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Intro (00:04):
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is Â鶹ÊÓƵ, where taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, inand higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Â鶹ÊÓƵ President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

Narrator (00:28):
Welcome to a special edition of the Access to Excellence podcast. For this special Best-Of episode, we've compiled some of our most thought-provoking and compelling conversations with President Washington. We'll revisit discussions that are more relevant than ever, from the complexities of artificial intelligence and the science of space, to the incredible capacity of humans for both evil and good. But to begin, we should zoom out. As an R-1 research institution and Virginia's largest public university, George Â鶹ÊÓƵ is organizing its vast research capabilities around what President Washington calls the Grand Challenge Initiative. He sat down with Andre Marshall, the vice president for research, innovation, and economic impact at George Â鶹ÊÓƵ to explain what that means for our community.

President Washington (01:20):
Well, look, I talked about the grand challenge issue, but you know, we often get the question, what is a grand challenge? So, given that this is a big part of your portfolio going forward, I'm asking you: what's a grand challenge?

Andre Marshall (01:34):
Alright, well, we spent really a lot of time thinking about this and for Â鶹ÊÓƵ, from our perspective, the Grand Challenge initiative, it's all about the future. And specifically as we thought about kind of what that means to operationalize this, we developed four criteria for what a grand challenge is. So, a grand challenge is large and enduring. And what we mean by that is we are not trying to solve the little problems. As you say, we are focused on the big rocks and we're not looking for quick fixes. Alright? We want to have a solution that lasts,

President Washington (02:16):
Give me an example. Not in one of our solutions, but give me an specific example of a grand challenge.

Andre Marshall (02:22):
A grand challenge that comes to mind would be a cure for sickle cell, for example. You know, that challenge impacts people globally. There's a lot of suffering associated with that. It, it changes people's lives. And so if you can address those kinds of issues, you can really make a difference. And guess what: It's big, and if you solve it, you've solved it. And that's what I mean by, you know, doing something that is big and enduring. You know, also a grand challenge is complex and it requires people from not just across the, the university, but it requires external partners. So what we mean by, you know, this kind of complex, interdisciplinary and external partner criterion, is that you can't do it alone, right? You need people, the problem is bigger than just you. Alright, so we got grand challenges that are big and they endure and they require multiple partners.

Andre Marshall (03:36):
Um, and now let's talk about this third criterion. And this is focused on Â鶹ÊÓƵ. Look, we need to focus on challenges that we can really do something about. And that aligns with our strengths, our assets, and our core values. So we want things that mean something to Â鶹ÊÓƵ in terms of our values and our expertise and strengths. And then finally, this fourth criterion is that we want to move the needle and to make a difference. So we don't want our, our, our activities to just be a drop in the bucket. The things that we work on, they're going to really make a change. They're not just gonna be additive. And so we have to be careful about the problems that we choose and the challenges that we choose so that they're aligned with our strengths and that we can really do something.

President Washington (04:35):
So we have world-class faculty focused on a whole host of issues, right? From poverty to health, to engineering and science. How would you recommend we focus our effort? I know you, you had a committee. This committee has met for a significant period of time, some of our best and brightest faculty, and you all tackled this issue. So talk a little bit about deploying our resources and focus.

Andre Marshall (05:02):
I appreciate that question and I appreciate the intentionality of this question. We really need to deploy our resources. We need to deploy our entire research enterprise for action and for impact, especially considering all the headwinds that we have right now. We've got, uh, resource limitations in terms of research. We have increased competition for talent and resources, and we have changing priorities in the research landscape to, to be frank. And so we have to be intentional about how we're gonna deploy our resources and our research enterprise. Well, our faculty, they're committed to making a difference. So we, we need to honor that they are committed to having an impact and changing the world. So, you know, that's our foundation. That we want to do something right, that the faculty care about, that they're good at that is really gonna make a difference. So we put together, uh, as you mentioned this committee, we talked about so many different possibilities of what we could do. There were 84 different ideas that came up.

