Vicky Santos:
When Dr. Stephanie Poindexter was a child, her parents often took her to the Brookfield Zoo just outside her hometown of Chicago. Like many children, she was captivated by the apes. Unlike many children, she would go on to make primates her life's work.

Today, Dr. Poindexter is a primatologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo. And while she still has a fondness for all primates, she has spent the past decade laser-focused on one species in particular, the little understood and endlessly fascinating creature called the slow loris.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Vicky Santos, and I will be your host for Episode Two: The Slow Loris.

I'm here with Dr. Poindexter, and would you please tell us about how you first became interested in primates?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Sure. The first thing that got me interested in primates would be visiting the zoo with my dad. We spent, I can't even think of how many weekends at the Brookfield Zoo, and I feel like we always started at the primate house and we probably ended at the primate house, but that's where it started.

Vicky Santos:
What is it about them that intrigued you then or intrigues you now?

Stephanie Poindexter:
It was seeing how similar they were to us. Many of the primates that they have at the Brookfield Zoo are in little family groups or they're housed socially. And so you could see young individuals with older individuals, and the way they cared for each other is pretty similar to how my family cared for me. That has always intrigued me.

Vicky Santos:
Most people get interested in something as a kid and then kind of outgrow it. How did you know that you wanted to study primates when you grew up?

Stephanie Poindexter:
I actually decided to study primates, later in life seems not accurate, but later than my childhood. When I was younger, I knew I wanted to do research, and at the time I think the only way I thought you could do research in the way that it's presented to you typically is in a lab coat, and so I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. But I did spend a lot of time with little science kits and microscopes and doing experiments in the backyard. But ultimately I decided that when I went to college, I was going to be pre-med and that medical school would be the best way to express my interest in research.

Vicky Santos:
How did you pivot to primates from med school?

Stephanie Poindexter:
When I initially started undergraduate, I knew that I wanted to be an anthropology major. I'd done all of my research about medical school, I knew all of the prerequisites and that I would spend a lot of time in the biology department and chemistry department, the physics department. But I thought being an anthropology major would give me a unique perspective on humans and maybe make me a better doctor in the long run.

The first class I took in the anthropology department was human evolution, and the very first section of that class was on primates, as primates are sort of the root of human evolution. And I realized that people studied primates for a living.

Vicky Santos:
What can you tell us about the slow loris?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Slow lorises are small-bodied. They have really big eyes, they've got very strong grip. They can't jump, and so they have to find lots of connections throughout the forest. And from that perspective, they move in this really agile way, in this really graceful way, when I think about it. But they primarily eat tree gums and so they create holes in tree bark, which makes them produce this resin or this gum that they primarily eat.

Most species live in a dispersed family group where there'll be a male, a female and then the female's offspring. But slow lorises are also venomous. That's always a very fun fact.

They are definitely threatened. Their populations in the wild are steadily declining, and so we need conservation interventions to help repopulate them and to help bolster their wild populations for the future.

Vicky Santos:
How did they become endangered?

Stephanie Poindexter:
They are threatened by many things that are plaguing lots of animals in terms of deforestation. So there's just less forested areas for these wild animals to be in. In addition to that, slow lorises are very cute, they have very big eyes, very round faces, they're small and furry, and so people sometimes collect them as pets. People will have them as photo props. So you could visit a bar within their geographic range and even outside of their geographic range and maybe take a picture with one.

Vicky Santos:
And what happens when these people find out that they are venomous?

Stephanie Poindexter:
People abandon them. Sometimes they bring them to rescue centers, which is sort of the best case scenario, but sometimes people just put them on a tree wherever they find one, which is not great for wild populations, or for those individuals.

Vicky Santos:
How were you introduced to the slow loris?

Stephanie Poindexter:
I have faint memories of learning about slow lorises when I was an undergraduate. So my major was in physical anthropology with a focus in primate studies. And so Wash U [Washington University in St. Louis] had more primatologists than I think I've ever seen in a department today. I took a lot of classes in primate conservation, biology, evolution. So I definitely learned about slow lorises then. But it wasn't until I did my masters in primate conservation at Oxford Brooks University in the UK that I really got a thorough introduction to slow lorises and all there was that we can learn about them and what we didn't know and what we did know. So I definitely attribute that to my time as a master's student.

