UTD Home

Friday FYI

Newsletter from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development- U. T. Dallas

University News

William C. Powers, Jr., Named President of UT Austin

William C. Powers, Jr., dean, School of Law, The University of Texas at Austin, was officially named president of The University of Texas at Austin on Monday (Dec. 5) by the UT System Board of Regents.

Powers, who will succeed President Larry R. Faulkner on February 1, 2006, was named the sole finalist for the position by the Board of Regents one month ago.

Powers, who has served as dean of the law school at UT Austin since 2000, is also a university distinguished teaching professor, Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law, and John Jeffers Research Chair in Law. He joined the law school faculty in 1977 and has held several faculty chairs and other administrative appointments. He served as associate dean for academic affairs from 1984 to 1987 and 1994 to 1995. Powers received his law degree from Harvard University and his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

As UT Austin president, Powers will oversee a major research university that is home to over 48,000 students, 2,700 faculty and 17,000 staff members. The campus operating budget for fiscal year 2006 is $1.65 billion.

The faculty at UT Austin is composed of outstanding scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including hundreds of members of prestigious academic and scientific organizations. The university has one of the largest graduate schools in the nation. The university has one of the largest single-campus enrollments in the nation, including students from all 254 counties within Texas, all 50 states and more than 100 foreign countries.

Colleges and schools include Architecture, the McCombs School of Business, Communication, Continuing Education Division, Education, Engineering, Fine Arts, Jackson School of Geosciences, Graduate Studies, School of Information, School of Law, LBJ School of Public Affairs, Liberal Arts, Natural Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy, Social Work, and interdisciplinary units.

[ FYI Index ]

Prof. Daniel Zajfman Nominated as Next President of the Weizmann Institute

Mr. Mandy Moross of London, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, announced Tuesday that the Institute’s nominating committee has recommended to the Board of Governors that Prof. Daniel Zajfman be elected as the next President of the Weizmann Institute.

The committee’s recommendation comes at the end of a process that lasted a number of months. A search committee for president, which included scientific and lay members of the Board of Governors from Israel and abroad as well as additional faculty members from the Institute, has unanimously selected Prof. Zajfman as its choice for president. The recommendation of the search committee was confirmed by the nominating committee of the Board of Governors headed by Mandy Moross. In accordance with the rules of the Institute, the election of the president will be approved by the full Board. Prof. Zajfman will serve as the tenth president of the Weizmann Institute, replacing the Institute’s current president, Prof. Ilan Chet. Prof. Chet’s term of office ends in Dec. 2006.

Prof. Daniel Zajfman was born in Belgium in 1959 and moved to Israel in 1979. He received a B.Sc. in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1989 from the Technion, in Haifa, in atomic physics. He then completed post-doctoral research at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. In 1991, he returned to the Weizmann Institute as a Senior Scientist in the Particle Physics Department. In 1997, he was appointed Associate Professor and was promoted to Full professor in 2003. Today, he serves as Head of the Physics Services Unit. Since 2001, he has been an external member of the Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and in 2005, he was appointed as a Director of the Max Planck Institute. In this capacity, he is currently overseeing a 4.5 million Euro project to construct an ion storage ring that will work at a temperature approaching absolute zero.

Prof. Zajfman's research focuses on the reaction dynamics of small molecules and how they influence the composition of the interstellar medium.  He recreates the conditions of outer space in the laboratory using special devices called ion ‘traps’ or ‘storage rings.’ In these devices, he is able to briefly store and measure the properties of small amounts of material, as little as a few hundred atoms or molecules-worth, under the extreme conditions of interstellar space (especially very low temperatures and low densities). Some of his research has focused on the puzzle of how complex molecules are formed in outer space.

In addition to his research, Zajfman has invested much time and effort in community outreach, to the public in general and youth in particular. One of his goals is to broaden interest in and knowledge of the advances taking place on the scientific front.

[ FYI Index ]

Science and Engineering Doctorates Are Up for Second Year in a Row

According to new survey results, the number of Ph.D. degrees granted in science and engineering (S&E) fields has increased for the second year in a row. Despite the gains, the 26,275 Ph.D. degrees earned in the 2004 academic year--the period the survey covers--are still shy of the 1998 peak of 27,278.

"Although there was an increase for two successive academic years, there is not yet sufficient evidence for determining if there is a new trend," says the report, which was issued in Nov. by the National Science Foundation.

