Research

25 years after 9/11: the persistence of stereotypes, the willingness to build understanding

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:42:01 +0000

25 years after 9/11: the persistence of stereotypes, the willingness to build understanding Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/10/2026 - 13:42

Bradley Worrell

In the weeks following 9/11, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist Lori Peek was in New York City hearing the stories of Muslim Americans navigating suspicion, hostility and questions of identity and belonging

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as smoke rose from the burning World Trade Center and the United States struggled to comprehend an unprecedented terrorist attack, sociologist Lori Peek found herself asking a different question: Who would be hurt next?

At the time, Peek was a doctoral student at the �鶹��Ѱ��’s Natural Hazards Center, where she studied disasters and how they affect vulnerable communities. As the nation focused on the destruction of the World Trade Center and the thousands of lives lost, Peek recognized another crisis was unfolding at the same time: anti-Muslim sentiment was quickly spreading across the country.

For Peek, this issue was not simply academic. While pursuing her master’s degree, she became close friends with an Afghan American woman whose family arrived in the United States as refugees. As public mistrust and anger quickly intensified, Peek worried about her friend and others being viewed through the lens of fear and blame.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center, interviewed Muslims in New York City about anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11.

When her academic advisor informed her that she would be traveling to New York City to study the disaster, Peek already knew the topic she wanted to pursue. Rather than document the attack itself, she set out to record how Muslim Americans, particularly young, second-generation Muslims, were experiencing the nation’s response.

Those interviews eventually formed the foundation for her first book, Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11. Peek says those interviews preserved the voices of people navigating anger, discrimination and uncertainty while insisting that the actions of a few religious extremists did not define their faith, their identities or their place in America.

As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches Friday, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Peek about what she learned in speaking with Muslim Americans immediately after the terrorist attacks and why she believes those lessons remain important today. The following interview was condensed and lightly edited for style.

Question: How did your research on the experiences of Muslim Americans following 9/11 come together?

Peek: Back in 2001, I was a PhD student in sociology, and I was working at the Natural Hazards Center here at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. Like the graduate students before me, I assumed I’d write a dissertation on natural hazards or disasters. That was one of the key expectations of being a research assistant here at the Center.

Then 9/11 happened. I came in that morning and my advisor, who was the director of the Natural Hazards Center at the time, looked at me and said, ‘I hope you know what you are going to do, because you’re going to New York City.’

As a sociologist, I was very interested in socially marginalized populations in disasters. That’s still my area of expertise. Even in that disaster, my immediate thought was, ‘Who is going to be hurt? What are the effects going to be for those who are already being blamed?’

Did 9/11 fundamentally reinvent U.S. policy in the Middle East? No, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder historian John M. Willis, a scholar of the modern Middle East. In fact, "promoting democracy or human rights has never been a priority for the U.S. in the Middle East," he says.

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I was also influenced by my personal connections. When I was a master’s student, I had become close friends with an Afghan American woman, who wore the full head covering, whose family had come to America as refugees.

When 9/11 happened, and I had to figure out what to study, I brought together my scholarly commitment to understanding social inequality and vulnerability in disasters along with my personal care for people in the Muslim community.

Question: Did you experience difficulties in attempting to speak with Muslim Americans in the environment of distrust and suspicion following 9/11?

Peek: It took a lot of what we call ‘shoe leather sociology.’ It meant making calls, sending emails and traveling around and meeting people once I got to New York City. There were practical considerations about how to find people willing to talk. Muslim student associations were a great way to gain access to groups of young, second-generation Muslim Americans, and then they helped me to meet other people.

Interviews Lori Peek conducted very soon after 9/11 built the foundation for her book Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11.

As a non-Muslim, people are often curious about how I was received. I think there were a lot of reasons people were willing to speak with me. I was only 26 years old at the time, and so I was a similar age as my participants. We also shared the same status as students or recent graduates in the case of a few.

Once I got on the ground and started talking to people, they often said, ‘It’s a good thing you’re talking to me, because there’s no way my parents or grandparents would have ever talked to you.’ They were too scared.

In other instances, interviewees would tell me, ‘It helps that you’re not Muslim because we’re trying to explain that we’re not all terrorists, but when that message comes from us, people may dismiss it.’ If someone outside of the faith is willing to take the time to listen, that matters.

Question: What did Muslim Americans share with you about experiencing backlash after 9/11? Also, did they feel like they had experienced discrimination before 9/11?

Peek: Like many members of religious or ethnic minority communities, participants often had stories from before 9/11 about insensitive comments, misunderstandings or stereotypes. It wasn’t as though life had been completely free of those experiences. But they generally described those earlier incidents as ignorance or unfamiliarity with the Islamic faith.

After 9/11, the situation felt completely different. There was fear from the public, often stoked by the media, regarding people who were perceived to share the identity of those responsible for the attacks. … Some participants who had grown up in diverse communities and rarely felt singled out suddenly found themselves wondering whether they were being watched, targeted or even physically endangered. Those fears were quantitatively and qualitatively different from anything they had experienced before.

Question: Did young Muslim Americans’ experiences differ depending upon gender, race, ethnicity or other factors?

Peek: All of those things mattered. None of us have only one identity. At any given moment, multiple identities operate together. In my study, Muslim women often expressed greater fear of physical violence because they felt more vulnerable and were also more visible due to their headscarves.

In addition to gender, race, ethnicity and immigration history also mattered. For example, I interviewed some white converts to Islam who felt that being white offered certain protections, but those protections seemed to disappear once they put on a headscarf because the clothing is such a symbolic marker of the faith.

All of those identity characteristics matter, but after 9/11, there was also a strong unifying effect around the faith itself. In sociology, we talk about identity salience, the idea that identity under the greatest threat becomes the most important one. After 9/11, being Muslim became a highly stigmatized identity—and that identity was pushed to the forefront of many young Muslims’ lives.

Before 9/11, many participants told me they felt they could be both Muslim and American without contradiction. Afterward, some felt society was forcing them to choose. One participant told me, ‘If I’m going to have to choose, I’m going to choose to be Muslim.’ That shift was very real.

Question: Did the backlash after 9/11 change the ways in which young Muslim Americans thought about being American?

Peek: Absolutely. I interviewed 140 people for the study, and I’ve remained in contact with some of them over the years. The effects were profound.

For some, it changed their educational paths and careers. People switched majors, pursued international relations, entered public service or sought careers where they felt they could bridge cultures and make a difference.

It also influenced how they thought about belonging and integration. Historically, immigrants tend to assimilate more easily when they are not stigmatized. When communities remain under suspicion or attack, that process changes.

I observed that some participants became more committed to living in communities where they felt safe speaking their heritage languages or marrying within their faith. I didn’t study those choices systematically, but they were themes that emerged in people’s stories.

Even now, a generation later, younger Muslim Americans who read Behind the Backlash tell me the experiences still resonate. They may not have lived through 9/11, but they recognize some of the same dynamics.

"Before 9/11, many participants told me they felt they could be both Muslim and American without contradiction," says Lori Peek. "Afterward, some felt society was forcing them to choose." (Photo: Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee)

Question: It sounds like, for at least some of the people you spoke with, they deepened their connection with their Muslim identity after 9/11?

Peek: Yes, absolutely. In my work, I describe three stages of identity development. First is an ascribed identity, the identity you are born into. Second is chosen or learned identity, where a person actively embraces and practices their faith. Then, after 9/11, many participants entered what I called the identity of crisis.

They didn’t suddenly become Muslim because of 9/11. They were already Muslim. But after the attacks, that identity became the most important and unavoidable part of how they experienced the world.

As a result, many increased their involvement with Muslim student associations, attended mosque more regularly when they felt safe doing so and sought out connections with other Muslims who understood what they were going through.

Understandably, during that time of upheaval they wanted community, support, information and solidarity. They also wanted to serve as a counterpoint to the stigmatizing narratives surrounding Islam and Muslims in the moment.

Question: Based upon what your extensive conversations with Muslim Americans after 9/11, what are a few of the top things you think are worth sharing?

Peek: First, the consequences of 9/11 have obviously been so enduring for so many people. The effects reach from geopolitics all the way down to individual lives. There is a reason we’re still talking about it decades later, and it is important to think about the many and varied consequences for so many people.

Second, I hope people understand the importance of listening to and learning from others. Many of the stereotypes participants faced didn’t begin with 9/11, but the attacks intensified them.

One thing that stood out to me was often Muslim women said, ‘Nobody is forcing me to wear this (the hijab). In fact, concerned family members immediately after 9/11 were telling me to take it off and I chose not to.’ Yet, even when they explained that repeatedly, they felt some stereotypes remained deeply embedded in public consciousness.