Vicky Santos:
Why the slow loris?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Why not the slow loris? So there are so many primates, and I think especially being in an anthropology department, the root of why anthropologists were interested in primates was trying to figure out how humans evolved. So we're looking back at different hominin species and you kind of keep stepping backwards. You get to great apes, you keep stepping backwards, you get to diurnal monkeys and then you take another step back and you get to nocturnal strepsirrhines, which are slow lorises. And I realized with the help of my PhD advisor that what we know about slow lorises, it pales in comparison to what we know about other great apes.

And so as kind of a young researcher trying to figure out what route to take and what would be interesting to me, the slow lorises filled a lot of the things that I think are important when you're developing a research project, in that there are so many gaps in our knowledge about them, and I personally find them to be a really interesting species. And so I started studying slow lorises and I haven't looked back really.

Vicky Santos:
What would you say are some of the more important discoveries you've made about the slow loris while researching them?

Stephanie Poindexter:
So a lot of my work is focused on how slow lorises understand their environment. And the way that we do that is by studying their movement and studying their social interactions with other slow lorises. A part of my work has been understanding how they move to different resources. And so one thing that came out of some research I did while I was in graduate school was that slow lorises move to goal locations in a similar way that much larger daytime diurnal primates would move to them. So the idea is that having a larger brain and being more social makes you a more intelligent primate, and what we were seeing is that even in a smaller group with a smaller brain moving at night, you have a pretty clear understanding of your environment and how to get to different locations.

Vicky Santos:
What can we gain from studying them?

Stephanie Poindexter:
When I think about being in an anthropology department and having a lot of interests that are rooted in biological anthropology, a lot of that is focused on studying and understanding humans and how we evolved. Humans are also primates just like slow lorises are. And so we're all in the same order in that what I can extract from observing slow lorises can be really informative about what might be an innate thing within humans. And so I think we spend a lot of time thinking about humans as being distinct and unique and different than other primates, and my perspective on all of that is that we are more similar than we are different in a lot of ways.

Vicky Santos:
Can you walk me through the process of researching and studying the slow loris in their natural environments? What do you have to do to get ready to go and be there, and what is it like once you're there?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Planning to go is a big endeavor. There is lots of ordering equipment, there is a lot of safety precautions. There are permits that you need to get from whatever country or whatever location you plan to go. You need to let people know that you plan to sort of root around in their forested areas at night or else you might surprise someone, and we don't want that to happen.

Once we get there, there's probably a day or two in the city that we fly into. So recently I've been doing some work in Thailand, and so we fly into Bangkok, we're probably there for a day or two gathering some things, doing a little shopping, and then we will head to the field site.

It normally takes a couple hours to get to wherever we want to get to and a few transfers of cars. So one car gets you to this point, and then once we get into the national parks or whatever reserve we're working in, the transportation changes and we might ultimately end in just a few motorbikes and we're all carrying different things to get to where we're actually going to stay.

But each site can be very different. So some places you'll still have running water, Wi-Fi, everything's very connected and it's great. Some places you can only get a signal if you go to this tree or if you get to this elevation. And so it can really vary.

Vicky Santos:
Who do you take with you on these trips?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Studying primates is very attractive to people, but being without Wi-Fi and running water is not very attractive to people. And so there is a bit of, I always have to have this real talk conversation with students who have really expressed an interest in going into the field in that, yes, you will be able to contact people, but it will be inconsistent, it will be unreliable, and there are bugs and snakes. So which one is more important to you? Because you can do it, but if the snakes are going to be a deal breaker, then maybe there are other ways to study primates.

Vicky Santos:
It's not the glamorous camping, the glamping?

Stephanie Poindexter:
No, it's not glamping, but it really does depend on where you are. We're not pitching tents and eating rice and beans every night, but sometimes for entertainment we watch ants.

Vicky Santos:
Can you tell us what it's like to be out there and what it's like, a day in this research trip? Just tell us what a typical day is like.

