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Students Invent/Market Nosebleed Device

Imagine waking up in the wee hours of the morning to your child standing beside your bed with a bloody nose, or leaving a movie early because your nose is bleeding, or even heading to the emergency room to have your child’s nose cauterized.

Nosebleeds are startling, messy and time-consuming, but they’re not just an inconvenience, they’re expensive. Currently, one in every 200 emergency room visits is for a nosebleed, with an estimated 700,000 cases annually.  

Jacob Hess BS ’18, Kortney James and Dalton Facer BS ’17 have a solution. Together, the three created and marketed Rhinostasis, an innovative, cost-effective product to stop out-of-control nosebleeds. Hess, a biochemistry and pre-medical graduate; James, who is pursuing a post-bachelor’s degree enhancement in microbiology; and Facer, an economics and entrepreneurship graduate, have already secured one patent for the product and are working toward Food and Drug Administration approval before going commercial.

“Rhinostasis will pre-treat cotton inserts with a safe medicine that helps clot blood and prevent future bleeding,” Hess said. “The inserts could be used by medical professionals or people at home.”  

The product has earned several kudos already, winning WSU’s 2018 Opportunity Quest and an annual business plan competition between WSU and Shanghai Normal University (SHNU) in China.

Planting Seeds of Knowledge

For 54 years, professor Stephen Clark BS ’64 introduced the wonders of botany to students like Mary Carver Hall BS ’85, who changed her major to botany after falling in love with the subject. She returned her thanks with a donation to name the Mary Carver Hall Herbarium in the Tracy Hall Science Center. The herbarium now houses Clark’s collection of 28,000 plant specimens gathered in the area surrounding the university, as well as plants from the first president of Weber Stake Academy, Louis F. Moench, who was an avid collector.

Grooving to Math

“It’s too hard,” “It’s boring,” “It’s frustrating,” “I hate it,” students have been known to say about mathematics. But, what if a different instructional approach made the subject more relatable, more understandable, more … fun?

In June 2018, WSU’s Center for Science & Mathematics Education presented the weeklong workshop Math + Dance: Physical Problem Solving Methods to a group of secondary educators. Dance professor Erik Stern and mathematics assistant professor Rachel Bachman taught participants how to teach mathematics through dance, integrating kinesthetic, creative and interpersonal concepts.

 

23:

The number of secondary math teachers who participated in Math + Dance

9:

The number of school districts represented at the workshop

Introducing Andrea Easter-Pilcher

The new dean of the College of Science helped reintroduce beaver to a Russian nature reserve, snare-trapped grizzly bears for research in Montana and spent her most recent nine years as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at St. George’s University in Grenada.

“My career has been so exciting; I’ve done research all over the world, and I’ve worked with great faculty and administration at many universities,” said Andrea Easter-Pilcher. “It’s been inspirational and exciting, and I really look forward to continuing that at Weber State University.”

Easter-Pilcher was awarded a postdoctoral research appointment in wildlife ecology from Purdue University. She earned a Ph.D. in biological sciences at Montana State University, a master’s in wildlife biology at the University of Montana and a bachelor’s in cultural anthropology at Bowdoin College in Maine.

 

Crowning Math Champions

In March 2018, Weber State hosted over 1,100 seventh- to 12th-grade students for the State of Utah Mathematics Contest. The young math whizzes visited the Ogden campus to compete in a 2.5-hour, 40-question math test, and the top five performers from each grade earned awards. WSU is slated to host the contest through 2020.