At the same time, I was struck by the grace many participants showed. They often felt that people were acting out of fear or misunderstanding rather than pure hatred. They wanted to educate, engage and correct misconceptions.

The persistence of stereotypes is also an important lesson, but so is the persistence of people’s willingness to build understanding despite them.

My study was just one within a much larger body of scholarship about 9/11, but I think the broader question it raises remains important: What happens when immigrant communities or minority communities come under suspicion or attack?

What interests me is not just the theory, but the lived experience. How are people affected? How do they respond? What does it mean for their daily lives?

The United States is an extraordinarily diverse country, and one of the enduring questions we continue to face is how hundreds of millions of people from different backgrounds can live together, understand one another and build a shared future? Those questions remain as important today as they were when I began this research.

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Top image: Pexels

Firefighter deaths afflict surviving colleagues, research finds

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:06:28 +0000

Firefighter deaths afflict surviving colleagues, research finds Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/08/2026 - 17:06

Researcher Robert Scott recommends expanded mental-health training, stronger support systems after fatalities and improved benefits for private-sector firefighters.

Clint Talbott

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist shines light on understudied area of wildfire research: how wildland firefighting fatalities affect the people on the front lines

Robert Scott started fighting wildfires so he could pay for college. While conducting graduate-level research in 2013, the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona overran and killed 19 firefighters in one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history.

At the time, Scott was researching how firefighters' perceptions of risk change over time. But in the wake of the Yarnell Hill tragedy, the topic felt much more personal.

“I had seen how that was affecting my crew members, how it was affecting me,” he says. Describing this as a pivotal event, Scott resolved to focus his PhD research on firefighters’ responses to their colleagues’ deaths.

Robert Scott an instructional associate in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Arts and Sciences Residential Academic Programs.

Another key experience happened a year earlier while working on an Idaho wildfire shortly after a firefighter had been killed by a falling tree.

“I got to see and experience what that’s like, being at a fatality fire several days after a death has occurred,” Scott says. “What happens in briefings, how firefighters are processing being out in the field at that time.”

His 2025 doctoral dissertation at the �鶹��Ѱ�� found that firefighter fatalities can inflict psychological wounds with long-lasting effects on crews, families and fire organizations.

Scott, a sociologist who is an instructional associate in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Arts and Sciences Residential Academic Programs, is originally from Ontario, Canada, and became a firefighter while attending college in the United States.

Based on in-depth interviews with 37 firefighters across the American West, Scott’s research documents trauma, grief, survivor guilt, anxiety, hypervigilance and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts among firefighters who experienced the deaths of colleagues.

Scott's dissertation, When Counterparts Die: Wildland Firefighters' Responses to Line of Duty Deaths, fills what he calls a significant gap in wildfire research.

“Focusing on firefighters' responses to peer fatalities in the line of duty is an area of research that's extraordinarily understudied,” Scott says.

The research comes as wildfires burn larger areas of the West. The number of wildfires has declined in recent years, but the size and intensity of them has increased.

Data from the National Interagency Fire Center and National Wildfire Coordinating Group reports 697 wildland firefighting fatalities in the United States between 1983 and 2023, an average of about 17 deaths per year. Medical emergencies accounted for about 27% of those deaths, followed by aviation accidents (20%), burnovers and entrapments (20%), vehicle accidents (19%), hazard trees (6%) and other causes (7%).

Four levels of involvement

Through interviews with firefighters ranging from rookies to veterans with decades of experience, Scott developed a framework describing four levels of involvement in firefighter fatalities.

“Some firefighters probably could have better addressed their conditions afterwards had they known a bit more about what was going on,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Robert Scott.

The most severe reactions were associated with primary involvement: personally knowing the deceased, witnessing death and dying or feeling implicated in a fatality.

Those firefighters often described consequences that extended years beyond the incident.

“What I found striking was just how much direct involvement in fatality incidents affected the daily lives of some firefighters who I talked to,” Scott says. “For some, there are ongoing chronic struggles, periods of suffering.”

Several firefighters reported persistent hypervigilance and anxiety on the fireline long after a fatality. Others described impacts on family life.

“The work was definitely affecting family life,” Scott says. “And it seemed also to be coming back into work life.”

One finding was that some firefighters continued working after traumatic incidents even when they were still struggling psychologically.

“Some would experience random bouts of anxiety in the field,” Scott says. “Some would be extremely hypervigilant for many years.”

'They knew something was changing'

Scott found that firefighters recognized changes in themselves after a fatality. “But they didn’t necessarily have a framework to fully understand what was happening to them.”

That happened, he argues, partly because firefighters historically received little training in grief, trauma and mental health.

Researcher Robert Scott recommends expanded mental-health training, stronger support systems after fatalities and improved benefits for private-sector firefighters.

One firefighter interviewed for the study experienced suicidal thoughts and feelings of worthlessness for a long duration. “He thought that it was normal until he opened up to a friend,” who assured him otherwise.

Another firefighter worked with military veterans struggling with suicidal thoughts before recognizing similar symptoms in himself.

“It took time for the full realization to come through,” Scott says. “Something’s going on here, and I need to get help.”

Scott believes that earlier education could have helped many firefighters recognize warning signs sooner.

“Some firefighters probably could have better addressed their conditions afterwards had they known a bit more about what was going on,” he says.

A culture of silence

The study suggests cultural factors have long discouraged firefighters from openly discussing emotional struggles.

“For a very long time, and still, the field has been primarily men,” Scott says. “There was the sort of soldier-on attitude and be mentally tough attitude that existed.” Additionally, there have been few research opportunities for firefighters.

As a result, many firefighters have kept their struggles private.

The interviews revealed that some firefighters grappled with severe trauma responses but disclosed them only to specific close family members, friends or helping professionals. That silence made conducting the interviews particularly meaningful.

“I’m so grateful that they opened up to me,” he says. Scott believes that being a firefighter himself, knowing the training and culture and being sensitive to the firefighters’ experiences helped them trust him. “They go through a lot, and they continue to.”

The people who remain

Much wildfire fatality research focuses on what went wrong during an incident, organizational responses and cause-of-death trends. Scott’s research focuses on the firefighters who continue working after various levels of involvement in fatality incidents, which is understudied.

“A big focus of the literature is about what went wrong, what happened and how can we mitigate that in the future,” he says.

But, “What about the people who are there and go back to work after? Maybe they take some time off, but they go back.”

That has implications not only for individual well-being but for the functioning of organizations.

“How organizations perform changes after these events,” Scott says. "People have been influenced by the events, and they continue to go to work.”

Recommendations for change

Scott’s dissertation recommends expanded mental-health training, stronger support systems after fatalities and improved benefits for private-sector firefighters.

Scott also argues that discussions about wildfire policy should factor in firefighter mental health alongside ecological and economic questions.

For decades, wildfire management debates have centered on suppression costs, forest health and fuel loads. “What's been left out is mental health,” he says.

Ultimately, Scott hopes his research might help firefighters better understand experiences that have often remained private.

“I didn't undertake the project to become known,” he says. “If I could have done it anonymously, I would have. It was about a very serious topic that I think matters and that I could contribute to in a valuable way for the fire community.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist shines light on understudied area of wildfire research: how wildland firefighting fatalities affect the people on the front lines.

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All photos courtesy Robert Scott

Mao still casts a long shadow

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:00:42 +0000

Mao still casts a long shadow Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/04/2026 - 07:00

Bradley Worrell

Five decades after his death, Mao Zedong remains the face of modern China, yet �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder historian William Wei argues his rise to power was never inevitable and neither is the verdict on his legacy

Mao Zedong remains one of the most prominent political figures in modern history. Fifty years after his death, his embalmed body still lies in state in Tiananmen Square, his enormous portrait continues to hang over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, his face appears on the country’s currency and Chinese schoolchildren are still taught that he was the founding leader who reunified and transformed the nation.

Mao’s omnipresence can create the impression that his rise to power was inevitable. However, reflecting on Mao’s legacy today—five decades since his death Sept. 9, 1976, at age 82—his place in history was never assured, argues William Wei, a �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of History professor who is an expert on modern China.

“One of the things I teach my students is that nothing is historically inevitable—and that is certainly the case with Mao’s rise to power,” he says. “If you study Chinese history, you see that his rise to leadership within the Chinese Communist Party unfolded over about a decade. It was driven by a combination of strategic skill, organization building, ideological innovation and, quite frankly, intra-party struggles that involved the purging of rivals.”

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder historian William Wei studies modern China, including the legacy of Mao Zedong.

Mao’s rise was never guaranteed

In fact, far from being recognized as leader of the communist movement in China initially, Wei says Mao in the early 1930s was sidelined by rivals known as the “28 Bolsheviks”—communist leaders trained in Moscow who adhered more closely to orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine of organizing urban workers to create a revolution.

