Richardson Regional Medical Center and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas announce an affiliation to establish a comprehensive cancer center for patients in North Dallas, Richardson, Plano, Garland and surrounding areas.

This partnership allows Richardson Regional to expand medical, surgical and radiation oncology services, while establishing a strong clinical research component within its program. For UT Southwestern, the partnership allows the expansion of clinical trial programs and broadens patient outreach in North Dallas and Collin Counties. Physicians from UT Southwestern's faculty will establish clinical practices in the cancer center and become part of the medical staff at Richardson Regional. North Dallas residents will benefit from direct access to UT Southwestern faculty physicians and to research and clinical trials, giving them the opportunity to receive new treatments that may not otherwise be available.

The two institutions will join forces in a new 50,000 square foot comprehensive cancer center located on Richardson Regional Medical Center's George Bush/Renner Campus. Currently in development, the Richardson Regional Cancer Center - UT Southwestern Medical Center is slated for completion in late 2005.

The comprehensive cancer center will focus on certain disorders which require advanced technologies to treat prostate, breast, lung, gastrointestinal, and head and neck cancers. A full spectrum of services, including prevention, screening, treatment and follow-up care gives patients access to all oncology specialties in one location. Due to the complicated nature of a cancer diagnosis, this multidisciplinary approach will offer a unique setting enhancing outcomes and the overall patient experience.

This new partnership is a direct result of Richardson Regional's long-term strategic plan for growth and continued clinical excellence.

The affiliation merges the cancer programs of Richardson Regional Medical Center into a network with The UT Southwestern Moncrief Cancer Center, with locations in Fort Worth and Weatherford, and The Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Moncrief Radiation Oncology Center on UT Southwestern's north campus.

A $300,000 grant from the GE Foundation to the University of Houston (UH) will enhance an education program aimed at encouraging students to pursue college-level studies in the quantitative areas of mathematics, science, technology and engineering.
The GE Foundation's Math Excellence Program Grant, given to UH's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM), is designed to support the creation of a "math and technology pipeline" at the middle and high school levels that engages teachers, as well as women and minority students from the greater Houston metropolitan area in professional development and service learning activities. Targeting underserved communities, the program is designed to strengthen and expand mathematics skills and technological self-efficacy of both teachers and students, while encouraging students' pursuit of such study.

"We're honored to be one of only 32 universities in the U.S. receiving this type of grant from the GE Foundation," said John Bear, dean of UH's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in a statement.

In partnership with Ross Shaw Sterling High School and Thomas Middle School (a feeder school for Sterling) in HISD (Houston Independent School District), NSM's Department of Mathematics is working with Sterling's executive principal, Daisy Maura, to develop outreach programs. With the support of GE volunteers and other organizations, this program is designed to foster increased interaction among students, teachers and university faculty. It is expected that these activities will lead to improved mathematics education in the Houston metropolitan area and enhanced recruiting of promising students into related college programs.

The program also will nurture the "teacher pipeline." Mentors will support teachers' efforts through workshops and trainings to develop an increased capacity to handle advanced material in thorough and challenging ways in order to compliment and promote true student advancement. Additionally, UH faculty, staff and students will create a Web-based "virtual resource center" for teachers, administrators and university professors and researchers to provide assessment tools, communicate project results and support service learning as a path for building math skills and their practical application.

To measure success, the program established specific goals that include increasing the number of students enrolled in eighth grade algebra from 10 to 15 percent, in 11th grade pre-calculus by 100 percent and in 12th grade calculus from less than one up to four percent. This will ensure that students who enter the mathematics "pipeline" are adequately prepared for successful entry in and completion of a university program in related subjects.

GE volunteers from the Houston area will support the program by serving as student and teacher mentors - using "customized" mentors who represent minority or female groups - and providing assistance to define appropriate service learning projects and application examples. GE also plans to host plant tours to showcase the technology in place in today's competitive energy environment.

Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) has named Dr. Violet Rogers dean of the Nelson Rusche College of Business effective June 1, Dr. Mary Cullinan, SFA provost and vice president for academic affairs, has announced.

Rogers, who had served as interim dean of the college since 2002, was among four finalists interviewed by a search committee during March.

