Five faculty and staff members have been appointed to the search committee to advise the UT System Board of Regents on the selection of a new UTA president. Faculty representatives are: Dr. Dennis Reinhartz, professor of history and Russian; Dr. Thomas Chrzanowski, professor of biology; and Dr. John W. Priest, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering; and Dr. Elizabeth C. Poster, nursing dean.

They are joined by Kathryn Beller, director of Texas Hall, and Dr. Michael Burton, president of the UTA Alumni Association. A student, who will be selected by the student government, also will serve.

The 18-member committee will be asked to present the names of five to 10 candidates to the board, which will make the final decision. Former President Robert E. Witt became president of the University of Alabama on March 1.

The committee will be chaired by Dr. Teresa Sullivan, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs for the UT System. Chancellor Mark G. Yudof will also serve on the committee. Representing the Board of Regents on the committee will be Dr. Judith Craven of Houston and Cyndi Taylor Krier of San Antonio. Representing presidents of other UT System institutions are Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, president of the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Dr. Larry Faulkner, president of UT-Austin.

Community representatives are: Tom Cravens, president and CEO of Northwest National Bank in Arlington and chair of the UTA Development Board; Robert L. Herchert, chairman of Freese & Nichols Inc. in Fort Worth and a member of the UTA Development Board; Wes Jurey, president and CEO of the Arlington Chamber of Commerce; Elzie Odom, mayor of Arlington; and Dan Serna, an Arlington CPA and a former member of the Arlington City Council.

The Hart eCenter at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has received accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) to offer a professional certificate program in digital game development. The program will begin in July 2003.

The new program, which will be called the Digital Games Guildhall at SMU, will offer three tracks that match the primary careers in the industry: art creation, level design and software development.

SMU officials believe that they are the first to receive accreditation from a regional accrediting organization for a program in digital game development. SACS is one of six regional accrediting organizations in the U.S. recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The SMU program is the only digital games program developed with industry participation at a research university.

Peter Raad, professor and L. W. Hart Director of the Linda and Mitch Hart eCenter, said that being housed at SMU will enable the Guildhall to draw on experts in fields such as business, engineering, humanities and law to add depth to the program.

SMU is creating the program to help meet the needs of the burgeoning digital games industry, which is growing at a rate of 15-20 percent a year. This results in the need for about 5,000 new hires a year, and the industry urgently needs adequately trained personnel to fill these jobs.

Raad also noted that technology developed for the games industry has applications for many other industries, including national defense, scientific simulation and education/training.

Dallas is home to many game development companies and luminaries in the game development industry. Several of these industry leaders approached the Hart eCenter in the fall of 2002 with the idea of an intense, industry-oriented training program.

The 18-month program consists of six three-month terms, each culminating in a real-world project. Classes will be taught by industry professionals and SMU faculty members and will be held in newly equipped rooms at SMU-in-Legacy in Plano. A total of 42 courses will be available, and students will complete 22 of these courses based on their chosen area of specialization.

The Guildhall at SMU is now accepting applications and will enroll 100 students in its first cohort. New cohorts will begin every six months.

Dr. King Davis, former commissioner of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been named the new executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at The University of Texas at Austin.

Davis is the Robert Lee Sutherland Chair in Mental Health and Social Policy in the university's School of Social Work. His research and teaching at the university have focused on public mental health policy, the provision of culturally competent mental health services, health care for the mentally ill and disparities in rates of illness and services for consumers of color.

Davis becomes the fourth executive director in the history of the 63-year old foundation, which awards grants and manages programs to improve mental health research and services in Texas. His appointment follows the retirement in December of Dr. Charles Bonjean, who had directed the Hogg Foundation since 1993. Davis also will hold the Hogg Professorship in Mental Health Policy in the School of Social Work.