Wei says the turning point came in 1935 following the Long March—one of the defining episodes in Communist Party history. After anti-communist nationalist forces overran the communist base in Jiangxi Province, Mao led his Red Army soldiers on a grueling 6,000-mile retreat over some of China’s most difficult terrain to escape encirclement and destruction.

According to Wei, the march was devastating from a military standpoint, with communists losing roughly seven-eighths of their forces. “But they survived, and for the Chinese communists, survival was a form of victory,” he adds.

Even then, Wei says Mao’s emergence was not the result of a sudden triumph but a long process. After communist forces under other leaders lost battles to the country’s nationalist forces, Wei says Mao’s rivals effectively ceded military leadership to him.

Mao also distinguished himself through ideological innovation, Wei says. While orthodox Marxists emphasized that the urban working class would form the revolutionary vanguard, Mao instead argued that China’s overwhelmingly rural population made the peasantry the natural engine for revolution. Wei says Mao’s emphasis on rural peasants as the agents of change helped establish an ideological identity known as “Maoism” that was distinct from both his domestic rivals like the 28 Bolsheviks as well as Soviet orthodoxy.

War, occupation and revolution

With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the nationalists and communists largely halted their fighting to focus on combatting the Japanese invaders. While the nationalists tended to engage in pitched battles with the Japanese, Mao’s communists employed hit-and-run tactics associated with guerrilla warfare.

“This strategy preserved the communist party’s strength, as the nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting,” Wei says. “(Nationalists) fought most of the major battles against the Japanese and consequently suffered most of the defeats as well.”

A propaganda image of Mao Zedong from 1967.

By emphasizing guerrilla warfare, recruiting peasants and expanding the party organization throughout rural China, Wei says Mao transformed a weakened movement into a formidable political and military force. Between 1937 and 1940, Chinese Communist Party membership grew from 40,000 to 800,000.

When Japan’s defeat ended World War II in August 1945, the nationalists and communists renewed their fighting. Here again, Wei argues that Mao’s success was never guaranteed.

The nationalists initially held several advantages. They possessed larger forces, better equipment and support from the United States. But Wei says the nationalists were also weakened by corruption, declining public support and incompetence in administering the country’s economy.

The communists, in contrast, entered the conflict stronger than they had been at any point since the Long March, and by the late 1940s the balance shifted decisively in Mao’s favor, Wei says. In 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with the communist victory marking one of the most remarkable political reversals of the 20th century, Wei says.

Korea and Mao’s emergence as a global leader

Mao’s stature expanded beyond China’s borders almost immediately after the communist victory. The Korean War became the first major international test of the new regime and played a crucial role in shaping’s Mao’s standing at home and abroad, Wei says.

He notes that both Mao and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were initially reluctant to support North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s plans to militarily reunify the Korean Peninsula. Kim convinced them that he could strike quickly and that America would not intervene.

However, America did intervene on behalf of South Korea. And once American-led forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur reversed North Korea’s initial victories and advanced toward the Yalu River—the border separating Korea from China’s industrial heartland in Manchuria—Chinese leaders viewed that as an unacceptable threat, Wei says.

Although Chinese forces were poorly equipped and lacked air support, Wei says that by their sheer numbers (more than 250,000 soldiers) and with the element of surprise, they decimated the U.S. Army contingent and pushed American forces back to the 38th parallel. The war eventually settled into a costly stalemate.

Politically, however, the war produced significant benefits for Mao, Wei says. He argues that Mao’s reputation was enhanced because China managed to fight the strongest post-World War II power to a standstill. The conflict elevated not only Mao’s prestige but also the People’s Republic by demonstrating that it could not be dismissed as a weak or a subordinate power, Wei says.

The war also reshaped China’s Cold War relationships. Wei says Stalin’s view of Mao improved after China’s willingness to confront the United States, while the conflict poisoned the country’s relations with Washington for decades, until rapprochement in the 1970s and the normalization of relations in January 1979.

Building a new China

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder historian William Wei. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right."

With the victory over the nationalists, Mao was able to impose his stamp on China. Even Wei, who is a critic of Mao, acknowledges his many accomplishments. Mao is remembered for ending what the Chinese call the “Century of Humiliation”—a period during which Western powers and Japan dominated large portions of China. Mao reunified a fragmented country after decades of warlordism, civil conflict and foreign invasion. For millions of Chinese, this achievement alone secured his place in history, Wei says.

The early years of communist rule brought significant social reforms. Perhaps most notably, Wei notes that land redistribution programs transferred land to hundreds of millions of peasants. He also credits the new government with launching a successful industrialization campaign, expanding public health initiatives, increasing access to education and implementing legal reforms designed to improve the status of women. Additionally, the country’s literacy rates improved dramatically, infant mortality declined and new public health programs reached rural communities for the first time.

At the same time, Wei emphasizes that many of these achievements came at an extraordinary human cost. He notes that land reform redistributed property on a massive scale, but at the cost of upwards of a million landlords as well as others targeted as “class enemies.” Meanwhile, industrialization generated rapid economic growth, yet it unfolded within an authoritarian framework that tolerated little dissent.

Twin tragedies

The darkest chapters of Mao’s rule came with the Great Leap Forward starting in 1958 and the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966. Wei describes the Great Leap Forward as a man-made catastrophe, as land collectivization policies, unrealistic farm production quotas and widespread falsification of agricultural data combined to create a disaster that by some estimates resulted in 35 million to 45 million deaths—making it one of the deadliest policy failures in human history.

The Cultural Revolution inflicted a different kind of damage. Initiated after Mao’s standing had been weakened by the failures of the Great Leap Forward, Wei says it was both a political power struggle and an ideological crusade, as Mao sought to eliminate rivals and prevent what he viewed as a drift toward capitalism.

“One of the things Mao believed was in his theory of continuous revolution,” Wei explains. “Permanent revolution believes the revolution never ends, even when you have a seizure of state power, because the party, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, could itself become a new ruling class.”

Wei says the campaign produced persecution and social chaos, as cultural and religious sites were destroyed, schools and universities were shut down and an entire generation lost years of educational opportunity.

For that reason, Wei sharply disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party’s official verdict that Mao was “70% right and 30% wrong.” He reverses that formula, arguing Mao was “70% wrong and 30% right.” While recognizing Mao’s role in reunifying China and advancing certain social reforms, he insists that Mao must be held responsible for the immense anguish caused by his policies.

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” Wei says. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right. As a historian, I’m not going to let him escape responsibility for the millions of deaths and all the suffering he caused.”

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Climate crisis behind bars is heating up

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:13:23 +0000

Climate crisis behind bars is heating up Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/01/2026 - 14:13

Bradley Worrell

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist David Ciplet explains why climate change and incarceration are deeply connected

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As climate change intensifies, discussions about vulnerability often focus on coastal communities, agricultural regions or low-income neighborhoods. Much less attention is paid to the 1.2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons—many of whom face extreme heat, flooding, wildfire and other climate-related hazards with little ability to protect themselves.

For David Ciplet, a sociologist in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focuses on climate change and inequality, that oversight represents a significant gap in both climate research and public policy. His recent paper in Environmental Politics examines U.S. incarceration in a changing climate, focusing on prisons as places where environmental vulnerability and social marginalization overlap.

As Ciplet sees it, climate-related threats such as extreme heat, flooding, hurricanes and wildfires can be especially dangerous for incarcerated individuals because they have very little control over their environment. They cannot choose where they live, leave an overheated building or escape a facility threatened by natural disaster, he notes.

David Ciplet is a sociologist in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Environmental Studies whose research focuses on climate change and inequality.

At the same time, Ciplet says people who are incarcerated are increasingly being called upon to fight wildfires and respond to other climate-related disasters, but often they don’t receive training and protection comparable to professionals, or fair compensation for their work.

“How we treat those who are most vulnerable says something about our society and priorities,” he says.

From studying climate equity to prison conditions

Ciplet did not begin his career studying prisons.

His earlier research focused on making climate policy more equitable. That included work with the Just Transition Collaborative at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, which aimed to ensure that local governments’ climate policies not only prioritized addressing the environmental impacts of climate change but also didn’t contribute to rising costs or other adverse effects for low-income residents and other vulnerable communities.

As he explored questions about vulnerability and environmental justice, Ciplet says he began hearing about dangerous conditions inside Texas prisons during periods of extreme heat. Many of those facilities lack air conditioning despite increasingly extreme summers, which can result in incarcerated people enduring prolonged exposure to temperatures that can pose serious health risks, he adds.

That struck Ciplet as an obvious blind spot.

“My research has always focused on people who experience the greatest harms,” he explains. “Prisons are not the only place where that occurs, but they are one of the most severe.”