Rogers earned her Bachelor of Business Administration and Master of Business Administration degrees from SFA and a doctorate with a major in accounting and a minor in economics from the University of North Texas. She served as associate dean of the College of Business at SFA from 1999-2002 and has been a member of the faculty since 1991. She also was a lecturer at the university from 1986-1988 and a graduate teaching assistant from 1984-1986. While studying at UNT, she was a teaching fellow. Before starting her career in academia, she worked for six years as a CPA.

Rogers served as co-chair of the planning council that produced the university's recent strategic plan and as editor of the university's self-study in preparation for its reaffirmation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) next fall will begin offering a master of science degree designed to prepare students for careers in the promising field of biotechnology. It will be the first such degree offered by any university in the Metroplex.

UTD can begin granting the new, interdisciplinary M.S. in biotechnology degree as early as the fall 2004 semester, and students can enroll in the program before then. Authority to grant the degree was given to UTD in January by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Biotechnology is "applied biology" - using living organisms to make or modify products, run processes or improve plants and animals. With recent advances in the science of genetics, including the completion in April 2003 of the Human Genome Project, many believe that biotechnology has the potential to revolutionize medicine by curing diseases and creating new products that dramatically benefit humanity.

The biotech industry is one of the fastest-growing areas of investment - one that is predicted to have strong and sustained growth well into the future.

"Biotechnology is the next wave of commercial and intellectual endeavor in our country and around the world," said Dr. John P. Ferraris, interim dean of UTD's School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. "Our new M.S. degree in biotechnology will enable students to master the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in the next-generation science and technology arena.

"UTD's will be the first and only such degree in the Dallas-Fort Worth area," said Ferraris. "While several schools in the Metroplex offer degrees in biomedical engineering, ours, which is broader and more flexible, will be the first graduate-level biotechnology degree offering among area universities."

The degree requires the completion of 36 semester hours of courses, which a full-time student should be able to complete in a year and a half to two years, according to Chemistry Professor Dr. Lynn A. Melton, who helped develop the degree program over the past two years.

Among degree requirements will be the completion of four core courses - one each in proteomics, genomics and biotechnology laboratory (all biology classes) and one of three other classes in applied bioinformatics (biology), biological database systems and data mining (computer science) and bioinformatics (mathematics).

"Beyond the core courses, students will be able to customize their individual degree program to meet their specific career needs by selecting from a wide range of elective courses," Melton said. "These fall into broad, diverse categories such as research, business, science and engineering and science education."

Melton believes the new degree will have particular appeal among three audiences:
-Those who earned a biology degree in the mid-1990s or before and want to upgrade their knowledge and skills. "The field of biology has been almost completely redone in the last eight years," Melton said.
-Those currently working in hospitals and other healthcare settings who want to qualify for jobs in new life-sciences-based companies and organizations.
-A diverse group of others, including what Melton called "telecom refugees" - those who lost their livelihood when the telecommunications industry bubble burst - who now wish to re-direct their career paths.

"UTD, which has a rich history of outstanding graduate-level education and research in the sciences and technology, is perfectly positioned to offer, through its M.S. in biotechnology, new career opportunities in the post-genomic world," Melton said.

The degree program is overseen by a newly established, multidisciplinary Committee on Biotechnology, which is composed of five members from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and one representative from each of the following schools: Social Sciences, Management and Arts and Humanities. Melton chairs the committee, which reports to interim Dean Ferraris.

Eight physicians at The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler have been named by their peers to the 2004 Best Doctors® list.

The faculty members represent different disciplines of medicine, including pulmonary and critical care medicine, specialty pediatrics, and infectious disease.

The Best Doctors® in America Database is compiled from a peer-reviewed survey of 35,000 physicians conducted every two years. The physicians are asked to recommend doctors in their specialty that they would go to for treatment. Only about 4 percent of all U.S. physicians are selected for the database.

The 2004 Best Doctors® at UTHCT and their specialties are: William Girard, MD, pulmonary and critical care medicine; David E. Griffith, MD, pulmonary and critical care medicine; Bettina C. Hilman, MD, specialty pediatrics and allergy and immunology; Steven Idell, MD, pulmonary and critical care medicine; Wayne Karaki, MD, general internal medicine; Robert M. Payne, MD, cardiovascular disease; David R. Shafer, MD, general internal medicine; and Richard J. Wallace, infectious disease.

