From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
Headlines
Gift from KU alumni creates scholarship for hometown students
LAWRENCE — Retired automotive chairman Robert Eaton and his wife, Connie Drake Eaton, both University of Kansas alumni, have established the Eaton Scholarship at KU with a $1 million gift. The scholarship is awarded to students from their respective Kansas hometowns, Arkansas City and Burlington.
KU author explores how network connectivity, collective action made historic South Korean impeachment possible
LAWRENCE – The 2017 impeachment of South Korean president President Park Geun-hye offers lessons for how the rapidly evolving information ecosystem can affect political movements, including use of traditional and social media, propaganda and misinformation in one of the most digitally connected countries in the world. Those lessons are shared in a new book, “Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment,” from a University of Kansas professor of journalism & mass communications.
Biotech company with KU roots wins national competition, secures funding to help move research ‘from bench to bedside’
LAWRENCE — Clara Biotech, founded by University of Kansas engineering alumnus Jim West and former KU engineering professor Mei He, has spent the last three years refining a novel technology to isolate and purify exosomes, which can be used for early disease diagnosis, targeted drug delivery, cancer immunotherapy and other forms of regenerative medicine. Now, the company is poised to commercialize its first product after recently finalizing $1.5 million in seed funding and being recognized in the national MedTech Innovator’s Biotools Innovator program, which recognizes the 10 best life science tools startups.
Full stories below.
————————————————————————
Contact: Michelle Strickland, KU Endowment, 785-832-7363, [email protected]; Michelle Keller, KU Endowment, 785-832-7336, [email protected]; @KUEndowment
Gift from KU alumni creates scholarship for hometown students
LAWRENCE — Retired automotive chairman Robert Eaton and his wife, Connie Drake Eaton, both University of Kansas alumni, established the Eaton Scholarship at KU with a $1 million gift. The scholarship is awarded to students from their respective Kansas hometowns, Arkansas City and Burlington.
However, the real gift, in Robert Eaton’s view, is the opportunity the scholarship provides.
Robert Eaton came from a family in which no one on either side of his family had graduated from college. His father was a baggage handler on the railroad, and his mother was a beautician.
Connie Drake Eaton’s father died in World War II, and she grew up with her mother and grandparents. Robert and Connie met while they were students at KU.
“Going to college had the biggest effect on my life of any single event,” Robert Eaton said. “We want to give back to the university and provide someone with a life-changing experience that they might not be able to have otherwise.”
After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from KU in 1963, Robert Eaton went to work for General Motors. After 29 years with GM, he became the chairman of Chrysler and then the chairman of DaimlerChrysler AG after a merger with Daimler-Benz. He retired in 2000, and he and his wife now live in Naples, Florida. He is a life trustee on the KU Endowment Board of Trustees.
The Eatons have a history of generous support at KU. In 2003, they gave a $5 million gift toward construction of a new engineering building, named Eaton Hall.
John Howard, the current recipient of the scholarship, is a freshman from Burlington. He is part of the Legal Education Accelerated Degree Program, which allows KU students to earn a bachelor’s degree and a law degree in six years instead of seven. He is working toward a bachelor’s degree in political science.
“This scholarship went toward my tuition, and without support I don’t think I’d be able to go to college and do the things I want to do,” he said.
Howard and Robert Eaton have one thing in common: cars. For his birthday a few years ago, Howard bought two 1967 Ford Thunderbirds, one to rebuild and one for parts. Robert Eaton said he, too, had that love for mechanical tinkering starting at young age. He bought his first car when he was 11 years old for $10 and put another $15 in it to get it running.
“Before that, I built a go-cart using a Maytag washing machine motor,” Robert Eaton said. “When I was in high school, there wasn’t one single thing I couldn’t do on a car. However, that wouldn’t be true with today’s technology.”
Howard has similar hopes for his Thunderbird, and he also aspires to be philanthropic like the Eatons.
“I appreciate their background, and where they’ve come from, and what they’ve built,” Howard said. “I’m so grateful for this scholarship, and I hope to someday get to where they are and be able to give back like they have.”
-30-
————————————————————————
The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.
Tweets by KUnews
————————————————————————
Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
KU author explores how network connectivity, collective action made historic South Korean impeachment possible
LAWRENCE — When South Korean President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017, the movement that preceded it looked similar to other political maneuvers around the globe: Traditional media, social media, everyday citizens, politicians, activists and others all took part sharing information, misinformation and connecting digitally. But one thing was different: Activists and citizens pushing for impeachment succeeded. A University of Kansas scholar and former South Korean journalist has written a new book exploring how digital connectivity and collective action enabled the historic movement to succeed.
“Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment,” Oxford University Press, tells the story of Park’s impeachment by examining intricate relationships both from the perspective of South Korean citizens, politicians, journalists, government officials and activists and analyzing technological and sociopolitical affordances around sustained citizen candlelight vigils calling for the impeachment. The book also offers a technical, empirical analysis of original data and a new scholarly theoretical framework related to digital media-facilitated collective actions of the connectivity that made it possible.
Hyunjin Seo, Oscar Stauffer Chair in Journalism and founding director of the KU Center for Digital Inclusion, observed two presidential impeachments in South Korea from different perspectives. When the nation’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun in 2004, Seo was a journalist covering public diplomacy and presidential affairs of the presidential Blue House in that country. By the second impeachment in 2016, she was a mass communications scholar at KU.
“That was such a big event to cover at that time,” Seo said of the South Korean National Assembly’s impeachment of Roh, which was ultimately overturned by the country’s Constitutional Court. “The presidential office is located very near to Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, the center of political and social movements, and also close to where I worked. Then, when I came to the U.S. and seeing another presidential impeachment in South Korea, but being removed was fascinating. I became interested in analyzing citizen mobilizations and roles of technology in all of this.”
Seo has always been interested in why some movements succeed and some others fail and how agents and structures interact during movements.
“Though this is a very complex question, we increasingly are beginning to see how network connectivity affords novel opportunities for collective action. I felt this is something I really wanted to study in-depth, and I didn’t want it to be just one journal article,” she said.
The result was “Networked Collected Actions,” in which Seo documents the Park impeachment amid presidential corruption scandals and the role of technology and actors therein. In the book, Seo, also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, outlines the “agent-affordance framework of networked collective actions,” a scholarly framework that analyzes how agents, or those who took part in all different aspects of the impeachment, interacted with affordance — in this case, technology and information ecosystems and sociopolitical environments — to share views and information.
South Korea is one of the most highly connected countries in the world. Broadband access is higher there than in most other nations, and a majority of citizens are active on the internet and social media. When allegations of corruption were made against Park, large numbers of citizens began holding candlelight vigils in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun area. While the vigils have a long history in South Korea as a means of citizen protest, these vigils were different, thanks in large part to the changing information ecosystem there, Seo said.
Right-wing and fringe media networks arose since the first impeachment. Bots were deployed to defend Park, generate misinformation and sow division, such as claiming North Korea was behind the impeachment movement. At the same time, social media and connectivity allowed citizens who supported impeachment to take part in the vigils and call attention to them, even if they could not be there physically.
“This impeachment, for someone who studies communications and connectivity, was especially important to help us better understand the rapidly evolving information ecosystem. You had so many agents, including right-wing propaganda social media bots, as well as traditional media and social media influencers all playing roles,” Seo said. “This book examines how interactions between these diverse agents produced shared content on all sides of the issue with the ultimate result of Park being removed from office.”
Based on interviews, secondary data analysis and content analysis of news reports and social media posts, the book details how both supporters and opponents of impeachment used network connectivity to make their cases. Park’s popularity plummeted, many of her defenders ultimately changed their minds, friendly media began criticizing her, and ultimately, she was convicted of corruption charges and removed from office.
One chapter analyzes the Sewol Ferry disaster, an incident that was instrumental in turning momentum against Park. In that case, nearly 300 teenagers on their school field trip drowned when a ferry sank. Park’s administration was accused of withholding information on the incident, mishandling its aftermath and failing to be transparent. That growing anger energized criticism against her and gave additional life to pro-impeachment supporters when a series of media reports revealed corruption. Interviews reveal how it engaged presidential critics and how the government tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to control information about the disaster and impeachment, as well as how former presidential supporters came to express embarrassment about their past support.
While Park was eventually removed from office, “Networked Collective Actions” explores issues that remained and how agent-affordance interactions have evolved, as well as the importance of understanding information ecosystems in political, social and other movements. People are often reluctant to change their minds on an issue, even when presented with credible information that contradicts their position. However, in the Park impeachment, a significant proportion of South Korean citizens did just that, upon seeing family, friends and people they trust protesting against the former president and when presented with new information from media and social outlets they frequented. The approval rating of Park, which once hit about 60%, dropped to 4% just before the impeachment.