Davis' previous academic experience has included service as the William and Camille Cosby Chair in Social Work at Howard University and the Libra Chair in Public Policy at the University of Maine, School of Business. Davis also has held the John Galt Chair in Public Mental Health at the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry. He has held academic appointments at Washington University in St. Louis, Virginia Commonwealth University, Eastern Virginia Medical School and Norfolk State University. Davis served on the Surgeon General's Taskforce on Mental Health and is a consultant to the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health and the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. He is a member of numerous national boards and commissions in mental health.

Davis managed the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services from 1990-1995. He previously served as its director of community mental health services. He was appointed commissioner by Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder. He also worked four years as chief of clinical and inpatient social work services at Walson Army Hospital in New Jersey. Davis earned his doctor's degree from Brandeis University's Florence G. Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He earned his master's and bachelor's degrees in social work from the California State University in Fresno.

The new Alternative Certification Program at Texas A&M University-Commerce will help Texas meet its teacher shortage head on.

The program will enable qualified recent college graduates and degreed career changers to become fully certified teachers in a little over one year.

Dr. Jerry Hutton, dean of the A&M-Commerce College of Education and Human Services, said that alternative certification (AC) programs have been in place since the late 1980s to help Texas obtain the properly certified educators it needs.

A&M-Commerce's program is designed to help Texas schools meet some of the goals established by the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation that deal with the preparation and hiring of teachers. One goal set by the federal initiative states that by 2005-06, 100 percent of teachers should be fully qualified to teach.

This number is a far cry from Texas' figures. According to the "The Teacher Demand Study 2001-02," nearly one-quarter of the new teachers hired during that school year were not fully certified. The report is compiled by the Texas Education Agency and the Texas A&M System's Institute for School-University Partnerships.

Students, who complete A&M-Commerce's AC Program, will begin teaching with a probationary certificate rather than a temporary or emergency permit. This is more appealing to school personnel directors because it ensures the teacher is knowledgeable in their content area and eliminates the need to notify parents that their child's teacher is uncertified, Hutton said.

Donna Tavener, director of Alternative Certification Programs at A&M-Commerce, said that the program is ideal for college graduates who already have coursework in the area they would like to teach.

The program will begin offering classes this summer, with the first students beginning their internship, or first year of teaching, this fall. Students are responsible for finding their own teaching position and can attend job fairs and apply for jobs just like students completing a more traditional field-based route.

The summer session, or pre-internship, will consist of two classes, which will be offered at the A&M-Commerce Metroplex Center in Mesquite. The special education option will require the completion of three classes during the summer.

For the post-internship, the new teacher will then take one additional class during the first summer session and can then apply for full certification.

The AC Program will be offered in all subject areas and grade levels, including high-need areas such as Bilingual/English as a Second Language, math, science, special education, and foreign language.

The AC Program is being funded by a $3 million Transition to Teaching Grant awarded to the Texas A&M System by the U.S. Department of Education. The grant is designated to develop and expand alternative certification programs.

A&M-Commerce received $230,000 in grant funding for the program this school year.

Officials from UT Brownsville and Universidad del Noreste de Mexico signed a cooperation agreement on Thursday, February 27 to enhance educational and scientific opportunities at both institutions. The memorandum of understanding is designed to increase the number of nurses eligible to work in the Rio Grande Valley.

The Consortium of Healthcare Professional Education, made up of four lower Rio Grande Valley hospitals and UTB/TSC, has long been dealing with a shortage of nurses. The local hospitals have had little success when sending recruiting teams to the Phillipines, Canada, Puerto Rico, Spain and Australia to meet the nursing needs of the Valley.

It is hoped that through the new partnership with UNM, located in Matamoros, Mexican nurses can be identified, study to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), then enter the U.S. to train in clinical English to successfully pass other nursing certification tests necessary to be licensed in the U.S.

UNM is a TOEFL preparation and testing site and may serve as a center for classroom instruction for other aspects of the training program. UTB/TSC will work with the CHPE and the Partnership Institute to initiate this program in the next few months.

The project will be funded by the participating hospitals, with expenses to include student stipends, examination fees, TOEFL preparation instruction, instructors' salaries and other administrative fees.

