Nalini Nadkarni, who describes herself as “a small brown woman,” has been pulled aside in airport security lines a couple dozen times as she has traveled the globe. For these special occasions, she has perfected what she calls her “Trees and Toiletries Lecture.”

As Transportation Security Administration agents rummage through her tote bag to make sure she’s not carrying any suspicious items, she begins her spiel. That lipstick? It gets its smooth texture from shea butter, derived from the seeds of a West African tree. The nail polish? Glossy because of tree fibers mixed with nitrocellulose. Those bandage strips? The adhesive on them comes from gum arabic, an exudate from trees belonging to the pea family.

She continues her lecture until the agents have finished searching—because even in the most unlikely situations, an alert scientist can always find an opportunity to talk about the topic she loves.

Nadkarni is a forest ecologist and, since the fall of 2011, the director of the University of Utah’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education. This is her mission now: to draw more K-12 teachers to science and math, to improve instruction on the college level, and to bring science and math to everyone else—to prisons and churches and halftime at Pac-12 football games.

The freedom to create such an ambitious center is what lured Nadkarni to the U, despite her initial reluctance. Utah, after all, is hardly the tropics, where she and her biologist husband, Jack Longino, have done the bulk of their field research. It’s not even the mossy, forested Pacific Northwest, where the couple had spent the previous two decades. Called “the queen of canopy research” by the National Geographic Society, Nadkarni is at home in the kind of lush foliage found hundreds of feet above the floor of the world’s rain and cloud forests. Utah, by comparison, is dry and sparse.

But in the summer of 2011, the couple packed up their labs and their furniture and moved to Salt Lake City, eager to start a new life at a research university dedicated to public outreach. In her office on the second floor of the University of Utah’s Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Building, she installed two hanging swings. If you climb onto them, look out the big windows, and squint, it’s the next best thing to being in a tree.

Her passion for science began in the towering maples in her parents’ front yard in Bethesda, Maryland. The trees were Nalini’s oasis, a place where she could read and watch birds and dream of tying a spool of thread to a squirrel’s tail so she could measure its journey across the branches. As she writes in her 2008 book Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, “Those perches aloft were my refuge from the world of homework, parental directives, and the ground-bound humdrum of the everyday.”

Her mother had been raised an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, New York, and her father had been raised a Hindu in Thane, India. The family lived an Indian lifestyle in suburban Washington, D.C., sleeping on mats on the floor, eating without utensils, and subtly expecting more from Nalini’s three brothers than they did from her and her sister, she recollects. Trees were the place where Nalini could both escape and excel.

By the time she was nine years old, she figured she had learned something the rest of the world needed to know; so she wrote her first book, a hand-written, stapled tome called Be Among the Birds: My Guide to Climbing Trees.

Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist, directs the University’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education.

By the time she entered college at Brown University in 1972, she was torn between careers in biology and dance. When she graduated, she wrangled two disparate internships: six months at the camp of a beetle taxonomist in Papua, New Guinea, followed by six months with a modern dance troupe in Paris. She came back home and drove a taxicab in Maryland while she sorted out her plans. She loved both science and dance—but science won out.

It was “the intellectual piece” that she found so enticing about field biology, she says. And the beetle taxonomist was 70 years old, proof that she’d be able to have a long career.

She enrolled in graduate school in the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources, and it was during her first summer’s field course—in the tropical forests of Costa Rica—that she found herself drawn to what was so tantalizingly out of reach, hundreds of feet above the dark under-story. How did plants live up in the forest canopy without connection to the soil, she wondered. Were there insects and animals that spent their whole lives up there?

Her instructors had no answers for her, because almost no one had been up in the canopy to study it. She itched to get up there herself, but, as she writes, “Most of these trees have unnervingly tall trunks, without lower branches, and can sport spines, biting insects, and the occasional lurking snake. The tree-climbing skills I had developed in the benevolent trees of my childhood were useless.”

Everything changed when she met a student who was applying mountain-climbing techniques to reach the highest treetops. Suddenly, literally and figuratively, her world opened up.

She came back to graduate school intent on researching the differences between the temperate rain forest canopy of Olympic National Park and the tropical cloud forest canopy of Costa Rica. But when she approached her grad committee with her enthusiastic plan, they balked, reminding her there was plenty still to be discovered on the ground. So Nadkarni applied for, and received, a $50,000 grant on her own.

The result was a first-ever study of these forests’ epiphytes, the canopy-dwelling plants—orchids, ferns, mosses—that cover every available trunk and branch of rain and cloud forest trees. Her discovery, a cover article in the prestigious journal Science when she was still a student, was that these epiphytes are able to trap nutrients from rainfall, eventually forming a rich mat of soil underneath them as they cling to the tree. She also discovered that trees develop aerial roots to absorb these nutrients from the mats.

She has spent her research career since then studying the canopy, helping to classify and categorize epiphytes, learning how they interact with the rest of the forest, and beginning to learn what effect humans are having on them.

The first time Longino saw Nadkarni, she was bouncing down a road in Costa Rica. He was a University of Texas graduate student studying ants in a remote field site in the lowlands and was part of a field excursion to the cloud forest. They both say it was love at first sight.

After a few days, he had to return to his field site, located a day or two away in one of the most remote places in Costa Rica, but they continued to see each other as often as they could. Once, when the bush plane didn’t come on time, Longino hiked 20 miles across the rain forest to catch a bus to another airport to catch a plane that would take him to the village bus that would take him to the rickety school bus that would finally get him to Nalini.

Nalini Nadkarni speaks to prisoners at the Stafford gallery with more photos. Creek Correction Center in Aberdeen, Washington. (Photo by Benj and Sarah Drummond)

Later, after they were married, he named an ant after her, and later still named ants after their two children. Asked if Nalini’s ant is beautiful, Longino—who is now a professor of biology at the University of Utah and a well-known taxonomist—admits “you’d have to be an ant lover to call any ant beautiful.” But her ant is a canopy ant. “And it’s rare.”

He says his first impression of his wife is still true today: a woman with energy, earnestness, and charisma. “It’s almost an aura,” says Longino, who is not typically a man who gushes. “And there’s not a political bone in her body. The normal politics that go on in any kind of organization, she’s somehow above it all. There’s nothing self-serving about anything she does. I watch her give talks, and it’s like people are ready to give their lives over to her. It’s some kind of Nalini evangelism.”

The search committee for the U’s Center for Science and Math Education was similarly smitten by Nadkarni. “She has this infectious enthusiasm that’s really hard to ignore,” says U biology professor Don Feener. “Her skills at outreach I think are really built into her bones.” Plus, adds U Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael Hardman, “she’s one of the most respected plant biologists in the world.”

Nadkarni laments the widening gap between both nature and humans, and science and society. “People who do not have awareness or the understanding of the approach of science lack tools that can help them make good decisions about important issues such as human health and the environment,” she says. Science provides a way to take the glut of data and “interpret it wisely,” she says, “rather than basing decisions on religion or emotions, traditions or being swayed by political pressure.”

