University News

Richard Smalley, Nanotechnology Pioneer, Dies of Cancer

Richard E. Smalley, Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Rice University and 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died of cancer on October 28. He was 62.

Dr. Smalley was widely known for the discovery and characterization of C60 (Buckminsterfullerene, a.k.a the “buckyball” ), a soccerball-shaped molecule which, together with other fullerenes such as C70, now constitutes the third elemental form of carbon (after graphite and diamond). The buckyball helped launch the field of nanotechnology.

It was the 1985 discovery of buckyballs for which he was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his research partners Dr. Robert F. Curl and Sir Harold Kroto.

Carlos Garcia of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) at Rice said “We will miss Rick's brilliance, commitment, energy, enthusiasm, and humanity. He epitomized what we value at Rice: path breaking research, commitment to teaching, and contribution to the betterment of our world. In important ways, Rick helped build and shape the Rice University of today. His extraordinary scientific contributions, recognized with the Nobel Prize, will form the foundation of new technologies that will improve life for millions. His life's work and his brave fight against a terrible disease were an inspiration to all.”

Professor Smalley received his B.S. degree in 1965 from the University of Michigan.  After intervening four-year period in industry as a research chemist with Shell, he earned his M.S. in 1971 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1973.  During a postdoctoral period with Lennard Wharton and Donald Levy at the University of Chicago, he pioneered what has become one of the most powerful techniques in chemical physics; supersonic beam laser spectroscopy.

After coming to Rice University in 1976 he was named to the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair in Chemistry in 1982. He was a founder of the Rice Quantum Institute in 1979, and served as the Chairman from 1986 to 1996. In 1990 he became a Professor in the Department of Physics and was appointed University Professor in 2002. He was the founding director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice from 1996 to 2002, and Director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory at Rice.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Smalley was the recipient of numerous awards. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1991 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of the 1991 Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics, the 1992 International Prize for New Materials, the 1992 E.O. Lawrence Award of the U.S. Department of Energy, the 1992 Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry, the 1993 William H. Nichols Medal of the American Chemical Society, the 1993 John Scott Award of the City of Philadelphia, the 1994 Europhysics Prize, the 1994 Harrison Howe Award, the 1995 Madison Marshall Award, the 1996 Franklin Medal, the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Distinguished Public Service Medal awarded by the US Department of the Navy in 1997, the 2002 Glenn T. Seaborg Medal, and the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award of Small Times Magazine.  He received three honorary degrees in 2004—an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Richmond; a Doctor Scientiarum Honoris Causa from Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and a Doctor of Science from Tuskegee University. 

He had been doing research on buckytubes, elongated fullerenes that are essentially a new high tech polymer, following on from nylon, polypropylene, and Kevlar. But unlike any of these previous wonder polymers, these new buckytubes conduct electricity. Applications are possible in nearly every technology where electrons flow. In February of 2000 this research led to the start up of a new company, Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. which is now developing large scale production and applications of these miraculous buckytubes.

He is survived by his wife Debbie and his sons Chad and Preston, his brother Clayton, his sisters Linda and Mary Jill, his stepdaughters Eva and Allison and his granddaughter Bridget. At press time there was no information about a memorial service.

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NSF Announces Undergraduate Research Centers

Representatives of The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced it will fund two new Undergraduate Research Centers (URCs), one based at The Ohio State University and the other at the University of South Dakota.

Together with a URC based at Purdue University, funded in 2004, these centers will constitute a 5-year, US$9 million experiment to attract undergraduates into science from the very beginning of their college careers.

URCs will try to accomplish that mission by giving college students a chance to participate in authentic, potentially publishable research using the most up-to-date tools and methods. In that sense, the URC program will resemble some of the foundation's existing education efforts, notably the long-established Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. But unlike the REU awards, which tend to serve juniors and seniors at a relatively limited number of four-year colleges and universities, the URCs will seek to attract first- and second-year students in a much broader range of institutions--explicitly including 2-year community colleges, where nearly half of today's college students begin their studies.

Indeed, a second major goal of the URC program is to get more of the nation's colleges involved in research. To that end, each of the three URCs has assembled a wide-ranging coalition of partner institutions.

Because NSF's Division of Chemistry leads this pilot program, all URC research projects are in the chemical sciences or in interdisciplinary areas supported by the chemical sciences.