Participating hospitals indicating interest and support for this unique program include Brownsville Medical Center, Dolly Vinsant Community Hospital, Valley Baptist Medical Center, and Valley Regional Medical Center.

The Infinity Project, a program sponsored by the Southern Methodist University School of Engineering and Texas Instruments that introduces students to engineering, has now expanded to community colleges.

Collin County Community College District is the first to embrace the innovative curriculum. Seventeen teachers from CCCCD attended a training program in January and are now teaching it at the college's Frisco campus.

The Infinity Project is designed to help students understand the real-world relevance of engineering, science and math, expose them to high-tech career opportunities and spur interest in pursuing engineering degrees in college. The curriculum and associated technology for the Infinity Project were developed by some of the country's leading college engineering professors, in cooperation with other education experts and high-tech leaders.

Currently, fourteen Texas engineering schools have embraced the curriculum for their first-year students. The Infinity Project also is offered in nearly 60 high schools in 14 states.

The Infinity Project is one of several programs sponsored by The Institute for Engineering Education at SMU, which was created in 2001 to facilitate collaboration among universities, K-12 educational organizations and corporate entities to address the issues related to the shortfall in engineering and technical talent expected in the coming years.

The University of Texas-Pan American will open a research office for the North American International Trade Corridor Partnership (NAITCP) in the International Trade and Technology building on campus. The announcement was made following a two-day conference of the NAITCP held Feb. 27-28 - the first time the group has met in Edinburg.

NAITCP is an organization of mayors and city officials representing U.S., Mexico and Canada and working on border issues affecting member cities. Among the issues of viable interest to the group were - the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Maquila Industry and transportation - in particular the promotion of I-69 and I-35.

Details on the newly established partnership between the University and NAITCP are still being worked out but organizers have said this could be very beneficial for the entire Rio Grande Valley.

The NAITCP quarterly conference held at the IT2 building made headlines both sides of the border and attracted representatives from nearly 25 cities, including San Antonio, Laredo, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

The Texas Tech University System Board of Regents have named Loretta Bradley, Ph.D., professor of counseling education in the College of Education, and Wijesuriya Dayawansa, Ph.D., professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, as Paul Whitfield Horn Professors.

The designation is the highest honor a professor can receive at Texas Tech. Named for the university's first president, the Horn Professorship was established in 1966 to recognize scholarly achievement and outstanding service to Texas Tech.

Bradley's research covers the areas of supervision, multicultural counseling, advocacy and integrative counseling interventions. She recently was selected as one of the top 25 counselors who made significant contributions to the counseling profession during the period 1952-2001.

Bradley also has been the co-recipient of the American Counseling Association's Research Award and the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision's Research Awards. She has served as president of the American Counseling Association and was invited to participate in the 1999 White House Conference on Mental Health.

In 1996 she received the President's Excellence in Teaching Award at Texas Tech and is currently a member of the Texas Tech Teaching Academy.

Dayawansa's expertise in control theory has led to more than 100 published articles in mathematical and engineering outlets. He has three funded research projects this year that total more than $1.5 million, including a National Science Foundation grant. In 1999, Dayawansa was named Graduate Professor of the Year in the Texas Tech Department of Mathematics.

Dayawansa serves on the editorial board of several journals and as a member of several international conferences on decision and control, including the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal of Control and Optimization, which is considered one of the top two journals in the field of control theory.

Dr. James R. Halpert, chairman of UTMB's Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, has been elected secretary-treasurer of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Pharmacology is the science that explores the way drugs and other chemicals act on the body.

Halpert will officially begin his new duties on July 1 and will hold the position for three years.

At UTMB, Halpert is researching cytochrome P450, a major enzyme system in the liver that is responsible for metabolizing drugs and other chemicals. His studies are intended to help improve drug design and therapy, which would lead to more customized medicines and, therefore, fewer adverse drug reactions. Halpert is also the deputy director of UTMB's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center and director of its Biotransformation Research Core.

