The research was led by Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, who co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair, doctoral student Mia Harbort, undergraduate Mason Sewing, and other colleagues from the United States and Europe. Graf began traveling to the site in 2013 and returned every year until the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted fieldwork, with subsequent seasons in 2021, 2023 and 2025. As director of the excavation project, she secured several National Science Foundation grants totaling 400,000 dollars to support the work. The effort has yielded more than 80,000 archaeological specimens, an assemblage that includes a unique hafted-biface form, tools made from bone and antler, a diverse array of animal remains, and remarkably well-preserved activity areas where ancient camp tasks can still be read from the ground.

To understand why the site matters, it helps to picture the world of the late Pleistocene. The Bering Land Bridge formed about 35,000 years ago, when sea levels dropped far enough to expose the continental shelf between Siberia and Alaska, and it remained above water until rising seas submerged it around 12,000 years ago. During that window, a region larger than many modern countries served as both a corridor and a homeland. Today the area around the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site is cloaked in spruce forest, but during the final millennia of the Ice Age it was covered in shrub-tundra vegetation, a cold, open landscape in which hardy plants, large herbivores and the people who hunted them coexisted along the Tanana River, one of the major river systems of interior Alaska.

The faunal record from the site shows that its residents were skilled hunters of Ice Age megafauna. Mammoth, bison and horse, all three of which are now extinct, appear in the assemblage alongside caribou, a species that survives today and remains a critically important resource for Indigenous communities across Alaska. Graf noted that caribou has always been a vital resource for the region’s Indigenous peoples, a continuity that stretches back to the very occupations her team has excavated. The combination of extinct and extant prey in a single site illustrates the breadth of the late-glacial subsistence economy and the flexibility hunters needed to survive in a subarctic environment where seasons were extreme and resources patchy.

Among the most evocative discoveries is a large stone anvil found within a dwelling feature. Around it, the excavators found bison bones that had been deliberately broken apart, along with numerous quartz and quartzite hammerstones, the tools used to fracture the bone. Graf explained that the pattern suggests people were using these stones to fully process the bones in order to extract marrow and likely to render grease, a calorie-rich food product that would have been essential in a northern winter. All of this activity, she said, was taking place near a large earth oven, a heated pit used for slow cooking. Together, the anvil, the hammerstones, the shattered bones and the oven preserve a frozen moment of camp life: a group processing an animal carcass into fat and marrow, likely sharing the results around a hearth.

Other key finds point to the sophistication of the site’s inhabitants. Bird bones were fashioned into needles, evidence of tailored clothing sewn from hides, an indispensable technology for people enduring Ice Age winters in a treeless landscape. The team also recovered numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, which Graf suggested may have served as the sharpened tips of weapons. The shape is distinctive: she said it is the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond form, and the only other places from this period with such points in a northern context lie on the Russian side of the land bridge. That distribution carries a striking implication. As Graf put it, it suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to, and possibly from, this location, making the site a potential waypoint in the back-and-forth movements that ultimately populated two continents.

Technically, the site contributes to a long-running debate about how and when humans moved from Asia into the Americas. Beringian archaeological occupations are concentrated in an area only slightly larger than the U.S. state of Maryland, which makes each well-documented site disproportionately valuable. The three components at Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, separated by roughly a thousand years, span the transition from the late-glacial period into the early Holocene, capturing what researchers describe as settling-in behavior: the process by which newly arrived populations learned the geography, established recurring camps, and developed the toolkits and food-processing strategies suited to a far northern setting. The presence of a dwelling feature, organized activity areas and repeated occupations indicates that this was a base camp, a place to which people returned, rather than a brief hunting stop.

The publication, titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska,” appears in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal. The research is an observational study of the archaeological record, and the authors declare no competing interests. For Graf, who has been at the University of Kansas since 2022 and specializes in Ice Age archaeology, environmental archaeology and the peopling of the Americas, the fascination began in an undergraduate North American archaeology class. She recalled falling in love with the Bering Land Bridge concept: people hunting megafauna and traveling from one massive continent to another across exposed continental shelf, studying extinct animals and the tools hunters used to take them. She described getting caught up in the wonder of that vision.

Beyond the individual artifacts, Graf frames the work as part of a larger effort to understand human evolution and adaptation. What began as a mere handful of individuals in a small region has expanded to more than 8 billion people in a fraction of geological time, a trajectory she finds remarkable given humanity’s meager beginnings as hunter-gatherers. Studying how early Beringians coped with the exigencies of Ice Age life, she argues, informs how humans have always adapted and responded to challenges. The more we learn about the evolution of the Homo sapiens species, she said, the more we can understand ourselves today. In that sense, the broken bison bones, the sewing needles and the diamond-shaped points on an Alaskan ridge are not just relics of a distant past but evidence of the problem-solving capacities that carried our species across a vanished land bridge and, eventually, around the entire world.

