University News
KAIST Decides Not to Extend President's Term
The board of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has decided not to extend the tenure of its embattled president Robert Laughlin who has been locked in a dispute with professors over his plan to reform the elite science school.
The Nobel laureate in physics said he will accept the decision. He will leave the school in July when his two-year contract expires.
The board of trustees examined a report by its subcommittee that evaluated his performance since he took office in July 2004 as the first foreign president of KAIST . On Monday, 20 department heads of the school offered to resign as an expression of their opposition to extending Laughlin's contract.
Nearly 90 percent of faculty members wanted his resignation, according to a survey of 278 of the total 409 professors in February.
Laughlin had proposed establishing popular departments such as pre-law and pre-med at the science and technology-focused school to improve the finances of the state-funded school. Faculty members vehemently opposed his plan, saying it went against the university's original goal of nurturing scientists and engineers of high caliber.
The professors also protested Laughlin's plan to determine granting research funds solely based on 20 minute interviews with professors. He was looking for investment opportunities for the globalization funds of 100 billion won and planning to channel them into fields of greater potential. Professors said it was nonsense to evaluate various fields in science and technology in that way. Laughlin replied that he could competently assess a professor's performance.
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Canadian University Lures Nobel Laureate From Boulder With $10-Million for Science-Education Project
Following a passion often means moving, and that's exactly what the Nobel laureate Carl E. Wieman is doing. After months of secret approaches and meetings, the physicist announced this week that he would move early next year from the University of Colorado at Boulder to the University of British Columbia to lead a multimillion-dollar joint project between the two universities that he believes will revolutionize the way science is taught.
The Canadian university is putting up US$10.3 million - more than twice the money that Colorado could promise. Dr. Wieman said that he had "a small team of superb people" in place in Colorado for his education project, and that he didn't want to lose the money there, so he has agreed to spend 20 percent of his time back at Boulder.
Wieman has been at Colorado for 22 years, and in 2004 he was named a professor of the year in the United States by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Although he won a Nobel Prize in physics and attracts millions of dollars in grants, his abiding passion is the teaching of science -- studying how students learn and developing new teaching methods and materials. Last summer, frustrated by the lack of money for his project, he began to sound out -- secretly -- other public universities about fulfilling his dream.
He acknowledged that for 15 years he has been approached by major universities, but the Canadian university was the only one that replied to his initial query about making a systemic change in the teaching of science.
Wieman was recently invited to Vancouver to give a public lecture and to meet with university officials to work out a deal. The turnout for the lecture helped him make the decision to move north. "Four hundred people showed up for a talk on science education, and that just doesn't happen at most institutions," he said.
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Cambridge Awarded £2.3m Grant for Cambridge Statistics Initiative
In the second round of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Science & Innovation Awards, University of Cambridge has been awarded a grant of £2.3 million (approximately US$ 3.9 million) to develop the Cambridge Statistics Initiative.
The initiative, which will be based at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Engineering, aims to create a centre of excellence in statistical research and teaching.
The grant will enable the appointment of four new lecturers and three post-doctoral research associates and will provide funding for three doctoral students. The initiative will involve the many Cambridge institutes, both within and outside the University, where applications of statistics flourish, as well as industrial collaborators.
This program will be overseen by Professor Ian Leslie, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, and Professor Geoffrey Grimmett, the Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. The first step will be the establishment by the University of a new Professorship of Statistics. Intellectual leadership for the initiative will be provided by the new Professor together with Professors Steve Brooks and Simon Tavaré of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences and Professor Bill Fitzgerald of the Engineering Department.
Science and Innovation Awards were introduced by the EPSRC in 2005 to address the issue of giving support to strategic areas of research that are particularly at risk.
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK Government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences.
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UTD Professor Awarded $1.3-Million NIH Contract To Build PDA Interface for Hearing Impaired
Dr. Philip C. Loizou, an electrical engineering professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), has been awarded a three-year, US$1.3-million contract from The National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build an interface that will enable personal digital assistants, or PDAs, to transmit sounds to an implant worn in the inner ear of deaf individuals.
“This will no doubt have a profound impact on the life of hearing impaired people,” Loizou said. “To them, this PDA processor could not only be a speech processor, but a PC, a phone, an assistive listening device, a GPS device, an Internet browser and a music player — all integrated into one device.”
PDAs have grown in popularity as personal data organizers, Web browsers, cell phones and music players. Loizou, who directs both the Cochlear Implant Laboratory and the Speech Processing Lab at UTD, said the new interface he hopes to develop will allow PDAs to process acoustic signals — such as speech — through a microphone that is worn behind an individual’s ear. The signal would then be transmitted wirelessly into a cochlear implant in the inner ear.
According to Loizou, technology currently exists to transmit sounds to cochlear implant users, but it is costly and relies on custom-made speech processors. Replacing the speech processors with PDAs will make the technology more affordable, and the flexibility of PDAs will make the technology more accessible.