Most science researchers, though, “live in the country of Academia,” with their own customs and scientific language, she says. So she both encourages and instructs them on how to become “ambassadors” to the non-science community at large. Nadkarni herself has taken dancers, musicians, and Washington state legislators into the canopy, and has brought rap singers and urban youth together in the forest to make their own beats about trees.

Last year, she teamed up with the U’s Athletics Department to develop “Sports ’n Science,” a program designed to explain the science behind sports. During last fall’s football season, they launched their first home-game Jumbotron video, “The Science of the Punt,” featuring U math professor Peter Trapa and Ute punter Sean Sellwood discussing velocity vectors, angles, and psi. The video is now being shown at other Pac-12 schools.

And then, there is Treetop Barbie. Nadkarni first created the makeover of the iconic, perfectly coiffed fashionista in 1996. Students and volunteers round up the used dolls from thrift stores, dress them in climbing gear, binoculars and a hard hat, and sell them on the International Canopy Network website to raise funds for canopy research.

After an article about Treetop Barbie appeared in The New York Times in 2003, the doll’s manufacturer, Mattel, Inc. complained—until Nadkarni convinced them that 1) the money raised was for a good cause, and 2) she knows a lot of reporters.

Her most ambitious outreach has been to prisoners. In 2004, she began a collaboration with Dan Pacholke, then head of a small corrections center in Washington and now director of prisons for the state. Pacholke, who describes Nadkarni as “electric,” had already been interested in making the correctional facility more environmentally sustainable. With Nadkarni’s help, they were soon bringing in scientists to give lectures and hiring prisoners to compost, grow an organic garden, and raise endangered frogs, butterflies, and prairie plants to repopulate threatened ecosystems.

The prisoners were also hired to research the best ways to grow mosses— the same epiphytes that the floral industry was stripping illegally from the rain forest and that take multiple decades to regenerate in the wild.

Pacholke reports that these work opportunities have given the prisoners a sense of “meaning and purpose beyond themselves,” and although hard data on the program’s effect awaits long-term studies, indications are that the prisoners involved are less prone to act out.

With Washington’s Sustainability in Prisons Project as a model, Nadkarni this spring began the Utah Science in Prisons Project, with the goal of bringing science education, job training, conservation projects, and environmentally sustainable operations to correctional facilities in Utah. The project includes a lecture series at the Utah State Prison on science and math topics, featuring her colleagues from the U. Nadkarni has also been working with researchers and community partners who would like to involve prisoners in conservation research and restoration projects. And she is talking with prison authorities about developing sustainability projects at the correctional facilities.

She’s comfortable in front of prisoners and loggers, professors and TV cameras, but to see Nadkarni in her element, it’s best to watch a 1999 National Geographic special called Heroes of the High Frontier (a clip appears in her 2009 TED talk). There she is, outfitted with ropes and a harness, hoisting herself up an impossibly tall giant strangler fig in Costa Rica. Eager and free.

Fifty years after she began climbing the maple trees in her parents’ yard, this is what she still loves: the arms of a tree holding her, the mystery of nature about to unfold. She and Jack held their own private, unofficial wedding ceremony in a silk-cotton tree in Costa Rica. And someday, when she’s about to die, this is what she’ll want, she says: to be hoisted up into a tropical canopy and strapped to a tree branch, left to sway until she’s gone.

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based freelance journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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As kids growing up in Boston, Andrew Witts and his older brother Jason spent hours before a video screen, locked in fierce battle with armies of skeletons and zombies that were wreaking havoc over a virtual Conan the Barbarian-type world. The video game, Golden Axe, paired the brothers as heroes—one in the form of a gnome and the other a muscle-ripped barbarian. They fought against the kingdom’s archenemy, who had captured the royal family and stolen a magic axe. In the end, of course, the brothers always prevailed from their perch on the family couch, their nemesis was vanquished, and peace was restored to the kingdom.

“It was pretty much Lord of the Rings, only with an axe,” says Witts, a self-described “hard-core gamer.” “I really felt like my brother and I were the rulers of this land and we were protecting it from the evil enemy. We played endlessly.”

//Curse of Shadows// was released through Xbox in 2012. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

Now, as a first-year graduate student in the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program, Witts is learning to channel his unbridled enthusiasm for game playing into a career. A collaborative, interdisciplinary effort between the School of Computing and the Department of Film and Media Arts, the program teaches graduate and undergraduate students to develop, design, and publish video games. It trains artists and engineers in the creative, analytical, and technical skills required to navigate a wide spectrum of digital mediums and to be leaders in next-generation technologies. Graduates are becoming game designers, filmmakers, special effects experts, animators, and more.

Andrew Witts, who grew up in Boston, is a first-year graduate student in the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program. (Photo by August Miller)

“It’s an extremely broad set of skills and understandings that you have to have in order to make good games,” says Robert Kessler BS’74 MS’77 PhD’81, the program’s co-founder and the associate director of the School of Computing. “It’s very complex, and the technology and graphics being used are really pushing the frontier.”

Launched in 2007, the Entertainment Arts & Engineering program is already making its mark. The program has already been ranked among the top three video game design programs in the nation by The Princeton Review, which began issuing rankings just three years ago. [*In March 2013, the program became ranked number one for its undergraduate degree program and number two for its graduate program. See the Editor’s Note below the short author bio at bottom for more.] 

Corrinne Lewis, left, program manager of the University of Utah’s Master Games Studio, talks with Rachel Leiker, a program assistant and graphic designer. (Photo by August Miller)

Getting Women in the Game

Corrinne Lewis is a gamer. She got hooked as a kid playing alongside her father. By the time she was a young teen, she was hanging out in a Salt Lake City-area bar where she played console games. She also loved Dungeons & Dragons.

“I think I have always been a puzzle solver,” says Lewis BA’03, who is program manager for the University of Utah’s Master Games Studio, the graduate component of the U’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program. Many of the video games she played while she was growing up focused on finding keys to riddles in order to win the game. More often than not, she was playing games with and against boys. Later, when she began working in sales and marketing jobs in the tech industry, she was also often one of only a handful of women. “But the reason I always liked tech is that it never mattered what I looked like; it was what was in my brain,” she says.

Even so, Lewis says she thinks about gender balance a lot when it comes to her students. At the undergraduate level, only about 10 percent of the approximately 200 students in the U Entertainment Arts & Engineering classes are women.

Women also have made up only about 10 percent of each of the program’s three graduate cohorts, Lewis says. The inaugural class in 2010 had 19 students, including three women, all of whom were artists. Class numbers jumped to 30 in 2011, but again that included only three women artists. The 2012 class also has 30 students and three women, although they come from diverse fields: one artist, one producer, and one engineer.

To help promote and support women in the digital entertainment industry, Lewis launched a U-based chapter of Women in Games International (WIGI) in April 2012, along with Laura Warner BFA’10 MFA’12, who was then a graduate student in the U program. Founded in 2005, the national nonprofit group, made up of both female and male professionals, works to promote diversity in all aspects of the video game industry, including game development, publishing, media, education, and workplace environment. Nationally, the number of female video-game designers is small. WIGI wants to change that, and believes that increased equality and camaraderie among genders will improve the industry overall and the quality of games produced. The WIGI chapters hold monthly social activities that double as networking and mentoring opportunities. The group also has an online mentoring service for members.

