University News
UTA Receives $400K Grant for Intruder Sensor Network
University of Texas at Arlington Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor Soontorn Oraintara will begin work in January to develop a self-managing radar sensors network to safeguard our nation's border and critical civilian infrastructures. The three-year, $399,927 research project is being be funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The project focuses on the development of a robust and energy efficient self-managing radar sensors network for intruder detection, identification and tracking. It involves integrating advances from three areas of research: multi-static radar remote sensing, digital signal processing and communications, and high-frequency integrated circuits. The resulting robust sensor system will fill an important need to safeguard the nation's border and critical civilian infrastructures.
In the proposed system, each node on the network would have capabilities for radar sensing, signal processing and wireless communication. Autonomous radar sensors operating in the microwave region would detect and track visible, obscured or hidden targets. Information about a target is then encoded and wirelessly forwarded to the central processor, where target identification and network-wide tracking are conducted using sensor data from every node in the network, along with their position and timing information.
Dr. Oraintara will be assisted by Drs. Sungyong Jung and Saibun Tjuatja, also in the Electrical Engineering Department. They will enlist the participation of graduate and undergraduate students, who will take sensor network-related courses and conduct experiments using the software tools and a radar sensors network test-bed being developed in the project. In addition, Oraintara will utilize a collaborative recruitment effort with the McNair and National Science Foundation’s Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Science Programs at the University of Texas at Arlington to increase the participation of students from underrepresented groups.
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Emory's School of Nursing Receives $60,000 for Service Learning Program
Emory University 's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing has received $60,000 in support of its Office of Service Learning from the Charles and Mary Grant Foundation and the Georgia Health Foundation.
The Grant Foundation awarded the school $40,000 over two years to fully integrate the service learning experience into the curriculum of all undergraduate and graduate nursing students, to expand the number of partnerships available in the service learning program, and to establish the program as a model for other U.S. schools of nursing.
Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.
Wendy Rhein, director of the school's 18-month-old service learning program, says the first year of the Grant Foundation funding will be used "to expand and support existing programs such as the Farm Worker Family Health Program in south Georgia as well as the Alternative Spring Break partnerships in the Caribbean. Next year we hope to add new programming including developing international and domestic service opportunities for the winter break."
The Georgia Health Foundation renewed a $20,000 grant to expand the school's Farm Worker Family Health Program that provides health services to migrant farm workers and their families in South Georgia each June.
Funds from the Georgia Health Foundation will be used to purchase equipment and supplies that will allow nursing teams to go out into the farm workers' housing communities and the fields during the day to deliver care to those farm workers who might not have access to the program's evening health care sites due to transportation constraints. Funds also will cover some of the costs to have teams of students work with the Department of Education to recruit and enroll children in the migrant education summer program, as well as cover some of the personnel, travel, and lodging costs associated with providing these additional channels of care. During the ten-day period of the program, such an expansion will increase the number of people served by approximately 20 percent.
The Office of Service Learning provides leadership, coordination, support, and other mechanisms to assure a high level of integration of service and social responsibility in the curriculum of Emory's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, the development of its students, and community focused research. Every undergraduate nursing student participates in at least one service learning project during their junior and senior years.
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UC Irvine’s Baram Wins Nation's Top Epilepsy Research Award
Dr. Tallie Z. Baram, whose groundbreaking studies on childhood seizures have fundamentally altered medicine's understanding of epilepsy, will receive the nation's top award for research on this brain disorder.
Baram will receive the Epilepsy Research Recognition Award from the American Epilepsy Society at its national meeting today in Washington, D.C. She is the first woman and the first UC Irvine researcher to achieve this honor.
Baram, the Danette Shepard Chair in Neurological Sciences in the UCI School of Medicine, is founder and executive committee chair of UCI's Epilepsy Research Center. As a researcher, she is considered the world's leading investigator of the basic neural mechanisms involved in childhood febrile seizures - seizures caused by high fever - and how prolonged febrile seizures might lead to the onset of adult epilepsy.