President Washington (06:21):
So there, so there was a big focusing effort that happened to get it down to six. One, advancing 21st century education for all two, building a climate resilient society. Three, driving responsible digital innovation and sustainable infrastructure. Four, improving human health, wellbeing and preparedness. Five, preparing for space exploration, research and collaboration. And six, strengthening peace, trust and engagement in democracy.

Narrator (07:04):
And it's in the spirit of that last grand challenge--strengthening peace and trust--that we turn to Rick Davis, Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He shared his vision for the future of the arts at George Â鶹ÊÓƵ and the power of art in creating community.

President Washington (07:20):
So last year, uh, you gave a presentation to the Board of Visitors and you began that presentation with your mantra: the arts create community. Talk to us about the tagline, what inspired it and what does it actually mean?

Rick Davis (07:38):
Oh, thank you. I call it my forward elevator speech because it encapsulates basically everything I believe about the value of the arts. And I'm going back historically, you know, to to ancient civilizations that that created, you know, theater and dance and music and, and cave paintings and, and sculptures and everything that, that the way the arts have always expressed themselves. Why were they born and why do they exist? Because people need occasions to come together. And for a lot of people, religion forms that function and religion in the arts have a, a strong connection, sometimes very tense connection, but, but a very strong connection in terms of ritual and in terms of, of symbolism. For some people, sports frankly create that opportunity. For me as well. uh, I know for you, you know, we love to go to a, a sporting event because it's a ritual, right?

Rick Davis (08:27):
It's a it's a collective experience. We all see the same thing and react, maybe not in the same way, but if everybody reacts right, you can be booing and cheering, uh, at the same play depending on your team. But you're reacting and you're reacting as part of a community. Same thing happens in a, in a play or an opera. The same thing happens quietly in an art museum because people are walking by a, a painting or, or standing in, in front of a sculpture and it catches them and it stops them. It interrupts their day a little bit. And great paintings, one person stops and then another person stops, and then another person stops. And suddenly you get a little audience <laugh> right in front. And it's amazing what happens there because everybody's concentrating on the same thing for a little while. You know, in the case of a play, it might be two hours or three hours, or god knows, four hours, uh, <laugh>.

Rick Davis (09:14):
But the value of bringing people together in, in common contemplation or having a common experience, I think is really vital to civilization. And I'm not being hyperbolic here. I think civilization requires opportunities for people to come together and witness things collectively, and then form their own conclusions. But when you go to a play that's working, whether it's a comedy or a tragedy or anything in between, and you feel that unanimity or that variety, but also people breathing together, laughing together, crying together, you are part of a temporary community that actually reminds us all of our common humanity.

President Washington (09:53):
Well, you can't talk about community without talking about the two pillars of bringing folk together in that community. And so I want to talk about 'em separately here, but what makes the center of the arts a critical part of the arts community for both George Â鶹ÊÓƵ and for the region?

Rick Davis (10:12):
So the Center for the Arts in Fairfax is, of course, our signature facility here on the, on the Fairfax campus, where we do the vast majority of our, of our instruction. The Center for the Arts was created out of the mind of President George Johnson, quite literally, uh, and his wife, Joanne, to say, let, let's put George Â鶹ÊÓƵ on the map as a place where the arts are happening, and how are we gonna do that? 'cause we don't really have big arts programs yet. So we have to bring in, we have to bring the world to Fairfax. We have to bring Yo-Yo Ma to Fairfax. We have to bring Michael Feinstein to Fairfax. We have to bring these incredible artists. We, uh, you know, Roberta Peters, Denise Graves--great top level artists, right? Who came to and are still coming every year to Fairfax. And that was something that changed the campus culture.

Rick Davis (10:58):
If you talk to Visitor Horace Blackman, former rector of our board, who was a student here during the opening. He, he started in the late eighties, graduated in the early nineties. He will tell you, he's told me that the opening of the Center for the Arts changed George Â鶹ÊÓƵ completely. Because all of a sudden the world was coming to Â鶹ÊÓƵ. You had a place to go on the weekends. You had meaningful things to do. You had the opportunity to be part of the world conversation about music and dance and theater. And that gave everybody, not only on campus, but in the whole sort of Northern Virginia region, a rallying point. It literally created a community. And from that, we have built the academic programs because the presence of all these wonderful artists that come in over the course of a season has also benefited our students tremendously.

