2013 guide to higher education

54 • South Dakota Magazine

2013 HIGHER EDUCATION GUIDE

January/February 2013 • 55

Selecting the college or university that best fits your future plans is one of life’s

most important decisions. Each of South Dakota’s colleges and universities

has its own emphasis — agriculture, the arts, engineering, computer technol-

ogy — so there truly is something for everyone.

Parents and students weigh a variety of factors when choosing a school: cost, dis-

tance from home and, perhaps most importantly, paths of study and the opportunities

available at each institution. Faculty members and students at South Dakota’s schools

are engaged in fascinating research projects. They are searching for alternative energy

sources in the invisible innards of termites, repairing damaged fighter planes with

the spray of a can, exploring the traditional medicinal uses — and vast potential —

of South Dakota’s native plants and using computer skills to crack into bank security

systems (then kindly blocking the path that let them in).

Our teachers are looking at old problems in new and exciting ways. Use this guide

to gauge which cutting-edge research opportunities pique your interest, then explore

each college or university to discover more.

2 0 1 3 G U I D E T O

HIGHER EDUCATIONBy John Andrews

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English students at Dakota Wesleyan University have helped professor Derek Driedger

(above) determine why 19th century novels painted a false portrait of Dakota Territory.


BACTERIAL GAS: THE FUTURE OF ENERGY?Amy Majeres

B acteria are the cause of many infectious dis-eases, but might they hold the key to energy independence?

Mount Marty College in Yankton is one of 80 col-leges and universities internationally participating in the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute Undergraduate Research in Microbial Genome Analysis program, the goal of which is to find alter-native fuel sources. Each college is researching a spe-cific microbe. Mount Marty’s is Spirochaeta coccoi-des, a microbe found in the digestive tract of termites. Scientists know that during digestion, this microbe converts wood into ethanol. It’s the job of Vicki Geiser and her biology students to determine how it happens.

“Certain genes are there, and there are others they predict would be there,” Geiser says. “It may get to eth-anol, but it may get there in different ways. We know

the reaction is done at the temperature of the termite, so it should be fairly efficient. Perhaps we can harness information and use these microbes or create synthetic pathways to do the same process.”

Much of the work Geiser’s students have done in-volves confirming predictions already made through computer analysis. “Just like your computer makes mistakes, they also make mistakes in genomic predic-tions,” she says. “You need undergraduate eyes. It’s perfect for them because they can learn about gene an-notation and catch mistakes the computers have made.”

Yankton is becoming a regional hub for bioinfor-matics, and other schools will soon be involved. The new South Dakota Genomic Consortium involves sev-en schools and 14 faculty members who will expand the project in 2013. They hope to eventually study mi-crobes found in South Dakota rivers and forests.

Vicki Geiser (center) and her Mount Marty College biology students look for alternative fuel in termite intestines.



Buffalo grass is abundant on the South Dakota prairie, but good luck finding it in a green-house. “It is difficult to buy truly native spe-

cies,” says Ben VanEe, a biology professor at Black Hills State University in Spearfish. “They haven’t en-tered the trade yet, but I think when demand is created for them and the supply is met, they will be more read-ily available.” VanEe and his colleagues are trying to

advance the cause with a 4,000 square foot garden comprised of species native to South Dakota. They hope the garden is used for research and interactive field trips for students and community members.

The garden resembles a Lakota medicine wheel, with each wedge themed botanically. Many spe-cies have histories of medicinal use in Lakota cul-ture. Sage was used for smudging, but a researcher is

THE PRAIRIE IS THEIR GARDEN

exploring its potential to combat malaria. Yucca is known as soap weed because its saponins (com-pounds with detergent qualities) froth when rubbed together, cre-ating soap.

The garden holds nearly 30 species, but VanEe plans to triple that in the spring. Then he hopes to invite students and the com-munity to explore. “Imagine be-ing able to go in there and pick plants, then smudge sage or make soap,” he says. “We have so many beautiful native plants, and there’s a lot of value to cul-tivating land with them. If peo-ple wanted to landscape in a wa-ter conservative fashion, most available options are non-native plants that are ecologically prob-lematic. They could escape and choke out native vegetation in other areas. There’s scientif ic sense to it and I think it’s fun and rewarding.”

Ben

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Native plants will grow in a medicine-

wheel shaped garden in Spearfish.


Laura Bartels

Kevin Streff spent years keeping hack-ers out of the security systems of major companies. Now Streff and his students

at Dakota State University in Madison spend time breaking into bank security systems, and then plugging the holes that granted them access.

Streff is a Salem native and Dakota State grad-uate. He worked IT jobs in major cities and re-turned to South Dakota 10 years ago when he saw the need for network security. “In the 1970s,

the hardware wave came. Then in the ’80s it was software companies, the ’90s was networking and now it’s security,” Streff says. “When I fin-ished in industry, I could see the security wave coming, and that it was going to avalanche these companies that were totally unprepared.”