Baram's work defined the molecular changes within brain cells that are caused by early life febrile seizures. She has studied how fever interacts with the brain to generate seizures, and how brain imaging can define individuals who are at risk for epilepsy after prolonged febrile seizures.
Her research also has helped establish an understanding of the neurobiology behind infantile spasms, a devastating form of epilepsy in infants. She was the first scientist to create a research concept for this disorder that is consistent with and explains the unusual responses of this form of epilepsy to stress hormones. Baram's research on this topic identifies targets for the design of new and more effective drugs that may help calm these childhood seizures without the side effects of drugs designed for adults.
A native of Israel, Baram earned a doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. After receiving her medical degree from the University of Miami in 1980, Baram completed pediatrics and neurology residencies at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She followed with faculty appointments at University of Texas at Houston and its M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and at USC, before joining UCI in 1995. In 2002, she founded the UCI Epilepsy Research Center, and she is currently the scientific director of the UCI Comprehensive Epilepsy Program.
The Epilepsy Research Recognition Award is annually given by the American Epilepsy Society, one of the oldest neurological professional organizations in the nation, with roots dating to 1898. The society promotes research and education for professionals dedicated to the prevention, treatment and cure of epilepsy.
Epilepsy is the third most common neurological disorder in the United States after Alzheimer's disease and stroke. It is not a single entity but a family of more than 40 syndromes that affect 2.7 million people in the U.S. and 50 million worldwide. Epilepsy strikes most often among the very young and the very old, although anyone can get it at any age.
The UCI Epilepsy Research Center and UCI Comprehensive Epilepsy Program collaborate to conduct research and help patients achieve the highest quality of life possible. The UCI Comprehensive Epilepsy Program provides individualized care for patients through comprehensive treatment methods and draws skills and talents from the board-certified physicians located at the UCI Epilepsy Research Center. Through education, research and direct patient care, the programs develop a greater understanding of epilepsy that will ultimately lead to its prevention and cure.
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Yale Psychiatrist Receives NIMH Merit Award
The National Institute of Mental Health has granted a MERIT award to Godfrey Pearlson, M.D., professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, for his research on structural and functional brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia.
The project involves psychiatric researchers at Yale and at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, where, in addition to his appointment at Yale, Pearlson is director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center.
MERIT Awards provide long-term support to investigators with impressive records of scientific achievement and superior competence and productivity in research areas of special importance or promise. Less than five percent of funded National Institutes of Health investigators are selected to receive MERIT Awards.
The principal feature of the program is the opportunity for such investigators to gain up to 10 years of grant support. The MERIT Awards are intended to provide such investigators with long-term, stable support to foster their continued creativity and spare them some of the administrative burdens associated with frequent preparation and submission of research grant applications.
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UTD Computer Science Professor, Students Win Best Paper Awards
Dr. Gopal Gupta, a professor and associate head of the computer science program in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), along with five co-authors, won the best paper award at the European Conference on Web Services held earlier this month in Sweden.
The paper, titled “A Universal Service-Semantics Description Language,” addresses the issue of designing a mark-up language that will allow automatic discovery of services on the internet. It was selected from among 70 submissions and was also authored by four UTD students — Ajay Bansal, Srividya Kona, Luke Simon and Ajay Mallya. The remaining co-author, Tom Hite, is the chief technology officer of Metallect Corporation.
Bansal, Kona, Simon and Mallya are Ph.D. students in UTD’s Applied-Logic, Programming Languages and Systems Lab, which is directed by Gupta. Hite’s Metallect is a local startup. The team created a mark-up language called USDL during the course of their investigations. The researchers also have published two prior papers, and Metallect gave UTD a $20,000 grant for continuing research in the field. Matching funds were provided by the Jonsson School.
Separately, Mallya, working under Gupta, received the best paper award at the International Conference on Logic Programming in Barcelona, Spain in early October. His paper, titled “Deductive Multi-valued Model Checking,” received the best student paper honor. The paper deals with verifying properties of software systems in the presence of inconsistencies or if the system is incompletely specified.
