UCSC professors receive national recognition

The American Association for the Advancement of Science recognized two UC Santa Cruz professors.

SANTA CRUZ >> The American Association for the Advancement of Science recognized two UC Santa Cruz professors, Fitnat Yildiz and Matt Wagers, for their contributions to their respective fields, electing them as fellows of the association.

Yildiz and Wagers are two of 489 association members that were elected as fellows, this year. Each year, the new batch of fellows is chosen by other members of the association rather than an executive board. It is an opportunity for colleagues to recognize each other for their hard work.

“It is nice to be recognized by your peers for the contribution you are making in your research,” Yildiz said. “You kind of hope that these types of things happen as you move in your career.”

Yildiz is a professor of microbiology at UC Santa Cruz. She was recognized for her team’s research of biofilms.

There was little understanding of biofilms and how they formed when Yildiz first started her research. Her team advanced the understanding of how biofilms form, something that was in the works for 25 years, she said.

“Biofilm formation is prevalent, and our understanding of how bacteria forms these structures is not complete,” Yildiz said. “Our work made a significant contribution to the whole field.”

Biofilms are organisms that grow in clusters, according to Yildiz. These clusters like to stick to each other and form on a wide range of surfaces.

“This is actually very prevalent. These biofilms are everywhere,” Yildiz said. “From your sink to your feet. They can colonize pipes. It’s a problem in industry, it’s a problem in medical settings.”

Biofilm formation can cause serious medical complications with surgery patients, Yildiz said. Some bacteria can cause chronic infections if they are biofilms, especially in prosthetics like hip replacements.

“You can’t really kill that biofilm bacteria with antibiotics,” Yildiz said. “You need to remove the medical device. It is a big concern.”

Understanding how biofilms form and what causes them to stick together is important in finding a way to treat the infections they cause.

Yildiz’s research worked with vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera in humans. However, her findings branched beyond her focused research. Yildiz’s research provided information on multiple bacteria and how they form biofilms.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is not exclusive to microbiology. Academics from a wide range of topics are elected as fellows, each year.

Wagers is an associate professor of linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. His focus is on psycholinguistics, which is the study of how humans comprehend language.

“I’m really thankful for the recognition from triple-A-S,” Wagers said. “It encourages me and inspires me to keep going.”

He compared the study to the way modern artificial intelligence like Siri and Alexa work when users speak to them.

People understand how artificial intelligence processes language because they programmed them, Wagers said. What is not fully understood is how the human brain does it.

The human brain can process complex sentences in the blink of an eye.

Linguists used to believe that humans waited to hear an entire sentence, then processed what they hear, according to Wagers. Now researchers understand that is not true. The brain is constantly processing language as the sentence forms.

Wagers studies languages that use different sentence structure than the world’s most commonly spoken languages. Whereas English follows a structure that flows from subject to verb to object, he works with languages where the structure starts with the verb.

He studied languages like Chamorro, which is spoken by roughly 45,000 people on the Mariana Islands, and Zapotec which is spoken by the Oaxacan in Central America. His goal was to determine whether the altered sentence structure changed the way people processed language. Ultimately, he learned that the structure does not matter, the brain was still able to process the speech as efficiently.

However, it was not his findings that earned him the recognition with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it was his practice. Wagers, with support from the National Science Foundation, conducted studies in the field with the communities that speak these languages.

“That is something that is a relatively new development in the field,” Wagers said of his method. “I do want to say this isn’t just me. It’s been a developing current in our field for about the past 10 years. There are other researchers like myself who are going into the field.”

While Wagers has been a part of the major innovation within his field, he is excited about the future.

“At UCSC we have a world- class linguistics department. Our students really are leading at pushing this to the next level,” he said. “The current generation of students at Santa Cruz are the ones that are taking it and really making something of it.”