“The impeachment movement offers important implications related to citizens’ information ecosystems in the age of misinformation and disinformation,” Seo said. “In particular, understanding why some people immediately reject certain information and never reconsider it, and why others, who initially rejected that information reconsider and accept it has significant implications for various challenges we face including political participation, climate change and vaccination. How can we effectively navigate this complex information ecosystem and strengthen citizens’ abilities to discern information quality?”
The Park impeachment was ultimately a major political moment in South Korea, but understanding how networked collected actions fueled the movement and changed minds in one case through the interaction of agents and affordances can potentially open the door to better understanding movements and how people interact with information and each other in a digital world.
“I think a lot about practical steps we can take to improve the quality of information we’re all exposed to. We’ve seen an increase in effective use of social media by fringe media, and they’re very good at using social media strategies,” Seo said. “Ultimately, I’m continuing to study agent and affordance frameworks and how we can apply it to other areas. Many studies only look at agents and actors or at structural influences, but we increasingly see how they interact.”
-30-
————————————————————————
Subscribe to KU Today, the campus newsletter,
for additional news about the University of Kansas.
http://www.news.ku.edu
————————————————————————
Contact: Rylie Koester, Office of Research, 785-864-0375, [email protected], @ResearchAtKU
Biotech company with KU roots wins national competition, secures funding to help move research ‘from bench to bedside’
LAWRENCE — The human body contains trillions of cells at any given moment, each doing highly specialized work to help us function — but they don’t operate in isolation. Imagine a sophisticated FedEx or UPS delivery network empowering communication between our cells. The nano-sized delivery vehicles in this scenario are called exosomes, and a company born from technology developed at the University of Kansas is harnessing the power of these tiny vessels to enable tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs.
Clara Biotech, founded by KU engineering alumnus Jim West and former KU professor of chemical & petroleum engineering and chemistry Mei He, has spent the last three years refining a novel technology to isolate and purify exosomes, which can be used for early disease diagnosis, targeted drug delivery, cancer immunotherapy and other forms of regenerative medicine.
Now, the company is poised to commercialize its first product after recently finalizing $1.5 million in seed funding and being recognized in a national competition. Clara Biotech was the only Midwest company singled out in MedTech Innovator’s Biotools Innovator program, which recognizes the 10 best life science tools startups. The company received $10,000 for securing a spot in the 2021 cohort and a $5,000 best-video award for a one-minute spot introducing the company and detailing what sets it apart.
“Clara Biotech was founded to help move exosomes from the bench to the bedside,” said West, who serves as Clara’s CEO. “Our company is about building a platform that everybody can leverage to bring their products to market and help solve challenges around isolation and purification, which today is one of the number one issues in the field.”
Exosomes deliver genetic information to cells throughout the body. Exosomes from regenerative cells, such as stem cells, can help the body heal and repair itself. Exosomes released from diseased cells might be used for early detection and diagnosis of cancer and other conditions.
But at 100 nanometers in diameter — less than the wavelength of visible light — exosomes are difficult to handle.
Clara Biotech’s patented ExoRelease platform is unique in the industry. Current processes rely on bulk isolation, whereas Clara’s “capture and release” technology isolates pure exosomes. This allows researchers to easily isolate and target specific exosomes — including cardiac, neurological, cancer and others — and use them for therapeutic treatments and drug delivery platforms.
“I’m very excited about the work that Clara Biotech is doing to improve exosome purification,” said Kathryn Zavala, managing director of BioTools Innovator. “Their technology has the potential to significantly impact how we diagnose and treat diseases by advancing the field of exosome research and development.”
Clara Biotech launched in 2018 with a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Cancer Institute and received training through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program on how to transfer knowledge into products and processes that benefit society. It has seven full-time employees, and its lab is housed in the KU Innovation Park.
“Clara Biotech is an example of how KU innovation provides the foundation to form a company that addresses societal needs and creates Kansas jobs,” said Tricia Bergman, KU’s director of strategic partnerships. “It also illustrates how technology developed in KU labs can transition into the KU Innovation Park, where the company can continue to develop through ongoing partnerships with the university.”
Until now, Clara Biotech has provided lab services to its customers. Now, it’s moving toward packaging its technology so other companies, labs and researchers can leverage it to complete the isolation process themselves.
“We’re trying to democratize access to these exosomes,” West said.
Clara Biotech is beta-testing kits containing its isolation technology — with promising results from early adopters — and hopes to launch its first product by the end of the year.
“Building a company is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but it’s also super rewarding,” West said. “The work we’re doing is really important.”
-30-
————————————————————————
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