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH CENTER AWARDEES

• Ohio Consortium for Undergraduate Research: Research Experiences to Enhance Learning (2005)
  The Research Experiences to Enhance Learning (REEL) initiative, based at The Ohio State University, is intended to transform the current first- and second-year chemistry courses into a research-intensive program. The center will involve a collaboration among 15 public institutions of higher education in the state of Ohio, and is projected to affect some 14,000 students a year when fully implemented. Using Ohio's ultra high-speed electronic network, participants will develop, implement and evaluate research modules for undergraduate chemistry courses; build student-learning communities in chemistry within and across institutions; carry out collaborative, faculty-student research projects across multiple sites; and pool the projects' research results in a common data base. The principal investigator will be Ohio State chemist Prabir Dutta. The university's URC partners will be Kent State University; the University of Akron; Bowling Green State University; Capital University; Central State University; the University of Cincinnati; Cleveland State University; Columbus State Community College; the University of Dayton; Miami University; Ohio University; the University of Toledo; Wright State University; and Youngstown State University. 
• The Northern Plains Undergraduate Research Center (2005)
  The seven institutions of the Northern Plains Undergraduate Research Center consortium, led by the University of South Dakota, will seek to make undergraduate research in chemistry an integral part of the entire 4-year  undergraduate curriculum. This multi-institutional reform is expected to bring research experiences to approximately 600 first-year students per year when the program is at full capacity. The center will provide access to major research instrumentation, along with technical expertise and training for setting-up and using modern scientific equipment and methods. It will sponsor research symposia and workshops on grant writing for participating faculty. It will  facilitate connections to industrial and government laboratories and international student exchange programs,. And it will attempt to build a stronger foundation for early undergraduate research through high school teacher outreach and training programs. In addition to its funding from NSF's chemistry division, the Northern Plains URC will receive support from the foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and its Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. The principal investigator will be University of South Dakota chemist Mary Berry. The university's partners will include Augustana College; Mount Marty College; Dordt College; Buena Vista University; Sinte Gleska University; and Fort Berthold Community College.

The Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (2004)

The Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE), based at Purdue University, will create laboratory modules for students in first- and second-year chemistry courses across all of the nine CASPiE institutions. This effort will initially engage up to 500 students each semester. The modules will teach fundamental chemistry skills and concepts but will be interdisciplinary, involving authentic research projects developed by faculty in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Biology, Medicinal Chemistry, Food Science and Chemical Engineering departments. The modules will also incorporate the Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) model, in which undergraduates who have recently completed the course will help those who are currently enrolled. The center will provide students in the CASPiE institutions with online access to automated, research-quality instrumentation, and will help faculty members in those institutions develop research projects that exploit this capability. The principal investigator is Gabriela Weaver of Purdue University. Purdue's partners include the University of Illinois-Chicago;  Ball State University;  Northeastern Illinois University;  Olive Harvey College;  Harold Washington College;  Moraine Valley College;  College of DuPage; and Chicago State University.

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International Consortium Completes Catalog of Human Genetic Variation

The International HapMap Consortium ( www.hapmap.org) published a comprehensive catalogue of human genetic variation on 27 October, a landmark achievement that is already accelerating the search for genes involved in common diseases, such as asthma, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Oxford is the only British university to be involved in the project, and is one of the two UK institutions involved.

In the 27 October edition of Nature ,more than 200 researchers from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States describe the initial results from their public-private effort to chart the patterns of genetic variation that are common in the world’s population. Their findings show that the search for clinically relevant genes can be simplified – and hence dramatically hastened – by using the map of variation developed by the HapMap Project.

At the project’s outset in October 2002, the consortium, which includes Oxford University Professors Peter Donnelly (Department of Statistics) and Lon Cardon (Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics), set an ambitious goal of creating a human haplotype map, or HapMap, within three years. The Nature paper marks the attainment of that goal with its detailed description of the Phase I HapMap, consisting of more than one million markers of genetic variation, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced ‘snips’). The consortium is also nearing completion of the Phase II HapMap that will contain nearly three times as many markers as the initial version and will enable researchers to focus their gene searches even more precisely on specific regions of the genome.

Any two unrelated people are 99.9 per cent identical at the genetic level. However, it is important to understand the 0.1 percent difference because it can help explain why one person is more susceptible to a disease or responds differently to a drug or an environmental factor than another person.