Active in ASPET since joining the scientific society in 1985, Halpert was a member of the organization's nominating committee for the Division of Drug Metabolism and also served on the division's executive committee. He chaired the division from 1997 to 1999, the same period he was a member of the ASPET Scientific Council. Halpert joined the editorial board of Drug Metabolism and Disposition in 1994, serving as an associate editor in 1998 and 1999. In 2000, he became editor of the journal and joined ASPET's Board of Publications Trustees. Halpert, who also served on the editorial board of Molecular Pharmacology from 1995 to 2000, co-chaired a symposium at the 14th World Congress of Pharmacology last year in San Francisco.

Halpert has been the professor and chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology since 1998. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1977 from Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, and his master's degree in toxicology the following year from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. After completing his post-doctoral training at the Center for Environmental Toxicology at Vanderbilt University, Halpert became a research assistant professor in 1981 at the Karolinska Institute and later an assistant professor. He then joined the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arizona as an assistant professor in 1983 and was promoted to associate professor four years later. Appointed to professor at the university in 1992, he became foreign adjunct professor at the Karolinska Institute in 1997.

Halpert served as deputy director of the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center at UA between 1994 and 1998. He was a member of the National Institutes of Health Pharmacology Study Section from 1992 to 1995 and served as chairman the final two years.

The 20 million Americans suffering from osteoarthritis are all too familiar with the paucity of treatment options for the painful disease. Most just take anti-inflammatory drugs and learn to deal with the pain.

But what if osteoarthritis could be stopped before it started? That's exactly what Rice University's Kyriacos Athanasiou hopes to accomplish through his latest research, a $1.3 million tissue-engineering program aimed at growing replacement cartilage for those suffering from knee injuries.

The research centers on the meniscus, a kidney-shaped wedge of cartilage about the size of a man's wristwatch.

The meniscus fits between the rotating surfaces of the knee, cushioning the stress of walking and running by spreading the load over a wider area of the joint.

This reduction of mechanical stress is critical because it is repeated mechanical stress in the joints that causes osteoarthritis, the form of arthritis that attacks most people as they age.

But removing the meniscus often is necessary because once damaged, it can never heal. Some 750,000 Americans have all or part of a meniscus removed each year, primarily due to sports-related injuries and auto accidents.

If surgeons could replace the damaged meniscus instead, they could reduce the chances for early onset osteoarthritis in each of those patients.

The push to grow menisci via tissue engineering follows three years of preliminary research by Athanasiou and colleagues in Rice's Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory (MBL). During that time, the researchers have established basic methods for growing cartilage in the lab using tissue engineering.

Tissue engineering, a relatively new field of research, combines the latest techniques in bioengineering and biotechnology with the latest advances in materials science. The goal of tissue engineering is to use a patient's own cells to grow replacement tissue outside the body. The lab-grown organs and grafts can then be transplanted back into the patient without any risk of rejection.

The cartilage-growing techniques developed at MBL include a number of methods of spurring cells to multiply by simulating the conditions the cells would experience inside the body. This includes mechanical stimulation - machines literally compress, tumble and stretch the tissue as it is growing - followed by periods of rest and relaxation.

Rather than growing slabs of cartilage and carving out meniscus-shaped pieces, Athanasiou and colleagues are attempting to grow the replacement meniscus in the exact shape needed.
This marks the first time that researchers in any lab have tried to grow menisci in a predetermined shape, but Athanasiou said it is vital because doing so will allow the researchers to precisely simulate the conditions inside the knee during tissue growth.

That will make it less likely that the replacements will fail once they are subjected to the high-stress environment of the knee following implantation.

The research is funded under a five-year grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have identified a crucial link in the process that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, uses to get inside one kind of human white blood cells.

A discovery reported in the current issue of Journal of Virology, ultimately could lead to new therapies that researchers hope might block the entry of HIV into some white blood cells, thus slowing the reproduction of the virus.

Led by William A. O'Brien, UTMB researchers Jana J. von Lindern, Daniel Rojo, Cheng Deng, Georges Herbein, Monique Ferguson and Todd C. Pappas implicated a protein known as CD63 in the intricate dance of biochemical reactions that enables HIV to slip through the protective cell membranes of macrophages, one of the two most important types of white blood cells targeted by the virus.

