FACULTY RESEARCH Scholars & Experts

Melissa Whitson, associate professor of psychology, says that her time as a faculty member has presented many chances for her to team up with colleagues and students across disciplines.

Whitson, who teaches and completed post-doctoral work at Yale University’s School of Medicine, was recently invited to collaborate on the NASA Innovative Mars Exploration Education and Technology Project by a colleague in the University’s Tagliatela College of Engineering.

The project involves conducting evaluations at a camp that fosters STEM education among disadvantaged junior high and high school students. Whitson and her colleague are conducting evaluations to assess how successful the program is over the next three years.

"It’s exciting and a good example of interdisciplinary research that we do at the University of New Haven," she said. "We have different skills, and when you put them together, it makes for more complete research projects."

For years, the closely held belief by those who study memory was that a traumatic event was seared in the mind. But when Charles "Andy" Morgan III, an associate professor of national security at the University of New Haven, studied post-traumatic stress in Gulf War veterans and went back to ask about the same event two years later, he found many veterans’ memories changed.

"Our memory is not a camera, but more like an editor putting all these pieces together," Morgan said. "We took terrible grief for our findings, even got hate mail that said this did a disservice to victims and veterans, but our position was we needed to know the truth about memory."

So, he embarked on another study to determine the role stress plays in memory, trying to closely replicate a real-life traumatic event. He studied 1,300 soldiers taking part in the Army’s, Navy’s, and Marines’ survival school training – in classroom settings and in the field – where they try to avoid capture and, when captured, undergo highly stressful interrogations.

When asked to identify their captor, the soldiers were 75 percent accurate in the classroom phase. As physical and mental stressors rose, the accuracy dropped to 42 percent when they tried to identify the person from photos and to 33 percent when looking for their captor in a lineup. Additional research, Morgan said, has shown that false memories can be created rapidly in response to highly stressful events.

Morgan’s studies began to be cited by judges around the country in criminal cases involving eyewitness testimony. "As more people were being exonerated after being wrongfully convicted, people went back to see what led to the person being convicted," he said. "Almost always, it was eyewitness testimony – often of just one person. Given that eyewitness testimony has been one of the foundations of our court system, this was alarming."

Morgan is a former medical director of the inpatient PTSD unit at the Connecticut VA and a consultant with the CIA and FBI. His studies into PTSD and the neurobiology of stress and detecting deception have taken him around the globe. Widely published, he has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Sir Henry Welcome Medal and Prize for his development of interventions to buffer negative stress on human memory, learning, and operational performance.

A member of the Yale psychiatry faculty for 25 years, he joined the University of New Haven in 2014 because he wanted to teach the next generation that will work in national security and criminal justice and continue his research.

"It was too enticing to pass up," he said. "And I am loving it."

Until 1970, the survival rate for a child with leukemia was just 10 percent. Today, 90 percent of children with leukemia will live at least five years. But for adults with leukemia, the outlook is much dimmer, with some leukemia subtypes having a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent.

Can better drugs be discovered to transform leukemia treatment?

That’s the dream of Dequan Xiao, a University of New Haven associate professor of chemistry, and Jun Lu, an associate professor of genetics at Yale University.

They have collaborated using a multi-disciplinary approach relying on both chemistry and biology to discover drugs that could eradicate leukemia one day.

Their work is being support by the Connecticut-sponsored Program in Innovative Therapeutics for Connecticut’s Health (PITCH) and the Connecticut Bioscience Innovation Fund.

"This is an exciting way for basic research to be translated to potential commercial products and then put on the market," Xiao said. "We will work together with the PITCH program to discover pre-drugs that restore health to leukemia cells and to significantly enhance our success rate of discovery."