Because incarcerated individuals have no agency over where they live or control over the temperature in those facilities, Ciplet argues, it makes prisons impossible to ignore when considering who is most vulnerable to climate change.

A population largely hidden from public view

One reason the issue receives so little attention, Ciplet believes, is that most Americans never see prison conditions firsthand. Correctional facilities operate largely out of public view.

As a result, Ciplet says assumptions about prison life often differ significantly from what incarcerated individuals experience. That invisibility shapes public understanding—and ultimately public policy, he says.

Ciplet emphasizes that the American public should be concerned about climate conditions in prisons because incarcerated people are human beings deserving of basic dignity.

“I think it’s also important to point out that many (people in prisons) are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and some were convicted under circumstances that are contested,” he says. “More broadly, there are all kinds of inequalities within our criminal legal system that disproportionately affect people who become incarcerated and how people are treated once they are in the system.

“Even if someone believes incarceration is appropriate in some cases, subjecting people to unbearable or dangerous conditions is not going to improve society, so it makes little sense.”

At the same time, Ciplet says there is the practical aspect of caring about prison conditions.

“Most people who go to prison will eventually return to their communities,” he says. “We should create dignified conditions that support successful reintegration, rather than exposing people to extreme physical and mental distress during confinement. Access to a healthy environment is a basic human right.”

Climate risks are growing

Climate-related threats to incarcerated individuals are not hypothetical, Ciplet says.

“Most people who go to prison will eventually return to their communities,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher David Ciplet. “We should create dignified conditions that support successful reintegration, rather than exposing people to extreme physical and mental distress during confinement. Access to a healthy environment is a basic human right.”

He points to rising temperatures in Colorado prisons as one example. He notes that the average temperature in Colorado has already risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1980s and is projected to increase by an additional 2.5 to 5 degrees by 2050.

“A few degrees may not sound dramatic, but if someone is already confined to a cell that reaches 95 or 100 degrees, those additional degrees matter,” Ciplet says. “We’re also seeing more extreme heat days and heat waves lasting for longer periods of time. The experience of enduring a single hot day is very different from enduring a week of extreme temperatures.”

Heat is only one concern.

“Beyond heat, incarcerated people are vulnerable to floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. Because incarcerated individuals cannot leave those dangerous conditions, climate impacts can be particularly severe for them,” Ciplet says.

He adds that climate change magnifies the vulnerabilities already built into the prison system.

The complicated role of prison labor

Ciplet sees a certain irony in that incarcerated people are often not only victims of climate-related conditions but are also part of the response, as many states rely on prison labor during emergencies.

Incarcerated workers may clear debris after storms, assist with disaster recovery or serve on fire crews battling destructive wildfires. While supporters of those efforts might point to benefits such as work experience and valuable job training, Ciplet argues it should also spur deeper questions about prison work conditions.

“In many states, incarcerated people play important roles in disaster responses, including firefighting. Yet they often are not given the same equipment and training as people who are not incarcerated and typically they are not fairly compensated for their work,” he says. “If incarcerated people are playing a major role in protecting us from natural hazards associated with climate change, we should be providing them with training and protective equipment and fair wages, as well as career pathways when they come out of prison.”

Typically, once individuals who are incarcerated complete their sentences, they face barriers that prevent them from pursuing careers in firefighting despite the valuable experience they gained while incarcerated, Ciplet says.

Meanwhile, Ciplet has reservations about correctional facilities making use of prison labor to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines or other carbon-reducing technologies. While tasking people in prisons with manufacturing “green” technologies sounds like a positive development, Ciplet says there is an underlying concern.

“Any system that becomes dependent upon prison labor can create incentives to maintain or expand incarceration,” he says. “I think we should be moving in the opposite direction.”

It’s that same concern, he says, that gives him pause when distressed communities sometimes seek to host a correctional facility as an economic development project.

“Rural communities—especially those that may have lost major industries, such as coal mining—absolutely need strong economic opportunities. The question is: What kind of development best serves those communities over the long term?” Ciplet asks. “I think we should be investing in forms of economic development that create healthy, sustainable opportunities without depending on or expanding prison populations.”

If more people knew how harmful some of the conditions in prisons are related to climate impacts, I do think people would care. I think most people believe basic human rights should be protected.”

Imagining something different

Although much of his research focuses on examining systemic problems, Ciplet also looks for examples that challenge assumptions about what prisons can become once they are shut down.

For example, he notes that some communities have proposed converting former prisons into affordable housing, community centers or facilities serving unhoused residents. Others have explored using former prisons for renewable energy projects. Ciplet points to proposals of transforming New York City’s Rikers Island correctional facility into a site for a renewable energy project.

Such projects remain uncommon, Ciplet acknowledges. Still, he says they suggest that communities are not limited to choosing between maintaining prisons and building new ones, as other possibilities exist if policymakers are willing to consider them.

For his part, Ciplet’s goals extend beyond publishing academic papers. Through the Climate and Incarceration Research Collective, which he directs, he and his colleagues are partnering with formerly incarcerated individuals in Colorado to better understand how extreme heat and cold affect health during incarceration and what policy changes could reduce those risks.

Ciplet says that work reflects a broader philosophy that research should not just describe inequality but help to address it. He says he believes climate policy can unintentionally reinforce existing injustices if decision-makers fail to consider who bears the costs. At the same time, thoughtful policy can improve environmental outcomes while advancing fairness, he says.

Asked if he is optimistic about whether society is moving toward a more equitable and sustainable future, Ciplet offers a mixed assessment.

“We are seeing policy rollbacks related to climate action, including expanded drilling and mining and reductions in support for clean-energy initiatives. At the same time, there has been a return in some areas to criminal legal priorities focused more on punishment than prevention and restorative justice,” he says.

Still, Ciplet says he remains positive.

“”I’m always hopeful,” he says. “National politics make large-scale change challenging in the near term, but there is considerable potential at state and local levels. Also, major shifts can happen unexpectedly, and public opinion can change rapidly. I am particularly encouraged by younger generations, who consistently demonstrate a strong commitment to addressing climate change.”

In the near term, Ciplet says he believes the lack of public awareness regarding extreme climate conditions incarcerated people face remains one of the biggest challenges in terms of addressing the issue.

“If more people knew how harmful some of the conditions in prisons are related to climate impacts, I do think people would care,” he says. “I think most people believe basic human rights should be protected.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist David Ciplet explains why climate change and incarceration are deeply connected.

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When leaving isn't a choice, staying becomes one

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:55:11 +0000

When leaving isn't a choice, staying becomes one Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/24/2026 - 14:55

Cody DeBos

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researchers ask who decides to stay behind when climate disaster strikes

“I don’t know when I floated to the river bank—but I survived. Remember, to live here, you have to be brave as crocodiles in water and tigers on land. But the peace of living here will not be found anywhere else.”

That’s how a grandmother in coastal Bangladesh once described surviving a flood to her 17-year-old granddaughter.

This type of survival knowledge, passed on from generation to generation, is one thread in a much larger tapestry of climate-driven migration. Lori Hunter, director of the �鶹��Ѱ�� Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), has been working to better understand the phenomenon and how to support the people it affects.

Lori Hunter is a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, women are most commonly the ones who stay behind when disaster strikes. Hunter says this partially comes down to socialization and the process of “learning” gender and what’s expected of us.

“Some of what we learn through this process relates to migration—what is seen as ‘acceptable’ in terms of men and women relocating,” she says.

Of course, the full picture is more nuanced.

Connecting the pieces

Hunter’s interest in people, places, and their connection to the environment goes back more than 30 years to her days in the Pacific Northwest.

“I lived in Seattle for many years, and my original curiosity was fueled by seeing the region’s demographic change as related to high levels of in-migration back in the 1980s,” she says.

Environmental amenities were clearly a draw to the area, leading to a boom in population growth that has significantly altered the region and its natural resources.

Yet, as Hunter puts it, “migration researchers just weren’t integrating broader environmental context into their investigations of human movement.”

That initial spark eventually led to a more focused interest in gender and specifically how it relates to human migration driven by climate change.

After co-authoring a paper on the subject that was published in 2011, Hunter was asked to create a white paper that would be included in World Bank’s Groundswell report.

“At the time there was virtually no research on the three-way intersection of displacement, climate change, and gender. We pulled together scholarship on 1) disasters and gender, 2) disasters and migration, 3) gender and risk perceptions and other related sub-topics to inform a discussion of potential connections,” she says.

More than a decade later, Hunter’s work has evolved into an examination of not only who leaves when climate disaster upends normal life, but equally those who choose not to or are forced to stay.

Forgetting about those who stay

The gap in both relocation by gender and the study of non-migration itself is at the heart of Hunter’s newest work with lead author Bishawjit Mallick, a IBS Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow. Published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, the paper details a framework called Intergenerational Gendered Environmental Non-Migration, or IGEN.

