Welcome to the 2024 edition of Spark, which chronicles our researchers’ quest to ask — and answer — these questions, and many more.

Their impulse for inquiry is not mere curiosity (although we hope it piques yours!). Research at UNH seeks solutions to familiar problems, like mapping our seafloor for better navigation or using DNA to bring closure to cold cases, and to those we’re just beginning to imagine. How can we recycle space debris to create a lunar landing station? How do bats keep from flying into each other?

Creating new knowledge that improves lives is at the core of our mission as the state’s public flagship research university. UNH also takes seriously its mandate to advance economic opportunities in New Hampshire. In these pages, you’ll learn about several industry partners who have expanded their footprints on our Durham campus to engage more deeply with our world-class facilities, researchers, students and the state we call home.

I hope you enjoy these stories of curiosity, discovery and innovation. Together, they tell a compelling tale of UNH’s ascending research success and its powerful impact in New Hampshire and beyond.

Dogging a Mysterious Illness

UNH researchers find major clue to canine respiratory syndrome

hen a mysterious illness sickened thousands of dogs across the country and confounded veterinarians this past winter, researchers at UNH’s New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (NHVDL) and Hubbard Center for Genome Studies played a critical role in solving it.

The UNH researchers identified a small portion of the genome of a previously uncharacterized bacteria that may be causing the illness, using genetic sequencing of samples from 70 dogs in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts from the last two years.

The researchers believe the bacterium may be host-adapted and potentially part of the dog microbiome and has recently developed the capacity to cause disease. Symptoms of infection in dogs include a cough that can linger for several weeks, runny eyes and sneezing. A very small subset of dogs have died after a long bout of this illness that is then complicated or superimposed with a severe acute pneumonia.

“A finding like this is potentially pretty exciting, even though we still have to see how it develops to a place where we are comfortable saying this is a pathogen in the syndrome,” says David Needle, pathology section chief at the NHVDL and a clinical associate professor. “You work at a state university to do work that you believe in, that is impactful and that you think has value, is engaging and interesting – and this really ticks all those boxes.”

Discovering Ina Jane Doe

my Michael, assistant professor ofanthropology and director of UNH’sForensic Anthropology Identification and Recovery Lab, and true crime podcaster Laurah Norton (“The Fall Line”) have been joining forces to work on cold cases since 2018. Their latest collaboration is Norton’s first book, “Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless” (Hachette).

In it, Norton dives deep into forensic science, centering her narrative on solving the identity of Ina Jane Doe, a woman whose head was found in a rural Illinois park in 1993, with Michael and UNH students Kyana Burgess ’22 and Audrey Waterman ’21. The team’s investigation updated the original forensic sketch in collaboration with a forensic artist and used updated forensic methods that ultimately identified Susan Lund, a 25-year-old mother of three from Tennessee. Circumstances of her murder remain unsolved.

Michael talks about her collaboration on “Lay Them to Rest,” Ina Jane Doe/Susan Lund and assisting law enforcement identify John and Jane Does in New Hampshire and the nation.

Advancing Sustainable Business

huili Du remembers when business profit and social impact were widely perceived as mutually exclusive.

Du, a professor of marketing at UNH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, has spent her career changing that perception by focusing her research on how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability can simultaneously benefit society and businesses.

“Academic research has played a huge role in changing business managers’ perceptions,” Du says. “In business, there is kind of this conflict between the short-term and the long-term. In academic research, we are free to examine long-term impacts. We can show the data on how social initiatives impact a firm’s stock price or valuation. We have the empirical data that business and social interests are not contradictory; they help each other in the long term.”

s UNH deepens its engagement with industry and seeks to meet the state and region’s workforce needs, there’s perhaps no richer partnership than that with New Hampshire-based GreenSource Fabrication, a leader in “green” printed circuit board manufacturing.

Facilities collaboration and co-location? Check. GreenSource has installed its InduBond X-Press at UNH’s John Olson Advanced Manufacturing Center.

Workforce development and career opportunities? Check. UNH students gain hands-on experience with this cutting-edge technology through GreenSource Fabrication (GSF) internships at the Olson Center.

Alumni engagement? So many checks. Half of GreenSource’s engineers are Wildcats, including Maria Virga ’21, who oversees the Olson Center internships.

hen a spacecraft lands on or blasts off from the moon, it kicks up a considerable cloud of dust and debris that, given the lack of gravity, can take years to fully settle. But what if it were possible to manufacture a landing pad on the moon’s surface using a combination of materials already available in space, making a lunar settlement a legitimate possibility?

It may sound like a far-fetched futuristic plot, but there’s a world in which it’s a reality within the next decade — and it’s a world UNH is helping bring into sharper focus.

“When you talk about a mission to Mars or even a lunar settlement, you’re not going to be able to rely on parts being supplied from Earth. If something breaks, you are going to need to be able to manufacture it there, on site,” says Brad Kinsey, associate dean of UNH’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. “Companies are already thinking about ways to use materials in space to build a landing pad on the lunar surface. There is talk about a lunar base within 10 years, and the goal is for UNH to be a part of that.”

His moment in the Sun

Cohen, who received his Ph.D. in space physics from UNH, is the deputy chief scientist of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where he’s worked since he left UNH.

And as our nation turns its gaze to the sun (safely, we hope) to witness a total eclipse, watch the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft get closer than ever to the sun or celebrate NASA’s Heliophysics Big Year, Cohen is seemingly everywhere: presenting at scientific meetings, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, meeting with policymakers, even showing up in social media videos to explain concepts like space weather.