President Washington (11:48):
So talk to us a little bit about the other core facility we have for bringing the community together: the Hylton Performing Arts Center. And that's on our science and technology campus in Manassas.

Rick Davis (12:01):
Oh, I'd love to. We built the Hylton Center. And by the way, for everybody listening on the podcast, that's H-Y-L-T-O-N, right? It's, it's not the, not the hotel chain, it's the Hylton Foundation. And a man named Conrad Hylton, uh, who was a major developer in, in the Prince William County area. Uh, they gave the naming gift for that back in the mid two thousands. The facility opened in 2010. And we built that essentially as an expression of George Â鶹ÊÓƵ's commitment to community partnerships, because Prince William County and the city of Manassas essentially asked us if we would partner with them to create a distinctive representative inspiring cultural facility that would help their city and county, and that region, take the next step into the community that they wanted to become. So we, we bill ourselves...I, this is a term I use a lot...we bill ourselves as a symbol of change and as an agent of change, we're doing both of those things in Sci, at SciTech.

Rick Davis (13:02):
This is one of the most beautiful theaters anywhere on the East Coast. The architecture is distinctive from the moment you walk into the lobby. Every space is designed with architectural distinction in mind. The acoustics in the main hall are praised by every single artist who comes in, whether they're a classical conductor or a pianist, or a jazz player, or a bluegrass musician. Everybody loves playing in that hall. And perhaps most importantly, it has uplifted the local and regional arts community to a very high degree, the Manassas Ballet, the Manassas Chorale, the Manassas Symphony, Prince William Little Theater, a youth orchestra that's going by the name of the Onyx Project now CAPAC--the Creative and Performing Arts Center from, from Woodbridge--these entities, which all preexisted the Hylton, but were doing their work in middle school auditoriums and, you know, church basements and everything. Now they have, truly, a world-class facility to play in. And over these 15 years that we've been operating, their work has gotten bigger and better and more popular, and they've attracted more people in the audience. But just as importantly for them, they've attracted more people on stage, more people to participate in these community-based artistic expressions. So it's been a, it's been a huge success for the community and for George Â鶹ÊÓƵ as well, because people see us as the purveyor and the partner that without us, this, this thing wouldn't have happened.

President Washington (14:25):
And I'll, and I'll be honest with you, this, the acoustics, the layout, first of all, it looks like a classical theater.

Rick Davis (14:32):
Yeah.

President Washington (14:33):
It has that, uh, classical theater look and feel. But the acoustics there just seem to be outstanding. I mean, there's no echo. It's great sound wherever you are in the facility. People sound so clear.

Rick Davis (14:49):
And if you're on stage in that theater and you, you're a singer, whatever player, you get just the right amount of sound coming back to you so you know that it's, you know that the hall is embracing you and that people just love playing there. And, and that, that means a lot because they play better.

President Washington (15:06):
Well, every, every single performance that I've seen there has been spectacular. It is, it's a gem.

Narrator (15:14):
To tackle a grand challenge, you might think you need a grand solution. But assistant professor of mechanical engineering Jeffrey Moran is proving that sometimes the answers are found in small, simple things like used coffee grounds.

President Washington (15:28):
Earlier this year, members of your lab made the news with the invention of what's being called the coffee bot. And this is spent coffee grounds coated in iron oxide that can absorb pollutants and water. So tell me about how it works.

Jeffrey Moran (15:48):
Sure. So the, the listeners can't see this, but I'm holding a vial of what are just ordinary coffee grounds, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And these are coffee grounds I literally brought from home and

President Washington (15:59):
Now spent coffee grounds, which means--

Jeffrey Moran (16:01):
Spent coffee grounds

President Washington (16:02):
They've--

Jeffrey Moran (16:02):
Been used. That's correct.