For now, the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site stands as one of the clearest windows into the lives of the people who stood at the threshold of the Americas nearly 14,000 years ago. Its 80,000-plus specimens continue to be analyzed, and each field season adds detail to the picture of a community that hunted mammoth and caribou, rendered grease from bone beside earth ovens, sewed tailored clothing with bone needles, and carried weapon technology across a land bridge that no longer exists. The name given to the site by Alaska Native Athabascan speakers, “they were there,” proves an apt summary of what the archaeology shows: a resilient group of hunter-gatherers, present on that ridge through centuries of change, leaving behind the material record of how they lived.

Subject of Research: Late Pleistocene archaeology of a 13,800-year-old base camp in Beringia, Alaska, and its evidence for the peopling of the Americas

Article Title: Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago

Article References: Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bering Land Bridge, Beringia, Alaska archaeology, Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, Pleistocene, megafauna, hunter-gatherers, peopling of the Americas, Tanana River, Science Advances, University of Kansas, late-glacial

Uintatheres emerged roughly 58 million years ago, fewer than 10 million years after the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs, and they persisted in the fossil record for around 20 million years. They were among the largest land mammals of their time, notable for their bulk, their prominent horns and their large canine teeth. Because living relatives of such animals are long extinct, paleontologists have traditionally inferred differences between the sexes from clusters of size and ornament in fossil samples. If a collection of skulls seemed to sort into a big-horned group and a small-horned group, the natural interpretation was males and females. For uintatheres, that interpretation hardened into orthodoxy: males were depicted as much larger animals bearing far more dramatic cranial features than females, a picture repeated in museum halls, popular books and scientific literature alike.

The new research began, fittingly, with a puzzle far smaller than a meter-long skull. Kevin Mulcahy, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, and his doctoral adviser K. Christopher Beard, senior curator at the institute, were trying to identify a single broken upper molar collected during fieldwork in Montana, a tooth they suspected might belong to the uintathere group. To solve that problem, the two traveled to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, whose storied vertebrate paleontology collections hold entire shelves of uintathere skulls, each nearly a meter long. These are famous specimens, described and redescribed in the literature for decades, and the original goal was simply to compare teeth and pin down the identity of the Montana fossil.

What Mulcahy found instead was a pattern that did not match the textbooks. As he examined the celebrated skulls to compare their teeth, he noticed an enormous amount of variation — but it did not appear to fall into two neat categories. Working quickly, he took a series of measurements of the skulls with a ruler and began exploring them statistically. The logic of the test is straightforward: if a sample of fossils truly reflects a strongly dimorphic species, measurements of traits such as skull size, horn development and canine dimensions should fit a bimodal distribution, with two peaks corresponding to average males and average females. If the species is not strongly dimorphic, the same measurements should instead follow a single, unimodal distribution. When he ran the analysis, the expected two-peak pattern was nowhere to be found.

“It wasn’t like there’s one group of specimens that look bigger than another, and then there’s another group that are smaller with smaller horns and canines,” Mulcahy said. That observation raised an uncomfortable question: were uintatheres really such good examples of sexual dimorphism after all? Was there actual evidence in the morphology of the skulls — in the distribution of the ranges of morphology — that two sexes were being sampled? To find out, Mulcahy broadened the project, gathering additional measurements from specimens held at other institutions and applying newer statistical procedures. His final dataset included about 30 skulls of Uintatherium anceps, the species at the heart of the dimorphism story.

The results were underwhelming for the traditional view. “Maybe there were some little signals of dimorphism here and there, but nothing really concrete,” Mulcahy said. Yet a skeptic could still object that the methods themselves were too weak to detect dimorphism if it existed. Fossil samples carry a fundamental handicap: no one actually knows which specimens are male and which are female. Researchers can guess, assigning the most extreme individuals to one sex and the least extreme to the other, and then test whether the groups differ — but as Mulcahy points out, that procedure is deeply circular. Of course the groups will differ if you built them by sorting extremes in the first place.

To break that circularity, Mulcahy turned the same statistical techniques on a living animal whose sex could be verified with certainty: the modern bison. Bison offered an ideal comparison. They are another very large herbivore, they occupy an ecology broadly similar to what has been proposed for uintatheres, and they carry substantial horns, making them a plausible modern analogue for testing how dimorphism signals appear in skull measurements. The contrast with the fossils was striking. In the bison sample, the dimorphism signal was clear and strong: females clustered with females and males clustered with males in an almost perfect separation. The methods, in other words, were fully capable of detecting sexual dimorphism when it genuinely exists — which made its near absence in the uintathere skulls all the more meaningful.