Approximately 62 percent of the total Ph.D.s earned in 2004 were in S&E fields. Of the remainder, roughly 16 percent were earned in education, 12 percent in the humanities, 6 percent in professional or other fields, and 4 percent in health fields.

Biological sciences was the only S&E field to issue more doctorates than ever before. Physical sciences, psychology and engineering in 2004 were still well below their past peaks. Doctorates in physics alone have declined nearly 20 percent in the past 10 years. The number of graduate students enrolling in physics, however, has been increasing since 2000, so that trend may reverse in future years.

According to the survey, over 50 percent of earned doctorates in several S&E fields went to non-U.S. citizens in 2004. The fields with the highest percent of non-U.S. recipients were--in order--engineering, computer science, mathematics, and physics.

[ FYI Index ]

Palmyra Research Station Launched

A new research station has opened its doors on Palmyra Atoll, a ring of tiny islands in the tropical Pacific about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. Stanford climatologists and marine and terrestrial scientists count among an international consortium led by the Nature Conservancy that will use the station to study climate change, disappearing coral reefs and invasive species.

"There's a relatively low level of human disturbance on the outside of the reef and on the fish," said geological and environmental sciences Professor Rob Dunbar, the Victoria P. and Roger W. Sant Director of the Earth Systems Program, who studies climate change by drilling cores from ice sheets and coral reefs. "We think Palmyra Atoll is an analog for how things were before humans exerted pressure."

The new laboratory lies on Cooper Island, the largest of Palmyra's islets. The atoll has seen little development and infrequent human visitors since 1943, when the U.S. military built an air base and packed 3,000 troops on it for six months, Dunbar said.

Built by coral growing on the ring of an ancient submerged volcano, the combined landmass of all of the atoll's islets would fill less than two-thirds of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Annual rainfall can exceed 7 feet, its highest point above sea level.

Lagoons offer sanctuary to bottle-nosed dolphins and green sea turtles. Coconut trees and native ferns pack the islets, also home to one of the last remaining populations of the giant Pisonia tree as well as the coconut crab, a rare hermit crab and the biggest land-dwelling invertebrate in the world. Such biodiversity makes Palmyra an excellent site to study dwindling species and other disturbances in ecosystems, according to the Nature Conservancy website.

While not pristine, the atoll boasts three times as many coral species as Hawaii. Step out of a 17-seat turbo-prop airplane after a three-hour flight from Honolulu and "everything looks different," Dunbar said.

One Stanford research project uses satellite tags to plot movements of manta rays within the lagoons and beyond. In another, researchers use satellite images and don rubber boots to map reefs, sandbars and algal flats. Dunbar's group drills core samples from 200-year-old corals to plot water temperature and rainfall all the way back to when the atoll's namesake, the American ship Palmyra, wrecked on its shores in 1802.

The Palmyra research consortium also includes scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, University of Hawaii, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, California Academy of Sciences, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California-Irvine, U.S. Geological Survey and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. The consortium will work in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the atoll as a wildlife refuge.

[ FYI Index ]

Founding Donors Add $100 Million to Broad Institute Gift

Only eighteen months after the launch of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Los Angeles-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced that they are doubling their founding gift to the institute from $100 million to $200 million.

The Broads' gift is the largest ever given to support a joint endeavor combining the strengths of two great universities - Harvard and MIT. The Broads' first $100 million gift was made to MIT, so the second $100 million gift will now be made through Harvard. The combined gift will be given as $20 million per year over 10 years.

The Broad Institute's mission is to fulfill the promise of genomics for medicine. It aims to empower creative scientists to construct powerful new tools for genomic medicine, to make them accessible to the global scientific community and to apply them to the understanding and treatment of disease. The Broad Institute is a new type of biomedical research institute announced in 2003 and launched in 2004 by an unprecedented collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Harvard-affiliated hospitals and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

The Broad Institute's annual budget of $100 million is derived largely from traditional peer-reviewed scientific grants, but the Broads' gift will allow the institute to pursue new directions and initiatives.

The Broad Institute involves a world-class faculty, including a total of 60 core and associate members, with appointments at one of the Harvard or MIT based institutions.

They collaborate through scientific programs based at the Broad to identify and tackle important projects. The activities range across biomedical science including:

Broad scientists have helped enable these studies by playing a leading role in creating genomic tools that can be used by the entire biomedical community. Broad scientists led the recently completed international effort to create a catalog of human genetic variation called the Haplotype Map ("HapMap"). They are also leading an international collaboration to make a complete library of RNA interference (RNAi) against every human and mouse gene. (For further examples of current initiatives and programs, go to www.broad.mit.edu).