The HapMap shows the boundaries of neighborhoods of correlated genetic variation, or haplotypes, across the entire human genome. With these haplotypes defined, HapMap provides an efficient method for choosing ‘tag SNPs’ that capture the genetic variation in each neighborhood with a minimum amount of work. By using HapMap data to compare the SNP patterns of people affected by a disease with those of unaffected people, researchers can survey genetic variation across the whole genome and identify genetic contributions to common diseases far more efficiently than is possible with traditional approaches.

Gene hunters around the world have been quick to recognize the potential of the HapMap, tapping into its publicly-available data even before the first draft of the map was completed. For example, in studies published in March in the journal Science, scientists used HapMap data to uncover a genetic variation that substantially increases the risk of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of severe vision loss in the elderly.

In addition to assisting in the identification of genetic factors involved in disease, the HapMap can help to pinpoint genetic variations that may affect people’s response to medications, toxic substances and environmental factors. Such information can be used to help doctors prescribe the right drug in the right dose for each patient, as well as recommend prevention strategies that take into account individuals’ varying responses to environmental factors, such as diet.

On top of its intended function as a resource for studies of human health and disease, the Phase I HapMap has yielded fascinating clues into how our species evolved over time and specific forces that were important as the human population spread around the globe.

Genetic diversity in humans is increased by recombination, which is the swapping of DNA from the maternal and paternal lines. Oxford-led research has found that in humans, most such swapping occurs primarily at a limited number of ‘hotspots’ in the genome. By analyzing the HapMap data, the Oxford researchers have produced a genome-wide inventory of where recombination takes place www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/news/2005-06/oct/26.shtml, published in Science. This will enable more detailed studies of this fundamental property of inheritance, as well as serve to improve the design of genetic studies of disease.

Professor Peter Donnelly from Oxford’s Department of Statistics, one of two corresponding authors on the HapMap report, said: ‘This report describes a remarkable step in our journey to understand human biology and disease. The human genome sequence provided us with the list of many of the parts to make a human. The HapMap provides us with indicators – like Post-It notes – which flag areas to focus on in looking for genes involved in common disease.

As was the case with all of the data generated by the Human Genome Project, HapMap data are being made swiftly and freely available in public databases.

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Ronald Blanck Announces Plans to Retire From UNTHSC Presidency

University of North Texas Health Science Center President Ronald R. Blanck , D.O., has announced his plans to retire from the position he has held for the past five years. He says he will remain at UNTHSC until a new president is named.

Blanck joined the UNT Health Science Center in August 2000 upon his retirement from a 32-year career in the U.S. Army. At the time of his retirement from the Army, he was a lieutenant general serving as the Army’s Surgeon General and commander of the U.S. Army Medical Command, which has responsibility for more than 46,000 military personnel and 26,000 civilian employees throughout the world.

Blanck presided over an expansion of the schools within UNTHSC and the creation of a fourth school. During his tenure, enrollment almost doubled, research funding tripled, and the size of the campus doubled, with the construction of the Center for BioHealth and the purchase of additional adjacent property.

He also increased hospital partnerships, opened a Center for Non-invasive Imaging in the Center for BioHealth, helped bring the first federally funded Community Health Clinic to Fort Worth, and expanded the biotechnology incubator in partnership with the city.

During his time at the UNT Health Science Center, Blanck has acted as an adviser on bioterrorism issues and an expert in preparing the medical community to respond to mass casualty incidents or those involving weapons of mass destruction. In addition to his many speaking engagements and advisory positions, he was chair of the task forces on bioterrorism for both the Texas Medical Association and the American Osteopathic Association.

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School Receives $1.4 Million Grant to Expand Outreach Programs for Disadvantaged Students

The University of California – San Francisco (UCSF) School of Dentistry was recently awarded a grant for US$1.4 million from the US Department of Health and Human Services to continue and expand its successful outreach programs.

The grant is a direct result of the school’s history of successful recruitment and retention of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, including those from underrepresented minorities. The federal grant, paid over a three-year period, funds educational training programs targeting students from middle school to postgraduate education.