If the statistics were sound and the sample was adequate, then the flagship example of sexual dimorphism in the mammalian fossil record may never have deserved the title. Mulcahy suggests that the mistaken assumption has deep historical roots, reaching back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when so many fossil species were first described. This was the era in which evolutionary theory, sexual selection and natural selection were entering scientific discourse, and the field was dominated by male paleontologists working within a distinctly Victorian-era mindset. Within that intellectual climate, the idea that males would be bigger and more fearsome than females was less a hypothesis to be tested than an assumption to be illustrated. “When you step back and actually test that hypothesis, it doesn’t really hold up,” Mulcahy said.

The implications extend well beyond uintatheres. If a species long regarded as the classic, near-definitive case of dimorphism yields only weak and inconclusive signals under modern analysis, then other fossil species whose dimorphism was asserted on similar grounds may deserve re-examination as well. The finding also speaks to a broader debate about the evolution of size differences between the sexes across the mammalian family tree. Strong, big-male-style dimorphism was probably not ancestral at the root of the mammalian tree, Mulcahy noted; among living mammals where the pattern does appear, it has almost certainly evolved independently several times. The assumption that males are typically larger than females, he argued, reflects a long-standing bias in which animals scientists chose to study and which questions they found interesting.

That bias has been quantified in recent work on living mammals. As Mulcahy points out, a paper published just a couple of years ago showed that among modern mammal species, most either show no sexual dimorphism at all or actually feature larger females. The popular image of the animal kingdom as a place where males invariably outweigh and out-arm females, he said, is really an artifact of which creatures biologists in the past chose to look at. For paleontology, the lesson of the uintatheres is a methodological one: claims of dimorphism in fossil species need to be tested against explicit statistical expectations, ideally benchmarked against living species of known sex, rather than assumed from Victorian intuitions. A broken molar from Montana set that reassessment in motion, and the iconic horned giants of the Eocene may never look quite the same again.

Subject of Research: Sexual dimorphism in the extinct Eocene mammal Uintatherium anceps

Article Title: Study: ‘Classic example’ of sexual dimorphism in fossil record actually shows nuance between males and females

Article References: Study: ‘Classic example’ of sexual dimorphism in fossil record actually shows nuance between males and females. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: uintatheres, sexual dimorphism, paleontology, Eocene mammals, Uintatherium anceps, fossil skulls, statistical analysis, bison comparison, sexual selection, University of Kansas, PLOS One, mammalian evolution

Roman, as astronomers call the observatory, is designed from the ground up for speed and breadth. Rudnick described it as a thousand times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope at taking data over large portions of the sky. That advantage comes from Roman’s combination of a sensitive wide-field camera and a spectrographic mode that can capture the light of many objects at once. Where Hubble painstakingly stares at narrow patches of sky, Roman can sweep vast regions in a fraction of the time, making it the ideal instrument for a survey that aims to chart the distant universe on a scale never attempted before.

The GRACE team, assembled with colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a large group of international researchers, proposed to observe for 420 hours with Roman, covering an area of sky ten times the size of the full moon. Within that enormous footprint, the survey will take spectra of every galaxy by exposing for 40 hours at each location. Spectroscopy splits the light from each galaxy into its individual colors, and from those split spectra astronomers can extract a remarkable range of physical information: how fast the galaxy is receding, what chemical elements it contains, how vigorously it is forming new stars, and how its stars are arranged into a coherent shape.

The payoff will be a detailed three-dimensional map of the universe covering hundreds of thousands of galaxies. For each of them, GRACE team members plan to measure precise properties including distances, the mix of elements within them, the rate at which they form new stars, and their detailed morphologies. Rudnick emphasized that this combination of ultrasensitive spectroscopy over such a large area of sky is unprecedented and is expected to revolutionize knowledge of the distant universe. Because light from remote galaxies takes billions of years to reach Earth, the map will function as a time machine, showing astronomers how galaxies looked when the universe was far younger than it is today.

For Sangeeta Malhotra, a supervisory research astrophysicist at Goddard and co-principal investigator of GRACE, the mission is the culmination of a dream more than two decades in the making. She recalled that the team started imagining a project of this kind in 2005, as soon as they saw what Hubble could do for spectra of the earliest galaxies. From that point forward, she said, the group did not merely dream but worked with colleagues to build the scientific case for the wide-field space telescope that was ultimately realized as Roman. Now that the mission has launched, the team is looking forward to seeing the first data from GRACE arrive.