Stephanie Poindexter:
I actually spend most of the days sleeping because the lorises are nocturnal. And so we switch our schedule to be like a loris. So our days typically start around 5 or 6 p.m. We will head out to the last known location of a slow loris that we're following. So we tend to follow one slow loris per night, and they all are outfitted with a collar that sort of emits a unique signal. And so we're able to find a specific loris when we want to find them for that evening. And we head out to where they are sleeping. And because it's at night, we do also want to be very quiet, and so we keep a pretty slow pace once we get to the loris. We might be very quick as we try to get to the last GPS location, but once we're following the loris, we're somewhat quiet and we're watching them with these red headlamps, which doesn't disturb them nearly as much as a bright white light would.

We take a data point every 15 to five minutes, and we take a GPS point, we note what behavior they're performing, what tree they're in, how tall they are, how high the tree is, how high they are in the tree. And depending on what night it is, we may go out to try and capture some slow lorises, to take their weight, measure their body lengths, measure their hand span, measure how much fat they have deposited on their body.

Vicky Santos:
How do you catch them?

Stephanie Poindexter:
In some places, it's very popular, there's a local tradition for games in which people climb up very thin poles. So we find a lot of really good tree climbers in the various places we’ve worked in Southeast Asia. This isn't like a universal thing, but just in some of the places that we've been, people are very inclined to climbing trees, are very good at climbing trees.

So a lot of the times you can just sort of shimmy up the tree to where the loris is. And as one of their anti-predator defenses, they freeze up and pause and hope that you don't see them. Because a lot of their predators are going to respond to their movement. And so when they freeze, they become invisible to things like cobras and other large snakes. But for us it becomes helpful because then we can just pluck them from where they are and carefully bring them to the ground to measure them, and then we release them back as quickly as we can in the same place that we found them.

Vicky Santos:
Well, you've walked us through a lot about the slow loris. We've learned a lot. Can you talk a little bit more about why it's important to research them and how it might affect humans?

Stephanie Poindexter:
Absolutely. When we think about human evolution, it's really a progression over millions of years. And with all of the different software or formulas we use to reconstruct the past, it's important that we have a good set of baseline data. So slow lorises are farther back in our evolutionary history, but we still don't know as much about them as we do about humans and other great apes.

And so if we want to fill in the gap between what we see in the present-day haplorhines and how we evolved to that place, starting with strepsirrhines and early non-primate mammals, it's important that we understand what happens with these nocturnal strepsirrhines as well. Because a lot of the times they really do reflect our origins. And when we try to reconstruct the past, it's hard to do it when we're missing this big piece of the puzzle.

Cory Nealon:
Dr. John Crassidis was just a toddler when astronauts first landed on the moon. But by the time he was five, he was obsessed with the moment.

John Crassidis:
My first Halloween costume was an astronaut. So I wanted to be an astronaut.

Cory Nealon:
It sparked a passion for space that only grew with time. Today, Crassidis is the Moog Professor of Innovation and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo. More importantly to you and me, he's the guy keeping satellites and objects in space from crashing into each other. Welcome to "Driven to Discover," a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Cory Nealon and I will be your host for episode one, "Space Junk."

Dr. Crassidis, can you take us back to your childhood and tell us what first inspired your curiosity with space?

John Crassidis:
Absolutely. My father had a National Geographic magazine.

Apollo 11 Audio:
We have a lift off. Lift off on Apollo 11.

John Crassidis:
And my twin brother and I played that over and over again about the Apollo landing.

Apollo 11 Audio:
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

John Crassidis:
It had a little record on it that we would listen to over and over again until it actually broke and we couldn't listen to it anymore. That's what really drove my passion into space.

Cory Nealon:
Over time, though, you’ve become a professor. When did you make this pivot to academia?

John Crassidis:
I got my dream job as a postdoc at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I got to work on real missions. At the time I was applying to be an astronaut. Didn't make the cut. For mission specialists, the vision requirement was 20/200. I have much worse than that, so I couldn't even pass the eye test. And that's fine. So I wanted to see what else I can do. I loved working at NASA. The opportunity came to be a professor. And NASA wanted to keep me on, but I said, "Hey, can I try this academia and see if I like it? If I don't, can I come back to NASA?" They said, "Yes, you can." I went out to academia, loved it. I get the best of both worlds. I get to work with NASA, and all these other agencies, and do the research that I enjoy as a professor too.

Cory Nealon:
Now, 20 some years into your career in academia, you work tracking space debris, otherwise known as space junk. What led you into this field?

