Quick Looks
University Science and Scholarship Highlights From the Past Year
Research and scholarship at the University of Montana continued its strong growth trajectory in fiscal year 2023, with a record $134 million in research expenditures. That was $8 million more than the record set the previous year.
“The inspiring, innovative ideas of our faculty, as well as their hard work, have helped our research awards reach new heights,” says Scott Whittenburg, UM vice president for research and creative scholarship. “We are a top-tier R1 research institution, and we are continuing to prove we deserve that high-level designation.”
UM was upgraded to R1 status in 2022 after decades of effort by University officials. Less than 4% of degree-granting institutions in the U.S. achieve R1 status, which is awarded by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education organization.
Three Most Cited UM Journal Articles From 2023:
“Scientists’ warning on climate change and insects” by Art Woods, Professor, Division of Biological Sciences (Ecological Monographs; 67 citations; received enough citations by fall 2023 to place it in the top 0.1% of papers in the academic field of Environment/Ecology)
“Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters” by Doug Brinkerhoff, associate professor, Department of Computer Sciences (Sciences; 46 citations; included in news from 649 media outlets)
“River ecosystem metabolism and carbon biogeochemistry in a changing world” by Bob Hall, professor, Flathead Lake Biological Station (Nature; 37 citations)
Researchers Prep Fentanyl, Heroin Vaccines for Human Trials
UM researchers and their partners are nearing human trials for vaccines to prevent fentanyl and heroin drug overdoses.
The vaccines would protect people struggling with drug addiction or those at risk of accidental overdose. According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 106,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths were reported in 2021. Of those, 71,000 can be attributed to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Researcher Jay Evans directs the UM Center for Translational Medicine, which is working on the vaccines. He also is co-founder of Inimmune, the corporate partner charged with scaling up the vaccine components for manufacture. Inimmune is based in MonTEC, UM’s Missoula-based business incubator.
“We anticipate testing our vaccines in humans in early 2024,” Dr. Evans says. “The first vaccine will target heroin, followed shortly thereafter with a fentanyl vaccine in Phase I clinical trials. Once we establish safety and early efficacy in these first clinical trials, we hope to advance a combined multivalent vaccine targeting both heroin and fentanyl.”
He says the vaccines start with Dr. Marco Pravetoni, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. His research team designs haptens, molecules that provoke an immune response, and drug conjugate vaccines that can elicit the production of antibodies against target opioids.
The UM team contributes a patented adjuvant called INI-4001 to the vaccine cocktails. Adjuvants are substances that boost the effectiveness of vaccines.
“Our adjuvants improve the vaccine response, providing a stronger and more durable immunity,” Evans says. “We have worked closely with researchers from Inimmune, the University of Minnesota, the University of Washington, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute and Columbia University over the past few years to design and optimize anti-opioid vaccines for advancement to human clinical trials.”
The work is 100% funded by the National Institutes of Health. A few years ago, UM earned a $33.4 million contract to develop and advance two candidate anti-opioid vaccines through Phase 1 clinical trials. This work is supported by the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) initiative.
“It takes a long time — years — to get to a final approved product,” Evans says. “Based on the efficacy data we see in our preclinical data and the established safety profile in animal models, we are very hopeful these vaccines will be successful. But there is still a lot of work to be done.”
The vaccines were tested with animal models to support their advancement to human clinical trials. Mice were tested at UM and rats and pigs at the University of Minnesota. Papers demonstrating how the TLR7/8 adjuvant increased the effectiveness of the fentanyl vaccine among animals were published recently in the journal NPJ Vaccines. Publications on the success of the heroin vaccine are forthcoming.
There are many moving pieces in vaccine development, and Evans expects the heroin vaccine human trials to begin before the fentanyl, even though the fentanyl papers published first.
“The human clinical trials will include a drug challenge to evaluate both safety and efficacy of the vaccines in early clinical development,” he says. “We will also follow the patients to evaluate how long the antibodies against opioids will last.”