“The goal is to develop the PDA as a research processor that is portable, flexible and easy to use, and make it available to researchers interested in clinical studies,” Loizou added. “Open access to such a PDA processor could accelerate the research at a faster pace. PDAs provide powerful computing ability and have excellent wireless connectivity options, and this will make cochlear implant technology accessible to all, including the hearing impaired population in Third-World countries.”
The team that will work on the project draws from several areas of expertise and includes four faculty members from UTD’s electrical engineering department, including Dr. Hoi Lee, Dr. Murat Torlak, Dr. Nasser Kehrtarnavaz and Loizou. Dr. Anu Sharma, who also will collaborate on the project, is from UTD’s School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and has extensive clinical experience in neurophysiology.
This is the second NIH award Loizou has earned. The first, which he received in March 2005, was a five-year, $1.5-million grant to improve the performance of cochlear implants by programming the prosthesis to operate more effectively in a range of listening conditions.
Loizou joined UTD in 1999. He earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from Arizona State University.
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Better Way to Cool Computer Chips Receives NSF Support
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) investigating better ways to cool today’s high-performance computer microprocessors have received US$275,000 from the National Science Foundation to further their work.
The three-year grant supports a project titled Thermal Sensing and Control for Efficient Dynamic Thermal Management, led by Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Jun Yang, with Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Sheldon X.-D. Tan, and Professor of Electrical Engineering Jie Chen. All three are faculty members at the Bourns College of Engineering at UCR.
Yang said today’s Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) microprocessors, which hold more than 100,000,000 transistors, are hindered by high power consumption and the heat they generate, which in turn creates reliability problems, reduces microprocessor service life and can sometimes physically damage the chips.
Not only do today’s temperature sensors read just one location on the chip, their efficiency is hindered by the on-chip high-frequency signal noise due to electronic interference from other processes. Temperature sensors also are unable to quickly process rapid heat buildups so readings may lag behind real-time conditions during the most critical moments. The result of these design shortcomings is significant performance degradation.
Yang proposes a two part solution. First is a fast and accurate software thermal sensor that uses a fine-tuned numerical method to quickly calculate accurate temperatures physically across the microprocessor on a given set of thermal limits.
Second is a heat control method that uses a promising control technique allowing it to operate quickly using the information developed by the software-based thermal sensor. This control system should be able to anticipate areas of heat buildup within the microprocessor and quickly cool them to within target levels.
The project’s educational component will include freshman mentoring by faculty and graduate students, a support network for female students, inclusion in the UCR Freshman Discovery Seminars program, the launching of a computer engineering outreach program, and the development of K-12 students’ and teachers’ research exposure activities.
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UTD Researchers Granted $240,000 to Study Communication Among Bacteria
A research associate and a professor at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) have been awarded a three-year, $240,000 grant to study how bacterial communication affects the formation of biofilms, the culprit in many human bacterial infections.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the grant to Dr. Audry Almengor, research associate, and Dr. Juan E. González, associate professor, in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. The grant supports Almengor’s postdoctoral work at UTD.
“This is a very important area of study, since most of the bacteria that interact with animals or plants attach to surfaces, where they form biofilms,” González said. Biofilms are a collection of microorganisms that attach themselves to either an inert or living surface, and they exist wherever surfaces contact water.
In addition to being implicated in a “significant number” of human bacterial infections, biofilms can also cause product contamination and even equipment failure. Almengor’s research will seek to provide a better understanding of biofilm characteristics and behavior, which could then lead to the design of new strategies to eliminate biofilm formation. González noted the significance of Almengor’s research, as bacteria, especially in the form of a biofilm, become resistant to antibiotics and scientists seek new ways to control bacterial growth.
“I am convinced that what we are doing to understand bacterial communication will eventually lead to new ways to control bacterial growth,” González said. “This could potentially lead to novel antimicrobials and new treatments for infectious diseases.”
Almengor said that the biofilms she is studying are not formed by an infectious strain, but will provide a good model to better understand how bacterial communication affects biofilm formation and will help in creating new strategies to control such formation.
Almengor began her postdoctoral research at UTD in February 2006. She earned a B.S. degree in chemical engineering and microbiology from the University of Oklahoma and a Ph.D. degree in microbiology from The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
González joined UTD in 1996 as an assistant professor. He was appointed associate professor in 2002. He earned a B.S. degree in microbiology and public health from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. degree in microbiology and molecular genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles. González was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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UGA Institute of Higher Education Partners with Jilin University
The Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia has entered into a historic partnership with Jilin University, the largest institution in China, to provide management training for its senior administrators. Officials at Jilin, which ranks among the top ten universities in China, believe this to be the first such effort in China.