The compelling national need to improve access to general health and oral health care, cited in the US Surgeon General’s Report in 2000, makes it extremely important to increase dental career opportunities for underrepresented minorities. In California, the shortage of minority and disadvantaged dental personnel is comparable to the shortage experienced in the nation as a whole. For example, there are approximately 24,500 practicing dentists in California. Less than 6 percent are from underrepresented minority groups, and most of these minority dentists are clustered in the urban areas of Southern California.

The grant will support a comprehensive approach to provide career awareness and academic enrichment to assist disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students compete for spots in dental schools. The program will collaborate with four San Francisco high schools (Philip and Sal Burton, Thurgood Marshal, Mission, and John O’Connell), four universities (UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, and San Francisco City College) and a community-based organization (The San Francisco Boys and Girls Club). Each educational partner has committed resources and staff to assist in the implementation and execution of the program.

The program will collaborate with each partner to provide recruitment activities, preliminary education during the academic year and summer, financial aid information, pre-entry activities, and counseling and mentoring services to develop a more competitive applicant pool of students. Currently the activities and programs of the UCSF Dental Careers Program affect more than 1,000 disadvantaged students annually. UCSF School of Dentistry’s Undergraduate Mentorship and Post-Baccalaureate Programs have been cited as model programs. Both have been very successful with recruiting and enrolling more disadvantaged and underrepresented minorities into dental schools, including UCSF.

Major activities of the UCSF-Dental Careers Program are the following:

• Targeting high schools and colleges with high concentrations of disadvantaged students for career presentations; hosting career day programs for partnership high school and college students; mailings targeted area high schools and colleges; and providing observation experiences for partnership high school students through a mentorship program. UCSF School of Dentistry staff will conduct year-round recruitment activities.
• Providing a year-round post-baccalaureate program for 15 to 20 disadvantaged undergraduate students to participate in an intensive 8-week summer Dental Admission Test (DAT) review and study skills assessment. Students will enroll in upper division science courses during the academic year and participate in seminars, clerkships and observational experiences at community dental clinics. Offering facilitation services (application assistance, interview workshops, counseling, DAT review, and financial aid information) for students enrolled at targeted universities and colleges.
• Providing academic assistance and counseling support for disadvantaged students enrolled in each first-year dental class. Tutoring will be available to targeted students and scheduled at least twice weekly during the academic year. Academic, financial aid and personal counseling will also be provided. Academic progress will be monitored using a formal reporting system consisting of student progress reports from faculty.
• Recruiting and enrolling 30 disadvantaged students from four partnership high schools to participate in a six-week summer enrichment program designed to increase proficiency in math and chemistry. Students will participate in skill-building seminars designed to improve study skills, reading comprehension, test taking and note taking skills. Students will also participate in career exploration, clinical mentorships, research experiences, and attend presentations by practicing health professionals.
• Recruiting 30 disadvantaged students to participate in an eight-week summer enrichment program (Undergraduate Mentorship Program) designed to strengthen their basic science (biology and chemistry) background, and exposure to clinical dentistry and research. Students will also participate in seminars designed to improve study habits, reading comprehension, stress management, test and note taking skills, and career explorations.

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University Receives Nearly $1 Million Grant to Train Developmental Disability Researchers Across Disciplines

The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development and the Vanderbilt Center for Human Genetics Research have been awarded a $980,922 grant from the National Institutes of Health Roadmap Initiative to support postdoctoral training in understanding and treating developmental disabilities. The funds will support four postdoctoral trainees for five years.

“This new program brings together various fields that have a stake in better diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders that impact cognition and mental health,” said Pat Levitt, director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. Levitt and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Associate Director Elisabeth Dykens will lead the new program. “The NIH Roadmap initiative was designed to stimulate such cross-disciplinary interactions. We at Vanderbilt University are fortunate to have outstanding researchers who believe in the value of training a new generation of scientists who will become facile at moving across behavior and biomedical disciplines.”

Vanderbilt faculty representing 15 various departments from the School of Medicine, Peabody College and the College of Arts and Science also serve on the grant team, providing a unique interdisciplinary approach.

The new training program includes research efforts focused on developing better diagnostic tools and new interventions for children, adolescents and adults with developmental disabilities. It facilitates ongoing, interdisciplinary application of behavioral and biological interventions in the community.

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Book by Laurent Dubois Wins $25,000 Frederick Douglass Prize

Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition recently announced that it has awarded the Seventh Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize to Laurent Dubois for his study of the trans-cultural struggle over slavery and citizenship in the revolutionary French Caribbean.