Hunter explains that human populations change through three processes. Birth, death, and migration all have a part to play.

“Demographers have long studied migration as an outcome (just like births and deaths). Who moves? Why do they move? What are the implications of those moves?” Hunter says.

“Although some women aspire to leave, many lack the agency to make such mobility decisions,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Lori Hunter. (Photo: Albert Gonzalez Farran/United Nations)

But despite all the research, there is a blind spot.

“The question of who doesn’t move just hasn’t been on the table. Perhaps because most people don’t move so it’s more interesting to consider who does,” she adds.

Yet, in locations facing repeated natural disasters, understanding who stays (and why) is anything but academic. Hunter’s IGEN framework suggests one reason for those decisions is the influence of gender roles that have been reinforced across generations.

“Living under a patriarchal social structure, in some cultural settings, women are often expected to move in with their in-laws after marriage. This can promote a situation where men become the primary decisionmaker, diminishing women’s agency,” Hunter explains.

“If women are more likely to remain at home as a result of cultural expectations but also have less access to income or other resources as a consequence of patriarchy, they become increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of disasters,” she continues.

As these factors compound, women living in high-risk areas may be pressed into staying somewhere they don’t really want to be regardless of their preference.

“Although some women aspire to leave, many lack the agency to make such mobility decisions,” Hunter says.

In her view, this is exactly why the research gap needs closing.

“The gap really does matter, and the example of climate-related disasters demonstrates why,” Hunter says. “It’s important to understand who is staying in risky areas—and why—in order to provide appropriate support within local communities and reduce vulnerabilities.”

Inherited ground

Of course, “staying” isn’t a decision defined by gender alone. Inheritance also plays a significant role in keeping someone rooted in place, despite logic and scientific evidence pointing them elsewhere.

“Some people choose to stay in a risky locale (voluntary non-migration), even if they understand the risk,” Hunter says.

During an earlier project’s fieldwork, one forty-three-year-old fisherman said “Our ancestors built this house for us. We want to stay here. It’s a very important part of our life. This village is our identity.”

This can help explain why, after devastating floods and cyclones, many families choose to rebuild on the exact same plot of land that was washed away.

Not everyone gets the choice, though.

“On the other hand, some stay in a risky locale because they’re unable to move (involuntary), such as perhaps lacking the funds to resettle elsewhere,” Hunter says.

This is often the case when changing environmental patterns have already lowered the value of a family’s home, or when affordability has put land elsewhere out of reach.

I think it’s important to consider the reasons why someone might be staying. We have a tendency to blame individuals if they remain in risky locales without considering why they remain."

Quoted from the paper, a seventy-one-year-old housewife from Bangladesh told the research team, “So many people are moving from here by buying land in other places, but we don’t have the ability to buy land.”

A 43-year-old housewife echoed the sentiment, saying, “If I had money, I would have bought land far away.”

For many in these communities, the reason for non-migration falls somewhere in the middle. The choice is often shaped as much by a lack of resources and agency as by attachment to a home.

Rethinking the motive

Hunter hopes that more research into non-migration amid the many challenges posed by environmental harm and gender norms will help reframe the conversation.

“I think it’s important to consider the reasons why someone might be staying. We have a tendency to blame individuals if they remain in risky locales without considering why they remain,” she says.

In the same vein, Hunter says much migration isn’t due to choice.

“Most people want to stay where they are. If climate-related pressures are combined with other economic and/or socio-cultural challenges, people might be forced to make a move they’d rather not,” she says.

Shifting the focus from blame to understanding is something for everyone to consider. Hunter also hopes this mindset is embraced by those with the power to enact change at the highest levels.

“I would love it if policymakers recognized that many people do not want to migrate but are forced to do so if climate pressures make their current lives untenable,” she says. “Supporting individuals and families to stay in their origin communities could reduce the tide of migration.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researchers ask who decides to stay behind when climate disaster strikes.

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What does a scientist look like?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:05:47 +0000

What does a scientist look like? Rachel Sauer Thu, 08/20/2026 - 17:05

Cody DeBos

In STEM, the stereotypes go beyond gender, asserts PhD candidate Sheba Aikawa

Ask a kindergartner to draw a scientist, and there’s a good chance a male figure will appear below the tip of a crayon. Decades of research have documented this tendency. Its persistence despite strong efforts to increase diversity in STEM fields points to something stubbornly embedded in the way society imagines who belongs in science.

Sheba Aikawa, a sixth-year social psychology PhD candidate in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, wanted to push the established literature further.

“We wanted to understand whether adding race would change how people perceive who ‘fits’ the scientist stereotype,” she says.

Sheba Aikawa is a sixth-year social psychology PhD candidate in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

The answer, it turns out, is that stereotypes of who “should” be a scientist and how scientists look aren’t limited to gender.

Who fits the mold?

Aikawa’s interest is in exploring ideas of identity, perception and belonging.

“Broadly, my research examines what factors promote welcoming spaces and how negative stereotypes may lead to hostile environments across healthcare, academia and workplace settings,” she says.

Working under Eva Pietri, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, Aikawa’s latest study builds on earlier work establishing that traits associated with scientists are more strongly linked to men than women.

Published in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations and co-authored by graduate student Nadia Floyd and Bernadette Park, professor emerita of psychology and neuroscience, the study asks whether that pattern holds when race is added to the conversation.

“We focused on scientists specifically because we wanted to examine whether the gender bias identified in previous research would hold when considering race. But our findings also have broader implications for understanding STEM bias more generally,” Aikawa says.

Across four experiments involving more than 1,100 white and Black participants, the results were consistent.

What the data reveals

Participants were asked to estimate what percentage of Black men, Black women, white men and white women society views as possessing scientist traits. This includes both positive traits like being analytical or meticulous as well as negative ones like being robotic or unsociable.

Across every study and across both white and Black participant groups, white men were perceived as most likely to possess scientist traits. Aikawa wasn’t surprised by this, but what the data revealed next was more interesting.

“What we found was that Black men and Black women were viewed similarly on scientist-related traits,” Aikawa says. “This suggests that racial stereotypes may be a particularly important factor shaping perceptions of who is seen as belonging in science.”

The gender gap documented in prior research, with men outpacing women in perceived scientific fit, essentially disappeared among Black individuals. Along the same lines, scientific perception of both Black men and Black women was rated lower than white women.

“The finding that race mattered more than gender did not necessarily surprise me,” Aikawa says.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Sheba Aikawa and her colleagues found that although there was no difference between white women and Black men and women on negative scientist traits, study participants rated white women as higher on positive scientist traits than Black men and Black women.

She points to multiple studies from her lab consistently supporting the idea that race plays a “powerful role in shaping perceptions across different contexts, including healthcare.”

“We know there are pervasive stereotypes that portray Black people as less competent, which could affect perceptions of both Black men and Black women,” Aikawa adds.

More than a number

The real-world implications of Aikawa and her team’s findings are huge. Stereotypes and perceptions about who looks like a scientist shape the decisions made by people in positions of power and determine who gets an opportunity to carry out important research or further their education.

“Even people who value diversity may unknowingly hold assumptions about who looks like a scientist or who seems naturally suited for STEM,” Aikawa says. “Awareness does not necessarily mean that people recognize how those beliefs influence their own judgments and behaviors.”

Those biases emerge early, even in children as young as five to six years old, and have persisted across generations. However, she sees signs of societal change moving in the right direction.

“We’re seeing more diverse representations of scientists in children’s media through characters like Doc McStuffins and Ada Twist, Scientist. Increasing visibility of diverse scientists helps broaden children’s understanding of who belongs in STEM.”

She also has a longer outlook.

“I’m optimistic that these perceptions of scientists can change. In fact, I would hope that if someone replicated our studies 100 years from now, they would find very different results.”

And though the findings might appear disheartening at first, Aikawa feels they could be empowering. The feeling of not fitting in, she argues, is not a verdict on a person's potential. By shifting the focus away from individual shortcomings and onto broader societal perceptions, she hopes minorities in STEM see that they do belong.

“The problem is not that Black women are less capable of being scientists; the problem is that society's image of a scientist has historically been narrow and exclusionary,” she says.

Who gets to be a scientist?

For any Black woman who has ever walked into a lab and felt like she didn't quite belong, Aikawa has a message to share.

“If you have ever felt like you don’t fit the stereotypical image of a scientist, that feeling is not simply a reflection of your abilities or potential,” she says. “If you've ever questioned whether you belong in STEM, our findings suggest that those feelings may stem from societal stereotypes rather than from a lack of talent, intelligence or potential.”

In many ways, expanding and redefining what a scientist looks like is exactly how these stereotypes change over time.”

On an individual level, Aikawa also reminds prospective Black scientists that they don’t have to fit society’s mold.

