Jay Gogue is now officially "listening."

With the University of Houston System Board of Regents approving his appointment as the next UH System chancellor and UH president, Gogue will "hit the ground listening," a promise he made when announced as the finalist for the post in July.

Gogue (rhymes with "rouge") will have about a month to hear what's on the minds of students, faculty and staff: his first official day as chancellor/president is Sept. 2. Current UH System chancellor and UH president Arthur K. Smith will retire effective Sept. 1, completing six and a half years spent leading the nation's most diverse urban research university.

Gogue is the second person to fill the role of chancellor of the UH system and president of the UH main campus. Smith was the first person to hold the two posts simultaneously. Gogue was president of New Mexico State University prior to being selected as the top administrator for UH and the UH System.

During the next month, Gogue plans on meeting with students, faculty, administrators and friends of the university in order to launch his term as chancellor/president with a firm understanding of what needs to be done to maintain the momentum UH gained during Smith's term in office.

The Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE), based at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, will receive $10 million over the next two years from the State of Texas in order to develop a plan for early childhood education, including developing resources for programs benefiting early education.

The funding for CIRCLE was one of several education initiatives passed as Senate Bill 76, co-authored by state senators Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) and Juan Hinojosa (D-Mission). The legislation becomes effective Sept. 1.

Last December, Governor Rick Perry designated CIRCLE as Texas' state center for early childhood development. The center now works with the Office of the Governor and the Texas Education Agency to design plans to implement the governor's Early Start Initiatives. As the designated state center, CIRCLE will work to develop training for early childhood providers in Texas, identify curriculum materials for voluntary state standards and focus on pre-literacy skills development. The center will also formulate school-readiness checklists for parents and further coordinate efforts among early childhood funds and programs.

The University of Texas System and its two institutions in San Antonio will allocate $6.5 million for the initial support of the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute, which will promote education, research, and economic development in biomedicine and biotechnology.

The institute, which was created by the Legislature in 2001 but has not been funded by the state, is a collaboration between U.T. San Antonio and the U.T. Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Of the total investment, $4.5 million will constitute a Research Enhancement Fund for the institute. This funding includes $2.5 million that Yudof has made available from the Chancellor's Special Projects Fund, which is derived from excess reserves for medical liability litigation, and $1 million in matching funds from each of the institutions.

UTSA will commit an additional $2 million in endowment funds for the support of two faculty members who will have joint appointments at the two institutions. This funding will come from the university's Lutcher Brown Endowment, which is dedicated to the promotion of academic excellence at UTSA. The endowment was created in the 1980s from the sale of the 25-acre Lutcher and Emily Wells Brown estate in the Terrell Hills section of San Antonio.

Although the institute has not been funded until this time, the two institutions have already been collaborating on a variety of biomedicine and biotechnology projects. The institutions, for example, operate a joint Ph.D. degree program in biomedical engineering. They have also submitted joint grant applications to the National Institutes of Health for studies related to health disparities among minority populations, and they are collaborating with Brooks Air Force Base on several projects related to biotechnology and defenses against bioterrorism.

Representatives of FNIS Flood Services, a division of FNIS, a comprehensive source for real estate-related technology, data, solutions and services, have announced the donation of the complete set of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) flood maps to The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) College of Science Environmental Science and Engineering program.

The donation is valued at over $335,000 and includes over 100,000 individual paper maps along with a complete set of digital map images. University representatives will receive this gift at 9:30 a.m. Thursday, August 7th, on the 6th floor of the UTA Central Library in the Special Collections area.

The FEMA maps delineate flood insurance requirements nationwide. The hard copies for the Texas set will be housed in the University's Central Library as part of the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library. The digital maps will also be made available at the Central Library.

In compliance with the National Flood Insurance Program, FNIS Flood Services provides flood determinations, data and tracking services to national lenders. FNIS is the first flood data provider to acquire and implement a nationwide set of flood maps in FEMA's new digital format. It was this aggressive industry leadership that provided the impetus for the donation. By incorporating digital flood layers with interactive road layers, digital tax/plat maps, aerial images and other property data, FNIS Flood Services has reduced turnaround times and increased productivity by more than 50 percent.

Based in Arlington, Texas, FNIS Flood Services has enjoyed a long-standing relationship and a unique alumni allegiance. Today, more than fifty-percent of FNIS Flood Services' employees have attended UTA or are currently enrolled there.

The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science has received $87,100 from Texas Instruments' TI Foundation to support the program during the 2003-04 academic year.