Graduate student Michelle MacArt BA’11 appreciates the effort. An artist whose true love is sound design, MacArt was one of the first women to enroll in Entertainment Arts & Engineering program classes as an undergraduate and expects to complete her master’s degree this spring. While developing games as class projects, MacArt says, she often advocates for the inclusion of female characters. She also pushes for those characters to look like “real” women, not ultra-skinny girls with unrealistic physical proportions.

“I was the only girl for the longest time,” says MacArt, who was on the student team that developed the Rapunzel’s Fight Knight game. “It’s a growing industry, and we need more women and ideas from women in game companies to balance them out. I’d like to see more in the arts and as programmers so that things are more diverse.”

 

Robert Kessler, left, co-founder of the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program, sits with student Ashley McMillan. (Photo by August Miller)

In 2012, the U’s undergraduate program was ranked third in the nation, just behind the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the graduate level, the U’s program, known as the Master Games Studio, wasn’t among the 10 ranked programs, but was included with the nine other schools that received honorable mentions.

“Those rankings are amazingly useful,” says Kessler. “Now we’ve got kids calling us from all over—kids who never thought about Utah before. This year, we had 12 or 13 international students apply. The first year, we had none.”

The machinima movie //Sekhmet// was created by U students. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

Another source of bragging rights is that Entertainment Arts & Engineering students get jobs. Good jobs. Six-figure jobs, sometimes even before they finish the program. In 2012, each of the 16 graduating students in the first Master Games Studio graduate-program class had jobs in hand, Kessler says.

One thing that sets the program’s graduates apart is that they enter the workforce having already published a video game.

That puts them way ahead of the competition, Kessler says. “Industry says it’s like our students have had their first year of working out of the way, so that they can come in and really be productive. We really have tried to make this like a studio simulation.”

The U faculty members are also making technology advancements and developing new areas of academic research and design, particularly in the so-called “serious games” arena. That opens doors to commercial opportunities for the University and provides students with additional hands-on projects for learning.

The video game //Minions!// was created and released by University of Utah students in 2011. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

A Panoply of Games

Got game? The students of the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program do. A driving purpose of the program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels is making sure students have the opportunity to produce and publish video games—valuable experience that gives them an advantage as they head to jobs in the entertainment arts industry. So far, most of the student-produced games are getting to market through small student-run companies—an experience that introduces them to careers as entrepreneurs. A handful of projects are being published through Utah Game Forge, a University-run company formed last year.

Here’s a year-by-year look at games students have created:

2010

• Rapunzel’s Fight Knight became the first published game by the student-created company Axull. About 500 copies have been sold through Xbox.
• Urban Space Squirrels was published by DTA Entertainment, a student company. About 2,000 copies have been sold through Xbox Indie Games.

2011

• Mr. Gravity was published by the student-run team Angry Newton and distributed by Xbox. About 750 copies have been sold.
• The Last Pod Fighter was published by the student company Fighter9 Studios and is distributed by Xbox.
• Minions! was released by Turtle Toss Studios, a company composed of 10 students. With nearly 25,000 sold, this is the most financially successful Entertainment Arts & Engineering program game and was ranked by players as one of the 16 best Xbox Live Indie Games.

2012

• Curse of Shadows was published by the student company 1 Block East. Released through Xbox, some 400 copies have been sold.
• Heroes of Hat became the first student-generated game published through Utah Game Forge, a U company created to market student work, and was the first game from students to use multi-player cooperative mode technology, which allows players to work as a team to accomplish the game’s goals. About 400 copies have been sold.
• Tactical Measure was designed by students to work with a U professor’s prototype game controller that allows deaf people to play music-based games. Published by Utah Game Forge and released on Xbox Live Indie Games, it received an honorable mention at Microsoft’s 2012 Imagine Cup competition.
• Robot Pinball Escape was developed by a team of graduate students, published through Utah Game Forge, and distributed by Desura. Downloaded about 13,000 times, PC Gamer mentioned it as a top free download. The game was also published on a disk that was inserted in Computer Bild, a European technology magazine, and distributed to 500,000 subscribers.
• Erie was also released as a free download by Desura, after being published by Utah Game Forge. The virtual horror game has been downloaded by more than 35,500 people. It can also be played though YouTube and has developed a following among players who have posted videos of themselves playing the game. More than 2 million people have seen those videos.

Those kind of credentials are exactly what Witts, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in English and creative writing, was looking for in a graduate school. After considerable research of the 50 or so programs nationwide, Witts says the U’s program was the “intelligent choice,” so he quit his marketing job and moved 2,500 miles west to Utah. “I wanted to make games and release games, and I wanted to be given a forum where I could express myself,” says Witts, a self-taught Web programmer who also worked for an education software company. “What I saw in this program was a program that promised opportunity above all. I knew it would prepare me to get out and get a job doing what I love every day.”

Video games and other forms of digital entertainment media are big business. Economic forecasters project the global market for games—both hardware and software—will grow from about $67 billion in 2012 to more than $82 billion by 2017. In 2011 alone, the industry generated revenues of nearly $25 billion, according to data from the Entertainment Software Association. Consumer demographic data also show that the driving force behind the industry isn’t the stereotypical 17-year-old boy, playing games in his parents’ basement. In fact, more than 47 percent of all game players are women over age 18. Men ages 18 and younger make up only 17 percent of the games market. And the games themselves are also more diverse than stereotypes suggest. More than 40 percent of games played are digital versions of popular board games, puzzles, TV game shows, or trivia games.

In terms of dollars, Utah isn’t yet among the top 20 places where video games are made, but it’s getting close, says Roger Altizer MS’06, co-founder of the U’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program and its director of game design and production. The state is perched on the industry’s cutting edge, and the presence of the U’s program provides an invaluable opportunity for both industry and students, he says.

Information technology is among seven industries that receive the focused attention of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development. The state has set aside $5 million to support new information-technology companies and recruit top researchers through the Utah Science Technology and Research initiative, or USTAR. Craig Caldwell, whose experience includes work as a 3-D specialist for Walt Disney Animation Studios and serving as head of the largest film school in Australia, was hired by the U in 2009 as a USTAR professor of digital media.

Video gaming is by far the largest sector of the state’s information-technology effort, says Jeff Edwards, chief executive officer of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, a private, nonprofit group that works closely with state officials. A 2011 report by that group said Utah had the fourth-highest per capita concentration of multimedia artists and animators in the nation. The industry employs about 2,100 people and added more than $93 million to Utah’s economy in 2009. The state has approximately 5,200 technology companies, of which more than 100 are digital media shops or film studios. Among the notable names are Disney Interactive Studios; Electronic Arts, Inc.; Imagine Learning; Chair Entertainment/Epic Games; Smart Bomb Interactive; and TruGolf, Inc.

