University News

Duke University Partners NUS to Start NUS Graduate Medical School

One of the finest medical schools in the US, the Duke School of Medicine is now National University of Singapore's partner in the establishment of the NUS Graduate Medical School (GMS).

The US News and World Report in 2004 ranked the Duke School of Medicine among the top four medical schools in the US; and Duke University Medical Centre among the top six of 6,012 American hospitals.

At the signing ceremony on 14 April at the College of Medicine Building, Deputy Prime Minister and Co-coordinating Minister for Security and Defense, Dr Tony Tan noted that they were witnessing the birth of Singapore's second medical school at the very birthplace of NUS' Medical School at the Outram campus.

The GMS will offer a graduate-entry medical program in collaboration with Duke University. The four-year program will lead to a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree. Students will devote the third-year of their course to research projects either of basic sciences or clinical nature. They will have the chance to work side by side with clinician-scientists in both the GMS and Duke University.

Said NUS President, Professor Shih Choon Fong: "Duke and NUS are natural partners. We have global aspirations and are actively seeking opportunities to extend our global reach and impact. With courage and vision, we can unite the capabilities of two hubs and build an alliance with strengths otherwise impossible to achieve."

Dr. Victor J Dzau, Chancellor for Health Affairs, Duke University and President and CEO, Duke University Health System, said Duke University could not agree more with Singapore's choices of scientific focus for the future – genomics, bioinformatics, bioengineering, cell and molecular biology and bioprocessing.

The GMS will be headed on an interim basis by Dr. R Sanders Williams, who is concurrently the Dean, Duke University School of Medicine.

[ Friday FYI index ]

Energy Department Awards Contract to the University of California

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a new five-year contract to the University of California to manage and operate its Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The award is the result of the first competition of the management and operating (M&O) contract for the laboratory since its inception.

The value of the new five-year contract is an estimated US$2.3 billion. Berkeley Lab's US$469 million annual budget is funded by the department's Office of Science, other DOE programs, as well as other government agencies and private industry.

The new "award-term" contract contains a number of innovative provisions intended to provide incentives for superior performance. The department may recognize superior performance through phased extensions, beyond the initial five-year term of the contract, for up to a total of 20 years, if the contractor meets performance criteria developed by DOE.

Following a short transition period, the initial contract term will be June 1, 2005 to May 31, 2010. The University of California has operated the laboratory since 1943 for DOE and its predecessors.

The contract award follows the submission of a proposal by The Regents of the University of California in response to DOE's December 15, 2004, Request for Proposals (RFP). Marvin E. Gunn, Jr., Manager of the Office of Science's Chicago Office, was the Source Selection Official.

This contract award is the first involving a major DOE science laboratory in response to Congressional legislative direction in 2003 to compete five Science and Defense Laboratory M&O contracts that were awarded more than 50 years ago without competition.

LBNL's missions include basic science and technology development, with no classified programs or facilities. Areas of research include the physical sciences, computing sciences, energy sciences and biosciences.

LBNL's unique research facilities, which attract scientists from all over the world, include the Advanced Light Source, Biomedical Isotope Facility, National Energy

Research Scientific Computing Center and the National Center for Electron Microscopy. The Molecular Foundry, a national nanoscience research center, is currently under construction and is expected to go into full operation in 2006.

[ Friday FYI index ]

Erb Family Gives University of Michigan US$10 Million

Fred and Barbara Erb have provided a $10 million gift to significantly enhance the research and education initiatives of the University of Michigan's Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. The program is a partnership between the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

The $10 million gift builds upon two earlier gifts of $5 million each from the Erbs, representing the largest known commitment to a university for interdisciplinary teaching and research in the area of global sustainable enterprise. This field explores how organizations throughout the world can achieve long-term success by harmonizing economic, environmental and social interests.