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UTD Professor Wins IEEE Best Journal Paper Award
Naofal Al-Dhahir, an associate professor of electrical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), has been named a co-recipient of the prestigious Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award for 2006 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The award is given for the most outstanding survey review or tutorial paper published in IEEE transactions, journals or magazines, or in proceedings of the IEEE. Established in 1979, it is named in honor of Donald G. Fink, a distinguished editor and author who was the first general manager and executive director of the IEEE. The Fink award is the only IEEE-wide journal best paper award; all other paper awards are at the technical society level.
Al-Dhahir’s paper, titled “Great Expectations: The Value of Spatial Diversity in Wireless Networks,” appeared in the February 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE Special Issue on “Gigabit Wireless.” Co-authors are Dr. Suhas Diggavi of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Dr. Robert Calderbank of Princeton University and Dr. Anastasios Stamoulis of Qualcomm Inc.
The award will be presented at the Awards Banquet of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, to be held in Seattle in July 2006.
It is the second time in as many months that Al-Dhahir has received a best paper distinction from the IEEE. Al-Dhahir’s previous award — for an article that described a novel transmission scheme for four transmit antennas and investigated its application to broadband wireless access according to emerging WiMAX industry standards — was given at the 2005 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference in Dallas last September.
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Vanderbilt Chemical Engineers Question Safety of Certain Nanomaterials
Soccer-ball-shaped “buckyballs” are the most famous players on the nanoscale field, presenting tantalizing prospects of revolutionizing medicine and the computer industry. Since their discovery in 1985, engineers and scientists have been exploring the properties of these molecules for a wide range of applications and innovations.
But could these microscopic spheres represent a potential environmental hazard?
A new study published in December 2005 in Biophysical Journal raises a red flag regarding the safety of buckyballs when dissolved in water. It reports the results of a detailed computer simulation that finds buckyballs bind to the spirals in DNA molecules in an aqueous environment, causing the DNA to deform, potentially interfering with its biological functions and possibly causing long-term negative side effects in people and other living organisms.
The research, conducted at Vanderbilt by chemical engineers Peter T. Cummings and Alberto Striolo (now a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma), along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Xiongce Zhao, employed molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the question of whether buckyballs would bind to DNA and, if so, might inflict any lasting damage.
“Safe is a difficult word to define, since few substances that can be ingested into the human body are completely safe,” points out Cummings, who is the John R. Hall Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Nanomaterials Theory Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.“Even common table salt, if eaten in sufficient quantity, is lethal. What we are doing is looking at the mechanisms of interaction between buckyballs and DNA; we don’t know yet what actually happens in the body.”
Despite the caveat, Cummings suggests that his research reveals a potentially serious problem: “Buckyballs have a potentially adverse effect on the structure, stability and biological functions of DNA molecules.”
The findings came as something of a surprise, despite earlier studies that have shown buckyballs to be toxic to cells unless coated and to be able to find their way into the brains of fish. Before these cautionary discoveries, researchers thought that the combination of buckyballs’ dislike of water and their affinity for each other would cause them to clump together and sink to the bottom of a pool, lake, stream or other aqueous environment. As a result, researchers thought they should not cause a significant environmental problem.
Cummings’ team found that, depending on the form the DNA takes, the 60-carbon-atom (C60) buckyball molecule can lodge in the end of a DNA molecule and break apart important hydrogen bonds within the double helix. They can also stick to the minor grooves on the outside of DNA, causing the DNA molecule to bend significantly to one side. Damage to the DNA molecule is even more pronounced when the molecule is split into two helices, as it does when cells are dividing or when the genes are being accessed to produce proteins needed by the cell.
“The binding energy between DNA and buckyballs is quite strong,” Cummings says. “We found that the energies were comparable to the binding energies of a drug to receptors in cells.”
It turns out that buckyballs have a stronger affinity for DNA than they do for themselves. “This research shows that if buckyballs can get into the nucleus, they can bind to DNA,” Cummings says. “If the DNA is damaged, it can be inhibited from self-repairing.”