Roger Altizer, co-founder of the U Entertainment Arts & Engineering program, stands with an original //Pong// console (signed by Nolan Bushnell) that was donated to the program. (Photo courtesy Roger Altizer)

To grow, the industry will need a steady stream of skilled workers and creative, innovative thinkers. The U Entertainment Arts & Engineering program’s focus and deep connections to industry set it apart from programs at other Utah schools, says Steve Roy, associate vice president for economic development at Utah Valley University and USTAR’s director of outreach and innovation activities in central Utah. “One of the key elements of economic development is workforce development and talent development,” says Roy. “The University of Utah has been able to access the industry and align themselves with industry needs. I think that’s why that program is such a good, solid program. They’ve spent the time to develop the curriculum.”

It should be no surprise that industry would find Utah’s flagship university offers a breadth of talent and a cutting-edge program, Edwards says. The Entertainment Arts & Engineering program’s roots reach back nearly five decades, to the mid-1960s, when a fledgling Computer Science Department with a deep bench of visionaries began to revolutionize computer technology and graphics. Computer scientist David Evans BA’49 PhD’53 was hired by the U in 1965 to start up the Computer Science Department within the College of Engineering. Evans knew competing with early computer science powerhouses such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be difficult, so he looked for a wide-open field in which a new program could establish itself. That field, he decided, was computer graphics.

Funded by grants from the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), for open-ended research, Evans and his colleague Ivan Sutherland recruited bright graduate students and challenged them to make new discoveries and advances in computer graphics. Those students went on to essentially found the computer graphics industry, developing such concepts as graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, simulation techniques, and computer animation. And after graduating, those students established companies such as Adobe Systems, WordPerfect, Netscape, and Pixar Animation Studios.

U Company Helps Get Student Games to Players

//Heroes of Hat// was the first game published through Utah Game Forge, in May 2012. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

It’s one thing to build video games. It’s another to get them to market and into the hands of gamers, and the University of Utah has taken the unusual step of creating a company, Utah Game Forge, to do just that.

The University’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program and the U’s Technology Commercialization Office started Utah Game Forge in 2012. The company is owned and financed by the U and works to place student games with commercial distributors. Utah Game Forge has also secured about a half-dozen commercial game-development contracts with outside companies and employs students to do the work.

“Few schools publish games, and we have yet to run into another that has a company dedicated to publishing student games and landing contracts for students to work on,” says Roger Altizer MS’06, co-founder of the U’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program and its director of game design and development. “The University of Utah is one of the most entrepreneurial schools in the nation, and Utah Game Forge is both a product of that culture and a service for its business-minded students.”

Utah Game Forge cultivates relationships with game-platform holders such as Microsoft and Apple and offers them student-produced games for distribution consideration. Utah Game Forge then handles the finances and legal obligations of any contracts. Royalties from any game sales are shared equally by the students, Utah Game Forge, and the University. Students surrender some commercial rights to their games when they publish through Utah Game Forge. However, students retain their intellectual property rights to the games they develop and can use elements of them for future projects.

Some students form their own companies and publish their games on their own, but for those students who opt to use Utah Game Forge, the company makes the publishing process a bit easier, says Robert Kessler BS’74 MS’77 PhD’81, Entertainment Arts & Engineering’s co-founder and executive director. Having a published game to their credit gives program graduates a jump start in the highly competitive video games job market, he says.

So far, the company’s games have received more critical acclaim than financial reward. The first published game, Heroes of Hat, debuted in May 2012. About 400 copies have been sold, at a cost of $1 each. Heroes was followed in the fall by two games produced by graduate students: Tactical Measure and Erie.

Among the department’s alumni of note are Nolan Bushnell BS’69, the co-founder of Atari; Ed Catmull BS’69 PhD’74, who launched Lucasfilm’s computer division, later co-founded Pixar, and now heads both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios; Alan Kay MS’68 PhD’69, who helped pioneer the laptop computer; and John Warnock BS’61 MS’64 PhD’69, who was the first to develop desktop publishing systems and co-founded Adobe. “It’s a great story about how Utah took a very early and very prominent place in the development of the computer industry,” says Edwards.

Games studies programs have existed in academe for about a decade. For many people, though, it may still seem counterintuitive to teach video games in a university setting. But technologies and digital media permeate both the modern economy and the cultural conversation, making games “too big to ignore,” says Altizer.

Even with the U’s history of innovation in computer science, the Entertainment Arts & Engineering program’s existence is something of a serendipitous accident. In the mid-2000s, Kessler was pondering a couple of problems. Enrollment in computer science courses was dropping, and the program needed a jump start. Kessler also wanted a better way to teach engineering students how to develop software programs that would last more than a nanosecond.

A video game provided a solution. At a Microsoft conference, Kessler acquired the source code for the game Half-Life 2. Back in Utah, he set students to work rewriting nearly a half-million lines of code, altering the game from its dark and violent, first-person shooting foray into a team-oriented video version of capture the flag. “The students loved it,” he says. “They already loved games, and then this is a game that they got to modify and work on.”

With the seed of an idea now growing, Kessler sought out his industry contacts to get a clearer picture of their needs. When graduates enter the workforce, he asked, what skills are students still missing? The answer: Most have good computer science skills or really good art skills, but they don’t have any idea how to work together. “I talked to a lot of companies—Pixar and Disney and Electronic Arts and Microsoft—and they all said, in essence, the same thing: You have to be really good, and you’ve got to be able to work with the other side,” Kessler says.

Games for Health

Vance B. Strong is the hero of the University of Utah video game //Sandy Shores//. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

Can a virtual superhero have therapeutic powers? He might if his name is Vance B. Strong, star of Sandy Shores, a video game designed to help young cancer patients battle their disease.

The game was designed in 2011 by Roger Altizer MS’06, a professor and co-founder of the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering program, and a team of five graduate students, in collaboration with Carol Bruggers, a pediatric oncologist at Primary Children’s Medical Center, and Grzegorz Bulaj, a U associate professor of medicinal chemistry. Robert Kessler BS’74 MS’77 PhD’81, a co-founder and executive director of the program, handled the technical issues of working with new technology, and Craig Caldwell, the program’s director of digital technology, worked on the artistic aspects of the game.

Sandy Shores became the first health game created at the U, and more are in the works. For Sandy Shores, Bruggers and Bulaj obtained seed money from the U Department of Pediatrics and approached Entertainment Arts & Engineering for help after talking about ways to incentivize treatment for children in a way that was not just fun, but also contributed to physical and emotional well-being. Young cancer patients often spend weeks quarantined in small hospital rooms and undergo intense treatments that leave them feeling sicker than their disease had. The result can be a loss of physical conditioning and emotional health, which can undermine the children’s ability to recover.

Altizer and the other U researchers set about creating a video game to help incentivize physical exercise for the patients. Then-students Kurt Coppersmith BFA’10 MFA’12, Laura Warner BFA’10 MFA’12, Brandon Davies BS’12, Wade Paterson MS’12, and Jordan Wilcken MS’12 also worked on the game. Each element of the game, from its theme and colors to the type of tasks accomplished and the physical movements the players use, was vetted and tested with patients, physical therapists, and social workers. Altizer was also able to tap his industry contacts to find a motion-control device being developed by Sony with an electronic frequency that does not interfere with sensitive medical equipment.