President Washington (16:03):
That's even better.

Jeffrey Moran (16:04):
That's correct. Okay. Yeah. And by one estimate, we throw away about 23 million tons of spent coffee waste per year. Much of that is being sent to landfills. Although increasingly I'm heartened to see that places like Starbucks are making just bags of the stuff available for folks to use for compost. Okay. So I've got a vial of spent coffee grounds here, and in my other hand I have a magnet. Now if I hold the magnet up to the vial, nothing interesting happens. Coffee is not magnetic. However, if I have another vial here, these also look like spent coffee grounds. They are. But they've been coated in, as you said, iron oxide, which is the main chemical constituent of rust. So we sometimes call these rusty coffee grounds because in a real sense they are rusty. And if I hold the magnet up, I don't know if you can see, uh, and for the listeners, the coffee grounds, once they've been coated in the iron oxide particles, they will actually follow the magnet.

Jeffrey Moran (17:06):
So I can make them go wherever I want to by holding up a magnet to it. So the essence of what we did was develop a safe and eco-friendly approach to coating the coffee grounds with these little tiny bits of rust. So what does that do for us? Well, it does two important things. First, it allows us to use a magnetic fields--you asked how they move--it allows us to use a magnetic field to drive them through the water. So for now we're just propelling them with the external magnetic field. We can come back to that in a second. We're looking at ways to improve upon that. And one of the things we demonstrated was that moving coffee grounds will actually remove pollutants from water more efficiently than stationary ones do. Hmm. And this makes intuitive sense because in a sense, the moving coffee grounds encounter more pollutants per unit time than stationary ones do. So we demonstrated three different pollutant types. Methylene blue, which is kind of a stand in for a chemical pollutant. But methylene blue itself is a textile dye that has some negative health effects that is itself a pollutant of concern in some areas of the world, particularly where textile production is common. Oil spills and microplastics, those are additionally pollutants of concern.

President Washington (18:27):
So both of those are problematic today.

Jeffrey Moran (18:30):
Absolutely. Absolutely.

President Washington (18:31):
Oil spills and microplastics, so much so that fish today have an incredibly large amount of digested microplastics in their, in their, in their systems.

Jeffrey Moran (18:43):
And potentially we do too, potentially. And because there are so many consumer products that contain plastic, they make their ways into waterways, right? And eventually in some areas, uh, it probably varies significantly. I haven't seen the statistics, but definitely lots of different forms of life are consuming these microplastics. And I wanna say this is not my area, but I think we're still as a community figuring out exactly what the health effects are. But they're definitely something to be concerned about for sure. So we demonstrated that we can remove each of those three types.

President Washington (19:16):
So microplastics--

Jeffrey Moran (19:18):
Oil and methylene blue as a model for a do methylene blue is, is a textile dye. And it's blue as the name suggests. Right. And that was convenient because then it's very straightforward to monitor how much of the methylene blue we've removed at any given time. Because you can use an instrument that essentially looks at how much blue light is being absorbed. You can use essentially the intensity at a certain wavelength to determine how much of the dyes left. So it was, it was, it was partially out of convenience that we chose that.

President Washington (19:53):
Hmm. So reuse of these coffee grounds was mentioned.

Jeffrey Moran (19:59):
Yeah. Yeah.

President Washington (20:00):
So you, and so how often can you use them?

Jeffrey Moran (20:02):
Yeah. So that brings me to the second major thing that the magnetism enables. So just to recap, the first thing the magnetism does is it allows us to drive them through the water. And that speeds up the pollutant removal process. The second thing it does is it allows us to take the magnet and pluck the coffee grounds out of the water after the treatment is complete., What we do next is rinse it off. We can rinse the pollutants off and we do still have to dispose of the pollutants elsewhere. That is a separate issue that is for now, tangential to the work that we're doing. We're mainly focusing on removing them from the water. But that is something that you do still have to do something with the oil or with the microplastics. And that's something that other researchers are working on. So then after you rinse them, we typically rinse them with an organic solvent like acetone. Acetone works pretty well. And then you can actually drop them back into the water. And we showed in the journal paper we published on this that you can reuse them at least four times with a minimal reduction in pollutant removal efficiency. So we haven't gone beyond that. But based on how well the first five trials went, and this is true by the way, with each pollutant class, with dyes, oils, and microplastics, we have reason to believe that you could go further.