A new Broad Institute building, located at 7 Cambridge Center in Kendall Square in Cambridge, is scheduled for completion in the early spring of 2006. The expansion from the institute's current nearby location at 320 Charles St., along with the new gift from the Broads, will allow Broad scientists to undertake additional exciting and critical scientific studies they have identified as priorities for furthering the understanding of human biology and disease.

The new gift will be provided through The Broad Foundations, a Los Angeles-based venture philanthropic organization established by Eli and Edythe Broad.

[ FYI Index ]

U. T. Arlington Bioengineering Gets $2.5 Million to Improve Medical Imaging

The University of Texas at Arlington received a US$2.5 million symbolic check from U. S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Ennis) representing a Congressional earmark secured by Rep. Barton to fund additional research in optical medical imaging. Investigators in the Bioengineering Department, in a joint initiative with The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, will conduct research combining engineering and medical techniques to dramatically improve disease detection and treatment.

Optical medical imaging is a new and novel area of research aimed at the use light to diagnose disease, evaluate the efficacy of treatment, better understand human physiology and explore cellular function. Optical medical imaging techniques have virtually no side effects. Optical imaging devices are also less expensive to develop and deploy in comparison to most other imaging equipment. This makes imaging more readily available to clinicians around the state and nation and will help reduce health-care costs.  

Four faculty members in the Bioengineering Department at UT Arlington are conducting research in optical medical imaging. These investigators developed optical imaging devices and demonstrated that they can lead to improved surgical procedures for implanting deep brain stimulators, determine patency of peripheral vasculature, and interrogate subcellular structures for the detection of cancer. Examples of current projects include detection of prostate, breast and oral cancer, prevention of limb and foot amputation of diabetic, and assessment of treatment of cancer and sickle cell disease. 

The appropriated funds for this project will allow the investigators to acquire the needed scientific equipment to help them design and develop new, more reliable and higher resolution optical medical imaging devices. The new devices will be rigorously tested and evaluated in both laboratory and clinical settings to prove their efficacy and provide valuable information to physicians to diagnose disease.

[ FYI Index ]

Researchers Publish Dog Genome Sequence

An international team, led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, announced the publication of the genome sequence of the dog. In the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Nature, the researchers present a detailed analysis of the dog genome and describe how the data offer the potential for improving the health of man and man’s best friend.

“When compared with the genomes of human and other important organisms, the dog genome provides a powerful tool for identifying genetic factors that contribute to human health and disease,” said Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which supported the research. “This milestone is especially gratifying because it will also directly benefit veterinary researchers’ efforts to better understand and treat diseases afflicting our loyal canine companions.”

Efforts to create the genetic tools needed for mapping disease genes in dogs have gained momentum over the last 15 years, and already include a partial survey of the poodle genome. More than two years ago, Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, Ph.D., co-director of the genome sequencing and analysis program at the Broad Institute, and her colleagues embarked on a two-part project to assemble a complete map of the dog genome.

In the first phase, they acquired high-quality DNA sequence covering nearly 99 percent of the dog genome, from a female boxer named Tasha. The boxer was chosen as a representative of the average purebred dog to produce what has become a reference sequence for the dog genome community. Using the sequence information as a genetic “compass,” they navigated the genomes of 10 different dog breeds and other related canine species, including the gray wolf and coyote. In this sampling, they pinpointed tiny spots of genetic variation, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which serve as recognizable signposts that can be used to locate the causes of genetic disease.

“Of the more than 5,500 mammals living today, dogs are arguably the most remarkable,” said senior author Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, professor of biology at MIT and systems biology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. “The incredible physical and behavioral diversity of dogs — from Chihuahuas to Great Danes — is encoded in their genomes. It can uniquely help us understand embryonic development, neurobiology, human disease and the basis of evolution.”

Humans domesticated the dog, Canis familiaris, from gray wolves as long as 100,000 years ago. As a result of selective breeding over the past few centuries, modern dog breeds present a model of diversity. From 6-pound Chihuahuas to 120-pound Great Danes, from high-energy Jack Russell Terriers to mild-mannered basset hounds, and from the herding instincts of Shetland sheepdogs to pointers pointing, humans have bred dogs for desirable physical and behavioral traits. While such breeding practices aimed to preserve the preferred traits of one generation in the next, they also predispose many dog breeds to genetic disorders, including heart disease, cancer, blindness, cataracts, epilepsy, hip dysplasia and deafness.