The grant will benefit 65 economically needy students in the academy, a two-year residential program at the University of North Texas (UNT) that allows talented students to complete their freshman and sophomore years of college while earning their high school diplomas.

Students enroll in the academy following their sophomore year in high school, live in a UNT residence hall and attend UNT classes with college students. After two years, they enroll at UNT or another university to finish their bachelor's degrees.

Since it opened in August 1988, TAMS has been funded by the Texas Legislature as a special line item in the state budget. The academy had received about $1.7 million annually from the legislature to cover operating expenses and tuition, books and fees for approximately 380 students each academic year. The students' parents paid only for room and board -- approximately $4,400 per year.

However, the state's budget shortfall caused the academy's funding to be cut by 12.5 percent for the 2003-04 academic year. Parents were asked to pay $1,000 in addition to room and board costs to enroll their students in the academy.

Out of the 214 new academy students and 162 students returning for their second year, 65 students will be on financial aid this coming academic year. The TI Foundation grant will support the additional $1,000 that these students' parents would have been required to pay, said Dr. Richard Sinclair, TAMS dean.

Sinclair said that in addition to covering the additional $1,000, the grant may be used to cover UNT's potential increase in tuition for the spring 2004 semester.

The extra $1,000 required of parents resulted in 44 students who were admitted to the TAMS Class of 2005 to decide not to attend. But Sinclair said the academy was able to easily fill the class because it had a record number of applications for this academic year.

Six new undergraduate and graduate degree programs at the academic and health institutions within the University of Texas System were approved by the Board of Regents on Thursday (August 7). The programs will go the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for final approval.

The programs include
- a master's degree in physics at U.T. Brownsville.
- a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary health sciences at U.T. El Paso.
- a master's degree in occupational therapy at U.T. Pan American.
- master's and Ph.D. degrees in clinical science at the U.T. Medical Branch at Galveston.
- a master's degree in respiratory care at the U.T. Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The board also approved new long-range plans for additional degree programs at academic institutions. These revised plans will also go to the Coordinating Board so the institutions can receive authority to begin planning for the programs.

After over a year of planning, an agreement between Sam Houston State University and the University of Houston to allow criminal justice doctoral students to receive credit for a law degree will become official on Aug. 21.

The signing will take place at a ceremony at 4:30 p.m. in the Frankel Rare Books Room, on the second floor of the Bates Law Building at the UH Law Center.

Sam Houston State criminal justice dean Richard Ward and associate dean Randy Garner will officially sign the agreement that gives SHSU criminal justice Ph.D. students the opportunity to receive credit for the Doctor of Jurisprudence degree offered by the University of Houston.

Under the agreement, law students will be able to receive credit for upper level course work at UH for a Doctor of Philosophy in criminal justice from SHSU.

Not only one-of-a-kind, the program is the only one of its kind in Texas.

UH Law School will count up to 15 criminal justice graduate credits from SHSU towards a J.D., and SHSU will count up to 15 law graduate credits from UH towards a Ph.D. Interested students must apply to both programs (SHSU & UH) and must declare their intentions during the first year.

In addition to applying and being accepted at both universities, those interested are responsible for taking both the Law School Admissions Texas (LSAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).

SHSU currently offers an independent Ph.D. in criminal justice, but the only law curriculum for students is a pre-law emphasis at the undergraduate level.
With the agreement, the addition of the added coursework will be more appealing to students, who could be more marketable with the coursework, and for the university.

The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler has received approval from the governor and the Texas Legislature to establish the East Texas Center for Rural Geriatric Studies, said UTHCT President Dr. Kirk A. Calhoun.

Being designated a rural geriatric center by the state of Texas allows UTHCT to apply for federal research grants, he said.

Senate Bill 1642, which established the rural geriatric center, was passed in May during the regular session of the Texas Legislature. The bill was introduced by State Sen. Todd Staples, R-Palestine, and co-sponsored by State Sen. Bill Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant. The bill was supported by the entire East Texas legislative delegation, including State Reps. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview; Leo Berman, R-Tyler; Chuck Hopson, D-Jacksonville; Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola; and Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin. Gov. Rick Perry signed the bill into law in June.

The University of Texas at Arlington TA School of Nursing will offer an Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) Program in the spring of 2004. This program provides graduates with a Masters of Science in Nursing or a certificate as an ENP. ENPs function in a variety of emergency departments and provide both emergent and non-emergent care to patients and their families.