Together, the UM Center for Translational Medicine and Inimmune employ about 70 people on campus and across the river at MonTEC. Evans believes they offer one of the largest university-based academic research teams for vaccine discovery and development in the U.S., and they were a major reason UM landed on a 2020 list titled “Best Universities Solving the Coronavirus Pandemic.”
University Also Works on Tuberculosis Vaccine …
UM’s Center for Translational Medicine and its partners also landed a five-year $12.3 million contract from the NIH to develop a novel vaccine adjuvant for use in a tuberculosis vaccine.
“The development and clinical evaluation of safe and effective adjuvants is urgently needed for the advancement of vaccines to combat the ongoing threat of bacterial and fungal infections, including tuberculosis, pertussis and others,” Evans says. “TB affects a significant portion of the global population, and the only licensed vaccine, BCG, has limited effectiveness. Thus the development of an effective vaccine is critical to end the global TB epidemic.”
According to the World Health Organization, 1.6 million people died from TB in 2021. Worldwide, TB is the 13th leading cause of death and second leading infectious killer after COVID-19 (above HIV and AIDS).
Drs. Evans and Walid Abdelwahab are the co-principal investigators on the contract, along with their colleagues Drs. David Burkhart, Asia Riel and Blair DeBuysscher. The project also includes researchers from the University of Chicago, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Missoula-based Inimmune Corp., a corporate development partner.
“This funding represents tremendous support for our continuous research efforts in advancing safe and efficient adjuvants and formulation strategies for further development of vaccine candidates against TB,” Abdelwahab says. “This contract is a strong endorsement of our exceptional vaccine research team at UM.”
The project involves a large vaccine research team at UM with more than two decades of research on improving vaccines through the use of adjuvants and novel delivery systems.
UM Research: AI Tests Into Top 1% for Original Creative Thinking
Research from UM and its partners suggests artificial intelligence can match the top 1% of human thinkers on a standard test for creativity.
The study was directed last year by Dr. Erik Guzik, an assistant clinical professor in UM’s College of Business. He and his partners used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a well-known tool used for decades to assess human creativity.
The researchers submitted eight responses generated by ChatGPT, the application powered by the GPT-4 artificial intelligence engine. They also submitted answers from a control group of 24 UM students taking Guzik’s entrepreneurship and personal finance classes. These scores were compared with 2,700 college students nationally who took the TTCT in 2016. All submissions were scored by Scholastic Testing Service, which didn’t know AI was involved.
The results placed ChatGPT in elite company for creativity. The AI application was in the top percentile for fluency — the ability to generate a large volume of ideas — and for originality — the ability to come up with new ideas. The AI slipped a bit — to the 97th percentile — for flexibility, the ability to generate different types and categories of ideas.
“For ChatGPT and GPT-4, we showed for the first time that it performs in the top 1% for originality,” Guzik says. “That was new.”
He was gratified to note that some of his UM students also performed in the top 1%. However, ChatGTP outperformed the vast majority of college students nationally.
Guzik tested the AI and his students during the 2023 spring semester. He was assisted in the work by Christian Gilde of UM Western and Christian Byrge of Vilnius University. The researchers presented their work at the Southern Oregon University Creativity Conference.
“We were very careful at the conference to not interpret the data very much,” Guzik says. “We just presented the results. But we shared strong evidence that AI seems to be developing creative ability on par with or even exceeding human ability.”
With AI advances speeding up, he expects it to become a key tool for the world of business going forward and a significant new driver of regional and national innovation.
“For me, creativity is about doing things differently,” Guzik says. “One of the definitions of entrepreneurship I love is that to be an entrepreneur is to think differently. So AI may help us apply the world of creative thinking to business and the process of innovation, and that’s just fascinating to me.”
He says the UM College of Business is open to teaching about AI and incorporating it into coursework.
Acclaimed UM Ecologist Earns Montana’s Highest Professor Rank
He has been called one of the top scientists this century in the field of ecosystem science. His work has been cited by researchers around the world more than 29,000 times.
And now Dr. Cory Cleveland, an ecologist and UM faculty member, was named Regents Professor of Ecology.