Streff developed the National Center for the Protection of Financial Infrastructure at Dakota State. Streff and his students try to crack into the security system of a model bank. If they are successful, they examine why and try to fix the problem. “Anything you can do at a bank we can replicate here and study how hackers break in, or how foreign nations compromise that infra-structure,” he says. “But hacking is just a part of it. We’ve seen that organizations typically don’t do a very good job testing the systems they de-velop or purchase. Some insiders like to put in back doors, or create problems in the software that can be exploited later. We need to think like an insider. How do you lock a system down so a trusted insider doesn’t get sticky fingers and do something with all this customer information?”

Students agree the knowledge they gain will be put only to good use. And so far it has. Streff and his students have already created tools to detect weaknesses in programming codes.

HACKING 101

One man’s garbage is John Peters’ muse. The Augustana College art instructor’s latest works are two light f ixtures in Sioux Falls’ new Environmental Center made entirely from recycled

materials. “I had been collecting milk jugs for about a year because I had this idea of creating sculptural forms with cut-up milk bottles,” Peters says. “I decided to try to make it work for these light fixtures.”

The architects liked the design and asked for another. “My son’s roommate really loved Bud Light Platinum beer, so I had all these co-balt blue bottles. I just love the color, so I peeled the labels off and had my son help clean them,” Peters says. The result was a combination of clear and dark blue bottles — accented with antique plates from a second-hand store — held together with fishnets and copper wiring.

As a mixed media artist, Peters uses found objects in his art and in classes. “I teach a box art class, where you take a box and use it for an-other purpose while making an artistic statement with it,” he says. “All the materials I encourage them to use are recycled or found objects.”

ART FROM THE TRASH BIN John Peters


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Crop rotation has become an essential component of successful farming, but

students and teachers at Lake Area Technical Institute in Watertown are trying to prove that today’s technology trumps the tried-and-true method our great-grandpar-ents used to f ind success on the Plains.

The school’s Ag Advisory Board challenged agriculture instructor Brian Olson to grow corn in Lake Area’s 70-acre demonstration farm for seven consecutive years, using treated and untreated corn varieties to control rootworm. Six years into the experiment, Olson says data collected using precision

technologies like field and yield mapping shows it may be produc-tive and cost-effective. “Growing a crop is expensive,” Olson says. “Producers need to grow enough food to feed the world while get-ting the most return on their in-vestment. Precision technologies can help decrease costs and in-crease yields.”

Students are using satellites, global positioning systems and data collection monitors to ana-lyze farmland acre by acre. Yield mapping helps them determine which areas of the field produce more or less bushels per acre. They can then make adjustments before the next growing season.

THE END OF CROP ROTATION?

LuAnn Strait



Satellite guidance and auto steer technology help them plant perfect-ly spaced rows with no overlaps or skips. Variable rate technology ad-justs the amount of seed and fertilizer being applied based on soil quality, and yield monitors record bushels per acre and the crop’s moisture content in real-time during harvest.

Another demonstration investigates which fertilizer application methods result in better yielding soybeans. It includes strip tilling with and with-out fertilizer and standard broadcast applications. Students use satellite guidance and auto steer technologies to ensure seeds are planted precisely along the same line in which the soil was strip-tilled. “We’re taking the lat-est trends and using them in a practi-cal setting to see if we can find ways to increase the return on investments for producers,” Olson says.

Brian Olson’s ag class is finding that

technology may replace crop rotation.


DREAMS VS. REALITY:DAKOTA IN 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE

Dakota Territory boosters tried to attract set-tlers, and they got East Coast writers to help. Students in Derek Driedger’s Great

Plains Literature class saw the connection, and it led the professor to scour archived newspapers to de-termine how it influenced contemporary literature.

“We noticed a cycle in literature that certain writ-ers presented their dreams for what Dakota Territory could be,” says Driedger, an English professor at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell. “As we read the next round, it showed the harsh realities. I wanted to determine where these dreams came from, so I turned to newspapers.”

He found much boosterism in pages of the Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., papers. President Grover Cleveland’s wife told a crowd that Dakota’s water was so plentiful the soil could never die. Governor Nehemiah Ordway boasted about the population boom. These stories migrated into litera-ture. “Readers in the Northeast wanted literature to match their dreams of Dakota,” he says. “There’s not much coverage of how harsh it could be.”

That’s partly because Dakota Territory was split into North and South Dakota before any respected literature was written about the region. Not until Hamlin Garland wrote Main-Travelled Roads in 1891 did audiences read about Dakota’s heat and

cold, droughts and blizzards.Driedger believes Garland’s book marked the be-

ginning of a correctional phase, followed by nos-talgia, epitomized by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s By the Shores of Silver Lake. “Writers were nostalgic for the idea of freedom that the frontier offered, and how difficult it was for the few who made it,” he says. “They wanted to remind future generations what it was like to live in Dakota Territory. But again nostalgia creeps in, creating very little objec-tive literature.”