Addressing these stereotypes, though, requires more than individual awareness. Changing perceptions, both internally and societally, takes a collective effort.

Aikawa experienced this firsthand through the Boulder Black Blossoms program at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. Led by Christina Alston, director of the Office of Graduate Access and Retention and faculty affiliate in the School of Education, the program creates a community for Black women in STEM and education graduate programs.

“What I appreciated about this program is that it did not just focus on individual resilience—it focused on creating belonging, connection and support within an academic environment. Those types of structural and community-level supports are critical for helping historically underrepresented groups thrive in STEM,” Aikawa says.

Ultimately, Aikawa sees the work of dismantling harmful stereotypes in STEM as an ongoing, collaborative effort. She says being aware of the stereotypes is an important first step. Increasing diversity in STEM fields and building supportive communities and mentorship networks is equally important.

Over time, she notes, these efforts compound to reshape society’s perspective on who gets to be a scientist.

“In many ways, expanding and redefining what a scientist looks like is exactly how these stereotypes change over time.”

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In STEM, the stereotypes go beyond gender, asserts PhD candidate Sheba Aikawa.

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Research shows flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:40:38 +0000

Research shows flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 09:40

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint Gary Upchurch and colleagues find evidence in ‘botanical Pompeii’ that forests of tropical flowering plants thrived millions of years before dinosaurs’ extinction

In the Jose Creek Formation of south-central New Mexico near the town of Truth or Consequences is what researchers call a “botanical Pompeii.”

There, preserved in volcanic ash, is fossil evidence that flowering plants became dominant in forests a lot earlier than previously thought—almost 10 million years earlier.

“There was a dogma that I helped create back in the ‘80s, which was that tropical-style rainforests, dominated by angiosperms (flowering plants), did not really get established until the Cenozoic (about 66 million years ago),” explains Gary Upchurch, �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint and former �鶹��Ѱ�� postdoctoral researcher. “There may have been some farther back in very isolated regions, but there is a big expansion of this type of vegetation in the early Cenozoic.

Gary Upchurch, �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint and former �鶹��Ѱ�� postdoctoral researcher, and his research colleagues found evidence that flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought.

“So, I published papers on that back in the ‘80s, with the caveat that there may be some little bits here and there that are older.”

Over many years of research in the Jose Creek Formation, Upchurch and his colleagues discovered some of those “little bits”: diaspores, or the seeds and associated dispersal materials of flowering plants, dating back nearly 76 million years—almost 10 million years before an asteroid strike that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. They detail their findings in a paper recently published in the journal Science.

Previously, Upchurch explains, it was thought that flowering plants became dominant on the landscape only after this mass-extinction event, but the diaspores he and his colleagues unearthed in New Mexico say otherwise. They tell a story of angiosperms that developed large, fleshy fruits even before the rise of placental mammals and modern birds—which eat the fruit and help disperse the seeds—encouraged them to do so.

An anomaly in the geologic record

“Flowering plants themselves are an anomaly in the geologic record because all the major phyla of plants occur in a very narrow window of time, basically by the Late Devonian [382 to 359 million years ago] into the Carboniferous [359 to 299 million years ago],” Upchurch says. “The flowering plant lineage must have been around then, but we don't see anything that we would call flowering plants until the Cretaceous [145 to 66 million years ago].

“There are some tantalizing remains that go back further in time, but the oldest that everybody would agree on is about 140 million years old. Now, flowering plants started off as weedy plants, perhaps in forest understories, and their seeds were small and dispersed mostly without help, maybe a little wind. One of the debates has been, when did they become big? When did they become dominant on the landscape?”

As a postdoctoral paleobotany researcher at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and longtime professor at Texas State University, from which he retired in 2020, Upchurch contributed to longstanding ideas in paleobotany and paleoecology that flowering plants thrived after the dinosaurs.

Throughout his research career, though, he has encountered evidence challenging those ideas. One of his earlier papers detailed an angiosperm leaf assemblage with rainforest structure in the Mid-Cretaceous Dakota Formation of Kansas that’s about 100 million years old. And recent papers by different authors describe Campanian-age tropical rainforests in northern Mexico and North Africa.

He also repeatedly encountered bias in the fossil record having to do with the fact that “so many of our fossil deposits are from coastlines and carbonaceous deposits,” he says. “And when you look today in places like the southeastern U.S., the swamps tend to be dominated by conifers, even though more broadly flowering plants are the dominants.”

Upchurch says he began researching in the Jose Creek Formation almost by accident. During his postdoctoral studies, one of his focuses was end-Cretaceous extinction and coming up with evidence for mass mortality of vegetation in response to the asteroid impact, followed by recovery.

Around that time, noted geologist Greg Mack of New Mexico State University called Upchurch and said he had some fossils that he’d like somebody to look at.

“And whenever Greg Mack says that, you go, ‘Oh, my god, here’s my career,’” Upchurch says.

Seed and fruit fossils found in the Jose Creek Formation of south-central New Mexico. (Image: Cindy Looy and Jaemin Lee/UC Berkeley)

So, beginning in 1991, Upchurch and later members of his lab began studying a series of locations that turned out to be Late Campanian Age, about 76 to 72.1 million years ago, and that were far inland from the epicontinental seaway that traversed North America during the Cretaceous.

What they found was angiosperm dominance in at least some of the assemblages they studied, especially those that were developing not in swamps but in well-drained soils like those in the Jose Creek Formation.

Larger-than-expected fruit

To dig further into this dogma-busting evidence, Upchurch recruited students to join the research, one of whom was Dori Contreras, now director of paleontology and curator of paleobotany at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas.

During her PhD studies at the University of California Berkeley, Contreras continued pursuing this research, working with her advisor, Cindy Looy. Analyzing the reproductive structures of the samples that Upchurch, Contreras and their research colleagues collected over the years, UC Berkeley PhD student Jaemin Lee found in the well-preserved specimens evidence of larger-than-expected fleshy fruit—about the size of a blueberry.

“One possible reason for this had to do with the fact that we were not dealing with fruits and seeds that got washed into the nearest pond,” Upchurch explains. “We were dealing with material that had basically been dropped from the parent plants into a volcanic ash bed that was preserving both the forest leaf litter and the diaspores. It’s a Pompeii type of situation.

“There’s a series of volcanic ash beds where we have radiometric dates as well as different types of fossil plant material—we have leaves, we have diaspores, we have exquisitely preserved petrified woods, both of conifers and angiosperms.”

Further, the diaspores they found suggest an ecological evolution toward humid and shady tropical forests rather than sunny, open environments and dispersal assistance by extinct mammals and birds, Upchurch says.

In ecology, he explains, organisms broadly reproduce via r-selection or K-selection. R-selection is all about numbers: disperse a huge number of small seeds and figure a tiny percentage will germinate and become established. K-selected species, on the other hand, have bigger diaspores and the focus is on survival and establishment because conditions might not be ideal—say, the shade of a tropical forest floor.

Upchurch notes that while previously held ideas about angiosperms weren’t wrong—they did, in fact, abundantly flourish after the asteroid hit Earth—they were incomplete.

“As a scientist and a researcher, sometimes there have been moments I wasn’t expecting, these rare golden finds,” he says. “But the most important thing I’ve done is simply observe.”

Jaemin Lee, Dori L. Contreras, James G. Saulsbury and Cindy V. Looy contributed to this research.

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Top illustration: An artistic rendering of the forest understory in the late Cretaceous based on fossils from the Jose Creek Formation in New Mexico. (Illustration: Brian Engh/LivingRelicProductions.com)

What can one tiny scanner detect in Mammoth sunflowers?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:59:23 +0000

What can one tiny scanner detect in Mammoth sunflowers? Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:59

Tiffany Plate

Researchers in �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are taking a closer look at the drought-recovery efforts of these beloved blooms

Drive down even the driest road in Colorado at the height of summer, and you’re bound to see rows of bright sunflowers lining the shoulder. And even if at the end of a long hot day those long-stemmed blooms look a little wilted, there’s a good chance that by the next morning they’re standing tall again.

That observable bounceback has led researchers to believe that sunflowers are capable of a process called “refilling,” in which the plant’s water transport capability, which can fail during intense drought stress, returns to normal after it has been rewatered. Refilling flushes drought-induced air bubbles, called embolisms, out of the plant’s water transport tubes to deliver much-needed moisture throughout the plant.

Study authors (left to right) Jared Stewart, Stephanie Polutchko and Brendan Allen found that, contrary to popular belief, sunflowers were not capable of “refilling” themselves after experiencing drought and subsequent rewatering. (Photo: Stephanie Polutchko)

But according to a recent study by researchers in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, refilling is not the cause of sunflowers’ apparent bounceback.