The survey’s observations are aimed at two pivotal epochs in cosmic history that astronomers refer to as cosmic dawn and cosmic noon. Rudnick leads the portion of the program focused on cosmic noon, a name he acknowledged can be misleading. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, and cosmic noon actually spans the interval from roughly 2 to 6 billion years after the Big Bang, nowhere near the midpoint of cosmic time. The label refers instead to what happened during that era: it was the period when galaxies across the universe were forming stars most rapidly. In that sense, cosmic noon marks the peak epoch of galaxy formation, the moment when the stellar output of the cosmos reached its zenith.

Among his multiple science goals with the GRACE data, Rudnick will investigate protoclusters, the earliest large assemblies of galaxies in the universe. In the present-day cosmos, galaxies are distributed across a hierarchy of structures. Galaxy clusters contain hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by their own gravity, moving around within a common gravitational well. Galaxy groups hold tens to hundreds of members. Beyond the groups and clusters, galaxies line filaments, long threads of matter that connect these systems into the vast network cosmologists call the cosmic web. The clusters and groups sit at the nodes, the intersections of that web, while still other galaxies drift in complete isolation, far from any neighbors.

A central question for Rudnick is how galaxies are shaped by the environments in which they live. Protoclusters contain all the galaxies that will eventually end up in a present-day galaxy cluster, but at these distant epochs they are spread out over very large areas of the sky. Observing a nearby cluster is comparatively easy because its member galaxies sit close together, but catching a cluster in the act of assembling requires the ability to study galaxies in exquisite detail across a wide field, which is precisely what Roman provides. Rudnick also hopes to learn how these structures connect with one another and how filaments tie the densest regions of the universe together. By his assessment, GRACE will be by far the biggest systematic survey to assess the cosmic web in the distant universe.

The environmental question extends to the striking differences between galaxies in crowded and empty regions today. In sparse, almost rural environments, galaxies tend to be spirals: rich in gas, actively forming stars, and rotating in an orderly fashion like a Frisbee. In dense regions such as clusters and groups, the picture changes dramatically. There, galaxies are no longer forming new stars, have exhausted much of their gas, and appear as conglomerations of stars moving in random orbits, like bees in a swarm. Astronomers call these elliptical galaxies because they look like fuzzy elliptical blobs on the sky, and their reddish color betrays a population dominated by old stars. What remains unknown is why galaxies in these different settings look so different, and by probing the earliest times at which galaxies could have been influenced by their surroundings, GRACE is positioned to make fundamental advances on that problem.

The practical timeline is already taking shape. Rudnick expects the first data from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to arrive a few months after commissioning, with the first GRACE-specific observations coming within the first year of operations. The impact will reach well beyond the professional community. NASA’s support will fund a postdoctoral researcher at Kansas, undergraduates at the university will work directly with data from the cutting-edge observatory, and Rudnick plans to incorporate the survey into a long-running outreach program at Lawrence High School. He noted that the program could define his scientific direction for the next five to ten years, and he highlighted what he considers one of the most meaningful aspects of GRACE: bringing data from NASA’s next flagship observatory to Kansas, giving researchers in the state first access to game-changing research on how the universe built its galaxies.

Subject of Research: Galaxy evolution and the cosmic web during cosmic noon, studied with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's GRACE survey

Article Title: Researcher will examine galactic evolution with new ‘Roman’ space telescope

Article References: Researcher will examine galactic evolution with new ‘Roman’ space telescope. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, GRACE survey, galaxy evolution, cosmic noon, cosmic dawn, protoclusters, cosmic web, spectroscopy, NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Kansas, 3D galaxy map

The research team set out to examine how imperialism is portrayed in open educational resources, commonly known as OERs, which are freely accessible teaching materials that teachers download, adapt, and distribute. Because these materials are often produced by trusted names such as PBS or C3 Teachers, educators frequently adopt them with limited scrutiny. Yonas described the typical scenario: a high school teacher planning three or four different courses needs to cover imperialism in an upcoming unit, searches Google for preexisting resources, and downloads whatever appears credible. With little time for deep vetting, teachers may assume that a recognizable institutional name guarantees quality. The study tested that assumption by systematically analyzing 46 sets of commonly used OERs designed for middle and high school social studies instruction.