Derek Driedger’s students explore first impressions of Dakota.

PRESERVING LAKOTA PROFICIENCY

The Lakota language is among the world’s most endangered tongues. The

Lakota Language Consortium es-timates that just 14 percent of peo-ple living on South Dakota’s nine Indian reservations speak their na-tive language, and most of those are elderly. Educators on the Pine Ridge Reservation believe that only 3 percent of its f irst grad-ers speak Lakota. They are try-ing to save the language through immersion schools and a Lakota speech contest that Karen Lone

Hill organizes every November at Oglala Lakota College.

A Rapid City minister orga-nized the f irst contest 10 years ago. “He felt the language was re-ally important,” says Lone Hill, the college’s chair of Lakota stud-ies. “He’d heard that most Native languages are becoming endan-gered, so he wanted to support a Lakota speech contest. It was his way of helping revitalize the language.”

The contest is open to all K-12 schools on the reservation, in

Bennett County and in Rapid City. The f ive divisions also include college students and community members. They are given a time limit and a topic. Monetary prizes are awarded at competition’s end.

Lone Hill says she hopes the contest keeps the language fresh on the participants’ tongues. “I think there’s some fluency, but it’s the proficiency we’re more wor-ried about,” she says. “People are comfortable in speaking and using the language, but we focus more on being really proficient.”



Banged up B-1 bombers that once cost the U.S. military $250,000 to fix can now fly

again with just a few shots of a revo-lutionary metallic spray developed by researchers and students at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. The cold spray technology accelerates metal powder through a supersonic jet of high-pressure nitrogen or helium. When sprayed onto damaged skin panels at speeds nearing Mach 3, the metal particles collide so violently with the surface that they weld with-out melting surrounding materials.

Christian Widener, a mechani-cal engineering professor at the School of Mines, led development of the process at the school’s Repair, Refurbish and Return to Service Center. “We take advanced materi-als and the technology that we use in the lab and try to find real world

applications,” Widener says.They found one east of town in

Ellsworth Air Force Base’s fleet of B-1 bombers and the damages they incur when fastener holds tear away from the skin panels. Spare parts are hard to find for the 1980s era jets, so the cold spray method saves en-gineers from building new panels.

A refurbished B-1 has already been redeployed to Southeast Asia, and several more are scheduled for repair. As word of the new tech-nology climbs the Air Force chain of command, it’s likely to be ap-proved for fixing B-52s and F-16s, Widener says. That should keep stu-dents busy. “My role is to identify good applications and guide them to delivering a sound process,” he says, “but the students often do the panel preparation and the spraying. They’re the ones who do the actual work.”

FIXING FIGHTER JETS

Zachary Hada / United States Air Force

Technology developed

in Rapid City saves the

military nearly $250,000

when Ellsworth’s B-1

bombers need repair.

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AN ORAL HISTORY TREASURE

Don Moccasin traveled the Rosebud Reservation with video camera in hand for

nearly 15 years. He recorded over 500 hours of interviews with tribal elders and public events and was in the midst of transcribing and trans-lating them when he died in 2009. But his dream for preserving the stories of elders lives through the Lakota Documentaries Project at Sinte Gleska University in Mission.

Linguist Jurgita Antoine leads a nine-member team that transcribes each interview in Lakota and trans-lates it into English. The end prod-ucts will be texts, English-subtitled videos and other teaching materials that students and researchers can use to gain insights into Lakota lan-guage, history and culture.

“He would start each interview asking questions about the person’s family, because in Lakota culture, relationships are extremely impor-tant,” Antoine says. “That’s how so-ciety is organized and operates. It’s based on relationships and extended families. Preserving that knowledge of relationships was the main goal of Don’s work. After that the conversa-tion could go different ways. They might tell life stories about Lakota dancing, horses, medicine.”

Antoine says Moccasin’s inter-views are unlike any others because the subjects and the interviewer are all Lakota. “That makes a difference because in Lakota culture, the types of stories people share depend on the relationship between the speaker and the listener,” Antoine says. “Because Don knew the people he interviewed and was related to many of them, he managed to capture on tape that real-ly sincere exchange of information, which provides unique insights into Lakota family relationships.”

The team has more than half the interviews transcribed and about a third of them translated. It’s slow going because the work requires unique skills. “Lakota language is oral. Although different writing systems have been created and been in use for over a century, to this day there are fluent speakers with lim-ited reading and writing skills in Lakota,” Antoine says. “But people really enjoy working with their lan-guage and it is a good learning expe-rience to all of us.”