Regents Professor is the highest faculty rank bestowed by the Montana University System. Cleveland’s new honor was approved last fall by the state Board of Regents during its Missoula meeting. He is the 14th UM faculty member to earn the professor rank since it was established in 1991.
Cleveland’s nominators describe him as a preeminent global scholar in the fields of ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry and environmental conservation. He is part of the University’s W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation.
“When I was offered a job at UM, it felt like I won the lottery,” Cleveland says. “It was one of the happiest days of my life. Being selected as a Regents Professor at UM is a close second. It’s definitely the most fulfilling and rewarding moment of my professional career. It has made me reflect with tremendous gratitude toward all the people who made it a possibility.”
In 2018, Cleveland became the first Montanan ever named a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America. He also has earned more than $5 million in competitive research grants.
He and his students have published more than 110 papers in leading national and international scientific publications. One paper, “Nitrogen cycles: past, present and future,” is described by nominators as something of a classic, as it alone has been cited nearly 6,000 times.
Nominators also noted his outsized impact on UM’s curriculum. He redesigned the forestry college’s traditional “soils” class into a modern environmental science course integrating biogeochemistry, bioclimatology and hydrology.
Of Mice and Mummies: Study Ups Elevation Limit for Mammals
UM researcher Jeffrey Good never suspected he would someday study freeze-dried mummy mice from atop some of the highest peaks in South America.
The mouse cadavers are a mystery because they were discovered on volcano summits reaching above 20,000 feet. The peaks rise from one of the most inhospitable spots on Earth, the Puna de Atacama plateau — a place so dry, cold and oxygen-poor that NASA uses it to practice hunting for life on Mars.
How could a mouse live up there?
“These discoveries are forcing us to reconsider the elevational limits of where life can persist,” says Good, a UM professor of ecology and evolution. “Some of these mice were discovered near ancient Incan ceremonial structures that were used to conduct human and animal sacrifices over 500 years ago. This led some early archeologists to speculate that mouse remains found in these areas were transported there by the Incas.
“However, our genetic results clearly show that these remains are not an anomaly associated with Incan transport, but part of a continuous population of mice that persist at elevations previously thought to be incompatible with mammalian life,” he says. “While humans occasionally visit these peaks, the mice appear to be full-time residents.”
The research was a collaboration between UM, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Universidad Austral de Chile. The results were published Oct. 23 in Current Biology: Cell Press.
The mummy mice were discovered on dry peaks where the temperature never rises above freezing and oxygen is less than half of that at sea level. Archaeologists first found the freeze-dried mice on expeditions to the Andean summits in the 1970s and ’80s and assumed the rodents somehow hitched a ride with Incas who used the peaks as sacred sites.
That hypothesis was cast into doubt in 2020, when this study’s lead author, UNL biology researcher Jay Storz, and fellow mountaineer Mario Pérez Mamani captured a live specimen of a leaf-eared mouse atop the 22,000-foot peak of Llullaillaco, a volcano straddling the Chile-Argentina border.
No mammal had ever been previously found living at such an extreme altitude. Storz and his colleagues wondered whether the high-elevation mice might represent a distinct subpopulation of the leaf-eared rodent. That’s where Good’s UM lab came in.
“Our role was to lead all of the genetic analyses, which included recovering genetic material from the samples and then sequencing and analyzing their genomes,” Good says. “Dr. Storz and his team sent the precious samples that they collected from expeditions to 21 Andean volcano summits to my laboratory for analysis.”
Good’s team sequenced whole genomes from 44 mice, including the 13 mummified mice from the tops of some of the highest peaks in the Andean mountains. The genetic work was led by UM postdoctoral researcher Dr. Schuyler Liphardt.
Survey Finds Growing Tolerance for Wolves
Montanans have varying attitudes and beliefs about wolves and wolf management, and over time some of those feelings have shifted, according to a new survey conducted cooperatively by UM and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.
The survey was distributed three times — in 2012, 2017 and 2023 — tracking trends in how residents view wolves and wolf management. It provides insights to wildlife managers and officials tasked with making decisions on wolf management.