John Crassidis:
It’s just a natural progression. I do a lot of work in estimation theory. When I worked at NASA, I developed systems that not only track satellites, but determine how they turn, is basically more where my main area of research is. That requires a lot of neat theoretical work that I liked. It was just a natural progression that I would go into, looking into space junk. I saw that this was going to be a problem, like a lot of us, and it was an area that excited me. It was something that I have a passion for because I know where this is going to lead if we don't fix the problem.

Cory Nealon:
Let's backtrack a bit. Can you tell us what exactly space debris or space junk is, and why we should be concerned about it?

John Crassidis:
Yeah. Space junk is defined as anything that's not useful anymore. So it can be something that fell off of a satellite, or it could be an actual satellite that's no longer working. It's a pretty broad definition. So for example, Ed White lost a glove that floated away when he did his first spacewalk. At that time, that glove was considered space junk.

Cory Nealon:
That gets to another question I wanted to ask. Roughly how many objects are we able to track in space right now?

John Crassidis:
Currently we track over 30,000 objects that are about softball-sized or bigger. That's the limit of what we can do with our current sensors. What we're really worried about is the stuff we can't see. It's estimated anywhere between one centimeter and 10 centimeters, there could be up to 900,000 of those objects. And you asked about the issue, what the problem is. They're traveling very fast, at 17,500 miles per hour. I like to always use the car lane analogy. If they're in the same orbit, meaning they’re in the same lane in terms of cars, they're not going to collide. But we have different orbits. We can have an orbit around the equator, we can have one around the pole, and now you're at the T-bone intersection case. So you can imagine two objects at a T-bone intersection going at 17,500 miles per hour. That would be a very violent collision. That's the stuff that we're very worried about.

Cory Nealon:
Just to put that speed in perspective, you're talking 17,500 miles per hour. Faster than the speed of sound?

John Crassidis:
Yes.

Cory Nealon:
Faster than a speeding bullet?

John Crassidis:
Yes.

Cory Nealon:
Can you tell us how long a typical object might stay in space?

John Crassidis:
That's another problem. We really can't tell how long stuff is gonna stay up there. In low Earth orbit, talking a couple hundred miles, it'll eventually come back down, depending on a lot of factors, unfortunately. But we just don't have very accurate models of how many air molecules are up there. We can do some predictions, but unfortunately they're not as accurate as we want to be. The Iridium-Cosmos, so those are two big satellites that we didn't think were gonna collide, and they did. So that's a problem. It sent a message that we're not tracking the stuff as well as we thought. Even the big stuff. We do a calculation called the probability of collision. It's based on a lot of math, but we can estimate that. And anything greater than one in 10,000 chance of colliding, we will tell one of those satellites, you should maneuver away. Those two satellites did not meet that threshold. I always like to say they won the bad lottery that day. It just happened. It's only... probability. They collided and caused about 500 pieces of debris.

Cory Nealon:
That gets us to another topic I was hoping to discuss, which is the Kessler Syndrome. Could you describe that to our audience and what it means?

John Crassidis:
Yeah. So Donald Kessler in 1978, a NASA engineer, had come up with this theory that said, basically, if a couple objects collide with each other, it's gonna cause more debris, and that debris is gonna collide with other debris. And now we're gonna get a cascading effect where we get to the point of having so much debris up there that it's not worth it to put satellites up there. Also we have to think about, we have to get through that debris field to get to the moon and Mars to get our astronauts. So we're putting our astronauts in harm's way too.

Cory Nealon:
And astronauts have been in harm's way before on the International Space Station with space junk, correct?

John Crassidis:
Correct. There have been a couple of instances where the astronauts had to go to the escape hatch. Fred Whipple in 1947 invented what's called now the Whipple Shield. That can handle little small impacts. There's over a hundred Whipple shields in a space station to protect it from small stuff. But astronauts out there doing their missions, they're completely vulnerable to it.

Cory Nealon:
Is that something that keeps you up at night?

John Crassidis:
I'm actually very worried about astronauts being exposed when they're out there in space and doing their missions outside of the space station, doing space walks. I don't mean to sound pessimistic about it, but I also like to be a realist. I don't think it's a question of if it's gonna happen, I think it's a question of when. If we keep doing this, someday an astronaut's gonna be hurt in space.