“We didn't see a single convincing instance where even one of the tubes was repaired,” says Research Associate Jared Stewart. Stewart served as lead author on a recent article in the Journal of Experimental Botany documenting his team’s use of a micro-CT scanner to peek inside sunflowers at various stages of dehydration and rehydration.

The finding stands in stark contrast to the results of a study the same team performed on a weedy grass, which was published last year in the journal Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences USA. In that instance, the grasses’ refilling capabilities were remarkable.

“There wasn't any real gray area with the two findings,” says Stewart. “This grass refilled 100% completely in every single plant, every single time. In the sunflowers, we saw zero refilling.”

So where does that leave the field of plant hydraulics? “In last year's paper we showed that this refilling process does happen,” says Stewart. “But these results suggest it’s probably not nearly as prevalent as people thought.”

Why sunflowers?

The study grew out of a conversation between Stewart and his then-postdoctoral advisor Sean Gleason, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, along with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colleagues Stephanie Polutchko, an assistant teaching professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and graduate student Brendan Allen. The four linked up with researchers at Colorado State University and mapped out a way they could leverage CSU’s micro-CT scanner to observe the drought processes in the plants.

Sunflower was an ideal candidate, Stewart says, because literature on plant hydraulics almost unanimously supported the idea that sunflowers were capable of refilling (in part because of the daily visual evidence of the flower wilting and then perking back up). In fact, for a long time most experts in plant hydraulics believed that refilling was a fairly universal phenomenon. The problem was that there was very little concrete evidence to back up that belief.

“Previously published evidence for this repair process has been scrutinized more and more intensely over the past decade,” says Stewart. The team thus opted for a simple experimental setup to ensure there was no confusion about the results.

A mouse-sized scanner to the rescue

An essential part of that simple design was using the micro-CT scanner that belongs to CSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. The small scanner is designed to scan small, live animals and was engineered to emit as little radiation as possible—so study subjects can be scanned repeatedly without exposure to high levels of radiation.

A sunflower plant experiencing drought and one week after being rewatered (top), and micro-CT images of its stem (bottom). The white arrows indicate where the stem was scanned, and the yellow areas in the micro-CT images show air bubbles, or embolisms, in yellow. (Image courtesy of study authors)

The setup was perfect for Stewart’s team, who scanned the 11 specimens of the “Mammoth” variety of sunflowers at three different times: while under drought stress, on the morning after re-watering and after one week of recovery under well-watered conditions. The plants were able to withstand the scanning with no visible damage.

That was not true in past studies on the topic, including research that dates back more than 40 years. “Conventional ways of studying this have involved basically cutting out portions of the plant,” says Stewart. “Then you do the same procedure on a different plant that’s been rewatered.”

That process of cutting the plant has been suspected to be problematic for more than 100 years, Stewart says, since it introduces air into the incision, making it difficult to measure the embolisms that existed in the tube prior to cutting. But that method has remained one of the most commonly used in the literature and may be a cause for confusion about the topic.

Now, Stewart believes they’ve come up with a gold standard method for studying this phenomenon. “Personally, I wouldn't trust any data generated with any other published methods at this moment,” he says.

A new line of questioning

Now that the team has validated their methodology with the two different studies, they see it as a first step in designing future experiments.

“There’s a ton of different directions we’d love to go with it,” says Stewart, adding that he hopes their results might be leveraged for agricultural efforts to improve food production and food security, especially as the planet potentially faces an increase in droughts.

“I think if we got to pick another crop to study and had unlimited time and money, it'd probably be corn or rice,” says Polutchko. “We know that a grass can do it, but it's one that’s an agricultural nuisance. So, can we have a grass that we like to eat that can also do this?”

Ideally, now that the method has been laid out, other researchers with access to similar micro-CT scanners can also conduct their own research, especially on crops with agricultural significance.

As for the sunflower’s drooping and reperking routine, Stewart, Polutchko and team are still stumped. “Maybe the plant doesn’t refill those embolisms, but it has a different strategy to work around that stress. Those are great questions, and we want to know the answers.”

“In true scientist fashion, you answer one question and 10 new ones pop up!” says Polutchko.

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Researchers in �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are taking a closer look at the drought-recovery efforts of these beloved blooms.

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How gut bacteria offer clues about the cost of industrialization

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:44:49 +0000

How gut bacteria offer clues about the cost of industrialization Rachel Sauer Thu, 07/30/2026 - 09:44

Cody DeBos

In newly published research, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Matthew Olm and colleagues map the gut microbiome’s hidden global diversity

When Matthew Olm’s daughter was born, he did something most parents never consider. He gave her a type of experimental probiotic designed to nudge her infant gut microbiome in a healthy direction.

Then again, most new parents don’t have a PhD in microbiology or run their own research lab studying microbes from around the world.

“It was fascinating in terms of how well it worked to colonize my daughter’s gut, and it really validated a lot of the science that I’d read about,” he says.

Matthew Olm, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant professor of integrative physiology, recently collaborated on a study examining the gut microbiomes of eight tribal communities across India.

At the time, Olm was a postdoc in Justin Sonnenburg’s lab at Stanford University, curious to know more about what happens to the human gut microbiome as one’s lifestyle industrializes.

“There’s a lot of reason to suspect that the way industrialization changes the microbiome opens you up to immune disease. Many studies also show that the infant microbiome is especially important in this regard,” he says.

Olm, now running his own lab and serving as an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the �鶹��Ѱ��, recently collaborated on a study examining the gut microbiomes of eight tribal communities across India.

While trying to understand what these communities’ relative isolation from industrialization may have preserved, the data revealed an unexpected story.

A better global picture

Now a paper published in the journal Gut Microbes, the project first found Olm while he was at Stanford.

“A graduate student, Abhijit Sanjiv Kulkarni, came up to my (principal investigator) Justin at a conference and asked if we wanted to help out with the analysis. He had done this sampling campaign across all of these different tribes in India and had a lot of microbiome samples,” Olm recalls.

It was a unique proposition.

Some 71% of gut microbiome samples come from the United States, Europe or Canada. Almost half of all samples come from the United States despite the country accounting for just 4.3% of the global population. Samples from more populous areas like Africa and Southeast Asia, particularly communities outside urban hubs, are studied far less often.

One challenge of acquiring samples from less developed areas, Olm says, is that the sample material must be frozen immediately lest the microbes inside keep growing and distort the snapshot.

Rather than freezing in the field, the team preserved each sample on-site with a chemical stabilization buffer that halts microbial growth until the samples could be frozen back at the lab. Olm then catalogued the samples and ran the initial analysis, doing much of the work with inStrain, a genome analysis tool he had written during his PhD work at UC Berkeley.

He points out that a single microbe most people have heard of, like the E. coli found naturally in your gut, isn’t really one thing at all.

Geographic and dietary diversity of the eight sampled tribal populations in India. A, Photographs of traditional dwellings, residents, and unique foods in participating villages. B, Geographical locations of the eight sampled populations. Map is from Survey of India. Green shading indicates tribal populations as a percentage of state population in the 2011 Census of India. C, Food items consumed daily by at least one population.

“That’s millions, billions, trillions of cells, and each individual cell is slightly different from the others,” Olm says.

inStrain allows researchers to see the hidden variations so they can trace the lineage of bacterial strains within communities, regions and even family trees.

Where do our microbes come from?

The study’s most striking finding centers on Bifidobacterium, a genus prized for its health benefits. Analysis showed it in much greater abundance among dairy-consuming Trans-Himalayan communities than anywhere else in the study. The microbes were also genetically distinct from Bifidobacterium strains found in industrialized populations.

Olm says this result speaks to a long-running debate over where we get our gut microbes from. Does everyone share the same global pool of microbes, altered by our diet and lifestyle, or does physical exposure determine our gut’s unique makeup?

“Actually, the physical source matters a lot. Even if you eat a lot of potatoes, if you don’t interact with a microbe that specializes in digesting potatoes, you’re never going to pick that strain up,” Olm explains.

The findings from these communities suggest their unique gut microbiome strains co-evolved alongside the populations themselves, passed down from generation to generation, rather than being acquired because of a shared diet. An American who started eating more dairy today, Olm says, would likely never achieve a similar microbiome through diet alone.

The cost of a cleaner world

Science has proven the benefits of a diverse microbiome. Yet, industrialized societies are notorious for a lack of gut diversity, even among individuals who do everything “right” when it comes to diet and lifestyle factors.

Olm says this traces back to a handful of compounding factors.

“We have a lot more antibiotic exposure, birth by C-section and these other medical things. Diet plays a role too,” he says.

But the biggest factor is one most people aren’t as comfortable discussing: modern sanitation.

Olm explains that acquiring new microbes from other people typically requires a level of everyday exposure that handwashing and modern plumbing have all but eliminated in industrialized societies.