The computer simulations showed that buckyballs make first contact with the DNA molecule after one to two nanoseconds. Once the C60 molecules bind with the DNA, they remained stable for the duration of the simulation.
Researchers tested the most common forms of DNA, the “A” and “B” forms. The “B” form is the most common form. In a stronger saline solution, or when alcohol is added, the DNA structure can change to the “A” form. A third, rarer form, “Z,” occurs in high concentrations of alcohol or salt and was not tested.
The researchers found that buckyballs docked on the minor groove of “A” DNA, bending the molecule and deforming the stacking angles of the base pairs in contact with it. The simulations also showed that buckyballs can penetrate the free end of “A” form DNA and permanently break the hydrogen bonds between the end base pair of nucleotides.
As expected, the buckyballs bound most strongly to single helix DNA, causing the most deformation and damage. While buckyballs did bind to “B” form double-strand DNA, the binding did not affect the overall shape of the DNA molecule.
What the researchers don’t know is whether these worrisome binding events will take place in the body. “Earlier studies have shown both that buckyballs can migrate into bodily tissues and can penetrate cell membranes,” Cummings says. “We don’t know whether they can penetrate a cell nucleus and reach the DNA stored there. What this study shows is that if the buckyballs can get into the nucleus they could cause real problems. What are needed now are experimental and theoretical studies to demonstrate whether they can actually get there. Because the toxicity of nanomaterials like buckyballs is not well known at this point, they are regarded in the laboratory as potentially very hazardous, and treated accordingly.”
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Physicists Describe Strange New Fluid-Like State of Matter
University of Chicago physicists have created a novel state of matter using nothing more than a container of loosely packed sand and a falling marble. They have found that the impacting marble produces a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid.
“We’re discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas—air in this case—and a dense arrangement of particles,” said Heinrich Jaeger, Professor in Physics and Director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of Chicago. “It’s just a most amazing phenomenon.”
Jaeger’s team describes the phenomenon in the December issue of the journal Nature Physics. The team consists of graduate students John Royer and Eric Corwin; 2003 University of Chicago physics graduate Andrew Flior; visiting physics graduate student Maria-Luisa Cordero from the Universidad de Chile; Peter Eng, a Senior Research Associate at the University’s James Franck Institute; and Mark Rivers, Associate Director of the University’s Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources.
Scientists typically have produced new states of matter at ultra-cold temperatures, those nearing absolute zero (minus 497.6 degrees Fahrenheit). In this case, granular materials take on unusual characteristics at room temperature.
The jetting phenomenon was first reported in 2001 by Sigurdur Thoroddsen and Amy Shen, who were then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Studying the way the characteristics of granular materials changes from solid to fluid has long been a research theme at Chicago’s Center for Materials Research. Thoroddsen and Shen’s work led Jaeger to suggest that Floir reproduce the experiment as the subject of his undergraduate honors thesis.
Meanwhile, a group led by Detlef Lohse at the University of Twente in the Netherlands used high-speed video and computer simulations to infer how the jet was caused by gravity as material rushed in to fill the void left behind by the impacting object.
But to actually demonstrate the underlying cause of the jet’s formation, the Chicago team needed very fast, non-invasive tracking of the interior of the sand. To this end, the Chicago scientists used high-speed X-ray radiography. Taken at 5,000 frames per second, the X-ray images were the fastest ever taken at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, which produces the most brilliant X-ray beams for research in the Western Hemisphere.
The experiments, conducted at both atmospheric pressure and in a vacuum, showed that air compressed between the sand grains provides most of the energy that drives the jet. The University of Twente’s Lohse said he regards the work of Jaeger’s team as “very important.”
Systematically reducing the pressure, Jaeger’s team observed that the jet, in fact, consisted of two stages. Air pressure exerted little influence on the jet’s initial stage, a thin stream of particles that breaks up into droplets. But air pressure played a key role in forming the jet’s second stage, characterized by a thick column of particles with ripples on its surface.
Jaeger’s team needed advanced scientific equipment and support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct this study.