The ENP Program is 51 hours for an MSN and maximum of 34 hours for a Post-Masters Certificate. The number of hours in the certificate program varies based on the educational preparation of applicants. The director of this program is Dr. Mary Schira, PhD, APRN, ACNP.

Randal S. Weber, M.D. returns to The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center to head the Department of Head and Neck Surgery, a department where he spent the early part of his career.

Weber returns to M. D. Anderson after serving more than seven years as the vice chair of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery and director of the Center for Head and Neck Cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

He joined the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 after coming to M. D. Anderson as a fellow in head and neck surgery in 1985. After a one-year fellowship, Weber joined the faculty and within five years was named an associate professor of surgery. While on the faculty of M. D. Anderson, Weber held a joint appointment in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Communicative Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine.

Weber assumed the M. D. Anderson position in mid July with the retirement of Helmuth Goepfert, M.D., on August 31. Goepfert has been chair of the Department of Head and Neck Surgery since 1982, and a faculty member since 1966.

Head and neck surgeons oversee the surgical management of cancers of the larynx, throat, oral cavity, salivary glands, tongue, skull base, sinuses and other specific regions in the head and neck, and collaborate with medical oncologists, reconstructive surgeons, speech pathologists and radiation oncologists in an effort to preserve form and function of these vital body parts.

Weber says his primary research interests are in treatments that minimize surgical removal of vital parts of the head and neck region, targeted therapies and prevention programs for at-risk individuals including teens who are addicted to tobacco by the time they are young adults.

A native of Chattanooga, Weber graduated from the University of Tennessee Center for Health Sciences Medical School in Memphis followed by a surgical internship at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. He completed his surgical and otolaryngology residencies at Baylor College of Medicine before coming to M. D. Anderson in 1985 for a one-year fellowship.

During his fellowship at M. D. Anderson, Weber trained under Dr. Goepfert, the outgoing chair of head and neck surgery.

Weber has been named among the nation's top physicians by various organizations six times and is the past recipient of the Louis Duhring Outstanding Clinical Specialist Award given by the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

As chief of head and neck cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Weber taught residents and fellows management of head and neck tumors and gave numerous lectures annually to medical students, residents and practitioners on subjects related to head and neck oncology. He has given more than 60 professional lectures in addition to his teaching. Weber has authored or contributed to more than 125 scientific publications, book chapters or editorials.

Juri G. Gelovani, M.D., has joined The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center as professor and chair of the Department of Experimental Diagnostic Imaging in the Division of Radiation Oncology.

Before joining the faculty at M. D. Anderson, Gelovani served as the head of the molecular-genetic and cellular imaging section in the Department of Radiology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Molecular imaging combines new molecular agents with traditional imaging tools to create more targeted therapies with the objective to simultaneously find, diagnose and treat disease. Gelovani's research is focused on developing new approaches to molecular imaging that would help detect cancer at an earlier stage and enable care teams to assess the extent of the disease sooner - making a significant impact on the diagnosis, therapy and management of cancer.

Gelovani has developed and introduced into clinical settings several molecular imaging tools and applications, including a radiotracer for imaging DNA synthesis during the growth and spread of brain tumors. He also developed and validated the original methodology for the HSV1-tk marker gene using radio-labeled Fialuridine (FIAU) and its analogues for non-invasive monitoring of novel anti-cancer gene therapies; a discovery that initiated a new interdisciplinary field in biology and medicine.

A native of the Republic of Georgia, Gelovani received his medical degree and doctorate in neurosurgery from Tartu University in Estonia and completed his fellowship in neuro-oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. In 2001, he received the International Fellow Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

A member of the editorial review boards for Molecular Imaging and Neoplasia, Gelovani also has served on advisory boards for the development of several molecular imaging programs and protocols. In addition to his memberships in the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Society for Gene Therapy, Gelovani is the co-founder of the European Society for Neuro-Oncology and the Society for Molecular Imaging, which awarded him a gold medal for his contributions to the field in 2002.

Two new members have been appointed to the Executive Board of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) School of Engineering.

The new members are Tony Affuso and Clifton Triplett.

Tony Affuso is president of EDS' PLM Solutions line of business and a member of EDS' Executive Operations Team. PLM Solutions develops software to support the collaborative engineering and manufacturing of products in the automotive, aerospace, consumer products, high-tech, retail and machine/tooling industries. The line of business employs 5,250 people in 140 sales offices and 23 research and development centers throughout the world.