The new gift from the Erbs advances the University's $2.5 billion The Michigan Difference campaign, and makes it possible to greatly increase the size of the Erb Institute MBA/MS Program. Already the largest of its kind with 48 students, the program will grow to 75 students who simultaneously earn master's degrees from the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Ross School of Business. The curriculum includes such offerings as Systems Thinking for Sustainable Enterprise, Competitive Environmental Strategy, Business Practices of Human Rights, Sustainable Manufacturing and Social Institutions for Energy Production.

The integrated three-year MBA/MS Program has produced more than 80 graduates to date who work within the business, nonprofit and government sectors. These leaders focus on a wide range of issues including clean technologies, conservation of biodiversity, corporate responsibility, renewable energy, green design, and human rights. Program graduates continually draw upon their interdisciplinary training to inspire, develop and implement innovative and practicable methods for cultivating a sustainable future.

[ Friday FYI index ]

University of Chicago Receives US$1.8 million to Study Connections Between Religious Beliefs and Health

A belief in God may improve a person's physical health, according to University of Chicago researchers who are launching the first comprehensive study to examine the relationship between religious attitudes and health.

The Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation has given the University US$1.8 million to launch the study, which will be coupled with University work on aging supported with US$7.5 million from the National Institute on Aging of the Department of Health and Human Services. That work is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the connections between longevity and loneliness. Religious belief, like social support, could have beneficial effects on people's health, scholars contend.

Because the research is multi-disciplinary, including researchers in University of Chicago departments of Medicine, Psychology, Sociology, History, and Human Development, and the Divinity School, it provides a useful framework to study scientifically the connections between religious belief and health, said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and the leader of both studies. Cacioppo is one of the nation's leading experts on social relations and aging.

Measurable effects of strong spirituality, regardless of religion, are improved physiological functioning, health and well being, especially in difficult times, Cacioppo said. Those benefits of belief in God accrue over time and are an important aspect of dealing with aging, he said.

Subjects in the NIA project—the Chicago Health, Aging and Social Relations Study—have been asked a battery of questions related to their health, exercise habits and emotions, as well as church attendance and religiosity.

For that study, the researchers began a series of day-long interviews and medical tests that began in 2002 and will continue through 2006. The study includes 230 African Americans, Hispanics and whites between the ages of 50 and 67 from Chicago and the suburbs. The researchers are gathering extensive medical histories, health assessments, health care utilization measures, health behaviors measures, sleep quality indices, personality measures and life events assessments.

The Templeton grant will permit researchers to do these additional research projects:

• A study of young adults, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to examine spirituality and brain patterns.
• A study of young adults to explore their mental representation of God. They will be asked a range of questions including whether they communicate with a higher being, feel inner peace through a relationship with a higher being or do not have an awareness at all of God's presence.
• A study of the older members of the NIA project, entitled "The Lord Is My Shepherd," that looks at the way belief promotes good mental health and reduces feelings of loneliness and depression.
• A study called "Something to Live For" that examines whether religious belief diminishes social conflicts, improves sleep and provides for successful aging.
• A study to determine the relationship between cardiovascular health and belief in God, based on the religion-related questions that have been asked since the beginning of the study with older adults

[ Friday FYI index ]

New York State Program Awards Grant to Cornell Engineer

A two-year, $200,000 grant from the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) will help a Cornell University mechanical engineer design smaller, faster and cheaper devices for processing and producing proteins. The research has implications for a vast array of applications in research of biological systems.

Brian Kirby, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical engineering, won NYSTAR's James D. Watson Investigator Award, which is part of the $225 million Generating Employment Through New York State Science (Gen*NY*sis) program. Gen*NY*sis supports life sciences research being conducted at New York's academic research institutions. The Watson award recognizes and supports outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show potential for leadership and scientific discovery in the field of biotechnology.

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries are interested in cheaper and faster ways to produce and process protein pharmaceuticals, such as insulin, Kirby says. He seeks to use mechanical engineering to solve problems associated with a widely used technique, called high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), for separating and identifying proteins.

