sexton graduated from UCF in 2007 with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and political science. She conducted research on the production of false memories alongside faculty mentor Dr. Alvin Wang, dean of UCF’s Burnett Honors College.

Williams Sexton said the McNair Scholars Program prepared her to pursue an advanced degree by exposing her to research and giving her the opportunity to present at national and international conferences.

“Participating in the McNair Scholars Program has ultimately defined my career,” she said. “Because of the McNair Scholars Program, I was already aware of the rigors of research that were expected at the graduate level.”

This spring, Williams Sexton will become the first McNair Scholar from UCF’s program to receive a Ph.D., earning a degree in cognitive neuroscience from Vanderbilt University. She has accepted a position as an academic advisor at Vanderbilt, where she will also teach and continue her research.

UCF senior Sara Bolivar Wagers, a molecular biology and microbiology major, will travel to Germany this summer to conduct research on infectious disease at the Paul Ehrlich Institute. Under the mentorship of Dr. Yvonne Maldonado from Stanford University, Bolivar Wagers has already been awarded at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students and presented her research on polio at STEM conferences.  Bolivar Wages was also a former participant in the PRIME STEM Program and is currently mentored by biology Professor Linda Walters.

“The McNair Scholars Program has motivated me to continue to do well in school while balancing my attendance at all of the great research conferences that I get to travel to in order to present my research,” said Bolivar Wagers.

Since the McNair Scholars Program was first funded at UCF, 88 percent of its participants have gone on to attend graduate or professional schools. Four of UCF’s McNair Scholars have received the Order of Pegasus, UCF’s highest honor, and eight have served on the President’s Leadership Council.

The McNair Scholars receive individualized academic and personal support from program staff members, and they are offered GRE preparation courses and free workshops on the graduate school application process, financial aid, scholarships and fellowships.

To be eligible for the McNair program, students must take courses full time and either be U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents. They must have a cumulative GPA of 3.0, have completed 60 credit hours and have a serious interest in pursuing a doctoral degree. Students must also qualify as a low-income student who is a first-generation college student or a member of a group that is underrepresented in graduate education.

“The McNair Scholars Program means having an academic family and community that will always be there to support you,” said Williams Sexton. “Even if you’re not from the same college, McNair Scholars universally know what it means to be a part of something special.”

For more information about the McNair Scholars Program at UCF, visit http://www.mcnair.ucf.edu.

Eduardo Salas, Pegasus and Trustee Chair professor of psychology and scientist with the Institute for Simulation and Training, will lead the research that supports NASA’s objectives to ensure the health of space flight crews, especially as they venture beyond the Earth’s orbit for extended periods of time.

NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute announced a total of 23 awards valued at approximately $17 million.  Salas is the only researcher to receive two awards in the peer-reviewed competition and only two other universities received more than one award.

Salas is an internationally recognized expert on teams and training.  His projects will help NASA safely and efficiently divide tasks between humans and automation, and assess the cognitive and emotional states of individuals and teams, both of which are priorities of the space agency.

The first project will focus on methods to detect and mitigate cognitive performance deficits, stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression for the operational setting of spaceflight from ongoing team member communications, either spoken or written.

Using software and analytic tools the researchers will quantify word choice and patterns in real-time, which may be used to alert them to any changes or potential risk factors.

The effort is critical to keeping teams in space for months and perhaps years, Salas said.

“During long-term spaceflight team members will talk a lot, both during mission critical operations and their down time.  By analyzing spontaneous verbal output in real-time communication, we can develop tools to predict problems before they arise,” he said.

The second project will develop a framework for measuring the safety and efficiency of interactions between human team members and the automation required to sustain long-term flight.

The awards come less than two weeks after UCF became the first Florida university selected to lead a NASA project.  Physicist Richard Eastes, from the Florida Space Institute, is leading that $55 million project to develop an imaging instrument to study Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“NASA is one of our earliest research partners and we are pleased, in our 50^th anniversary year, to be granted these awards, in complimentary disciplines, which highlight the increasing breadth of our research strength,” said MJ Soileau, vice president for research & commercialization at UCF.

Eduardo Salas, Pegasus and Trustee Chair professor of psychology and scientist with the Institute for Simulation and Training, will lead the research that supports NASA’s objectives to ensure the health of space flight crews, especially as they venture beyond the Earth’s orbit for extended periods of time.

NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute announced a total of 23 awards valued at approximately $17 million. Salas is the only researcher to receive two awards in the peer-reviewed competition and only two other universities received more than one award.

Salas is an internationally recognized expert on teams and training. His projects will help NASA safely and efficiently divide tasks between humans and automation, and assess the cognitive and emotional states of individuals and teams, both of which are priorities of the space agency.

The first project will focus on methods to detect and mitigate cognitive performance deficits, stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression for the operational setting of spaceflight from ongoing team member communications, either spoken or written.

Using software and analytic tools the researchers will quantify word choice and patterns in real-time, which may be used to alert them to any changes or potential risk factors.

The effort is critical to keeping teams in space for months and perhaps years, Salas said.

“During long-term spaceflight team members will talk a lot, both during mission critical operations and their down time. By analyzing spontaneous verbal output in real-time communication, we can develop tools to predict problems before they arise,” he said.

The second project will develop a framework for measuring the safety and efficiency of interactions between human team members and the automation required to sustain long-term flight.

The awards come less than two weeks after UCF became the first Florida university selected to lead a NASA project. Physicist Richard Eastes, from the Florida Space Institute, is leading that $55 million project to develop an imaging instrument to study Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“NASA is one of our earliest research partners and we are pleased, in our 50th anniversary year, to be granted these awards, in complimentary disciplines, which highlight the increasing breadth of our research strength” said MJ Soileau, vice president for research & commercialization at UCF.