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Lavina Milk (right) translates scores of

interviews led by Don Moccasin (above).



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South Dakota’s lone native grapevine — Vitis ri-paria, or riverbank grape — sustained Private George Shannon of Lewis and Clark’s Corps

of Discovery when he became lost for 12 days near present-day Yankton in 1804. Today it’s the basis for a hybrid grape research program at South Dakota State University in Brookings that has helped start dozens of vineyards and wineries in South Dakota.

Plant Science Professor Anne Fennell started

researching grapes in 1992, four years before the state legislature passed a bill allowing winemakers to sell their creations. She says she is working with Professor Rhoda Burrows and others to “write the owner’s man-ual” for growing grapes in South Dakota and similar cold climates. “We are tapping into the genetics of our native species to produce cultivars that you can grow in these climates,” Fennell says. “We have to have something to withstand early freezes and late frosts,

WRITING THE GRAPE GROWERS OWNER’S MANUAL

low temperatures in winter, diseases and other pests. If we can tap into those genes in our native vine and combine them with the high quality grapevines found in Europe, that’s what people have wanted.”

Today there are over 20 cultivars available (and more in develop-ment at labs in South Dakota and Minnesota) that can withstand win-ter temperatures as low as 25 de-grees below zero Fahrenheit. Still, growing grapes in South Dakota is a gamble. “Grape production is very expensive time-wise and money-wise,” she says. “You’ve got a lot of risk involved. When a grower puts a vine in the ground, it’s three years before there’s any fruit, and another few years before full production. We figure it’s at least a $10,000 per acre investment by the time you get to full production.”

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Anne Fennell develops new grape

hybrids in her Brookings lab.


WEST RIVER VS. EAST RIVER: NOT SO EASY IN POLITICS

Since scholars f irst noticed that the Missouri River slices South Dakota in half, they’ve compared West River

and East River. South Dakotans are familiar with the tired comparisons: cowboy hats vs. seed corn caps, the Denver Broncos vs. the Minnesota Vikings, cattle vs. corn. But the distinction becomes as muddy as the Missouri when it comes to politics, says Erin Fouberg, a geography professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen.

“The central part of the state never cooperates when you’re trying to divide it into East River and West River,” says Fouberg, who studies South Dakota’s political geog-raphy. “I think it’s something pundits like to fall back on because it’s easy to say there’s an east-west divide.”

Fouberg studies the same questions posed to political scientists, but views them in terms of place. West River is seen as conservative, but it’s home to three vast, tra-ditionally liberal Indian reservations. The Missouri River

corridor is hard to predict during elections, Fouberg says, because it contains Pierre, our seat of government. And East River, wide-ly interpreted as more Democratic than West River, still contains pockets of staunch con-servatism, especially areas settled by German immigrants.

That said, South Dakota’s political geogra-phy is fluid. “Just because a place started as a German settlement doesn’t mean it will always be a German settlement,” Fouberg says. “There

are far fewer farmers in some of these counties as a per-centage of the population than there were 30 years ago. You have to allow for some change.”

She anticipates South Dakota will someday resemble Nebraska with one urban center in a largely rural state. “It’s hard to deny the growing power of Sioux Falls in terms of its political influence,” Fouberg says. “If Sioux Falls con-tinues to grow, we’ll see a different geography to the vote.”

Erin Fouberg



Money seems to get a make-over every few years, as the Secret Service tries

to stay one step ahead of coun-terfeiters. The next security inno-vation might come from a lab in Vermillion.

Chemistry Professor Stanley May has worked with professors Jon

Kellar and William Cross at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City to devel-op an invisible version of quick re-sponse (QR) codes using inks made with tiny particles that fluoresce only under near-infrared light.

Kellar and Cross were study-ing printing technology while May

examined nanoparticles of fluores-cent materials when they realized their research could be combined. “I thought, ‘Maybe we can actu-ally make some ink out of these things,’” May says. “I didn’t think of applying it to security printing, but they started playing around and found they could print some pretty

NOT JUST DOTS ON A PAGE

distinct letters and shapes. These are invisible under normal light, but if you shine an infrared laser on them they become viewable.”

QR codes are 21st century ver-sions of barcodes. They appear as blocks of black and white, but can hold 100 times more information than a traditional barcode. When scanned by a smartphone, they lead consumers to product websites that often feature special offers.

Now that May’s team has prov-en the technology will work in QR codes, the next step could be usage in the nation’s currency. May has al-ready traveled to Washington, D.C., to brief the Secret Service on his research’s potential. “This technol-ogy can be customized as the needs continue to evolve,” May says. “We can manipulate the composition of the inks and the characteristics of the code readers to adapt to a broad range of specific applications.”

2013 guide to higher education

Documents

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south dakotas colleges

biology students

computer analysis

future of energy

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mount marty college