The results were unambiguous. According to the study, 85.7 percent of the primary sources included in these materials were recorded by colonizers, with very few sources contributed by colonized peoples themselves. The authors wrote that OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, frequently favor Eurocentric narratives, and minimize colonial voices. In doing so, the researchers argue, these materials normalize imperial conquest and perpetuate what they describe as systemic silences, gaps in the historical record that render the experiences and resistance of colonized populations nearly invisible. For a field that has spent decades working to diversify its sources and narratives, the prevalence of one-sided materials in widely used digital resources represents a significant setback.

Beyond the imbalance in sources, the study documented the prevalence of what the researchers call a balance sheet approach to teaching imperialism. In this framework, students are asked to weigh the pros and cons of colonization, essentially debating whether imperial expansion produced net benefits or harms. The researchers found that this approach was not uniform across platforms. They analyzed four: OER Project, PBS, DIG, and C3 Teachers. None of the DIG resources employed a balance sheet approach, while OER Project and PBS used it relatively infrequently. Every single C3 Teachers resource examined, however, included one. The variation suggests that platform-level editorial decisions, rather than isolated lesson design choices, may drive how imperialism is framed for students.

The specific questions embedded in these balance sheet exercises illustrate the researchers’ concerns. Examples included asking students whether Hawai’i should be sovereign, whether American expansion abroad was justified, and requiring students to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the French occupation of Vietnam. Jackson argued that such questions are inappropriate on multiple levels. They invite high school students to debate whether people have a right to exist freely or whether colonizing another nation can be justified, placing fundamental matters of human rights and self-determination on the table as subjects of casual classroom debate. He noted that this framing invites moralizing and shallow, uncomplex thought rather than rigorous historical reasoning, and that it treats sovereignty as an open question rather than an established principle.

The researchers also emphasized that the balance sheet approach is academically inappropriate because it diverges from how professional historians actually work. Historians do not, as a matter of practice, weigh the supposed benefits of imperial conquest against its costs, and recent scholarship is extremely critical of pedagogical frameworks that do so. Furthermore, the approach reduces history to hypotheticals: it is impossible to determine how life in colonized regions would have unfolded had imperialism never occurred, so asking students to calculate what colonization contributed becomes an exercise in counterfactual speculation rather than evidence-based analysis. The authors contend that this method misrepresents both the discipline of history and the moral reality of empire.

Not every resource examined drew the researchers’ criticism. Yonas highlighted the OER Project as a positive example, noting that it does a strong job of providing lessons that include sources from a range of perspectives and of asking questions appropriate for students, such as how colonized peoples resisted imperial rule. The researchers argue that elevating materials of this kind serves two purposes. First, it steers practicing teachers toward resources that handle difficult topics with balance and rigor. Second, it offers a model that can be incorporated into pre-service teacher preparation, training future educators to identify the shortcomings in the materials they encounter before those materials ever reach a classroom.

The study fills a notable gap in the research literature. Although open educational resources have become a fixture of modern classrooms, little research has been conducted on their actual content, the sources they draw upon, or their overall quality. Yonas has previously studied how states mandate the teaching of difficult topics such as genocide and how early-career teachers approach such subjects, and she argues that understanding the materials themselves is a critical piece of the puzzle. Without systematic evaluation, schools and districts cannot know whether the free resources they approve or the websites their teachers frequent meet the standards of accuracy and inclusivity that educators and families expect.

The broader implications extend well beyond the topic of imperialism. As the economics of education push schools toward digital and open materials, the mechanisms that once guaranteed a baseline of quality, such as editorial review at established textbook publishers, are being bypassed. The Kansas study demonstrates that even resources bearing the names of respected institutions can embed problematic framings and skewed source selections. The researchers hope their work will encourage schools, teachers, and teacher educators to scrutinize online materials more carefully, to favor resources that include colonized perspectives and historically sound questions, and ultimately to ensure that all students have access to high-quality, reliable materials when learning about the most difficult topics in human history.

Subject of Research: How open educational resources portray imperialism in middle and high school social studies

Article Title: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions

Article References: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: imperialism, open educational resources, social studies education, curriculum, colonialism, balance sheet approach, University of Kansas, teaching materials, history education, OER Project, PBS, C3 Teachers

The center’s mission is rooted in a deceptively straightforward observation about how modern science is organized. Infectious disease biologists at KU have long been skilled at identifying the gene products and factors that contribute to disease, mapping the molecular machinery that pathogens deploy to infect, evade and persist. Chemists and medicinal chemists, meanwhile, excel at developing chemical tools, probes and approaches that can interrogate and manipulate biological systems. Too often, Hefty noted, that expertise is not shared between the two camps. The CBID center was created precisely to bridge that divide, connecting infectious disease biologists with colleagues in chemistry, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry and bioengineering so that the identification of a disease-relevant target can be followed rapidly by the design of molecular tools to study and defeat it. As Hefty put it, both sides are good at what they do individually, but together is where they really excel.