Dubois, associate professor at Michigan State University, will be awarded the prize for his book “A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804” (A Colony of Citizens was published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press). Focusing on the island of Guadeloupe, Dubois explores the slave revolts there that brought about the 1794 abolition of slavery. His historical account sheds new light on the contradictory ways this emancipation developed, leading to its ultimate reversal in the early 19th century. On a broader scale, he examines how slaves-turned-citizens both experienced and shaped the transformations of the age.

The $25,000 annual award for the year’s best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition, is the most generous history prize in the field, and the most respected and coveted of the major awards for the study of the black experience. The prize will be awarded at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 23, 2006, as the capstone of Black History Month.

Four other books were singled out as finalists: “The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia,” by Claude A. Clegg III (University of North Carolina Press), “Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War,” by Melvin Patrick Ely (Knopf Publishers), “Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892,” by Robin Law (Ohio University Press) and “The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech,” by Shane White and Graham White (Beacon Press).

This year’s winning book was selected from a field of nearly 70 entries by a jury of scholars that included Colin Palmer ( Princeton University) and Deborah White ( Rutgers University) in addition to Smith.

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004.

The award is named for Frederick Douglass, the onetime slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, was launched at Yale in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, in particular the Atlantic slave system, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.

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Health Literacy Expert Receives Alvarez Award for Work in Medical Communication

Health literacy expert Ruth M. Parker, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of General Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2005 Alvarez Award. The award was presented to Dr. Parker at the last month's American Medical Writers Association annual conference.

The Alvarez award honors Walter C. Alvarez, MD, a pioneer in the field of medical communication, and is given in recognition of excellence in communicating health care developments and concepts to the public.

During her speech at the conference, Dr. Parker praised Dr. Alvarez's work in medical communication and quoted an excerpt from his book, "How to Help Your Doctor Help You," which reads: "So often the man who knows much about his disease and its treatment lives long and comfortably while the man who does not know what to do loses his life needlessly."

Parker is a general internist at Grady Memorial Hospital. For more than 14 years, she has devoted her medical career and advocacy efforts to the issue of health literacy -- how well people obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services when making decisions about their health. She has worked with numerous groups and agencies in an effort to change the widespread ignorance on the topic of health literacy.

Parker is a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Non-Prescription Drug Advisory Committee, which is responsible for providing recommendations on whether current prescription drugs should be sold over-the-counter. She has chaired the Expert Panel on Health Literacy, Council of Scientific Affairs, for the American Medical Association (AMA) that authored a frequently cited JAMA white paper on health literacy. She co-authored the National Library of Medicine Complete Bibliographies of Medicine on Health Literacy, and is chair of the Steering Committee for the AMA Foundation Signature Program: Partnership in Health -- Improving the Patient-Physician Relationship through Health Literacy. She has also served as a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Health Literacy, which published a breakthrough report, Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion.

Parker is chair of the Programs Committee for the American College of Physicians Foundation, and past chair of its Patient Literacy Advisory Board, which has several national initiatives devoted to improving health literacy. She has received numerous grants for health literacy research, from organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Prudential Center for Health Services Research.

Parker has authored or co-authored nearly 100 published articles, reviews, book chapters, and books.

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UTMB to Receive National Award for Innovation

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston’s Electronic Health Network was selected by the National Homeland Defense Foundation as this year’s inaugural winner of the Focus on Innovation Award.

UTMB will receive the award at the Homeland Defense Symposium at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. This year’s topics will address defense and security issues of borders, municipalities and infrastructures, as well as hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Telemedicine at UTMB represents much more than another advance in medical technology and high-tech equipment, Hammack said. “For more than a decade UTMB has been testing, refining and combining sophisticated videoconferencing capabilities, comprehensive electronic medical records, proven disease management guidelines and quality monitoring systems to extend the reach of health care,” he said. “UTMB’s Electronic Health Network has redefined distance medicine.”

The National Homeland Defense Foundation was the initiative of a group of Colorado civic leaders to support the post-9/11 defense missions of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command. Together, they created the Homeland Defense Symposium, the premiere national conference that addresses the range of homeland defense and security issues. The Focus on Innovation Award, was presented on Oct. 26, the last day of the conference.