“A hundred years ago, the number one causes of death were all infectious disease, because we didn't have this hygiene,” Olm says. “Hygiene is definitely a good thing, but the downside is you're also not exposed to the way you'd naturally pick up healthy microbes from other people and other people’s poop.”

In other words, our cleaner world is also one with less microbial diversity.

“The more you sanitize the environment, maybe the less diverse microbiome you have, but also the less infectious disease you have,” Olm says.

He’s careful to reiterate that this isn’t an argument against modern medicine. It’s simply a reminder that everything has a trade-off.

There’s a lot of reason to suspect that the way industrialization changes the microbiome opens you up to immune disease."

“If you’re prescribed antibiotics for an ear infection, it’s important to take it. You should be washing your hands regularly and practicing good hygiene. Yes, it will have some harm on your microbiome, but in the cost-benefit analysis, modern medicine and sanitation still win,” he says.

Racing to preserve a moving target

As the world moves further along the path of industrialization, we risk losing much of the gut diversity our ancestors had. Once that diversity is gone, Olm says, it’s very difficult to bring it back—let alone study it.

This is why some researchers have begun freezing and banking fecal samples from non-industrialized populations, similar to preserving seed banks for crop diversity. Others have taken to studying ancient fossilized fecal matter to recover snapshots of gut microbiomes lost millennia ago.

While projects like the one Olm collaborated on can reveal some hidden secrets of humanity’s gut health, he is careful not to frame traditional communities as something to be preserved for the benefit of research.

Pointing to the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, he says it’s tempting to romanticize the lifestyle as something worth protecting, but adds, “If you talk to some of these communities, they want education, they want modern medicine.”

Industrialization, he says, is “part of the human condition.”

“I don’t think it’s right to discourage these non-industrialized populations from becoming industrialized with the rest of the world just so it benefits our microbiomes,” Olm adds.

“Most of the microbes in our gut, they eat fiber, and it's the primary food source for our microbiome," says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Matthew Olm. "The more fiber you eat, the more substrate there is to sustain a healthy microbiome." (Photo: iStock)

Instead of discouraging it, his lab publishes its sequencing data publicly, serving as what he calls a computational resource for future researchers to study before these unique microbiomes change further.

What about your gut?

As for the rest of us, Olm’s advice on a healthy microbiome is refreshingly unglamorous in a world where we are constantly bombarded by ads and influencers pushing one supplement or the next.

“Eat more fiber. That’s definitely the number one recommendation,” he says.

Recommended daily fiber intake in the U.S. is about 25 to 28 grams per day for women and between 28 and 34 grams per day for men, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Olm says most Americans get just 10 grams of fiber from their diet each day. Traditional hunter-gatherer communities may eat up to 200 grams a day during certain bountiful seasons.

“Most of the microbes in our gut, they eat fiber, and it's the primary food source for our microbiome. The more fiber you eat, the more substrate there is to sustain a healthy microbiome,” Olm adds.

It’s not a flashy recommendation, but that’s the point. In a field full of trendy probiotics that are more marketing than science, the answer may be as simple as supporting the system our bodies have relied on for thousands of years.

For Olm and his lab moving forward, the real promise of gut microbiome research lies in building a fuller picture of what a healthy gut can look like and how we can support it with science-backed interventions.

As more of the world's underrepresented microbiomes get studied, that picture, and our knowledge of our own health, can only be clearer.

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In newly published research, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Matthew Olm and colleagues map the gut microbiome’s hidden global diversity.

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Top image: "Farm Near Karlee, India" by Marianne North

The only way to make beef and dairy more climate-friendly? Stop producing it

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:37:16 +0000

The only way to make beef and dairy more climate-friendly? Stop producing it Rachel Sauer Tue, 07/28/2026 - 13:37

Tiffany Plate

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Cliff Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues are showing why microbial solutions to livestock methane emissions reductions won’t stop beef and dairy’s environmental and health problems

By nature, cows are gassy creatures. But it’s not just the stink of their manure or their belches that are troublesome. The methane gas released by ruminants like cows (or bison, sheep or goats) also causes a lot of trouble for the planet.

That’s because methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a dramatically higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. And ruminants raised for food account for 14% of global methane emissions.

Over the last decade or so scientists have been hard at work figuring out how to infuse cows’ feedstock with additives that inhibit methane-producing microbes. The process could reduce those methane emissions and potentially produce a more “climate-friendly” beef.

Cliff Bueno de Mesquita, who studies microbial ecology of permafrost and ancient sediments in the lab of ecology and evolutionary biology Professor Noah Fierer and in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, teamed up with other microbiologists passionate about environmental issues for this perspective piece. (Photo: Cliff Bueno de Mesquita)

Sounds like a win-win, right? A new perspective piece by Cliff Bueno de Mesquita (PhDEBio'19), a research scientist in the lab of ecology and evolutionary biology Professor Noah Fierer and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), says otherwise.

“Even if you could decrease cows’ methane emissions by 100%, cows are still worse than plant-based agriculture for their land use, water use, pollution and impacts on human health,” says Bueno de Mesquita.

In their piece in the journal Sustainable Agriculture, Bueno de Mesquita and a team of microbiologist colleagues outline all the reasons that altering cows’ rumen microbes is a misdirected use of time, money and energy. “This is basically distracting from what we really need to be doing, which is reducing the ruminant population size,” he says.

This conclusion—that reducing the numbers of ruminants raised for food is the only solution to actually reducing livestock’s impact on the planet—has already been drawn by researchers around the world.

“There are a lot of great scientists working on this topic, with strong data sets that have been assembled with all of the evidence,” says Bueno de Mesquita.

Bueno de Mesquita and his colleagues cited 98 studies, to be exact, in their peer-reviewed opinion piece that re-emphasizes the personal and planetary benefits of a shift to a plant-based diet—and lays out exactly why rumen microbes are not the answer.

The problem with microbes

Some of the literature references cited in the piece are studies that have been done on the most common feed additives that have been studied for methane inhibition: seaweed and 3-nitrooxypropanol (or Bovaer). The research shows that the demonstrated efficacy of these microbes is extremely variable, with one review reporting a range of 10–63% reduction and another review reporting a range of a 4% increase to a 97% reduction.

Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues are also concerned that altering rumen microbes may lead to unpredictable health effects for the cattle, and may even decrease immunity to pathogens that could be detrimental to human health.

Another reason for concern? This method favors intensive beef production, where cattle are fed in feedlots rather than on grass (as is more likely to be the case in small-holder production). Not to mention that seaweed harvesting has its own inherent carbon emissions and environmental impact.

But Bueno de Mesquita’s team points out that even if none of these were issues, methane reduction does nothing to address potent nitrogen emissions or other emissions from the rest of the production life cycle (e.g., land use, water use, fertilizer, crop residues, manure).

Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues created this graphic to demonstrate how many ways livestock production can impact the environment and human health—and how only one of these impacts is reduced by trying to alter the microbes in the rumen with feed additives. (Graphic: Cliff Bueno de Mesquita and Ylenia Vimercati Molano)

Shifting people’s perspectives

The authors wrote the piece to be accessible to non-scientists in hopes of reaching as wide an audience as possible. “I want the public to be aware and to be skeptical of labels coming from the beef and dairy industry that are calling those products climate friendly,” says Bueno de Mesquita.

Of course, he also hopes that people will consider simply shifting to a plant-based diet in order to make their meals more climate friendly. But he knows that’s easier said than done.

“We're basically living in a ‘carnistic’ society where eating meat is perceived to be normal, natural and necessary,” says Bueno de Mesquita. “That's sort of people's default. So when they’re met with a proposal for a minor shift that challenges that, we know there's gonna be pushback.”

Two years ago Bueno de Mesquita and his co-authors published another paper documenting a push within �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department for more plant-based meals. “The PhD students were very hesitant to implement a dietary change, even though they know that it's going to be better for the environment.”

Even still, Bueno de Mesquita says the current perspective piece is getting a lot of traction. “I basically never get emails about my research papers,” he says. “But I've already gotten emails from multiple people saying that they agree.” He adds that even some leading microbiologists have posted it on social media.

That’s key to reaching the other audience Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues wanted to address: the microbiologists actually doing the research on rumen microbes in livestock feed, usually funded by the beef and dairy industries, he says.

“They're enabling the dairy industry to say, ‘Hey, we're doing this research. This is going to work’,” says Bueno de Mesquita. “Then the industry has an excuse to keep business as usual.”

Instead, he hopes that microbiologists and other scientists studying climate change will step up and speak with a unified voice about what needs to be done as a society. “It's very obvious,” says Bueno de Mesquita. “If you want to reduce methane from ruminants, you need to decrease the number of ruminants.”

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