What makes the Kansas effort notable is its scale and its reach across institutional boundaries. CBID recruits, mentors and supports investigators not only at the University of Kansas in Lawrence but also at KU Medical Center, Kansas State University, Wichita State University and other regional partners. The center gives participating researchers access to four core research labs organized around infectious disease high-throughput screening, computational chemical biology and molecular modeling, synthetic chemical biology and flow cytometry. These cores function as shared scientific infrastructure, allowing a researcher with a promising hypothesis but limited equipment to test it using capabilities that would be prohibitively expensive to build in an individual laboratory. Investigators can apply for pilot project funds and vouchers for low-barrier use of the core facilities, lowering the entry cost for exploratory science that might otherwise never get off the ground.

The center also invests heavily in something less tangible but arguably more important: bringing people together. Monthly programs and annual symposia create regular occasions for researchers from different departments and institutions to share results and swap ideas. You just have to get scientists in a room, sharing science, talking science, and great things come out of that, Hefty said, adding that collaborations and events often happen organically. Anyone who has watched interdisciplinary research struggle against the gravitational pull of departmental silos will recognize what the center is attempting. The most productive ideas in chemical biology frequently emerge at the boundaries between disciplines, where a biologist’s unmet need meets a chemist’s unexpected capability, and those encounters require deliberate cultivation.

The track record from the first two phases of funding offers evidence that the model works. Over its first decade, the center has recruited seven faculty members, contributed to 15 startups, and helped generate roughly $25 million in NIH funding along with $90 million from broader research projects, pilot projects and cores. Researchers affiliated with the center have authored more than 600 publications, and the scientific network now includes 80 affiliates. Those numbers matter beyond vanity metrics. Faculty recruitment supported by COBRE funding builds permanent intellectual capacity at a university, and the startup activity suggests that basic research at the center is feeding into the kind of translational pipeline that can eventually carry laboratory discoveries toward real-world applications against infectious disease.

Beyond the publications and the grant dollars, Hefty emphasized the center’s role in training and workforce development, a contribution he argued cannot be understated. Undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs have spent a decade learning techniques, tools and approaches in the center’s labs, and will continue to do so for at least another five years under the new award. Those trainees will disperse into professions across Kansas and beyond, carrying chemical biology skills into academia, industry and the biotechnology sector. In a state working to build a high-tech regional workforce, the center functions as an engine of human capital as much as a generator of papers. Hefty also credited the KU Office of Research, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Kansas Board of Regents for their support, and pointed to the School of Pharmacy and researchers at KU Medical Center in microbiology and biochemistry as key partners in the enterprise.

Scientifically, the Phase 3 era will be guided by the theme of fighting antibiotic resistance, and the strategy Hefty describes represents a meaningful departure from the traditional pharmaceutical playbook. Rather than pursuing broad-spectrum antibiotics, the center’s researchers will develop targeted treatments designed to protect the body’s beneficial microbiome while defeating resistance mechanisms. The logic is compelling. Conventional broad-spectrum antibiotics cannot distinguish between a pathogenic invader and the trillions of beneficial microbes that inhabit the human body, and the collateral damage they inflict on the microbiome has been linked to a range of secondary health problems, including opportunistic infections such as Clostridioides difficile. Hefty framed the ambition in concrete terms: if a patient has an infection with staph, strep or enterococcus, can researchers develop chemical tools, probes and approaches that target just those organisms without disrupting the rest of the flora in our bodies? And can new tools be developed to address the antibiotic resistance mechanisms that currently exist?

That question sits at the frontier of chemical biology, a field that uses small molecules as precision instruments for understanding and manipulating biological systems. Pathogen-selective compounds require an intimate knowledge of the biochemical differences between a pathogen and its human host, and between the pathogen and the harmless commensal bacteria that share the same ecological niche. Computational chemical biology and molecular modeling, one of the center’s four core capabilities, allow researchers to identify selective targets and predict how candidate molecules will interact with them. High-throughput screening can then test hundreds of thousands of compounds against those targets, while synthetic chemical biology provides the capacity to design and build new molecules from scratch. Flow cytometry, meanwhile, enables researchers to sort and analyze individual cells at high speed, a capability that is essential for studying heterogeneous bacterial populations and the emergence of resistant subpopulations within an infection.