“I think these results show that as Montanans have lived with wolves for the past 10 or more years, their attitudes and tolerance toward wolves are increasing, but support for hunting and lethal control also remains high,” says Dr. Alex Metcalf, a UM associate professor in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation.
The survey was sent to 10,000 residents categorized into four groups: deer and elk hunters, landowners, the general population, and wolf hunters and trappers. Most of the questions asked people to rate their tolerance on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being very intolerant, 5 being very tolerant). Survey results have a margin of error of 3.7% for the general population and less for other groups.
Results showed an increasing tolerance for wolves on the landscape, particularly among deer and elk hunters and the general population. In 2023, 74% of the general population was tolerant or very tolerant of wolves, up from 50% in 2017 and 41% in 2012.
Wolf hunting in Montana enjoys a high level of positive views among all groups but is seeing a decline in tolerance from the general population. The most recent survey showed that 82% of deer and elk hunters, 86% of landowners, and 100% of wolf hunters and trappers are tolerant or very tolerant of wolf hunting. That number for the general population was 58%, down from 71% in 2012.
Research: 1 in 6 Toddlers Don’t Finish Vaccines
UM researchers have found that 17% of U.S. toddlers start, but do not complete, common and recommended vaccine series.
UM’s Alexandria Albers, Sarah Michels and Sophia Newcomer published their findings in Pediatrics last summer, highlighting the primary cause of not completing a vaccine series is due to logistical barriers and not vaccine hesitancy. When publishing the study, the researchers urged action to address this public health shortcoming.
“For most vaccines, children need three or four doses in the first two years of life for optimal protection against diseases that can be quite dangerous,” says Michels, an epidemiology specialist with the UM Center for Population Health Research and lead author of the study. “Completing all doses of multidose vaccine series is important for long-lasting immunity.”
The researchers analyzed data collected in the CDC’s National Immunization Survey from 16,365 children ages 19 to 35 months. In addition to finding that 17% of U.S. children started but did not finish their vaccine series, the researchers found that 10% did not start one or more vaccine series, including 1% of toddlers who did not receive any vaccines. About 73% of toddlers did complete all seven recommended vaccine series analyzed in the study.
The vaccines the researchers specifically evaluated were four doses of diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis; four doses of pneumococcal conjugate; three or four doses of Haemophilus influenzae type b; three doses of hepatitis B; three doses of polio; one dose of measles, mumps and rubella; and one dose of varicella vaccines.
The researchers found that children who moved across state lines, children who did not have health insurance and families with multiple children in the household, were more likely to have started, but not completed, multidose vaccine series. Socioeconomic and racial and ethnic disparities also were observed, which indicate that effective strategies for supporting vaccine series completion are not reaching all communities.
“Concerted efforts are needed to close these gaps,” says Newcomer, an associate professor of epidemiology at UM and the study’s senior author. “Clinics can proactively reach out to families to let them know when their kids are due for vaccines, offer flexible scheduling and appointment options, and make sure eligible children are getting free vaccines through the federal Vaccines for Children program. We need to make getting vaccinated as easy as possible.”
UM-Led Project Creates Satellite Mapping Tool
When the Cold War grew chillier around 1950, the U.S. military worried about a communist land invasion of the United States. So pilots were employed — many of them veterans of World War II — to photograph the entire country using aircraft.
This 70-year-old archive of overlapping photos was taken at different angles, providing topographic information for artillery in the event the Soviets rolled onto American soil. Such a “Red Dawn” never happened, but those pilots created an invaluable historical snapshot that predates useful satellite imagery by decades.
The collection was stored away and eventually digitized by the U.S. Geological Survey. Now UM and its partners have created a new online tool, Landscape Explorer, which combines those 1950s photos with modern satellite imagery.
Visit the site and type in a city, location or your own address, and a slider can be pulled back and forth across the resulting image, allowing people to easily visualize the changes that have taken place during the past seven decades. At present the tool covers the American West, from the Pacific Ocean to North Dakota and down to Texas.