Four faculty members from The University of Texas at Austin have been appointed Guggenheim Fellows on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Mitko Panov and Ellen Spiro of the College of Communication, Martha Ann Selby of the College of Liberal Arts and David Zuckerman of the College of Natural Sciences each received one of the awards. They are among 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 3,200 applicants for awards totaling $6,912,000.

Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the foundation's Board of Trustees, which includes seven members who are themselves past fellows of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Panov, an award-winning filmmaker who has taught film production at The University of Texas at Austin since 1998, was selected for his work "Texas Weeds," a fictional film detailing the demise of an American farming family struggling with globalization. The fellowship will enable him to produce the film through his film company, Kamera 300, and to incorporate his students into the production process to provide hands-on experience. Panov has received multiple film awards, including the Sundance Documentary Film Fund and The Golden Palm.

Spiro, an internationally recognized filmmaker whose documentaries have been broadcast around the world, has taught filmmaking at the university since 1998. She was awarded the Guggenheim based on her documentary, "Atomic Ed and the Black Hole," about an ex-atomic bomb laboratory worker and his views on the history of government nuclear waste. The fellowship will enable her to develop the feature film version of her PBS documentary, "Troop 1500 - Girl Scouts Beyond Bars." Spiro's sometimes-unconventional film techniques have earned her awards, including two Rockefeller Fellowships and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among many others.

Selby is an associate professor of South Asian studies in the Department of Asian Studies, where she teaches courses on Indian literature, Hindu and Buddhist religions, history of Indian medicine and gender formations in India in the classical and modern periods. Selby joined the Texas faculty in 1999. She is a scholar of classical Indian languages and works on texts composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Old Tamil. She works primarily on anthologies of poetry, but is also an expert on classical medical literature in Sanskrit. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is the author of" Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India" and "The Circle of Six Seasons: A Selection from Old Tamil, Prakrit, and Sanskrit Poetry." She is completing a book titled "Sanskrit Gynecologies: The Semiotics of Gender and Femininity in Sanskrit Medical Texts." During her tenure as a Guggenheim fellow, she will complete an annotated translation of a fourth-century anthology of Tamil romantic poetry. Selby has just finished a two-year term as chair of the South Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies and recently served on the association's board of directors.

Zuckerman, a professor in the university's Department of Computer Sciences, submitted an entry titled "Randomness and Computation." He will use the Guggenheim to develop mathematically rigorous ways of improving the randomness used in computer programs. Many computer programs involve random numbers so that his theoretical work can have broad applications, such as in predicting changes in the economy or providing security for on-line purchases. His previous awards include a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He joined the university faculty in 1994, and became a full professor in 2003.

Professor Basil Markesinis, QC. LL.D. (Cantab.), DCL (Oxon.) and Jamail Regents Chair in Law at The University of Texas at Austin, has been elected a Corresponding Fellow of the French Academy (Institut de France: Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques), the highest academic honor and recognition in France.

He is the only law professor in the United States to be elected to membership in the French Academy.

Markesinis work has already earned him a Fellowship of the British Academy, a Foreign Fellowship of the Royal Academies of Belgium and the Netherlands, a Corresponding Fellowship of the Academy of Athens, a Fellowship of the Greek Archaeological Society and membership in the American Law Institute. He is the author of 110 law articles and 25 books, the latest of which, "Comparative Law in the Courtroom and the Classroom," will appear in French, German and Italian later this year.

He has been teaching in Texas since 1986 and also holds a Chair in Comparative Law at University College London, having previously held the Chair of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford (England) between 1995-2000 where he founded and directed the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law. Markesinis holds high decorations from France, Germany, Italy and Greece for his work on European law and integration.

The Institut de France is the 'umbrella organization' set up in 1795 to encompass the four (and later) five Academies set up "to promote to perfection arts and sciences in an interdisciplinary manner." The first, which became known as the Académie Française, was set up by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to establish the purity of the French language and since this was referred to as an immortal task, the Members of the Academy became known as Immortals.