President Washington (21:20):
So let me get this straight. 'cause I want to make sure that the folk out there see the depth and the profoundness of what you are stating.

Jeffrey Moran (21:32):
Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

President Washington (21:34):
Spent coffee grounds coated in iron oxide can be dropped into, say, an oil spill.

Jeffrey Moran (21:42):
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Absolutely.

President Washington (21:43):
And the coffee grounds will attach themselves to the oil.

Jeffrey Moran (21:46):
That's right.

President Washington (21:47):
You have a process for then pulling those grounds, separating those grounds with the oil on them from the water. The oil is rinsed off where it can be disposed. You throw the grounds back out to repeat the process. And you can do it up to four times.

Jeffrey Moran (22:04):
Five times total. Right. So four reuses...

President Washington (22:07):
Four reuses...

Jeffrey Moran (22:08):
So five total uses. That's amazing. You nailed it. That's exactly right.

Narrator (22:13):
From the smallest coffee grounds to the vast expanse of space, George Â鶹ÊÓƵ faculty are stretching our imaginations of what lies within the cosmos. Anamaria Berea, an associate professor of computational and data sciences, studies the intersection of data sciences, economics, and astrobiology. And it's that last field that led President Washington to ask the question we've all wondered about at some poin: what are the chances of intelligent life beyond earth?

President Washington (22:41):
So let's start with your work at NASA. You were selected to participate in an independent study on UAPs or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. Our listeners are probably more familiar with the term that I grew up with, which is UFOs, <laugh>: Unidentified Flying Objects. So can you explain the difference between these terms and what is the rationale behind the change in terminology?

Anamaria Berea (23:11):
Sure. So UFOs comes from Unidentified Flying Objects, which was the original term that the community and the public used for several decades after the 40s when we had allegedly the first observation of what more popular was called the flying saucer, right. But to get things more serious and into the scientific realm, scientists decided to change the name into unidentified anomalous phenomena, which is not necessarily about flying phenomena. Right? So this can be any type of unidentified phenomena, maybe coming from the sea or sub-sea. Most of them might have been observed in our atmosphere. So the rationale for the change in the name has been to basically cast this serious scientific lens to the phenomenon so that we can actually study it. The idea here is to actually emphasize the word unidentified, and the other word is phenomenon. Right. So, I'm a scientist at the course. So for us in, in science, whenever we see something that we cannot explain or understand, we want to cast the, um, scientific method and to try to understand this phenomenon. So it's science that draws that unidentified to identify it, right? So what we have in the middle, whether it's anomalous, whether it's flying, whether it's terrestrial, whether it's under the sea, that is a different story. So that speaks to where that observation has been made.

President Washington (24:52):
Understood, understood. So you are also affiliated with the SETI or S-E-T-I institute, commonly known as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Can you tell us a little bit more about that institute and a little bit more about your work?

Anamaria Berea (25:13):
Yeah, sure. So I've been affiliated with the SETI Institute for a few years now, since before I was in, uh, the, uh, independent study panel with NASA because the institute is looking at all aspects of alien life. So we are not talking about little green man. What we are talking about is microbial life that can potentially be on other planets or moons within our solar system or outside of our solar system. And also potential intelligent life, which can also be potentially within our galaxy. So the SETI Institute actually has two different axis of study. One is with respect to biosignatures, as I was mentioning, microbial life, whether it's current or past on, uh, planets like Mars or on the moon, like, uh, Europa--in this October, we have Europa clipper that is going to launch to study that further--or Titan, right, which is the moon of, of Saturn, or, and the other axis is on technosignatures. So technosignatures mean finding signals or signs of technology anywhere in the universe, and particularly on exoplanets. So, so exoplanets being planets that orbit other suns than our own.

