University News
UTD's BrainHealth® Center Gets Second Major Gift
For the second time this year, a foundation has pledged a significant gift to The University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth to be used exclusively for collaborative research efforts with The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The Eugene McDermott Foundation, which is known for its support of education, social services and various civic, cultural and community activities, has pledged US$250,000 to the center and designated that the gift be used for joint brain studies with UT Southwestern. The two institutions will investigate such areas as brain plasticity and conduct research about how the brain works and “rewires” itself after treatment. The new gift will bring to more than $700,000 the amount pledged in recent months for joint research by the university’s Center for BrainHealth and the medical center. In March, the Caren and Vin Prothro Foundation announced a $500,000 gift to the center with a similar stipulation.
The Eugene McDermott Foundation was established in 1955 by industrialist Eugene McDermott, co-founder of both Texas Instruments and the research institute that in 1969 was turned over to the state and became The University of Texas at Dallas. The foundation is based in Dallas.
The two other founders of the research institute that became UTD — the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, later renamed the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies — were former Dallas Mayor J. Erik Jonsson and Cecil Green.
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Phyllis Wise Selected as University of Washington Provost
University of Washington President Mark A. Emmert announced the appointment of Phyllis M. Wise as provost of the university. Wise is currently dean of the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Her appointment will be effective Aug. 1, 2005, subject to approval by the UW Board of Regents.
The provost is the chief academic officer and chief budget officer of the university, to whom the deans of the University's schools and colleges report. Other major units of the Provost's Office include: Educational Outreach, Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies, Diversity/Office of Minority Affairs, UW TechTransfer, International Education, Office of Research, Undergraduate Education, The Graduate School, Planning and Budgeting and UW Libraries. The provost is responsible for the University's annual budget of nearly $3 billion, including nearly $1 billion in sponsored research. The University of Washington ranks first nationally among public universities in total federal support for research and training.
Wise, who is a distinguished professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior in the Division of Biological Sciences, and professor of physiology and membrane biology in the School of Medicine at Davis, has served as dean since 2002.
Prior to that, she was professor and chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington from 1993 to 2002. Wise was a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, from 1976 to 1993, promoting through the ranks to full professor of physiology in 1987.
As dean of biological sciences at UC Davis she chaired the group that oversaw life science initiatives, including: the Genome Center Initiative, the Center for Neuroscience, the Center for Population Biology and the Bodega Marine Laboratory. She has also served as a member of the International Programs Advisory Group at Davis, the UC Davis Enterprise Campus Board and the Coordinating Council for the Center for Regenerative Science and Therapies.
Wise serves on a number of scientific advisory committees, including the advisory board for the Oregon Regional Primate Center, the scientific advisory council for the Society of Women's Health Research, the advisory board of the University of Michigan Nathan Shock Center for Biological Aging, the Kronos Research Foundation Board of Directors and the Buck Institute Board of Directors.
Wise was featured in Parade Magazine cover story on "The Quiet Heroes" engaged in lifesaving research and has received many awards, including the Award for Excellence in Science from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in 2002, and the Women in Endocrinology Mentor Award in 2003. She was also selected by the Endocrine Society in 2004 as the recipient of the Roy O. Greep Award for outstanding contributions to research in endocrinology. Wise received the Albert D. and Elizabeth H. Kirwan prize from the University of Kentucky in 2002. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to original research.
Wise also has received two MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) awards from the National Institutes of Health, from 1986 to 1996 and again from 2001 to 2010. MERIT awards provide NIH grant recipients with funding for innovative research over an extended period of time. This highly selective award is presented to researchers who have demonstrated superior competence and outstanding productivity.
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Harvard Business School Dean to Step Down
Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark announced that he will step down on July 31, 2005, in order to accept the role as President of Brigham Young University-Idaho shortly thereafter. Clark was named Dean of HBS in 1995; he is the eighth Dean in the School’s ninety-seven-year history.
During his nearly ten years in office, Clark oversaw a 20% growth in the faculty, as he focused on expanding the range of the School’s research with power in practice while also strengthening its well-known commitment to course development and teaching. During the same period, the School’s endowment rose from $550 million to more than $1.8 billion, providing a solid base for attracting the best students and faculty, and increasing global impact and outreach. The School’s 42-acre campus was also renewed and transformed by the addition of more than 325,000 square feet of new facilities, including housing, a student center, classrooms, and an expanded library/academic center.
Dean Clark spearheaded a number of strategic initiatives that have strengthened key areas of teaching and research at HBS, including entrepreneurship, leadership and values, and the use of technology to broaden and deepen the learning experience. As part of a major effort to expand the School’s involvement in and understanding of the global arena, HBS has established a network of six research centers in Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong and Tokyo), India, and California (Silicon Valley). These centers support faculty research and course development by building relationships with leaders in business, government, academia, and other organizations worldwide.
Under Clark’s leadership, HBS also significantly enhanced the diversity of its student body, a factor critical to the vitality of the discussion-based case method of teaching that is the hallmark of the School. The percentage of international students has jumped from 23% for the MBA Class of 1995 to 33%— representing more than 70 countries—for the Class of 2006. At the same time, the percentage of women has grown from 28% in 1995 to 34% in 2006, while minorities have climbed from 14% to 21%.
An expert in technology and operations management, Clark, who is the School’s George F. Baker Professor of Administration, has been a member of the HBS faculty since 1978.[ FYI Index ]
Yale Law School Receives Award from Microsoft for Studies of Law and Technology
Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP) has received an award of more than US$500,000 from Microsoft Corp., a leading software and information services company.
The ISP will use the funds over a period of three years for a variety of educational and research programs focusing on the deeper social and technological challenges of the information society. It produces innovative thinking and scholarship about law and technology by bringing together a network of professors, young scholars and law students.
The ISP will expand its working group of young researchers with seven additional post–graduate fellowships over the next several years. Fellows will be in residence at the Law School to teach, conduct their own research and contribute to ISP workshops. In addition, the ISP runs conferences, symposia and a speaker series each year, which bring together policy makers, scholars and students from around the world.
The broad range of issues that the ISP studies—such as intellectual property, digital democracy, freedom of speech, privacy, telecommunications, biotechnology, cybercrime and cybersecurity—are leading subjects of debate in the halls of academia, in government capitals and on newspaper editorial pages; and more and more law students have been drawn to these subjects. Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh noted: “The ISP has been a leading center of innovative thought on the information society since its inception in 1997. This award will help the ISP’s scholars and students continue to take a comprehensive approach to the study of global technology and advance our understanding of these fundamental issues.”
The ISP will begin implementing the new programs in the 2005–06 academic year with summer grants, a new fellowship and a speaker series. The ISP is also planning the first conference devoted to developing issues and problems in search engine law, to be held during the 2005–06 academic year.
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UC Secures $2.2 Billion Settlement with JPMorgan Chase in Enron Fraud Case
The University of California has reached a second large settlement in the Enron Corp. securities fraud class action, with the announcement on June 14 of a US$2.2 billion agreement with JPMorgan Chase. The university is lead plaintiff representing a class of Enron investors who lost tens of billions of dollars.
UC alleged that JPMorgan Chase participated in an elaborate scheme to defraud investors and thereby violated Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and other securities laws.
With this $2.2 billion latest settlement, UC has now obtained more than $4.7 billion for Enron investors, including $2 billion from Citigroup, $222.5 million from Lehman Brothers, $69 million from Bank of America, $168 million from Enron’s outside directors, and $32 million from Andersen Worldwide. Through the bankruptcy proceeding for the LJM2 partnership involved in the Enron scheme, UC will secure a distribution of approximately $32 million for investors.
Retired federal judge Hon. J. Lawrence Irving, who is acting as an advisor to the UC Regents in the Enron litigation, said, “I unqualifiedly endorse this additional settlement and hope it helps lead to further substantial recoveries for Enron investors.”
This settlement is subject to approval by the UC Regents, the JPMorgan Chase board of directors and the court.
Remaining defendants in the investors’ lawsuit include the financial institutions of Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and the Royal Bank of Scotland, all alleged to be key players in a series of fraudulent transactions that ultimately cost Enron investors an estimated $40-45 billion in market losses.
These banks allegedly set up false investments in clandestinely controlled Enron partnerships, used offshore companies to disguise loans and facilitated phony sales of phantom Enron assets. As a result, Enron executives were able to deceive investors by reporting increased cash flow from operations and by moving billions of dollars of debt off Enron’s balance sheet, thereby artificially inflating securities prices.
Additional remaining defendants include Goldman Sachs, because of its role as an underwriter of Enron securities, as well as former officers of Enron, its accountants, Arthur Andersen, and certain law firms.
In February 2002, UC was named lead plaintiff in the Enron shareholders’ class action suit previously filed against 29 top executives of Enron Corp. and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP. The university filed a consolidated complaint on April 8, 2002, adding nine banks and two law firms as defendants in the case. In April 2003, U.S. District Court Judge Melinda Harmon completed her rulings on the various defendants’ motions to dismiss and lifted the stay on discovery. Following those rulings, UC filed an amended complaint on May 14, 2003.
Other institutional investors acting as representative plaintiffs on behalf of Enron investors include Washington State Investment Board, the Amalgamated Bank and its Long View Funds, Illinois State Board of Investment, San Francisco City and County Employees’ Retirement System, Employer-Teamsters Local Nos. 175 & 505 Pension Trust Fund, Hawaii Laborers Pension Plan, Greenville Plumbers Pension Plan, Archdiocese of Milwaukee and Staro Asset Management.
Depositions in the case began in June 2004, with the trial slated to begin in Houston on Oct. 16, 2006.
Recovered funds, to be split among investors who bought Enron shares or publicly traded debt securities issued by Enron and Enron-related entities between Sept. 9, 1997, and its Dec. 2001 bankruptcy filing, are earning interest. The court must approve an allocation plan for the distribution . At this point, the total amount of money that will be recovered and the total pool of investor shares to receive it are unknown.
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Scientists from U. T. Dallas Share International Innovation Prize for Nanotechnology Breakthrough
Scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) NanoTech Institute, together with an Australian collaborator, were honored at an international conference in Frankfurt, Germany, for their breakthrough in spinning carbon nanofibers into multifunctional yarns that demonstrate remarkable properties and have many promising potential applications.
At a gathering of more than 20,000 scientists, technologists and industrialists from around the world, the scientists were presented the New Materials Innovation Prize of the Avantex International Forum for Innovative Textiles. The advance for which they were honored involved assembling untold trillions of nanosize fibers into strong, tough, electronically conducting yarns that hold promise for such diverse applications as electronic textiles, artificial muscles, anti-ballistic vests, supercapacitors, fuel cells and wires connecting to neurons in damaged limbs. This major award recognizes the scientific and technological importance of the breakthrough in downsizing ancient technology of wool and cotton spinning to the nanoscale.
The breakthrough resulted from an unusual collaboration involving UTD nanotechnologists Dr. Mei Zhang and Dr. Ray H. Baughman and a noted expert in wool spinning, Dr. Ken Atkinson of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), an Australian national laboratory. The world first learned of the results of their work when they published a paper in the Nov. 19, 2004, issue of the prestigious journal, Science. Their more recent work is in enabling process upscale, optimizing properties, expanding applications opportunities and understanding fundamental scientific aspects – and that work has been dramatically accelerated by the efforts of Dr. Shaoli Fang, a research scientist at UTD, and Dr. Anvar Zakhidov, associate director of the UTD NanoTech Institute.
While individual nanotubes are well known to have remarkable properties, they are like minute bits of string, and many trillions of these invisible nanotubes must be assembled in a fraction of a second to make useful yarn, according to Baughman, a co-inventor of the technology and Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at UTD and director of the UTD NanoTech Institute.
The nanotubes in the yarns, comprising seamless cylinders of carbon arrayed like rings in a tree trunk, are many thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
Pending patents, co-owned by UTD and CSIRO, describe the nanotube yarn spinning process and applications in artificial muscles, protective clothing, thermal heat pipes, sensors, electron field emitters, ultra-high intensity lamps, displays, structural composites, supercapacitors, batteries, fuel cells and electronic textiles. These and related pending patents in the nanotechnology area will be offered for license in November.
The research that led to the New Materials Innovation Prize was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the United States Department of Defense, NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Texas Advanced Technology Program, the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the Strategic Partnership for Research in Nanotechnology (SPRING).
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UCSF Medical Center Receives Distinguished Stroke Center Certification
The University of California San Francisco Medical Center Receives Distinguished Stroke Center Certification Recognizing UCSF Medical Center's exceptional efforts to foster better outcomes in stroke care, the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) recently certified the hospital as a Primary Stroke Center.
UCSF is the first hospital in San Francisco to receive this designation.
Staffed with personnel trained to diagnose and treat stroke quickly and effectively, the stroke center provides all aspects of stroke care, including prevention, acute care and follow-up. A neurologist is on site 24 hours a day as part of a response team that works together to determine the best treatment option for each patient.
In addition, UCSF offers the latest treatments and tools that aid in dissolving or removing the clots causing a stroke, offering patients a greater chance of complete recovery. One device, the Mercy Retriever, has been used to safely remove clots in patients experiencing a stroke past the three-hour window that the anticlotting drug, tPA, can be used. The tiny corkscrew device is placed in a catheter and threaded through an artery to reach and remove clots. UCSF has other clinical device trials underway as well.
One focus of the newly certified stroke center will be to conduct outreach with other hospitals and clinics in the San Francisco area.
Citywide Improvements Recognizing that patients can only receive the best care reliably if a network of prepared hospitals is in place, Johnston and colleagues hope to see improvements in stroke care throughout San Francisco. They are exchanging information with other health care providers in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, sharing their knowledge of stroke care and helping to foster stroke centers in other hospitals in the area.
In parts of Northern California, such as Santa Clara County, ambulances may preferentially bring patients with signs of stroke to hospitals with JCAHO stroke center certification. Although such policies might improve care for stroke patients, Johnston cautioned that it might not work yet in San Francisco, given that UCSF is the only certified center.
Stroke is the number one cause of disability and the number three cause of death in the United States. More than 700,000 people have a stroke each year. About 160,000 of these cases result in death.
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UTMB Named Collaborating Center on Aging and Health
The Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization has designated UTMB as a Collaborating Center on Aging and Health. Kenneth J. Ottenbacher, director of the new collaborating center, said it would facilitate collaboration with Latin American researchers studying aging. Ottenbacher is associate director of UTMB’s Sealy Center on Aging. Kyriakos Markides is the collaborating center’s co-director, and is a senior fellow at the Sealy Center on Aging.
Martha Pelaez, regional advisor for aging and health with PAHO/WHO, presented a certificate to Dr. James Goodwin, director of UTMB’s Sealy Center on Aging, designating UTMB as the home of the collaborating center. Pelaez is responsible for technical collaboration on public health and aging to 28 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Goodwin is an internationally recognized leader in geriatric medicine and aging.
The mission of the collaborating center is to improve the health of Hispanic older adults through collaborative research, education and clinical training. The center will support a visiting scholars program for faculty, fellows and students. The center will also encourage, conduct and disseminate collaborative research, education and clinical training activities with partner institutions in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
UTMB is home to three other WHO collaborating centers, including the Center for Training in International Health, the Center for Nursing/Midwifery Development in Primary Health Care and the Center for Tropical Diseases.
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Renowned Geographer Dr. Brian Berry Named Dean of Social Sciences at UTD
Dr. Brian Berry, a world-renowned geographer, economic and urban development expert and member of the National Academy of Sciences, has been appointed dean of the School of Social Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), succeeding Dr. James Murdoch, who will return to full-time research and teaching duties at the school following completion of his term of appointment as dean.
Berry, who is the Lloyd V. Berkner Regental Professor in UTD’s School of Social Sciences and a long-time leader of the university’s political economy program, will assume his new duties on July 1. The School of Social Sciences is one of seven schools at UTD and offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in a broad range of fields, including sociology, political science, geography, economics and finance, government and politics and public affairs. The school has 53 faculty members and nearly 1,200 students.
Berry joined UTD in 1986, after holding faculty and administrative positions at Carnegie Mellon University (where he also served as a dean), Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He helped found and was the first director of UTD’s Bruton Center for Development Studies.
Berry is internationally recognized as a dominant intellectual force in the development of the modern discipline of geography. His early urban and regional research and associated work in spatial analysis helped spark the social-scientific revolution that occurred in geography in the 1960’s, leading him to become the world’s most frequently cited geographer – a ranking he maintained for more than a quarter century.
Berry has been deeply involved in urban and regional development planning as an advisor, consultant and expert witness, in both advanced and developing countries, with his influence felt in cities around the globe.
The awards and other forms of recognition Berry received for his work are legion. Chief among them are the Victoria Medal he received from Britain’s Royal Geographical Society in 1988 and his election as a Fellow in the British Academy in 1989. In 1975, he became the youngest social scientist ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific association in the United States, and in 1999 he became the first geographer elected to the academy’s council.
A native of England, Berry earned a B.Sc. degree in economics from University College, London. He received a M.A. degree and a Ph.D. degree, both in geography, from the University of Washington, Seattle.
Berry is the author of more than 500 books, articles and other professional publications.