Taking a major step forward in stem cell biology, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have turned muscle progenitor cells - stem cells that are "committed" to becoming muscle tissue - into cells that look and act like neurons (nerve cells).

Using an artificial gene they created, the researchers "switched on" a panel of genes that are normally silent in the muscle cells, causing them to morph into cells that show biochemical, physiological, and structural properties of neurons.

The researchers say the advance, published in the April 15 issue of Genes and Development, provides evidence that stem cells could be profoundly "flexible" - able to develop into different cell types. The lead author is Sadhan Majumder, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Cancer Genetics.

The work was conducted in laboratory cell cultures of "myoblasts," the progenitor muscle stem cells, and the new cells were then injected into the brains of healthy mice, where the cells did not cause any ill effects. Majumder says the next phase of the research is the "big test, whether these new cells can replace neurons that are damaged inside the body. That would be a remarkable step towards neuroregeneration."

To date, nerve cell regeneration from nonneural stem cells primarily has been studied using bone marrow cells, but mouse experiments that suggested these stem cells could convert to nerve cells have been controversial. Some investigators suspect that manipulated bone marrow cells are either contaminated with neural stem cells or get fused with neuronal stem cells present in the brain, and so only appeared to become nerve cells.

To avoid any issue with such potential contamination or fusion, Majumder and his colleagues chose to use for their experiment a line of homogenous cultured myoblasts that has long been used for muscle differentiation research.

Majumder devised the artificial gene that played a key role in the experiments several years ago when studying how neural stem cells mature into neurons. Neuronal stem cells go through a series of steps before they differentiate into neurons, and each step is initiated by expression of different sets of genes. The last step, in which a large number of genes are activated, is only made possible when a repressor gene - a kind of brake known by the acronym REST/NRSF - is absent, allowing the set of genes to be turned on.

At the time, Majumder wanted to know what would happen if those particular genes - the last to be activated were turned on first, by-passing the normal development process. So he and his colleagues created a new gene (REST-VP16) that was modeled on the natural repressor gene, but actually worked to turn the genes on. "We converted what is normally a brake into a gas pedal," he says.

So now the researchers tested what would happen when myoblasts, which are normally committed to become muscle, were genetically altered to express the new gas pedal gene attached to a molecular switch. To his delight, the experiment worked. When REST-VP16 was turned on in myoblasts, it was enough to block the cells' entry into the muscle differentiation pathway and caused them to show neuronal properties.

Working with Majumder were M. D. Anderson researchers Yumi Watanabe, Ph.D., Sei Kameoka, Vidya Gopalakrishnan, Ph.D., Kenneth Aldape, M.D., Zhizhong Pan, Ph.D., and Frederick Lang, M.D. The study was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute. Watanabe is now at Kyoto University and Kameoka is at Harvard University.

A researcher at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston has discovered a new visual illusion that sheds light on the way brain cells determine the brightness of objects.

In a paper published in advance online today by Nature , David Eagleman, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, along with colleagues John Jacobson and Terrence Sejnowski at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, report that time plays an important role in the brain's visual system. With changes in the time that objects appear and disappear, the brain can experience the illusion that the brightness of an object has changed when, in fact, it has not.

It is well known that the brightness of an object depends on its spatial context. For example, bright or dark objects surrounding a gray disc can make the disc appear to be dimmer or brighter. What Eagleman and co-investigators discovered is that brightness also can depend on how those surrounding objects are displayed in time.

Study participants were asked to view two flashing objects on a computer screen. When researchers manipulated the relative timing of the appearance and disappearance of objects, it changed how bright the objects were perceived to be.

Eagleman and his colleagues extended the illusion-which they call the "temporal context effect"-into predictions about the underlying neural machinery. Specifically, they concluded that there must be at least two interacting populations of brain cells involved in encoding brightness, a hypothesis not previously considered.

Studies of timing could lead to a greater understanding of language disorders, memory and consciousness, he added.

For demonstrations of the illusion, see: http://nba.uth.tmc.edu/homepage/eagleman/TCE
The paper, titled "Perceived luminance depends on temporal context," was selected for publication under the journal's Advance Online Publication program and will appear in the print version at a later date.