President Washington (26:33):
Right. Well, you mentioned Europa. What is Europa and why is it important?

Anamaria Berea (26:39):
Right. So Europa, it's what's called an icy moon. So that means that with some past missions that were just doing flybys, so flybys Jupiter and the moons of Jupiter, they observe that Europa is enveloped in an ice crust. But underneath this ice crust, there is a very vast ocean. And wherever you have water, there is a high probability of life. Now, the only way we can accurately determine whether there is life underneath the icy crust of Europa is by sending a probe, right. Sending a mission there to basically sample in two and analyze the composition of the ocean on, uh, Europa. So Europa is one of the high probability candidates when it comes to finding these biosignatures within our solar system. So Europa is one, Io is another one, which is another moon of Jupiter, and Titan is another one. And there will be another mission called Dragonfly that will launch probably late in the 2030s and look for signals of life on, um, Titan, which, uh, has, uh, oceans of methane.

President Washington (27:51):
Outstanding. So any plans or analyses or studies in the work, works to look at planets outside of our solar system.

Anamaria Berea (28:02):
Yes. So that is the main purpose of the James Webb telescope. So the James Webb telescope is sampling through spectrometry, the exoplanetary atmospheres on these exoplanets that orbit, uh, suns that are not our own sun. Right. Okay. And through the composition of these atmospheres, scientists try to determine whether some of those chemicals or combinations of chemicals can be produced by biological processes. Right. So you can infer from the composition of the atmosphere if there can be life on that planet. So going back to your question about my affiliation with the SETI Institute, it's actually then when my affiliation with the institute came about when I was part of this project with Frontier Development Lab, where we simulated the exoplanetary atmospheres based on metabolic networks. Okay. So finding metabolic networks on the, uh, surface of a planet. How will that processes, how will they change the composition of an, uh, atmosphere on that exoplanet? Right? And we create lots of simulations and try to understand what kind of combinations we can have at the micro scale on the surface of the planet in these metabolic networks. And the macro scale with respect to the planetary atmosphere.

President Washington (29:21):
Okay. So let me take that question to the next step. Give me an idea, give me your thoughts on intelligent life on other planets.

Anamaria Berea (29:31):
With respect the intelligent life and, and actually even the other life. Are we talking about simultaneous life that exists right now living versus past versus future?

President Washington (29:44):
I'm talking about right now.

Anamaria Berea (29:45):
Right now. Simultaneous with us

President Washington (29:47):
Right now.

Anamaria Berea (29:49):
So for that, I actually have a low probability for that. We have the Drake equation, uh, which actually is good heuristic or indicator for us in how we can calculate these probabilities. And with the Drake equation, while we might have lots of planets within, or exoplanets, within the habitable zone, uh, where life can develop and emerge, there is a, an entirely different question with respect to whether that life can evolve into intelligent life. That's one step. The next step with the, can that intelligent life evolve into a life that can create technology. Right. Because may, maybe they won't. Right, right. But just with respect to intelligent life, we actually don't know that because we only have a sample of one. Right.

President Washington (30:40):
I I know, I know. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. But, but let me throw out some numbers and you tell me where I'm off. Alright. We know that there is an estimated about a hundred billion galaxies.

Anamaria Berea (30:53):
That's right. Yeah. Okay. <affirmative>.

President Washington (30:54):
Each galaxy, each single galaxy has billions of stars, as does ours. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And each of those stars has in many sense, lots of planets on those individual stars. Right. A hundred billion galaxies, billions of stars each with most likely multiple planets. And so if you use the Kepler data alone It estimates 300 million habitable

Anamaria Berea (31:29):
In habitable zones, yes.

President Washington (31:29):
With environments not too different from Earth.

Anamaria Berea (31:33):
That's right.

President Washington (31:34):
Yeah. 300 million. And out of those 300 million planets, your estimate is very low

Anamaria Berea (31:42):
For intelligent life.

