Ecology, Conspiracies, and Chemistry: A Peek into Chatham’s Faculty Research
Assistant Professor of Water Resources Ryan Utz stands outside the Eden Hall Campus deer exclosure. (TK CREDIT)
Tucked away in the woods of Eden Hall Campus, there are fences standing eight feet high. Each surrounds 400 square meters of land. Inside, you might see an ash tree or American elderberries—species that once thrived in Pennsylvania but are harder to find today.
Within these barriers, Assistant Professor of Water Resources Ryan Utz and his students are studying what happens to native plants when deer are kept out of a natural area. Eden Hall’s woods are characteristic of lots of urban and suburban forests in Pennsylvania, Utz said. “It’s mostly invasive species that are out there in the woods,” he said. “The forests are really radically changing. The biggest part of that here is probably the overpopulation of deer.”
Pennsylvania’s ubiquitous white-tailed deer are one of the state’s biggest environmental concerns, Utz said. That’s because so many natural predators of the deer, such as wolves and mountain lions, are gone due to deforestation, hunting, and other human interventions. So, deer proliferate and eat everything remotely palatable to them down to the stump. Many invasive species tend to thrive in Penn’s woods partly because they’re among the few things deer won’t eat.
The results of one study were published by Utz and his colleagues in the journal Forest Ecology and Management in 2022. “It’s sort of a mix between good news and bad news,” Utz said. Overall native plant diversity within the fences didn’t go up, but some native plants rebounded that wouldn’t have outside of the exclosure. “It’s very specific plants that either have a long life in the seedbank or have some ability to get into the fences and do well, if you turn off the deer pressure.” One example is ash trees, which were among the dominant trees in Pennsylvania and the Northeast U.S. until an invasive beetle decimated them.
Now, Utz wants to explore management options that could be applied to the whole Eden Hall Campus. That’s a challenge due to the scale of the deer problem. He has a grant proposal that would create a longer deer fence and study the hydrological effects of such an exclosure. But the whole campus can’t be surrounded by a fence, so Utz also envisions a hunting program, potentially involving students, to keep the deer population down. These ideas could point towards future solutions for the lack of diversity throughout the forests of the Northeast U.S.
“Diversity promotes the things we want out of ecosystems,” Utz said. That includes natural resources, food, and clean water. More diversity also allows ecosystems to thrive and build resilience. “We depend on these ecosystems to give us quality lives,” he said. “The more diverse the ecosystems, the more those resources are sustained. And diversity is crashing right now because of these problems.”
Conspiracy Theories
Christine Sarteschi researches those on the fringe. From the loose collection of individuals known as sovereign citizens to the loyal followers of a woman who calls herself the Queen of Canada, Sarteschi’s work is interested in people whose lives are consumed by conspiracy theories and extremist views.
“I’ve always studied people in extreme circumstances,” she said during an interview in her office in August 2024. During her Ph.D. scholarship at University of Pittsburgh, she became interested in the crossover between the criminal justice system and mental illness. In 2010, Sarteschi joined Chatham’s faculty as a professor of social work and criminology. Since then, she’s focused her research on people who propagate conspiracy theories.
She gave an example involving sovereign citizens, anti-government individuals who believe they’ve found loopholes in the law which allow them to evade taxes and legal documents, such as drivers’ licenses. The schemes are often illogical and naturally lead to run-ins with law enforcement. This year, she learned of a new tactic of theirs. Via in-person seminars and online discussions, sovereign citizens were sharing the false claim that obtaining a U.S. passport could give them diplomatic status, elevating them above the laws that apply to ordinary Americans.
“I’ve always studied people in extreme circumstances,” said Christine Sarteschi, professor of social work and criminology.
She wrote a report about it and published it online, so police officers could identify people espousing these views and tactics as sovereign citizens. Police need to know this information because “officers are often the first people dealing with them, and they might end up getting into a physical altercation with them,” she said. “There have been incidents where sovereign citizens have shot and killed police.”
A persistent subject of Sarteschi’s research is Romana Didulo, a conspiracy theorist and social media personality who calls herself the “Queen of Canada.” In posts on Telegram, she combines elements of the QAnon movement—where followers of an anonymous forum poster named “Q” believe a secret cabal of satanists run the United States—with her own false claims, which center around the alleged illegitimacy of the Canadian government.
One of the reasons for researching these social media phenomena is warning people of the dangers of getting involved with these ideologies, Sarteschi said. “I’m watching people be harmed by them,” she said. “[Didulo’s] followers are hurting themselves by believing in ideas that aren’t true.” For example, some of her most loyal adherents stopped paying their bills and taxes after their “Queen” told them they no longer had to. As a result, Sarteschi said, these people end up with utilities shut offs and dwindling pension payments.
While she noted governments face a difficult task in responding to these types of movements, Sarteschi thinks institutions could do a better job of alerting the public to these individuals. “I do think there’s a role for government to play in warning about people like this,” she said. “Maybe [there’s] a place for educators to teach people how to recognize scams or scam artists. And groups in society that are nonprofit-oriented who could help people in circumstances like this.”
Saba Ismail ’25 works in one of Chatham’s chemistry labs. (Nancy Andrews)
Chemistry
Can electrical fields make chemical reactions more sustainable by reducing wasted products? This is essentially the question Assistant Professor of Chemistry William Pfalzgraff and his undergraduate student researchers are trying to answer as they run experiments, gather data, and interpret the results.
One of those students is Syba Ismail ’25, who majors in chemistry and handles the experimental side of the project. She catalyzes electrodes with molecules in a clean room lab and uses those instruments in reactions. In another room down the hall, Sam Schury ’25, who majors in biochemistry, analyzes data on a computer and looks at how different factors in the experiments can be tuned to optimize the electric field effect. The team’s work received national recognition last year, when Sam Beall-Dennell ’25 was awarded the Goldwater Scholarship for her computational research on the project. Her simulations track whether or not the experiments in the lab worked, why they did or didn’t, and how they could receive different results in the future.
“The thing about research is that it’s never done,” Pfalzgraff said. “Every time you find something new, that creates 10 more questions.” For Pfalzgraff, Chatham’s small size allows him to provide more direct mentorship to his student researchers, helping them with tough problems and reminding them that in research, unlike in the classroom, not getting the right answer is part of the process.
“Small colleges have a really outsized impact on research relative to their size,” Pfalzgraff said. Lots of STEM Ph.D. students obtained their undergraduate degrees from small universities like Chatham. “Here, we really care about teaching. Teaching was my first love. I’ve also grown to love research quite a lot.”
This article by Mick Stinelli was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of the Chatham Recorder alumni magazine. To view more Recorder stories, click here.
Mick Stinelli is the editorial and communications manager at Chatham University. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, WYEP.org, and 90.5 WESA.