Thirty administrators from Jilin University will arrive in Athens on June 23, spending three weeks at the University of Georgia before traveling to Washington, Philadelphia and New York. Faculty from the Institute of Higher Education will provide instruction in all facets of higher education management. The participants also will engage in field work while in the U.S., visiting various sites related to higher education. J. Douglas Toma, associate professor at the institute, will oversee the program.
The Institute of Higher Education, established in 1964, is noted for its multi-disciplinary approach to teaching, research and outreach. It has among the most accomplished faculties in the world devoted to the study of higher education policy and strategy at all levels - institutional, system, state, national and cross-national. The institute has conducted professional development throughout the 42 years since being founded for that purpose. The institute is also active in training administrators and faculty from other countries, including extensive work in Croatia and recent efforts in Tunisia, Mexico and China.
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Studies Link Cancer, Inflammatory Disease
The biological processes underlying diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer are fundamentally linked, and should be linked in how they are treated with drugs, a series of MIT studies indicates.
Key to the work: The researchers applied an engineering approach to cell biology, using mathematical and numerical tools normally associated with the former discipline.
In a series of three papers, the latest of which appeared in the March 24 issue of Cell, Professors Douglas A. Lauffenburger, Peter K. Sorger and Michael B. Yaffe, all members of MIT's Center for Cancer Research, led a team of scientists and engineers in looking at how cells make life-or-death decisions. Understanding what tips a cell toward survival or death is key to treating diseases and fighting cancer through radiation, drug therapy and chemotherapy.
The researchers looked at tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a substance produced by the immune system that promotes cell death, and two prosurvival hormones, epidermal growth factor (EGF) and insulin. TNF and EGF induce conflicting prosurvival and prodeath signals, and the "crosstalk" between these signals is not well understood. The MIT studies provide the first big picture of how these two key factors interact in time and space.
The studies uncovered a surprising link between inflammatory diseases and cancer that may change how these diseases are treated in the future.
Researchers have been exploring ways to use drugs in combination to increase their therapeutic value in fighting tumors. The results of the three MIT studies have implications for how two classes of drugs involving TNF and EGF affect common biological processes in the body.
Drugs that inhibit TNF are used to treat debilitating chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Yet TNF, which causes inflammation, also leads to generation of the EGF signals that play a role in many cancers. (The breast cancer drug Herceptin, for example, works by blocking EGF-induced signals.) "TNF is supposed to kill cells. It's counterintuitive that it simultaneously promotes cell survival by sending an 'autocrine' EGF signal to itself," said Sorger, a professor of biology and head of MIT's Center for Cell Decision Processes. Autocrine EGF messages are analogous to mailing yourself a letter. In the case of TNF, cells also mail back the response via another hormone, IL-1.
Among the cells lining the intestines of a person with inflammatory bowel disease, two different camps are at war. TNF launches an attack, killing many of the epithelial surface cells, while EGF struggles to keep the cells alive and dividing to repair the damage.
In every cell, genes create proteins, the building blocks of life. Besides carrying out the functions of keeping the cell alive, some proteins such as TNF and EGF work as signals, turning on or off other genes. In a cascade effect, the proteins from these genes may affect still more genes. What's more, a single protein behaves differently at different points in time: A protein may do one thing early after stimulation and something else later on.
Researchers want to be able to predict how cells will respond to tiny molecular changes that spur them to develop, multiply or die. If researchers knew exactly how much of a certain protein was needed to kill a cancer cell and exactly when in the cell's life cycle it would be most lethal, drugs could be custom-designed to destroy malignant cells while leaving normal cells intact, Yaffe said.
But for many cell-decision networks, there is simply not enough information about the signaling proteins and reactions to construct a believable model that would allow accurate predictions to be made. Can you design an effective model without measuring every one of the tens of thousands of proteins in a cell?
To answer that question, the team used an engineering approach typically applied to manufacturing or software. "At some point, we need to bring new tools to bear on complexity, and those new tools are engineering-based mathematical and numerical tools," Sorger said. "Just as we can engineer extremely complicated systems like jets that we can't understand in their totality just by looking at them, we can do the same thing in biology." Modeling signaling pathways with computers is one of the tactics of MIT's Center for Cell Decision Processes.
Yaffe divided cell signals into two major dimensions that can be plotted on a graph with a stress/death axis and a survival/growth axis. Where the conflicting factors fall on the graph determines whether the cell upon which they are acting lives or dies. "Our study gives us a broader functional sampling of a lot of things at the same time," he said.
Using this new approach involves teams of researchers, a concept unusual in traditional cell biology. Working as a team, computational scientists remain in close touch with their laboratory-based collaborators. Interdisciplinary scientists working at the interface of biology and computation is the way of the future, according to Kevin A. Janes, graduate student in biological engineering and one of the study's co-authors.
The payoff is high. Combining broad protein-based measurements and computation revealed the big picture, uncovering connections between spheres of biology previously believed to be distinct. "We are finding that things that once appeared to be biologically independent are closely connected," Sorger said. "We are not just collections of independent parts."