“Satellite imagery doesn’t start getting really useful until the ’80s,” says Dr. Dave Naugle, a UM professor of large-scale wildlife ecology. “Thank goodness USGS archived all the car parts, but then our guys put it together and made a Ferrari out of it.”
Scott Morford, an NTSG research scientist and the project lead, says the original military imagery collection comprises millions of photographs from across the United States. Landscape Explorer incorporated roughly 170,000 of these images, using nearly 40 terabytes of data. The project scaled up from just western Montana to the entire state and eventually 17 western states.
Elite Honor
UM Regents Professor Anna Prentiss officially was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Sept. 30, 2023. She was inducted with the others from the classes of 2022 and 2023 during a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She signed the “Book of Members” that goes all the way back to 1780 and was signed by George Washington. In spring 2022, Prentiss became only the fourth Montanan ever elected to the prestigious academy. She joined an elite group that includes Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr.
Study Shows Mammal Declines With Urbanization
Chris Hansen’s trail cameras reveal remarkable moments but also convey a critical call for the preservation of wild spaces.
Hansen is a postdoctoral researcher in UM’s Boone and Crockett Wildlife Conservation Program. His team deployed 178 motion-activated trail cameras at random sites across urban, suburban, exurban, rural and wild regions during a comprehensive 2019–20 study.
The research aimed to identify how the number of houses in an area affects where animals live, how many of them there are, how many different types of species are present, how common they are and when they are most active during the day.
The findings, recently published in the Journal of Mammalogy, revealed that as cities get more crowded, there are fewer types of mammals around. Larger animals, in particular, are less common in urban areas. Hansen’s study emphasizes the critical need to maintain wild spaces for species unable to thrive in developed areas.
Hansen earned his Ph.D. from UM in December 2021. He has been at the forefront of wildlife research, focusing on the impact of urbanization and grazing on mammal communities.
“Chris’ work brings vital insights into the complex relationship between urbanization and mammalian biodiversity,” says Joshua Millspaugh, the Boone and Crockett Professor of Wildlife Conservation at UM.
Glimpse
UM was awarded $6.6 million from the federal Columbia River Basin Restoration Program last year. Researcher Rachel Malison of UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station will use the funding to develop a comprehensive and collaborative Pesticide Stewardship Partnership Program for Montana’s Upper Columbia River Basin. The program will focus on reducing pollution to improve water quality while engaging and educating the public on ways to reduce toxics from polluting Montana’s pristine water.
A new building for UM’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture opened last fall. The 17,000-square-foot building provides state-of-the-art storage and exhibition space for the MMAC’s 11,000-work collection — the oldest, largest and most comprehensive art holding in the state. The facility was made possible by the generosity of many donors who gifted and pledged more than $15 million to the UM Foundation for the project, including $12.5 million from longtime UM donors Patt and Terry Payne.
Bob Yokelson, an accomplished UM researcher who studies biomass burning, recently was named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. AGU is the world’s largest Earth and space sciences association, with nearly 60,000 members in 137 countries. This marks at least the third time a UM faculty member has earned this rare distinction.
In a groundbreaking effort to bridge the digital divide across Big Sky Country, UM earned a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to plan how to boost digital network connections with its tribal college partners. Chief Information Officer Zach Rossmiller will oversee the grant, which he says will revolutionize digital access for Montana’s tribal colleges and universities.
A recent study by David Ketchum, a 2023 graduate of UM’s systems ecology Ph.D. program, reveals that irrigation practices play a crucial role and often surpass climate-induced changes in altering water flows across the American West.
UM’s Center for Children, Families and Workforce Development secured a five-year $7.1 million federal grant to help prevent unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases among young American Indian populations. The UM center will provide evidence-based programs for young Natives in Montana, Arizona and New Mexico. The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Indigenous Health is a key partner on the grant.
UM has forged a new cooperative research agreement with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center based in Keyport, Washington. It will make possible U.S. Department of Defense funding opportunities ranging from $500,000 to $10 million. The agreement could lead to improved monitoring of coasts and the Arctic, new remote-sensing applications and new AI applications for environmental assessments. •