The machines that currently perform HPLC are about twice the size of a desktop computer. Kirby plans to make hand-held devices packaged in a 4-inch cube that can separate and identify proteins. The miniaturized device should be faster, cheaper and better suited to work with smaller volumes of proteins.

The grant also will help Kirby develop new procedures for protein production, which is of great interest to pharmaceutical companies that produce proteins on a large scale.

Many proteins can be synthesized in large quantities using recombinant techniques, in which bacteria are trained to make specific proteins in a controlled fashion. However, the resulting proteins are often unusable until they are "refolded" by exposing them to a series of solutions that cause the molecules to orient themselves into a form that has the desired qualities. "Currently, protein folding protocols are not well understood," Kirby says. He is developing what he calls an "Edisonian approach," where miniature devices will allow researchers to explore a thousand folding protocols at the same time.

Kirby continues Cornell's connection with the James D. Watson Investigator Award, which began three years ago. Each year, a Cornell faculty member has received the grant: D. Tyler McQuade, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, in 2002, and Matthew Delisa, assistant professor of chemical engineering, in 2003.

[ Friday FYI index ]

Yale Professor Receives Nanotechnology Research Grant from Keck FUTURES

The National Academies Keck FUTURES initiative has announced that Yale Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering David LaVan and Andrew Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin are recipients of a FUTURES grant in the amount of $75,000 to support their interdisciplinary research on nanoscience and nanotechnology.

LaVan and Ellington's project "Nano-Biocomposites for Conversion of Sunlight to Electricity" addresses the great need for generating economical power. They have proposed a novel paradigm in which photons are transformed into high-energy electrons. Their effort will meld bio- and nanotechnologies to create a system for solar energy capture that can be efficiently mass-produced and scaled to a variety of energy needs.

The National Academies Keck FUTURES INITIATIVE was launched in 2003 to stimulate new modes of scientific inquiry and break down the conceptual and institutional barriers to interdisciplinary research. Funded by a $40 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the National Academies Keck FUTURES INITIATIVE is a 15-year effort to catalyze interdisciplinary inquiry and to enhance communication among researchers, funding agencies, universities, and the general public - with the object of stimulating interdisciplinary research at the most exciting frontiers. The meetings are held on a different topic every two years and are limited to 100 selected participants.

[ Friday FYI index ]

A New Particle Detector Built at the Weizmann Institute of Science

When the first matter came into being right after the big bang, what was it like? It may not have been quite as scientists have been describing it. That's one of the possibilities raised by four international teams of researchers that are about to publish important results three years into an experiment to recreate the primordial matter of the universe. Weizmann Institute scientists are among those who participated in the creation of matter that may be the "quark-gluon plasma" thought to be the first matter in the universe.

Scientists studying the unique physical properties of the quark-gluon plasma attempted to recreate the primordial matter using an accelerator, called RHIC, built especially for this purpose at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. The RHIC creates two beams of gold ions and accelerates them one towards the other, causing a head-on collision. The power of the collisions (about 40 trillion electron volts, also termed 40 tera electron volts) turns part of the beams' kinetic energy into various particles (a process described by Einstein's well-known equation E=mc2).

The first stage in the creation of these new particles, like the first stage of the creation of matter in the Big Bang, is thought to be the quark-gluon plasma. In this stage, the jets of blazing matter that dispersed in all directions in the first few fractions of a second in the existence of the universe contained a mixture of free quarks and gluons. Later on, when the universe cooled down a bit and became less dense, the quarks and gluons got "organized" into various combinations that created more complex particles called hadrons, a group that includes protons and neutrons. Since then, in fact, quarks or gluons have not existed as free particles in the universe.

But, while many of the experimental results fit in with predictions of how particles in the quark gluon plasma should behave, others have been a surprise. For instance, some analyses of the data show the plasma, created at a heat up to 150,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, behaves not as a super-hot gas, as expected, but more like a liquid.