Clifton Triplett is the Global Process information officer for Manufacturing and Quality at General Motors Information Systems and Services (IS&S) organization. In this position, he is responsible for driving common processes and systems across all the various GM manufacturing and quality business functions to maximize business results. His areas of responsibility include process and systems support of manufacturing, industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering and quality.

Board members work with Dean Stephen Szygenda and his leadership team to promote interaction between the school and industry and to implement new programs in the school, including its new executive master's degrees in engineering, its new Industry Scholars and Research Scholars programs, and its new Gender Parity Initiative.

The M.J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University (TCU) has appointed Maribess Miller, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Dallas office; Phil Norwood, chairman of the board, president and CEO of Summit Bancshares, Inc. and Summit Bank, N.A.; and David P. Purcell, founder and managing partner of Continental Advisors, LLC, to serve four-year renewable terms on the school's international advisory board. All were appointed July 1.

Purcell, Miller and Norwood join more than 40 other local, national and international senior-level executives providing program development and other guidance to the Neeley School's dean, faculty and staff.

Miller, who earned a degree in accounting at TCU, is the managing partner and a certified public accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas. She joined the firm in 1975 and was named a partner in 1984. She is a member of the American Institute of CPAs and the Texas Society of CPAs.

Norwood, a Fort Worth native and 1972 graduate of TCU, currently serves as chairman of the board, president and CEO of Summit Bancshares, Inc. and Summit Bank, N.A. He began his career in the local banking industry in1970 and currently oversees $680 million in assets and six Summit Bank locations in Tarrant County.

Purcell is the managing partner of Continental Advisors, LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser, managing financial services and healthcare sector hedge funds. He received a B.B.A. in finance from TCU and a M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago.

Thomas Moorman, EdD, has been promoted to executive director of student affairs at the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC).

In his new position, Dr. Moorman oversees the division of student affairs, including the registrar, financial aid, academic support services and student development.

Dr. Moorman has worked at the health science center for nine years, advancing from a student development coordinator to the assistant dean for admissions and student services for the School of Public Health.

During the 2002-2003 academic year, Dr. Moorman was recognized for his outstanding service and contributions to the Public Health Student Association.

He earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Texas A&M University and a doctorate from the University of North Texas.

One of Dr. Gloria Durr's final duties as chair of the Department of Human Sciences at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) is to deliver the commencement address at SFA's graduation ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 16. Durr has served as a member of the faculty for 31 years.

The study of home economics at SFA is as old as the university itself. Food classes were taught at the local high school before the university's first building, the Austin Building, was even complete. The first clothing classes were taught in what is now the Old Stone Fort museum. Despite its lengthy existence, the department has been chaired for the past 80 years by only four leaders.

Today the department has approximately 400 students studying a wide range of topics, including child and family development, fashion merchandising, food and nutrition, family studies, hospitality administration and interior design. To reflect the broad scope of studies, the name of the department was changed in 1994 from the Department of Home Economics to the Department of Human Sciences.

Although Durr has received numerous awards during her tenure at SFA, including a distinguished service award from the Vocational Home Economics Teacher Association of Texas in 1999, the Professional of the Year award by the Texas Association of Family and Consumer Sciences in 1998 and selection as Regents Professor by the SFA board of regents in 1991, Durr's tenure will be remembered for the programs established under her direction.

The fashion merchandising program, the hospitality administration program and the interior design program were added under Durr's leadership.

Durr said that, regardless of the chosen career path, the study of human sciences ensures a brighter future for every student.

Regardless of the wide variety of course offerings, the area of study closest to Durr's heart is consumer education. Durr helped to create the Center for Economic Education at SFA, which provides in-service education for public school teachers in East Texas. Because it is easier than ever for college students to get into debt, Durr said the program is particularly important.

Dr. Lynda J. Martin from Oklahoma State University will replace Durr as chair of the department.

A space scientist at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) is a member of a team selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to undertake the first of the space agency's "scout" missions to the planet Mars, scheduled for launch in 2007 and arrival one year later.

The goal of the unmanned mission is to conduct a variety of scientific experiments from a lander that will dig a trench in the surface in an attempt to discover where the water that ran over the surface of Mars eons ago has gone.

Dr. John H. Hoffman, a UTD physics professor and member of the university's William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences, will receive funding of approximately $4 million to build the project's mass spectrometer instrument system, which will be connected to a series of ovens designed to "cook" materials dug from the trench to determine their water content. In addition to performing sub-surface soil studies, the instrument will analyze the atmosphere of Mars.