The resulting game features the cape-clad Vance, who battles a series of obstacles that threaten his relaxing beach vacation. In one scenario, Vance scrambles to clean up after an army of bright red robotic crabs littering the beach, and in another, he uses mortar and bricks to build a wall to stop a tidal wave from flooding a city. With each victory, Vance’s image on the screen gets stronger and healthier, just like the kids who are battling cancer. The children primarily use upper body and arm movements to play the game, which helps raise their heart rate. Best of all, the game isn’t boring. There are no pills, no IV bags, and no negative side effects. And, importantly, no one dies. “The psychological message of that is huge,” Bruggers says.

Kids who have played the prototype love it, and other medical centers are clamoring for a chance to use it. “Our biggest compliment is that one kid played to exhaustion,” says Altizer, though that did lead to an adjustment in the game’s design. Since exhaustion isn’t a desired outcome for kids whose bodies are already stressed, designers added a “cool down” feature, which helps avoid repetitive motion and forces kids to switch to a different part of the game, with different physical activity, or take a two-minute break.

Bruggers and Bulaj plan to conduct a series of clinical trials and hope the FDA will eventually approve the game for therapeutic use. A nonprofit company in development through the University’s Pierre Lassonde Entrepreneur Center and the Technology Commercialization Office will eventually make the game commercially available, Bulaj says.

The U has already begun developing more health games. John Hollerbach, a U research professor who directs the robotics track in the School of Computing, is working on a National Science Foundation-funded project to enhance physical therapy for patients with spinal cord injuries. His team’s “treadport” is a giant treadmill inside a cave with three large video screens that transport patients to virtual worlds.

Entertainment Arts & Engineering students are assisting Hollerbach in developing other games and virtual environments to engross and motivate patients to work harder and spend more time on physical therapy. Neuroworx, a Utah physical therapy provider, is a project partner.

The U student game //The Last Pod Fighter// was released in 2011. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

Back in the classroom, Kessler was working on a second video-driven experiment: a course in machinima, or 3-D movies that use video-game programming to generate computer animation. Again, the students responded with enthusiasm. “And this is when the serendipity happens,” Kessler says. One of the graduate students in the class at the time was Altizer, who was studying communications and had been working as a video-games journalist. Altizer was also teaching video-game design courses in the film department. They decided to try to create a way for art, film, and engineering students to take classes together.

Selling the idea across the campus to both Film Department and administrative leaders wasn’t hard. “I haven’t had anybody up here at the University who thinks this is a bad idea,” Kessler says. To make the new program a reality, a committee of faculty from both the Film and Computer Science departments met to examine existing electives and knit together the academic requirements of the program. “We didn’t ask for any money, and we didn’t create any new classes; we just kind of moved things around,” Kessler says.

When the program was unveiled in the fall of 2007, students in both disciplines clamored to join it, and the demand has remained strong ever since. The program now has three tracks: design and production, led by Altizer; art, directed by Caldwell; and engineering, directed by Mark van Langeveld PhD’09. For the current academic year, Kessler estimates that of the 800 students collectively enrolled in the Film and Computer Science departments, about 200 are in the Entertainment Arts & Engineering program. The program has remained only an academic course of study, but that may change during the 2013-14 academic year if a proposal to elevate it to a full-fledged degree program is approved this spring by the state Board of Regents.

Success at the undergraduate level helped lay the groundwork for a master’s degree program launched in 2010, under the Master Games Studio name, with just 19 students. The studio provides a study program for artists, engineers, and producers—the key team leaders who in both the classroom and industry manage projects from start to finish. The students from the various disciplines work together throughout most of their two years of academic study.

In the first year of study, students work on prototype games for real-world clients. In 2012, those included a marketing-focused game to drive up sales of the Utah-made Beehive cheese and a game to teach the Shoshone language to Native American teens. Second-year students focus on developing an original video game for publishing. The University in 2012 launched Utah Game Forge, a company that helps students market their games without having to form their own companies. Currently, 60 students are enrolled in the graduate program—a number Kessler hopes to double.

//Erie// was published by Utah Game Forge and released by Desura in 2012. (Photo courtesy U Entertainment Arts & Engineering Program)

The results of both the graduate and undergraduates tracks have been extraordinary. Students are winning awards for their video games and films. They’re also pushing the boundaries of technology and grasping an academic approach to video games with ease. And the interdisciplinary work helps the students evolve and learn. “In the beginning, I think there’s not a lot of respect between them,” Kessler says. “You have the artists saying, ‘It’s because of me the games are beautiful, and you don’t have any art skills,’ and the engineers are saying, ‘It’s because of me that the game even works.’ ”

Kevin Hanson MFA’84, chair of the Film Department, says the artists and engineers often discover skills they didn’t know they had: “There are some engineers who turn out to be painterly, and some filmmakers who can actually do calculus.” Corrinne Lewis BA’03, who directs the Master Games Studio, says the students grew up playing video games, and the program helps transform their knowledge. “We give all of this practical skill stuff with an academic flavor so that they think more broadly,” she says.

Even after a single semester, Witts says the program has stretched his creativity, and his ideas about games. “Video games go way beyond just sitting there for hours getting to new levels and shooting people,” he says. He now finds himself playing games with a notepad at his side and pausing to write down what he finds interesting about how a game is designed. “It doesn’t ruin the fun of playing,” he says. “I’m still having fantastic fun.”

—Jennifer Dobner is a former longtime Associated Press reporter and editor who now is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

*Editor’s Note: On March 12, shortly after this article was published, the Princeton Review released its 2013 rankings, and the U’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering was ranked number one for its undergraduate program and number two for its graduate program. Read more here: http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/entertainment-arts-engineering-tops-the-charts/

Web Exclusives

This video trailer showcases Robot Pinball Escape, a game developed by a team of University of Utah graduate students and published in 2012 through Utah Game Forge:

This video trailer gives a preview of Heroes of Hat, which in May 2012 became the first University of Utah student game published through Utah Game Forge:

This video trailer shows scenes from Erie, a virtual horror game by University of Utah students that was published by Utah Game Forge in 2012:

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About 15 miles from Ghana’s second-largest city of Kumasi, where the pavement turns to hard-packed dirt and the African rainforest grows up thick and tangled, a story of transformation is unfolding. In Barekuma, generations of villagers have carved out a meager existence by farming the equatorial soil. They’ve lived on dirt floors and without electricity and toilets. Access to health care and education has been limited, and the water the community has always relied on for everything from laundry to cooking and bathing has been so contaminated that most of Barekuma’s 2,500 villagers became chronically ill.

Over the last eight years, though, a partnership with the University of Utah’s Global Health Initiative has led Barekuma to remake itself by engaging educators, medical practitioners, university students, and the community in a cross-disciplinary approach to problem solving that helps residents increase their own capacity to improve their lives and create sustainable change. Villagers now have—and use—clean water sources and restrooms. The incidence of disease has been reduced, and greater economic stability is being fostered.

Paired with education-centered programs for medical students and other health-care providers at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, the efforts in Ghana are a cornerstone example of how the U’s Global Health Initiative is charting new pathways for addressing the challenges of health, education, and economic development, not just in West Africa but in other developing nations and here at home. The initiative is now working in 20 Ghanaian villages and changing the lives of more than 30,000 people. Recently created programs in India, China, and Peru are in their infancy, but already have enhanced opportunities for learning for more than 100 students and faculty members.