O'Brien's team discovered the involvement of CD63 after testing a large "library" of antibodies that blocked the action of different proteins on the surfaces of macrophages. They were looking for a protein whose deactivation would prevent HIV from entering the cells. When an antibody for CD63-a so-called "transmembrane" protein that lies partly inside and partly outside the cell membrane-prevented HIV from getting in, they knew that CD63 was a necessary part of the process by which HIV entered macrophages.

The scientists found that CD63 antibody did not keep HIV out of the other major type of cells the virus infects, T-helper lymphocytes, despite the presence of CD63 on the surface of those cells. Still, the ability to prevent infection of macrophages would be a significant advance for HIV therapy, since the cells are an important reservoir for HIV and may be directly involved in illnesses specifically caused by HIV, such as AIDS-related dementia.

His team is now investigating how that mechanism works, which he thinks might involve the way in which the virus initially attaches itself to the macrophage. A compound able to block that process could be part of a battery of "entry inhibitor" drugs aimed at fighting HIV at the cell membrane. Current therapies target the virus only after it enters cells.

A drug used to treat a rare form of leukemia may not fight the same disease in the central nervous system, according to researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

STI-571, also called Gleevec, was approved nearly two years ago by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a relatively uncommon leukemia, with about 5,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States. The drug blocks signals within cancer cells and prevents a series of chemical reactions that cause the cell to grow and divide.

Specifically, Gleevec is a chemical inhibitor of the Bcr/Abl tyrosine kinase, a dysregulated enzyme believed to cause leukemia. The drug prevents Bcr/Abl from stimulating the white blood cells to grow and overproduce, especially blast (immature) cells.
Dr. Robert Ilaria Jr. is an assistant professor of internal medicine and molecular biology and senior author of the study that will appear in an upcoming issue of Blood. The study is now available online as a "First Edition Paper."

In the Blood study, Ilaria and his colleagues introduced Bcr/Abl into mouse bone-marrow cells to generate mice with a form of leukemia similar to human CML. Though not an inherited disease, CML has a genetic component. It is caused by an abnormal joining in bone-marrow cells of DNA sequences from two chromosomes that form an altered chromosome, called the Philadelphia chromosome, leading to an overproduction of white blood cells. CML usually develops slowly, although it can progress to a fast growing "accelerated phase."

When mice received Gleevec for treatment of CML, many of them became lame, developing altered posture, weak limbs and neurological abnormalities. These abnormalities were originally believed to be from drug toxicity, but further investigation revealed all the mice developed central-nervous-system (CNS) leukemia in their brain and spinal cord, Ilaria said. It was not related to their existing CML, which was responding well to treatment.

Additional mice studied by the researchers showed the drug does not cross the blood-brain barrier, thereby allowing CNS leukemia to develop. Similar results also have been observed in nonhuman primates, and there has been one published case report of a human developing CNS leukemia while on Gleevec, Ilaria said.

These results will be useful in the additional study of anti-CML drugs and in better defining the mechanisms for limited Gleevec penetration into the central nervous system, Ilaria said. Philadelphia chromosome-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) - notorious for being aggressive and incurable without a bone-marrow transplant - is the other form of leukemia that contains the altered chromosome, he said.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Leukemia Association of North Central Texas.

Other UT Southwestern contributors to the Blood study were Dr. James A. Richardson, professor of pathology and molecular biology, and Nicholas C. Wolff, first author of the study and research associate in the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research. A researcher from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute also contributed to the work.

The Sky Theater at the University of North Texas will be closed until further notice due to weather damage from a recent ice storm. Ron Dilulio, Planetarium Manager said that facilities and equipment were damaged when a water pipe frozen and burst. Although no fate has been set for a reopening, Dilulio hopes to have the planetarium back online after the school's spring break.

The planetarium is located at the Environmental Education, Science and Technology building at the corner of Hickory Street and Avenue C.