Hoffman is a member of a team of researchers lead by Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The team's concept for the Mars Scout mission - called Phoenix to symbolize rising out of the failed 1999 lander mission to Mars - won a competition against proposals from three other research teams. The selection of the winning team was announced earlier today by the space agency.

Phoenix involves placing a lander laden with sensors onto the Martian surface in the northern region where the Mars Odyssey spacecraft has observed excess amount of hydrogen that most likely comes from sub-surface water.

In addition to the trench experiment, Phoenix instruments will study the atmosphere and climate history of Mars. If Mars has had copious amounts of running water in the distant past, as channels on the surface indicate, the climate in the early times likely was greatly different from that of today.

Hoffman, who has worked at UTD and its predecessor research institution since 1966, has designed and built scientific instruments that have flown on numerous missions of exploration - both manned and unmanned - into space and to other planetary bodies and objects, including the moon, Venus and Halley's Comet.

Hoffman's work on Phoenix is one of many projects under way at UTD's Hanson Center for Space Sciences. Other significant work includes space weather research being done by Dr. Roderick A. Heelis, director of the center and chairman of the physics department, under a $10-million grant from NASA, and associate professor Dr. Gregory D. Earle's study of winds in the ionosphere, another NASA project.

Dr. Riaz Chowdhury and other world leaders in the medical specialty of gastroenterology are improving the care of cancer patients through a major advance in the field - an imaging technique called endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS). This minimally invasive procedure is hailed as a safe way to diagnose cancers of the upper and lower gastrointestinal tracts and more accurately set treatment strategy.

Dr. Chowdhury, assistant professor of medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, uses endoscopic ultrasonography to locate and study esophageal, stomach and duodenal tumors in the upper GI tract, and colon and rectal tumors in the lower tract. Thanks to EUS, he can determine the size of a tumor and the extent of its invasion into surrounding tissue - both important factors for advising patients on treatment options. Studies show EUS is more accurate than traditional approaches including CT scans. Users can even image tumors as small as 2 or 3 millimeters in diameter.

UTHSC, in collaboration with the Cancer Therapy and Research Center (CTRC), is the first institution to offer endoscopic ultrasonography in San Antonio and South Texas. Dr. Chowdhury, who is performing the technique on five to six patients a week at CTRC's Grossman Cancer Center, recently presented an EUS update for university and community physicians.

By using an instrument called a linear echoendoscope, Dr. Chowdhury can see five layers of digestive tract anatomy - a view not possible with CT scans. The procedure also is useful for studying organs such as the pancreas and gallbladder, which are next to the GI tract.

The procedure costs a little more than regular endoscopy ($800 vs. $600), but Dr. Chowdhury said the benefits to patients far outweigh the extra cost. He has done about 100 cases since March and is the first physician in San Antonio to do the procedure.

Dr. Chowdhury presented data from the medical literature showing EUS is more effective than CT scanning and other techniques for diagnosis and preoperative staging of esophageal, pancreatic, rectal, gastric and colon cancer, and even lung cancer. Physicians also can use EUS to establish a celiac plexus block for the relief of abdominal cancer pain. A fine needle may be incorporated to the EUS instrument for acquiring biopsies of lymph nodes. EUS has been used for about five years in practice in other areas of the country.

A team of physicists led by researchers at Rice University has developed the first thermodynamic method for systematically classifying quantum phase transitions, mysterious electromagnetic transformations that are widely believed to play a critical role in high-temperature superconductivity.

The new research is described in two papers - one theoretical and one experimental -in the Aug. 8 issue of Physical Review Letters. The theoretical paper predicts that a mathematical irregularity called a divergence occurs at every "quantum critical point," a stage materials pass through as they change phases. The experimental paper reports the observation of such a divergence in the quantum critical points of two metals with very different quantum signatures. The lead researcher is Qimiao Si, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rice.

Matter commonly transforms itself via phase changes. Melting ice and boiling water are examples of phase transitions that arise from changes in temperature, which can easily be described using classical physics. Within the past decade, physicists have detected quantum phase transitions, changes that arise entirely from quantum fluctuations - the jittering of subatomic particles as described by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Every phase transition, whether classical or quantum, is marked by a change in the way matter is ordered. For example, when ice melts, water molecules change from an ordered crystal lattice to a disordered fluid. In quantum phase transitions, which occur in rare earth metals called heavy fermions, electrons change from magnetic to paramagnetic. As the metals change quantum phases, they pass through a stage known as the "critical point" in which all electrons throughout the material respond collectively and can no longer be regarded as individual particles.