Some may wonder why the University of Utah should focus resources and talent on solving problems in places half a world away, when there are community health challenges here in the United States. But in a shrinking world, where global travel is common and refugee programs relocate tens of thousands of people from the developing world, medical providers in Utah need the skills to recognize and treat a wider variety of diseases, say the U Global Health Initiative’s co-directors, Dr. Stephen C. Alder and Dr. DeVon C. Hale. Alder is chief of the U Medical School’s Division of Public Health, and Hale is a U professor of internal medicine and pathology, whose specialty is exotic diseases and travel medicine. They note that many ailments in the developing world can be prevented and treated, so enhancing health education both in medical schools and communities abroad can markedly improve many people’s quality of life.

“The reason we’re in Ghana or China or Peru or India is that we can learn so much in being a part of that community,” Alder says. Hale agrees and says, “I think it’s important that we sitting here in Salt Lake City, Utah, realize that we’re part of the world.”

The U Global Health Initiative’s approach differs from other international programs, Alder says. “We’ve come in, and we’ve looked at the comprehensive health system,” he says. “The community is our patient. And we think that for a healthy community, you certainly need great clinical care and great care delivery systems, but you also need clean water. You need sanitation systems. You need immunization. You need good, clean food; people that are educated; economic viability; and you need good government.”

University of Utah professor Stephen C. Alder, right, shakes hands with Nana Joseph Tabiri, the Ashante Tribe’s chief of Barekuma, joined by Ghanaian pediatrician Daniel Ansong, left. (Photo courtesy Stephen C. Alder)

Started by Hale in 1998 and spurred by medical students’ desire to help in the world’s developing countries, the largely volunteer program is something of a happy accident that has grown in unexpected ways. What Hale first envisioned was nothing more than an exchange program that would send medical students and residents abroad for clinical care experience in the developing world. His own interest in exotic, infectious diseases was fueled by a travel study he conducted of health risks and medical resources in 25 countries where missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were at work.

With Hale’s help, many U medical students went abroad, and most returned with wide smiles and tales of invaluable learning. Others had spent frustrating weeks in locales severely strapped for resources or were used as the vacation relief for overworked local staff. In Swaziland, for example, a female resident arrived to find herself left alone to care for a ward of 40 patients suffering from HIV. “That isn’t a position we want our students in,” Hale says.

Hoping to do better, in 2001, the U Medical School partnered with Indiana University, which had a well-established exchange in place at a Kenyan hospital. The plan was to study Indiana’s program before deciding whether Utah should attempt one of its own, Hale says. But a persistent group of students kept up the pressure for a program through the U, and that same year, the University launched its own fledging program at the Komfo Anokye hospital in Ghana. Ten students and Hale made the first trip, spending a month working on immunization efforts and breast-feeding education, as well as weighing babies and treating dehydration in children.

From the start, the U wanted to build a collaborative, long-term relationship to enhance medical education and training rather than provide one-time donations of money or medical supplies. Hale ended that first visit with a promise to doctors and administrators at the Komfo Anokye hospital that he would return the next year with a new crop of students. “They were suspicious of us,” Hale says of his Ghanaian counterparts. “By the third year, I think they realized maybe we were serious and would keep coming back.”

It was a critical turning point. In 2004, Hale recruited Alder to join the program. Alder had been seeking a way to add an international component to public health education at the U, and he helped the Komfo Anokye hospital develop community-health-oriented outreach and programming. The two Utah doctors were then invited by Ghanaian physician Daniel Ansong to Barekuma. Ansong and two other doctors had adopted the village as their own and were working to try to improve the community’s health conditions. “We went in pretty naively, and our partners went in pretty naively, but we very quickly realized that there were some incredible opportunities for us to make a big difference,” says Alder.

U medical professor DeVon C. Hale, center, listens to residents in Barekuma, Ghana. He says listening has been key to the Global Health Initiative’s success. (Photo courtesy U Global Health Initiative)

In Barekuma—and shortly thereafter in the smaller villages of Kumi and Anikroma—Alder and Hale met with the village chief and other leaders, trusting their assessments of those projects and problems that most needed University help. “Our philosophy has been that we don’t go take charge of a system or a program, but we go as support, as partner,” Alder says. “There are times when we can be a mentor or a technical adviser, but we also go there to learn.”

A prime example of how that process has worked is a Global Health Initiative research project mapping the prevalence of a parasitic flatworm disease known as schistosomiasis. The chronic disease, which is transmitted through human urine and contracted through exposure to contaminated water, was a known health problem that the community wanted to address. The U doctors got community participation in their research project by starting at the top. “We had everybody pee in a cup. The chief started it out to demonstrate that this was a good thing to do,” Alder says. “We did it appropriate to Ghanaian culture, and we got great participation.”

Testing found 41 percent of villagers suffered from the disease. The U team compiled the results into a report and suggested mechanisms for changing local practices and reducing disease. The findings were presented at a community meeting. “There were just these fantastic debates about what this all means, and we never got to the solutions because the community did it before we could. They fixed it,” Alder says of their resolve to find ways to avoid using or getting in the contaminated water.

Other projects have included a health census of villagers and Global Positioning System mapping to better track the spread of disease, early identification and treatment of malaria, efforts to stem the transmission of rotavirus, continued schistosomiasis studies, and the development of sanitation and water treatment systems. A community-based medical clinic that will provide primary medical care and prevention programs for 5,000 residents in five villages also has been completed and is set to open this year. The U doctors this year also launched the Healthy Families Initiative, a program based on the Ghanaian government’s plan for health care that places community health nurses in local clinics.

Working in concert with the Ghanaian government, the U Global Health Initiative helped secure funding and building materials for two schools in the village of Anikroma, with labor supplied by local villagers. In Barekuma, U teams have helped build a community bathroom facility near a school and install a sewer system, so villagers no longer have to use an open pit covered with boards for a toilet. And U students helped write a grant that secured loan funding so villagers could transform a five-acre plot of unused land into an orange grove. Proceeds from the sales of the fruit and its juice will provide an ongoing revenue stream to increase the village’s economic viability and help break the cycle of poverty.

Even more exciting for Hale is what’s happening back in the Kumasi hospital where the U program has its roots. Each year, more students and faculty from both countries have become involved, expanding opportunities for research and learning. The annual summer medical exchange that brings Hale and U students to Africa now also allows for Ghanaian students and faculty to come and study at the University of Utah. About 40 U faculty members are involved and have developed new residency, teaching, and training programs for budding doctors, nurses, dentists, laboratory technicians, and community health workers, as well as physicians’ assistants, who play a critical role in health-care delivery across Ghana and are often the first, or only point of contact a rural village may have with medical care.

The difference the U program has been making is dramatic. An ophthalmology program has expanded access to cataract surgery for patients of all ages, and the Global Health Initiative has helped build an eye surgery center in Kumasi that is nearing completion. Infant mortality is decreasing through the efforts of a neonatal resuscitation course, as well as a new method for treating severe dehydration in babies. A growing dental program for Ghanaian students will graduate its first class this September, improving access to dentistry in a place where the dentist to patient ratio is one per 80,000 people.