President Washington (31:43):
For intelligent life.

Anamaria Berea (31:44):
Yeah. So my estimate is <laughs>

President Washington (31:44):
So help me, so help me to understand why that, 'cause the numbers tell me that by golly, there's gotta be intelligent life.

Anamaria Berea (31:52):
So, uh, your numbers are correct in saying that the probability for life is high in generic. But now

President Washington (32:01):
Again, I'm not talking about amoebas and protozoans, I'm talking about

Anamaria Berea (32:04):
Â鶹ÊÓƵ humanlike. Right? Yes. Intelligence. Right. But again, evolutionary processes require, um, millions and millions of years. Right.

President Washington (32:16):
But we're, but we're a young galaxy.

Anamaria Berea (32:18):
The question, yes. But the question is more about are we early in the evolution of emergence of intelligent life versus are we late on that? Right. If we are talking about galaxy times. So the question is whether they're simultaneous with us, right. And at the same level or similar level of intelligence with us. So that is actually a lower probability.

President Washington (32:48):
<laugh>. Yeah, I hear you. We think we're smarter than what we are. I'm telling you right now, my estimate is that it is a high probability of intelligent life.

Narrator (33:01):
Last, but certainly not least, let's revisit an old fashioned crime story. Mary Ellen O'Toole is a professor and director of the Forensic Science Program. And as a former criminal profiler, she's helped capture, interview and understand some of the world's most infamous people, including Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and Ted Kozinski, the Unabomber.

President Washington (33:23):
Not often do we get to talk to someone who engaged the Green River Killer and the Unabomber. So how do you profile somebody and did you find anything interesting with these individuals?

Mary Ellen O'Toole (33:34):
When we profile somebody, it means that we study their behavior from a crime scene. So for example, in the Green River Killer, he killed for a long time before he was identified. He killed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the early 2000s. That's a lot of murders.

President Washington (33:53):
Yes.

Mary Ellen O'Toole (33:54):
That's a lot of murders. And it's a lot of time to fly under the radar screen. So that task force was looking for him for all of those years. And it became important to understand how did he get away with it? Because there were other cases where they get apprehended pretty quickly. Recently, there was a serial killer in LA who killed three people. Over the course of a couple days. He got arrested quite quickly, Green River, however, decades. And one of the reason that he did is because he lived a normal lifestyle. He was married, he had a child, he went to church, he had a regular job for some 30 years.

Mary Ellen O'Toole (34:27):
So people thought when he was arrested, they were, it couldn't be this guy 'cause he's my neighbor and he's very normal. But what we do, we looked at all of Gary Ridgway, who's the Green River Killer, we looked at all of his murders and he left his victims outside at outdoor crime scenes. And in fact, some of the remains of the victims were not found for decades because he was very efficient at being able to hide the bodies or dump the bodies in a way that prevented them from being found. And of course, over the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, we simply did not have the technology from a forensic perspective to be able to do a lot with those crime scenes. Now, times have changed and we can do a lot more. But when I first met him--I became part of the task force out in Seattle--when I first met Gary Ridgway, I was really surprised by how normal and engaging that he was. And to look at him, there is no way that you would know what he did. I mean, you'd sit next to him on Metro and you would never know that he was the most prolific serial sexual killer in US history.

President Washington (35:37):
But somehow you profiled him. So you knew. If you sat by him on that train, would you know, could you have said something to him or asked him a question that would say to you, okay, I'm starting to get some eerie feelings from this guy.