The new theoretical work by Si and Rice graduate student Lijun Zhu, in collaboration with Achim Rosch's group at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, sprang from the fact that thermodynamic quantities - like specific heat - often diverge at classical critical points. The team predicted that the Grüneisen ratio - the relative value of thermal expansion to specific heat - would diverge in a very predictable manner in any material as it approached a quantum critical point.

To test the theory, Si and Zhu collaborated with Frank Steglich's experimental group from the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. Steglich, together with his colleagues John Mydosh, Philipp Gegenwart and Robert Küchler, chose two heavy fermion compounds that are based on cerium and ytterbium. The quantum critical points for each occur at absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible.

Since it is impossible to achieve absolute zero in a laboratory, the team cooled the metals to within a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero. They found that the Grüneisen ratio diverged as predicted in both metals as they approached absolute zero.

From the divergences, the researchers concluded that the two metals belong to two different classes of quantum phase transition. One of these is the locally-critical quantum phase transition, a new class of quantum phase transition first proposed by Si and colleagues in an article in Nature two years ago.

Materials scientists are interested in superconductors because they conduct electricity with no resistance. In standard conductors, like copper or aluminum, a significant percentage of power is lost due to resistance, the tendency of the wires to convert some electricity into heat. Most superconductors must be cooled to near absolute zero before they superconduct. High temperature superconductors operate at temperatures as high as minus 164 degrees Fahrenheit, far above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, an important milestone for those interested in designing practical systems that are both technologically and economically feasible.

Heavy fermion metals are prototype systems for quantum criticality. When these metals reach their quantum critical point, the electrons within them act in unison and the effects of even one electron moving through the system cause widespread effects throughout. This is very different from the electron interactions in a common wiring material like copper. It is these collective effects that have increasingly convinced physicists of a possible link between superconductivity and quantum criticality.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, and the Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials at the University of Houston.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have identified a main regulator of the system that controls membrane trafficking, debunking what scientists for a decade had thought controlled this process.

The Golgi - described as the "grand central sorting station" of the cell by scientists - is regulated by phosphatidylinositol 4 phosphate (PI4P) instead of phosphatidylinositol 4,5 bisphosphate (PIP2), which was believed to be the main regulator of this system. Both lipids are essential for recruiting proteins to the membrane.

The findings appear in the current issue of Cell. Dr. Helen Yin, professor of physiology, is the study's senior author.

PI4P acts as a zip code by directing proteins to the Golgi. An understanding of this system gives researchers insight into membrane trafficking, a vital process for cell survival.

Diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are a result of problems associated with protein trafficking, Dr. Yin added.

Other UT Southwestern researchers contributing to the study include Dr. Ying-Jie Wang, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in physiology; Dr. Joseph Albanesi, professor of pharmacology; Manuel Martinez, research assistant in physiology; Dr. Michael Roth, professor of biochemistry; Dr. Hui-Qiao Sun, assistant professor of physiology; Dr. Yuxiao Sun, postdoctoral researcher in molecular biology; and Jing Wang, a student research assistant in physiology. Researchers at Harvard Medical School also contributed to the work.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Welch Foundation.

When classes begin for the 2003-04 academic year at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) on Aug. 21, the largest of UTD's seven schools, the School of Management, finally will have a place to call home - a 204,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $38-million new building.

The facility, located at the southeast corner of Drive A and University Parkway on the UTD campus and designed by the architectural firm of Omniplan, will feature, among other things, 29 classrooms, two large computer labs, a 350-seat auditorium, break-out spaces for undergraduate, graduate and executive education student groups, desktop Internet access in every classroom, wireless network access throughout, audiovisual and online learning support in every classroom and conference rooms and office space for all 96 of the school's faculty members.

Until now, the School of Management faculty, staff members and students have been using no fewer than seven buildings on the UTD campus. The new facility will enable all of the school's operations to be housed under the same roof for the first time.

Enrollment at UTD's School of Management, which was founded in 1975, has increased 80 per cent over the last six years to more than 4,300 students. Last January, a study published by OR/MS Today, a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), ranked the school sixth worldwide in research productivity in operations management and management information systems over the last six years.

Dean Hasan Pirkul said he thought that the new building was a factor in his ability to recruit the top-notch faculty that garnered the OR/MS Today recognition.
Pirkul will host an open house at the new facility on Sept. 30, and a formal dedication of the building will be scheduled in the near future.