Elaine A. Ostrander, Ph.D., chief of NHGRI’s Cancer Genetics Branch, co-authored the Nature paper, along with postdoctoral research fellows, Heidi G. Parker and Nate B. Sutter. Dr. Ostrander's laboratory maps genes responsible for cancer susceptibility in canines and humans, including breast and prostate cancers. In addition, Dr. Ostrander was the lead author of the white paper that provided the biomedical rationale for sequencing the dog genome.

“The leading causes of death in dogs are a variety of cancers, and many of them are very similar biologically to human cancers.” said Dr. Ostrander. “Using the dog genome sequence in combination with the human genome sequence will help researchers to narrow their search for many more of the genetic contributors underlying cancer and other major diseases.”

While dogs occupy a special place in human hearts, they also sit at a key branch point, relative to humans, in the evolutionary tree. It was already known that humans share more of their ancestral DNA with dogs than with mice; the availability of the dog genome sequence has allowed researchers to describe a common set of genetic elements — representing about 5 percent of the human genome — that are preferentially preserved among human, dog and mouse. Rather than being evenly distributed, some of these elements are crowded around just a small fraction of the genes in the genome. Future studies of these clusters may give scientists the critical insight needed to unravel how genomes work.

Other interesting observations emerged from this cross-genome analysis. For example, the research group found that while different breeds show amazing physical diversity, they often share large segments of their DNA, likely reflecting their recent shared origin. As a result, genetic tools being developed at the Broad Institute and NHGRI for any one breed of dog are likely to be useful in genetic experiments in nearly any breed.

The international team of researchers also identified roughly 2.5 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) sprinkled throughout the dog genome. SNPs are variations in the DNA code, some of which contribute to diseases or the overall health of a dog. SNPs also can be used to create a set of coordinates with which to survey genetic changes, both within and across dog breeds. These efforts revealed that individual breeds have maintained a large amount of genetic variability, despite their long history of restrictive breeding. In practical terms, this means that future efforts to locate disease genes in dogs can be much narrower in scope than comparable human studies, requiring a smaller number of genetic markers and DNA samples collected from the blood or cheek from only a few hundred dogs.

Scientists in the canine genetics community worldwide are currently tackling this problem by applying the knowledge gained from SNP analysis to find disease genes. To this end, the dog-owner community is an essential collaborator.

Sequencing of the dog genome was conducted as part of NHGRI’s Large-Scale Sequencing Research Network, at an approximate cost of $30 million. Researchers can access the sequence data through the following public databases: Dog Genome Resources at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI); EMBL Bank at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database; UCSC Genome Browser at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at the Broad Institute. The SNPs may be viewed at dbSNP at NCBI and at the Broad Institute.

See a high-resolution photo of Tasha, the boxer whose DNA was sequenced. Learn more about the rapidly expanding field of comparative genomic analysis. Read the white paper that outlines the scientific rationale and strategy for sequencing the dog genome.

[ FYI Index ]

National University of Singapore Offers Asia's First Engineering Science Program

The Faculties of Engineering and Science at The National University of Singapore will jointly offer a new Engineering Science Program (ESP) beginning August 2006. A first in Asia, ESP aims to equip engineers and scientists with a strong scientific foundation for R&D and professional careers which require interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary education. This new undergraduate program will train students to be proficient in mathematical modeling and technology development in selective emerging and cutting-edge interdisciplinary areas. Apart from helping to expand Singapore's technological base, ESP graduates will play an important role in developing and designing novel engineering systems.

Offering a rigorous broad-based multidisciplinary curriculum in engineering and science, ESP's key features include core engineering science modules, design projects, research projects, research internships, and significant depth in the chosen engineering discipline. In contrast to students who take up science and humanities courses in the first year under traditional engineering curricula, ESP students will be taught science and engineering subjects in an integrated way so that they are directly exposed to the interdisciplinary aspects.

Students can pursue their interests in their final two years in any one of the following areas of concentration: Nanoscience & Nanotechnology; Computational Engineering Science; Bioimaging & Optics; or Energy Systems. These courses are specially designed to reduce the usual barriers to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work and bring out creative and leadership qualities. ESP plans to take in about 40 to 50 students for its inaugural batch. Outstanding first-year students from NUS' Engineering and Science Faculties may also apply for admission to the first or second year of ESP. Graduates will be conferred a Bachelor of Engineering (Engineering Science) degree.

© 2005-2007 The University of Texas at Dallas
Contact Us FYI Archive Research UTD