Cory Nealon:
One of the things I think people think about is, is this space debris gonna fall from space and hit me while I'm walking around in my day-to-day life.

John Crassidis:
When the satellites come back in, most of the stuff burns up as it comes back in. We, and most countries follow this. We don't build satellites with materials that won't do that. So the satellites that we're building here at University at Buffalo are all made of aluminum. That's gonna burn up. We don't make them out of titanium because that generally won't burn up. The bigger satellites, and not every country follows this, unfortunately, we know the two ones that don't are Russia and China. But our allies and us, any satellite that has thrust remaining has to do a controlled entry over the Pacific Ocean in an area that's very, very unpopulated. We can very much control this. Now obviously, all the stuff that China's been doing lately, with uncontrolleds getting people worried. And some of it did come close to some populated areas. One in particular. But this thing, the chances are small. And really, what can you do about it? Live your life. No human has been hurt by anything coming back in to this point and we're 60 years into the space age.

Cory Nealon:
Is there any way to clean up or remove space junk?

John Crassidis:
Again, a lot of great ideas and a lot of great experiments that are really nice in the sense of showcasing this, but nothing practical, unfortunately. And I don't see anything practical for at least the next 10 to 20 years.

Cory Nealon:
You recently received a $5 million grant to help in your efforts tracking space debris. Can you tell us about that?

John Crassidis:
Sure. So it's called a Space University Research Initiative and it was sponsored by the Air Force. Multiple universities are involved, myself and Moises Sudit from UB. We also have some great partners. We have partners from Purdue, MIT, Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech. I think we have a very strong team to tackle this problem. It was an extremely competitive effort and we ended up winning it. So the grant's gonna look at a number of things, but we want to look at space domain awareness as one of the issues. So adversaries are doing things right now. For example, there's an attack on our satellites every day. Now it's not a major attack in terms of a missile attack, but they're doing more annoyance type stuff, and we have to try to overcome these issues. One of the things with space is, it's very difficult to get that domain awareness.

So the research questions are, "What do we need to do to be able to do that? How do we need to optimize our sensors? Put sensors in space?" The other issue: The moon is starting to get very popular in terms of strategic assets, and to be able to do that out on the moon. That makes the problem a thousand-fold bigger than it is right now. So we're looking at that. The Air Force is not without their sense of humor. They have this thing called the ‘cone of shame,’ and you can't see anything within that cone of shame. So if our adversaries were to put objects within that cone right now, we can't see them. So how are we gonna do this? We're not particularly worried about the moon right now, but in 10 to 20 years it might be an issue. So we have to start doing that basic research that universities do well, to be able to help to the point where we start transitioning that basic research into more applied, and getting technology to be able to do that domain awareness.

Cory Nealon:
How are students involved with this work?

John Crassidis:
We have both undergraduates and graduate students involved in this. The graduate students are doing the research we're trying to do in that space domain awareness. The undergraduates are building satellites for the Air Force. One also, this program called the University Nanosat Program with the Air Force. We're getting ready to deliver our first satellite. That satellite's all done by undergraduates. They're learning tremendous things. What I tell the undergraduates is all the design reviews that I went through at NASA when I was working on satellites, the Air Force is making them go through the same thing.

Cory Nealon:
And it's students, the future generation, who's going to be helping solve this problem with space debris, right?

John Crassidis:
They're gonna have to. That's what I say. The space age didn't start until 1957. So we're talking 65 years ago. And look at what we're talking about right now. Imagine what it would be in another 65 years if we don't do anything. I think for sure Kessler Syndrome is gonna be true. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, we pawn off our problems onto our children. So this generation is going to have to solve this problem.

Cory Nealon:
What in general do you see as the future of aerospace exploration?

John Crassidis:
I think this is a great time to be an aerospace engineer and to get in the field. Look at the excitement that Apollo created. Right now, with all these satellites that we're building, it's giving a tremendous opportunity for aerospace engineers. I think it's the second Apollo. And we're talking about going out to Mars and things like this. So this is a very exciting time. A lot more exciting time than when I was a student. So I would've loved to have been a student right now. I think the excitement that these students bring are going to bring us at a forefront for space exploration. And also solving the space junk problem.

Cory Nealon:
Dr. Crassidis, thank you for joining us.

John Crassidis:
Thanks for having me. It's been a great time.