Mary Ellen O'Toole (35:52):
What I'm gonna tell you may not click for a lot of people, but the one thing that is present in most of the serial sexual killers, and I say that specifically because a serial sexual killer, that's their motivation for murder. It's for sexual purposes. They meet the criteria of the psychopathic personality disorder. The old term is sociopath, the new term is psychopath. And part of the psychopathic structure is that these individuals have the ability to show you what we call snake eyes, which means their eyes are very normal a lot of the time, but when you're interviewing them or they're angry at you during an interview, or they don't like something that you've said, their eyes transform into what we call snake eyes. Their eyes lose their color, they go at half mask. And when you see it, it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Mary Ellen O'Toole (36:45):
And if I saw someone in public, and I have a couple times, that makes it transformation to snake eyes, then I know stay away. And I saw that with Gary Ridgway a lot. If I said something to him that he didn't like, he would lose the eye color from his eyes and his eyes would become coal black and they would be at half mask. And I know those were the eyes that his victims saw right before they murdered him. And we know it's a neurological issue. We don't have a lot of information on why. We just know that it's present in psychopathic individuals.

President Washington (37:18):
So do you help train students now to profile?

Mary Ellen O'Toole (37:24):
Actually, I do. And we're starting some pretty neat new initiatives that will allow us to do even more of that. Because I do have a group of students that want to go take their expertise more into the behavioral area and they see the value of it. So I have a class right now, where students are learning how to study crime scenes from a behavioral perspective and then analyze the behavior. And then from that behavior, what they do is they explain who's the offender, what kind of an offender would've committed a crime like this. And in fact, in the small semester this time, I gave them three cases to analyze. And one of them was D.B. Cooper: never solved, jumped out of an airplane with $200,000. We never found him.

President Washington (38:11):
They're still looking for him. Right. This is the

Mary Ellen O'Toole (38:13):
Still looking for him. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Never found him. So some of the students get that case. Another group, they get the Marilyn Monroe case. Marilyn Monroe was determined to have died as a result of suicide. Not so sure about that. And then the third case that my students work on just for their midterms is the Black Dahlia case. And Black Dahlia is a unsolved case out of Los Angeles where this beautiful young woman that had moved to LA to become a movie star. And she ended up meeting up with the wrong person who kidnapped her and kept her for a number of days, and then placed her dismembered body in a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and she's referred to as the Black Dahlia. So my students study those cases for the first half of the year, and they look at the behavior and from the behavior they draw behavioral traits of the offender and what the offender is like, what kind of a job the offender has, what kind of relationship the offenders have with other people. So they learn how to take the behavior and extrapolate that into who the offender is.

President Washington (39:15):
What type of student goes into forensic science?

Mary Ellen O'Toole (39:18):
I think there is a type, and I've thought about this for a long time, students who are very curious, very empathic, very motivated students that have a lot of internal fortitude because they know they're gonna go out there, for example, at least a lot of them to the body farm. And they're gonna see some things that are pretty upsetting with the decomposition of a human donor. So these are students that have really thought this through very well, and students that are critical thinkers. That's the course I teach here is critical thinking. You're not born with it. It's not a gift. You need to develop it. I am amazed by how quickly students learn to be very adept critical thinkers in a way that allows them to cut through complex cases, tear them apart, and look at sections, put the sections back together, and then make analysis about who the offender is.

Mary Ellen O'Toole (40:20):
So I see that in so many of my students, and they don't jump to conclusions. And they understand that opinions are just that. They're just opinions. They're not the result of critical thinking. So I'm impressed by how well my students bring those traits together and apply it into these cases. So it's really an eclectic combination of traits that students really develop, knowing that all of that is gonna be necessary if they want to be really well-rounded in the job. And I love the term audacity because being audacious is not the same as being arrogant. Being audacious is to stand up and say, we've got thousands of unidentified remains in medical examiner's offices throughout the United States. What can we do to reunite those individuals with their family members? We know that we've got unsolved cases out there of marginalized victims throughout the United States. Audacious means what can we do to solve those crimes? And so if my students can be as audacious as is humanly possible, they're gonna be magnificent forensic scientists.

Narrator (41:37):
This is only a preview of the incredible talent and innovation here at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. There's so much more to explore and we hope you stick around to see more ways that George Â鶹ÊÓƵ is hard at work, developing bold solutions to the grand challenges of our time. On behalf of President Gregory Washington, thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are all together different.

Outro (42:03):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students graduates in higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.