The collaborative spirit underpinning the award will be on public display on October 16 and 17, when researchers and stakeholders gather for the fifth annual Chemical Biology Symposium at KU. The event is expected to draw more than 100 attendees, with regional participation from Kansas State and Wichita State. According to organizers, the symposium seeks to provide a forum for Graduate Training in Chemical Biology trainees and Chemical Biology of Infectious Disease researchers to present their work and to cover special topics with invited speakers. For Hefty, this cross-pollination of ideas among institutions, departments and disciplines is the whole point of the enterprise. We’re breaking down a lot of those disciplinary walls and barriers so that interdisciplinary science can occur and happen in a very productive way, he said.

Looking a decade ahead, Hefty described what success would look like: an established, formal research chemical biology center with the scientists recruited and supported over the years still participating in its activities. Such a center could continue to focus on infectious disease or expand into other areas, whether cancer, Alzheimer’s or neurological disorders, but the essential outcome would be a durable research structure that continues to support investigators at KU, KU Medical Center and other institutions. In an era when federal research funding is increasingly competitive and antibiotic resistance continues to outpace the development of new drugs, the Kansas experiment offers a test of whether deliberate, sustained investment in collaborative infrastructure can produce science that no single laboratory, department or discipline could achieve alone. With $5.8 million in new support and a decade of accumulated momentum, CBID now has the resources and the runway to find out.

Subject of Research: NIH Phase 3 COBRE funding for a chemical biology center addressing infectious disease and antibiotic resistance

Article Title: KU receives $5.8 million NIH Phase 3 COBRE funding for Chemical Biology of Infectious Disease center

Article References: KU receives $5.8 million NIH Phase 3 COBRE funding for Chemical Biology of Infectious Disease center. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: University of Kansas, NIH, COBRE, chemical biology, infectious disease, antibiotic resistance, microbiome, drug discovery, high-throughput screening, molecular modeling, workforce development, interdisciplinary research

The persistence of this leadership gap is particularly striking when viewed against the demographic reality of the profession itself. If women constitute roughly three-quarters of PK-12 educators, one might expect their representation in administration to approach parity, since promotion pipelines typically draw from the ranks of experienced teachers. Instead, the distribution of decision-making authority diverges sharply from the composition of the workforce, a pattern that researchers in educational leadership have documented for decades. This disconnect suggests that the barriers involved are not simply matters of individual ambition or qualification, but reflect structural and cultural dynamics that operate across hiring committees, search processes, board relationships and informal professional networks. Understanding how those dynamics function is a precondition for changing them, which is precisely the kind of practical knowledge the new book attempts to codify for its readers.

The authors’ combined vantage points give the project an unusual blend of scholarly and practitioner credibility. One author brings nearly two decades of frontline experience as a teacher, principal and district-level leader before transitioning into higher education, where she now directs a doctoral program in K-12 administration. The other is an active district superintendent-level administrator who completed both her master’s and doctoral work at the same university, and whose dissertation research involved in-depth interviews with two dozen women in educational administration. That research found a consistent pattern: every woman interviewed reported encountering either an entrenched informal network of male gatekeepers or explicit messages that she was not yet ready for advancement. The universality of that finding across a relatively small sample echoes broader literature on gendered organizational culture, in which informal norms often matter as much as formal policy in determining who rises.

One of the book’s central conceptual contributions is its attention to what the authors call silent saboteurs, the less visible forces that derail women’s advancement. Some of these are external, such as the timing of family formation relative to career ladders, or the subtle signaling that occurs when women are repeatedly passed over for stretch assignments. Others are internal, including the self-doubt and sense of intellectual fraudulence commonly described as impostor syndrome. Psychological research on impostor phenomena has long noted that it is especially prevalent among high-achieving women in fields where they are underrepresented, and that it can suppress applications for promotions even among candidates whose records exceed the stated requirements. By naming these forces explicitly and pairing them with coping strategies, the book treats internalized doubt not as a personal failing but as a predictable response to a professional environment that sends mixed messages about women’s readiness.

The structure of the book mirrors the arc of a leadership journey itself. The opening section diagnoses the barriers, the middle section builds strategies for moving past them, and the closing section turns toward long-term transformation of the field. This progression reflects a deliberate choice to move readers from recognition to action rather than leaving them with a catalogue of grievances. The middle chapters focus on concrete, learnable skills: crafting a compelling resume, understanding how search committees and hiring processes actually operate behind closed doors, negotiating employment contracts, and learning to advocate for oneself without triggering the backlash that assertive women sometimes face. Research on negotiation has repeatedly shown gendered differences in both initiation of negotiation and in how assertiveness is perceived, making explicit instruction in this area a practical necessity rather than an optional refinement.