The Weizmann Institute scientists participate in the experiment known as "PHENIX," carried out by an international team of 460 physicists from 12 countries. A number of the particle detectors installed for the original PHENIX experiment were designed and built by Prof. Itzhak Tserruya of the Weizmann Institute's Particle Physics Department and his team. These detectors are capable of providing three-dimensional information on the precise location of the particles ejected from the collision area. The particles' direction, together with their energy and identity, help characterize the matter's properties within the collision area. The team is now working on an upgrade of the PHENIX set-up that entails the addition of a new detector, called the Hadron Blind Detector, which will allow scientists to focus on specific particle pairs. These particles are electrons and their antimatter opposites, called positrons. When they show up in pairs, they can give the scientists valuable clues as to the processes taking place in the matter. The new detectors are now in the construction phase, and Tserruya hopes to install them in time for the new experiments next year.

[ Friday FYI index ]

New Superlens Opens Door to Nanoscale Optical Imaging and High-Density Optoelectronic Devices

A group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is giving new relevance to the term "sharper image" by creating a superlens that can overcome a limitation in physics that has historically constrained the resolution of optical images.

Using a thin film of silver as the lens and ultraviolet (UV) light, the researchers recorded the images of an array of nanowires and the word "NANO" onto an organic polymer at a resolution of about 60 nanometers. In comparison, current optical microscopes can only make out details down to one-tenth the diameter of a red blood cell, or about 400 nanometers.

The breakthrough, reported in the April 22 issue of the journal Science, opens the door to dramatic technological advances in nanoengineering that could eventually lead to DVDs that store the entire contents of the Library of Congress, and computer processors that can quickly search through such a huge volume of data, the researchers said.

Xiang Zhang, UC Berkeley associate professor of mechanical engineering, is the principal investigator of the study.

Nicholas Fang, one of Zhang's former Ph.D. students and lead author of the paper, said a nearer term application would be the development of medical imaging devices that could reveal never-before-seen details with optical microscopy.

With current optical microscopes, scientists can only make out relatively large structures within a cell, such as its nucleus and mitochondria. With a superlens, optical microscopes could one day reveal the movements of individual proteins traveling along the microtubules that make up a cell's skeleton, the researchers said.

Scanning electron and atomic force microscopes are now used to capture detail down to a few nanometers. However, such microscopes create images by scanning objects point by point, which means they are typically limited to non-living samples, and image capture times can take up to several minutes.

The study is the latest entry in a hotly debated topic among physicists and engineers surrounding the creation of a lens that can break the so-called diffraction limit of optics through negative refraction.

Conventional lenses, whether manmade or natural, create images by capturing the propagating light waves all objects emit and then bending them. The angle of the bend is determined by the index of refraction and has always been positive.

Yet objects also emit "evanescent" waves that carry a great deal of detail but are far more elusive. Such evanescent waves decay exponentially and thus never make it to the image plane, an optics threshold known as the diffraction limit. Breaking this diffraction limit and capturing evanescent waves are critical to the creation of a 100-percent perfect representation of an object, considered the Holy Grail in optics.

Zhang and his research team used UV light at a 365-nanometer wavelength in the new experiments, so the image created actually has more detail than is possible with beams in the microwave range.

The array of nanowires imaged measured 40 nanometers wide and the word NANO was about 60 nanometers wide. The objects, embedded onto a layer of chrome, were placed before the superlens, which was a layer of silver that was about 35 nanometers thick. The researchers recorded the image onto a photoresist, a polymer coating on the other side of the superlens that becomes insoluble when exposed to UV light.

Notably, no lens is yet able to completely reconstitute all the evanescent waves emitted by an object, so the goal of a 100-percent perfect image is still out there. However, many scientists believe that a true perfect lens is not possible because there will always be some energy absorption loss as the waves pass through any known material.

In the long run, this line of research could lead to even higher resolution imaging for distant objects, the researchers said. This includes more detailed views of other planets as well as of human movement through surveillance satellites.

Other authors of the paper are Hyesog Lee, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, and Cheng Sun, a research scientist in Zhang's group.

The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, and the National Science Foundation Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering.