University News
Dr. Larry R. Faulkner Announces Resignation As President of The University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, president of The University of Texas at Austin since 1998, announced Thursday his plans to resign as president.
Faulkner said his announcement enables the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents to plan an orderly succession and ensures a smooth transition to a new administration. The target is to have a new president in place by March 1, 2006.
The UT System Board of Regents will conduct a national search for a successor to Faulkner. The chairman of the board will appoint a presidential search advisory committee to solicit and review nominees and applicants before the Board of Regents interviews finalists and selects a new president.
During Faulkner’s tenure, the university introduced a wide range of critical new academic programs. Through the Commission of 125, a group of alumni and citizens, it developed a new long-range, strategic plan. Faulkner reorganized and modernized the institution’s administration and installed a structure to foster more effective strategic planning. He introduced new programs and initiatives to promote participation in university life by all segments of the Texas population. And he gave new emphasis to human resources, addressing issues of faculty and staff salary competitiveness, organizational structure and campus services. Under Faulkner’s leadership, the university also completed the most successful fund-raising campaign in its history, raising more than $1.6 billion.
Faulkner was appointed the university’s 27th president on Dec. 16, 1997, and officially took office on April 13, 1998, after serving as provost, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and head of the Department of Chemistry during 25 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Faulkner’s tenure is the third longest among the university’s presidents. Dr. Harry Yandell Benedict served in the position from 1927 to 1937. Dr. Theophilus S. Painter served from 1944 to 1952. Should Faulkner remain as president until March 2006 his tenure will be the second longest among university presidents.
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Penn Receives $9.5 Million Grant from NIH as Part of National Screening Network to Discover Active Molecules
The University of Pennsylvania is receiving US$9.5 million from the National Institutes of Health during the next three years to establish the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery. The Penn team will screen the NIH repository of small molecules to discover new biological interactions.
Hundreds of thousands of molecules, collected and purified from natural sources or synthesized by chemists around the world, will be tested against biological targets for inhibitory or activating activity. The Penn center is one of nine facilities that the NIH is establishing across the country as part of the Molecular Library Screening Center Network.
"This initiative is comparable in scale and complexity to the Human Genome Project," said Scott Diamond, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the new center. "Small molecules come in an astronomically large variety of shapes and sizes that dwarfs the number of genes in the human genome. Finding the important ones within the NIH repository is a classic needle-haystack challenge, but we have robotic and biosensing tools that were not available even a decade ago."
Each of the new NIH centers will be screening the compound repository against unique targets of biological interest provided by scientists around the country. The screening centers will create a massive, public-domain database where the interactions of thousands of chemicals with scores of biological targets can be data-mined. Such tools have previously been available to university researchers only in a very limited way at few sites.
The Penn center has developed a very special capability to print thousands of molecules on a glass surface the size of a business card and then test the molecules against proteases and other enzymes purified from human or animal cells, bacteria, parasites, insects or viruses. As targets for drug development, proteases have proven critical to viral infection or replication, cancer cell migration, inflammation and blood clotting.
Penn will also be able to test compounds in thousands of miniature wells each containing a millimeter-sized zebra fish, an unlikely organism that has proven its worth in studies of heart or nerve function as well as in cancer biology because the transparent fish is easily imaged.
When the researchers identify a new molecule that reacts to a specific target, the results will be added to a database open to the public. Using the "hits" of the chemical screening, Amos Smith, a professor in Penn's Department of Chemistry, will head the effort to create highly tailored, higher potency molecules useful in biological research, imaging and pharmacological research.
The Penn Center for Molecular Discovery will be housed at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering. The center represents a truly multidisciplinary exercise, involving engineers with skills in robotics from Penn School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, chemists from Penn School of Arts and Sciences and biomedical researchers from Penn School of Medicine.
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The Sultan of Oman Awards $5 Million to University of Cambridge
His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the Sultan of Oman, has bestowed a £2.8 million (US$5) gift on the University of Cambridge for the permanent establishment of a Professorship of Modern Arabic.
The Chair will be known as the His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professorship of Modern Arabic and will be located within the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
An additional £300,000 ($537,000) from His Majesty will enrich the study of Oriental Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge by supporting a Fellowship there.
The gifts will enhance the University of Cambridge’s long-standing position as a center of excellence for Arabic studies. They are also timely – modern Arabic is one of the academic subjects that the UK Government last year identified as being of strategic importance to the country’s future success.
His Majesty the Sultan has long been a generous supporter of scholarship and learning. His gifts to Cambridge – made through the Office of the Adviser to His Majesty the Sultan, for Cultural Affairs – will help achieve his goal of enabling the Arabic language to become a living, modern and freely developing entity. They will also underline Oman’s unique position in binding Arabic-speaking nations with the rest of the world.
Arabic has been taught at the University of Cambridge since the 17th century and the UK’s first ever professorship in the subject, the Sir Thomas Adams’s Professorship of Arabic, was established there in 1632.
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Researchers Create First Nanofluidic Transistor
University of California, Berkeley, researchers have invented a variation on the standard electronic transistor, creating the first "nanofluidic" transistor that allows them to control the movement of ions through sub-microscopic, water-filled channels.
The researchers - a chemist and a mechanical engineer - predict that, just as the electronic transistor became the main component of microprocessors and integrated circuits, so will nanofluidic transistors anchor molecular processors, allowing microscopic chemical plants on a chip that operate without moving parts. No valves to get stuck, no pumps to blow, no mixers to get clogged.
Arun Majumdar, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and colleague Peidong Yang, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry are exploring using this for cancer diagnosis. A nanoscale chemical analysis chip could, theoretically, take the contents of as few as 10 cancer cells and pull out protein markers that can tip doctors to the best means of attacking the cancer.
Yang, who built a variation of the transistor using nanotubes, is equally intrigued by the computational possibilities of the device.
Majumdar, Yang and colleagues Rohit Karnik, a mechanical engineering graduate student; Rong Fan, a chemistry graduate student; and mechanical engineering students Min Yue and Deyu Li reported their success - the product of three years of effort - in the May issue of the journal Nanoletters. Yang and Majumdar are also faculty scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
One big advantage of nanofluidic transistors, Majumdar said, is that they could be made using the same manufacturing technology that today produces integrated circuits. Nanofluidic channels could be integrated with electronics on a single silicon chip, with the electronics controlling the operation of the nanofluidics. The only microscale parts of the device are the microchannels for injecting liquid.
Majumdar and Yang's team constructed a 35-nanometer-high channel between two silicon dioxide plates, and then filled the channel with water and potassium chloride salt. They showed that by applying a voltage across the channel by means of electrodes attached to the plates, they could shut off the flow of potassium ions through the water. This is analogous to the control of electron flow through a transistor by means of a gate voltage.
Such ion manipulations are not possible through microscopic channels because ions in the liquid quickly move to the plates and cancel out the voltage, basically shielding the interior of the liquid from the electric field. Channels less than 100 nanometers across, however, are so small that this shielding doesn't occur, so ions in the bulk liquid can be pushed or pulled by electric voltages.
If the ions are proteins, they can be shuttled through channels lined with fluorescent antibodies for detecting or sensing. If the ions are pieces of DNA, they can be sorted and sequenced. In fact, the authors say, any highly sensitive biomolecular sensing down to the level of a single molecule could be performed with nanofluidic transistors. They demonstrated that labeled, charged DNA fragments could be manipulated in their transistor.
Yang, who is adept at making nanoscale lasers, tubes, wires and other devices, created a version of the transistor using nanotubes with internal diameters of 20 nanometers, proving that the same sort of molecular processing can be done with these innovative structures. While Majumdar foresees putting electronic and nanofluidic transistors on the same chip to provide computer control of chemical processing, Yang foresees the computing and chemical processing being done by the same nanofluidic channels.
Majumdar and Yang acknowledge that a lot more work needs to be done, including understanding the surface effects inside nanochannels. In addition, the voltage required to shut off ion flow is now 75 volts, far too high for any of today's integrated circuits. But their team has a few other papers waiting to appear in Nanoletters and in the Physical Review Letters that push the technology farther than this initial paper. They hope to beat the time lag between invention of the transistor in 1947 and creation of the first integrated circuit in 1960.
The work was supported by the National Cancer Institute's Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies program and by the Department of Energy. Current work is being funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Nobel Laureate Named Dean of UT Southwestern Medical School
Nobel laureate Dr. Alfred Gilman, chairman of pharmacology for 24 years at UT Southwestern Medical Center, has been named dean of UT Southwestern Medical School, effective immediately. As dean, Dr. Gilman will be the chief academic officer of the institution, including overseeing all faculty appointments and the education of more than 800 medical students and 1,200 clinical residents in training. Gilman has served as interim dean since May 2004. He succeeds Dr. Robert Alpern, who left the university to become dean and chief executive of the Yale University School of Medicine.
Gilman's association with UT Southwestern began in 1981, when he joined the faculty as chairman of pharmacology, a post he will relinquish when a search committee identifies a new chair for that department.
Gilman was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of G proteins and the role they play in the complex processes by which cells communicate with each other. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He will continue to lead the Alliance for Cellular Signaling, a multimillion dollar interdisciplinary research effort he established in 2000. The program involves investigators at five academic centers and is aimed at advancing the understanding of cell communication networks. The Alliance has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, five pharmaceutical companies and two foundations.
Gilman also will continue oversight of the Cecil H. and Ida Green Comprehensive Center for Molecular, Computational and Systems Biology.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Yale University, Gilman earned an M.D. and Ph.D. in pharmacology from Case Western Reserve University. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics at the National Institutes of Health. In 1971 Gilman began a 10-year stint in the pharmacology department at the University of Virginia School of Medicine before joining UT Southwestern.
Dr. Gilman holds the Nadine and Tom Craddick Distinguished Chair in Medical Science, the Raymond Willie and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Molecular Neuropharmacology, in Honor of Harold B. Crasilneck, Ph.D., and the Atticus James Gill, M.D., Chair in Medical Science.
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Study to Explore Risks, Benefits of Synthetic Genomics
At a time when biologists are faced with more ethics and security concerns than ever, three organizations--MIT, the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.-- announced a new project to examine the societal implications of synthetic genomics, a new field involving the development of viruses and cells using designed and engineered DNA.
The 15-month study will explore the risks and benefits of this emerging technology, as well as possible safeguards to prevent abuse, including bioterrorism. It will be jointly directed by Drew Endy of MIT, Robert M. Friedman of the Venter Institute and Gerald L. Epstein of CSIS.
Funded by a US$570,060 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the multi-organization effort will engage scientists and policymakers to better understand the potential risks and benefits associated with synthetic genomics.
The study, expected to be completed by July 2006, will include a series of workshops analyzing technological and societal concerns. In addition, a meeting including policymakers, scientists and the media will be conducted to discuss oversight, governance and monitoring issues. Study results, including a suite of evaluated policy options, will be reported in numerous scientific and policy journals and will be disseminated broadly to the public.
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Roeder Named Director In Residence at UTD's Excellence In Corporate Governance Institute
John M. Roeder, a retired certified public accountant and member of the boards of directors of several publicly held corporations, has been named the first director in residence at The University of Texas at Dallas School of Management’s Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance (IECG).
As IECG’s director in residence, Roeder, who spent more than 30 years with the firm of Arthur Andersen, much of it at the executive level, will advise the institute in such areas as research topics and program structure. He also will give lectures to classes at the school, advise the institute on its organizational structure, assist it in fundraising and help it benchmark its programs and structure against other corporate governance organizations nationwide.
Roeder said he was looking forward to working with the faculty, staff, students, alumni and corporate partners of the UTD School of Management.
The term of Roeder’s appointment is one year.
IECG conducts research and presents programs that are focused on enhancing the abilities of corporate directors, senior officers and institutional investors to protect and promote stakeholders’ interests in an effective and ethical manner. IECG’s director of research is Dr. Suresh Radhakrishnan, a UTD professor of accounting and information management.
The institute presents a series of “Compliance and Beyond” programs that focus on ways expenditures for regulatory compliance can be used to enhance corporate governance systems of publicly traded companies and, at the same time, create value for the shareholders and other stakeholders.