A Ghanaian medical worker takes a blood sample. (Photo courtesy U Global Health Initiative)

The University’s success in Ghana has drawn plenty of attention to the community, and requests have come in recent years to expand the Global Health Initiative. Programs and medical exchanges are now in place or in development in China, India, and Peru, opening new opportunities for U students and faculty and those in host countries, Hale says.

Hale and Alder now have a very specific dream: a Global Health Institute at the U that would support both the work already under way and serve as a launching pad for new endeavors. The institute would help them foster new collaboration with universities worldwide and sponsor conferences and research. Hale says a formal institute would also lend the kind of credibility needed to win grants to support the work.

To date, participants in the Global Health Initiative have self-funded most of their work and travel. The U’s medical school provided Hale with a small budget of $60,000 for the first time this year. A fully funded institute would create the needed stability to hone the focus on programming, rather than finding the money to fund the work, Alder says.

For students, working in Africa is as much a lesson in trans forming their own perspectives as it is in medicine, public health, or any other discipline, says Chris Brown, the current chief resident at University Hospital. Brown has traveled to both Kenya, where the University remains involved with the Indiana program, and Ghana. “Their resources are much more limited, so simple lab tests and things that we order here without even thinking about it are very costly, or sometimes you can’t get them,” he says.

He believes he has become a better doctor because of the time he has spent in Africa. He has encountered diseases, sometimes at very advanced stages, that he might never have seen at home. He thinks more about the implications of expensive diagnostic tests and tries to rely more heavily on doing what he says his Ghanaian counterparts do so well: listening closely to patients and conducting more thorough health histories to map a path to diagnosis. He also has a deeper commitment to a medical career entwined with public health work.

University of Utah ophthalmologist Alan Crandall, right, performs eye surgery on a child in Ghana, with Ghanaian ophthalmologist Peter Osei-Bonsu, left, and U nurse Brittnee Zacherson. (Photo courtesy U Global Health Initiative)

Stephen Oluaku Manortey, a Ghanaian who is now studying in Utah in the U’s doctoral program in public health, says conducting community-based participatory research with the Global Health Initiative has allowed him to develop a deeper understanding of the health challenges his country faces. “It has helped me learn more about my own backyard,” says Manortey, who plans to work in Ghana after finishing his degree.

The Global Health Initiative has developed health centers there that bring primary health services to rural communities and has created a database of demographic and health data that aid disease surveillance work. Efforts like those are changing Ghana’s health systems, all without creating a dependence on foreign partners, he says. “This has helped my people to see themselves as stakeholders and owners of the projects much more than the foreign counterparts who have come to work with them,” Manortey says. “I think the GHI is having an impact in Ghana and is there to help make Ghana and the world a better place.”

— Jennifer Dobner is a former longtime Associated Press reporter and editor who now is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

If you would like to participate in a service trip or visit any of the Global Health Initiative sites, or make a donation, contact Taylor Scalley at (801) 585-6874 or taylor.scalley@hsc.utah.edu.

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A U professor travels the world to document birds’ crucial role and conserve their dwindling numbers.

With its bald head, its preposterous neck, its tendency to hunch its shoulders while waiting for something bad to happen, the vulture is a bird that makes us cringe. But look what happened in India.

First, the vultures’ habitat was cut down to make way for human villages and farms, and then farmers began medicating their cattle with a painkiller that caused the birds’ kidneys to collapse when they ingested the cattle remains. Vulture populations began to decline—to near-extinction levels in some areas of the country—and then the land was littered with rotting carcasses, which caused the feral dog and rat populations to increase, contributing to a bubonic plague outbreak and the deaths of 48,000 people from rabies.

Collared redstart

As Çağan H. Şekercioğlu tells it, this is one more cautionary tale about the perils of diminishing biodiversity. And it’s why, in 2009, he opened the first “vulture restaurant” in his native Turkey (that is to say, a place where the scavengers could get a safe meal, not an eatery with roast vulture on the menu.)

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu (pronounce it cha-HAN shay-KER-jeoh-loo) is a conservation biologist, ornithologist, and tireless advocate for biodiversity. Last year, he was honored as one of 14 “emerging explorers” by National Geographic for his work in tropical and mountain outposts from Costa Rica to Ethiopia. The distinction recognizes Şekercioğlu as being among the “uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists, and storytellers making significant contributions to world knowledge through exploration while still early in their careers.” In 2008, he received Britain’s prestigious Whitley Gold Award for his conservation efforts in Turkey, from the Whitley Fund for Nature. At 36, he is already one of the most cited environmental scientists in the world.

Since 2010, Şekercioğlu has called Salt Lake City home. When the University of Utah wooed him in 2009, he was impressed by both the Department of Biology and its generous offer: a brand-new lab, a generous start-up fund, and enough time away from teaching duties each year to pursue his far-flung fieldwork.

During the 2011 Fall Semester, he traveled to Ethiopia, where he set up six bird-banding stations in a remote forest to explore whether climate change is forcing birds to seek higher elevations. He also went to Turkey, where he worked with his nonprofit organization, KuzeyDoğa, on projects including Turkey’s first wildlife corridor and the vulture restaurant, which is modeled after similar safe havens in India and Nepal. And at year’s end, he traveled to New Zealand to participate in the International Congress for Conservation Biology, where he urged the world’s university-based conservation scientists to not just go into the wild and then publish papers, but also to work with local groups that can make conservation happen. Decision-makers, especially in the developing world, he told them, are more likely to follow the recommendations of academics than those of independent NGOs, which they often suspect of having political agendas.

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu talks to high-school students about bird ecology, conservation, and migrations, at KuzeyDoğa Aras Bird Research and Education Center, in eastern Turkey.

To save birds, he believes, you’ve got to encourage humans to get involved. Increasingly, that means working with grassroots organizations to help them see that saving species can be a win-win for local economies. It also means dealing with bureaucrats to get permits and garner support for ventures such as the 58,000-acre wildlife corridor and a man-made bird-nesting island that Şekercioğlu spearheaded in Turkey’s Lake Kuyucuk.

Sometimes it also means drinking endless cups of tea with government officials. Writer Elif Batuman, in her keenly observed profile of Şekercioğlu published in The New Yorker last fall, quotes him on the matter of tea drinking:

“I should just put on an adult diaper and drink tea all day long,” Çağan reflected, rubbing his eye. “They’ll be like, ‘That Çağan, he’s a really good guy—the other day he had tea with us for five hours. Let’s declare this a protected habitat. ’ ”

Even a short conversation with Şekercioğlu is often a winged migration, a flight that starts in the tropics, perhaps, and then veers off-course toward an even better story.

He might begin with his historical idol, Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and then detour to the 19th-century extinction of a flightless songbird called the Stephens Island wren; then take a sharp turn toward the Ottoman Empire; and then veer east to Papua New Guinea, where the construction of a gas pipeline is destroying habitat yet also making the area accessible to birders. Then, suddenly, he will realize that he is going to be late to a meeting.