Self-advocacy receives particular emphasis, and for good reason. Many women in education have been socialized into roles that prize supportiveness, collaboration and care for others, qualities that make them effective educators but can work against them in promotion contexts where visibility and self-promotion are rewarded. The authors argue that advocating for oneself can be done authentically and without confrontation, reframing self-advocacy as an act of professional honesty rather than aggression. This reframing matters because studies of workplace advancement consistently find that women who wait to be recognized often wait indefinitely, while those who articulate their accomplishments and aspirations are more likely to be considered for leadership pipelines. The challenge, as the book frames it, is to help women speak up in ways that feel congruent with their values rather than requiring them to adopt a persona that feels foreign.

The final section of the book shifts from individual advancement to collective change, urging readers to think about how their own careers can lay groundwork for the next generation of women leaders. This generational framing reflects a growing emphasis in leadership scholarship on succession and mentorship as mechanisms for durable change. A single woman ascending to a superintendency is significant, but the effects compound when that leader deliberately sponsors other women, reshapes hiring practices, and normalizes flexible arrangements that accommodate caregiving responsibilities. The authors suggest that a changing workforce demographics can be leveraged strategically: as retirements open positions and as the profession’s composition continues to evolve, there are genuine windows of opportunity for women to move into roles that have historically been closed to them.

Another notable feature of the book is its use of first-person accounts from women already serving in educational leadership roles. These contributors describe their paths to their current positions, the missteps they made, the knowledge they wish they had possessed earlier, and the lessons they hope to pass on. Narrative and testimony of this kind serve functions that purely analytical writing cannot. They provide readers with relatable models of success, they normalize the struggles that aspiring leaders may assume are unique to them, and they demonstrate the diversity of routes into leadership, countering the notion that there is a single correct career trajectory. For readers weighing whether to pursue an advanced credential or apply for a first administrative post, such stories can be the difference between aspiration and action.

Although the primary audience is K-12 educators, the authors are explicit that the lessons extend to higher education, where women face parallel patterns of underrepresentation in senior academic and administrative roles. They also see value for pre-service teachers, who can begin building leadership confidence before they ever enter a classroom, and for men in the field who wish to act as genuine allies. The inclusion of male readers is strategically significant, since men still hold a disproportionate share of hiring authority and board influence in school districts. Allyship in this context is not framed as abstract support but as concrete behavior: mentoring women colleagues, ensuring search processes are equitable, interrupting dismissive commentary, and advocating for candidates whose contributions might otherwise be overlooked.

The authors are careful to acknowledge that the landscape has shifted over recent decades, even as inequities persist. Overt sexism and discrimination, they note, are less blatant than they once were, but subtler contextual pressures remain potent. The demands of motherhood intersect with the long and unpredictable hours of administrative work; the absence of visible role models can make leadership feel unattainable; and assumptions about who looks like a superintendent continue to shape search outcomes. Because these forces rarely announce themselves, they can be difficult to name and even harder to challenge, which is why the book invests so heavily in helping readers recognize patterns in their own professional lives. Naming a barrier, the authors suggest, is the first step toward devising a strategy against it.

For the field of educational leadership preparation more broadly, the book arrives at a moment when preparation programs are reexamining how they serve women candidates. The authors’ own program enrolls a majority of women, mirroring national trends in educational administration graduate study, yet the profession’s top ranks have not followed suit. That gap between who is trained for leadership and who actually attains it is a puzzle that preparation programs, professional associations and districts alike are beginning to address through targeted mentoring, equity audits of hiring practices and leadership development cohorts designed specifically for women. Books of this kind can serve as companion texts in such efforts, giving candidates a shared vocabulary for the challenges they face and a set of tested strategies drawn from those who have navigated them successfully.

Ultimately, the book’s title captures its core message: that women in education can pursue and exercise leadership without apologizing for their ambition, their expertise or their priorities. Moving from aspiration to advancement, the authors contend, requires both personal readiness and institutional change, and each woman who makes the journey makes the path easier for those who follow. In a profession where the majority of practitioners are women but the balance of authority is not, that argument carries practical weight for districts seeking to draw on the full talent of their workforces, and for the educators who have long been told, implicitly or explicitly, to wait their turn.

Subject of Research: A guide to advancing women into educational leadership roles

Article Title: New book 'Leading Without Apology' provides guidance to women to advance to educational leadership roles

Article References: New book 'Leading Without Apology' provides guidance to women to advance to educational leadership roles. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: educational leadership, women in education, University of Kansas, school administration, superintendent, impostor syndrome, career advancement, gender equity, K-12 education, mentorship, negotiation, workforce