“I’m talking too long,” he will say then. It is part apology, part the clear-eyed observation of a scientist observing his own behavior. “I often give myself to things. Being a professor these days means doing three, four jobs at once. I am still learning to balance my life.”

It is this passion—for stories and work, for life and all living things—that first impressed University of Utah College of Science Dean Pierre Sokolsky. “You can tell immediately that this is not just an academic subject for him,” Sokolsky says of Şekercioğlu. “His whole face lights up.”

Resplendent quetzal

In hiring a new faculty member, Sokolsky says, “what you’re really trying to hire is the intellect and the energy,” rather than to more narrowly find a person who does a particular type of research. The dean was also struck by Şekercioğlu’s ability to reach out to the world’s millions of bird watchers, and beyond them to the general public, to make science not just accessible but a heart-pounding experience.

Bird “watching” hardly captures the lengths to which Şekercioğlu goes to find the planet’s nearly 10,000 bird species. He is No. 69 in the world in number of bird species observed (last count: 5,781) and one of the handful in their 30s who has seen more than half the world’s bird species. “If I live to an old age and am able physically,” he says, “8,000 species is possible.”

To track down, keep track of, and study the habitats of everything from the scruffy bald ibis to the showy keel-billed toucan, Şekercioğlu has endured the following: He was chased by a machete-wielding mob in Costa Rica (they thought he was a thief when in fact he was searching for a Pacific screech-owl); he was charged by an elephant in Tanzania; he acquired the skin disease form of leishmaniasis in Peru from the bite of a sand fly; he almost lost his legs to a lymph system infection in Papua New Guinea; he came face to face with a grizzly bear in Alaska; and he was carjacked by AK-47-toting tribesmen in Ethiopia. Still, he says, it’s safer to do fieldwork than to drive a car in his native Istanbul.

Fieldwork—not just studying the habits and habitats of birds but working with local communities to save species—is essential for solving the world’s conservation problems, he says. But with the growing pressure on academic scientists to publish quickly and on big topics, biologists tend increasingly to work with existing data sets. And funding to do long-term field research gets harder and harder to come by.

On a recent afternoon, Şekercioğlu re-enacts what it was like to come upon the book that changed his life. He gets up from his desk in his office in the U’s South Biology Building, walks to the bookshelf, and picks up the Collins Field Guide: Birds of Britain and Europe. He was 14 when he first found it on the shelf of his high school library in Istanbul and was awed by what the world offered.

His father bought him a pair of Russian-made military binoculars, and, despite the fact that their heft gave him a neck ache, he wore them everywhere. Before it was birds, it was insects. And frogs. And hedgehogs. He made his first insect net out of his mother’s wedding veil. He taught himself to read when he was 4 years old (his parents wearied of reading him yet another book about animals). He read about Darwin at age 5 (although he thought Darwin had written On the Origin of Türks, since the Turkish word for “species” is “Tür”).

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu radio-tracks a silverthroated tanager to find its night roost near Costa Rica’s Las Cruces forest.

Worried that he preferred insects to soccer, his parents took him to a psychiatrist, who assured them that he was normal. But in Turkey at that time, he says, there was not a single role model for a boy who wanted to study wildlife. “If you’re good at science,” the conventional wisdom went, “you should become a doctor or an engineer.” To this day, no university in Turkey has an ecology department, and in all of Istanbul, there isn’t a single natural history museum.

Because there also weren’t many natural history books in Turkish, he read them in English. And that, he says, eventually boosted his college entrance exam scores, and that helped him get a full scholarship to Harvard University. It also probably didn’t hurt that at age 16 he contributed a rare beetle to the Harvard entomology collection. He got his doctorate at Stanford University, studying with famed population biologist Paul Ehrlich. While still in college, at age 23, Şekercioğlu initiated a study of a community of more than 400 bird species in Costa Rica. (So far, the project has mist-netted more than 60,000 birds of 262 species, radio-tracked about 450 birds, and monitored hundreds of bird nests.) The work has helped reveal how tropical forest birds respond to agriculture and deforestation. He also organized a worldwide bird ecology database that covers all of the world’s 10,000-plus bird species—one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of any class of organism, he says—and which he updates based on the literature and his field experience.

And that brings us to the heart of Şekercioğlu’s work.

Farming, logging, cities, roads: Over the centuries, birds have had to make room for human pursuits and have sometimes become extinct in the process. Now, add to that the threat of climate change, says Şekercioğlu.

“Even if we were oblivious to the present changes in Earth’s climate,” he writes with co-author Janice Wormworth in the 2011 book Winged Sentinels: Birds and Climate Change, “a careful look at birds’ patterns of responses over recent decades would warn us that some sort of widespread and systematic change is afoot.”

When and where and how often they breed, for example, can give us a clue that their ecosystem is awry. They are nearly literally the “canary in the coal mine,” warning of what might follow for other species, says Şekercioğlu. And their diminishing numbers could have a direct effect on the planet. The seeds of rainforest trees, for example, are mainly dispersed by birds. If the birds dwindle or become extinct, eventually, the trees will, too. As part of his efforts to help preserve those tropical species, Şekercioğlu co-authored the 2011 book Conservation of Tropical Birds, another exploration of how climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species affect birds and other wildlife.

In a 2008 study published in the journal Conservation Biology, Şekercioğlu and his colleagues at Stanford predicted that if the Earth’s surface temperature rises 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century (a moderate scenario, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), it could trigger the extinction of 400 to 550 bird species. Part of that is due to what he calls the “escalator effect”—as habitats get warmer and vegetation changes, birds move to higher elevations; eventually they run out of places for escape. A worst-case scenario of habitat loss plus 6.4 degrees Celsius warming could mean more than 2,500 land birds would become extinct by the year 2100, about 30 percent of all land bird species.

Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, left, who joined the University of Utah faculty in 2010, puts a tracking band on an emerald toucanet in Costa Rica’s Las Cruces forest.

The good news, though, is that even a reduction of 1 degree Celsius of warming can make a huge difference, Şekercioğlu says, resulting in up to 500 fewer bird extinctions. We can also make sure there are vegetation corridors between forest fragments; we can improve the “hospitality” of farmland so birds can thrive.

Our economic system is based on constant growth, notes Şekercioğlu, and we humans are a “short-sighted species… Our brains are not wired to deal with long-term, catastrophic threats” such as climate change. At the other extreme, though, by the time scientific data are condensed into a magazine article or summarized in a misleading headline, projections can look worse than they are. It’s a constant struggle to make sure the science reporting is accurate, he says, and that the real environmental threats aren’t overlooked.

Like any scientist, he sometimes uses fuzzy phrases like “bird-mediated ecosystem process” and “avian extinction correlates.” But Şekercioğlu is also a photographer and a storyteller, a cheerleader for every bird that flies or swims or waddles.

If he could be any bird at all, he says, he would be a raptor. In English, his first name translates as “hawk.” But it’s not just that. He would rather be the bird that isn’t eaten, the one that lives long enough to see every other bird. He would rather be a long-distance traveler, spreading the word.

— Elaine Jarvik is a freelance writer and playwright based in Salt Lake City.

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