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

University News

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Awards $1.5 Million for Undergraduate Science Education

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded US$1.5 million to the California Institute of Technology for support of interdisciplinary undergraduate science education programs.

The four-year grant to Caltech is one of the 50 awards the HHMI is conferring this year, at a total expenditure of $86.4 million, to bolster programs that bridge biology and other disciplines such as chemistry, physics, engineering, and computational science. At Caltech, the funding will be used to pioneer several new programs, including a training program in synthetic biology, a course- and lab-development assistance program in science and engineering, a series of interdisciplinary undergraduate lab courses, and a precollege outreach program directed at local public schools.

According to Christina Smolke, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Caltech and director of Caltech's HHMI undergraduate science education program, the focus will be on interdisciplinary training and the development of programs that span the gap between science and engineering. The emphasis on a synthetic biology training program will be particularly innovative because the emerging discipline represents an exciting and rapidly evolving area of research that has significant potential to solve pressing human needs.

The second new program supported by the grant will provide opportunities for Caltech undergraduates to participate in developing science and engineering courses and labs. This undergraduate course-assistant program, lead by Douglas Rees, Dickinson Professor of Chemistry and coprincipal investigator of this grant, is being developed in response to requests from Caltech undergraduates for such opportunities to gain experience in instruction.

In addition, the HHMI grant will provide funding for three new undergraduate lab courses reflecting core interdisciplinary strengths of research at Caltech: a physical biology lab to be taught by Rob Phillips, professor of applied physics and mechanical engineering, a biomolecular engineering lab to be taught by Smolke, and a neuroscience and neurophysiology lab to be taught by neurobiology professor Erin Schuman.

Smolke says that the purpose of her biomolecular engineering lab is to teach undergraduates design principles in biological systems. Students will conduct major open-ended design projects in which they will design, construct, and characterize engineered biological systems.

Caltech will support several existing programs with the grant money as well, including the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, which has operated since 1979 to provide undergraduates with opportunities to work on research projects in Caltech laboratories over a ten-week period. The HHMI funds will be used for SURF stipends in the biological and chemical sciences, with a particular emphasis on supporting women and minority students.

The HHMI funds will also be used to support the MURF program, which was created in 1991 and has been supported by HHMI since 1992. This program is directed toward giving gifted underrepresented undergraduate students from other universities summer research experiences in Caltech laboratories.

The final component of the HHMI grant will provide funding for two outreach programs. The first of these programs, the California Classroom Connection (CCC) is a student-run organization that started in 2002. The CCC matches Caltech students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff volunteers with teachers in the area's public schools for enhancement of science instruction in grades 6-12. With a current average of 13 volunteers, the CCC will be able to expand to about three dozen participants over the four-year period of the grant. The other outreach program is the new Caltech Research Connection (CRC), which will bring approximately 15 students from public high schools into Caltech labs to conduct research.

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Berkeley Physicist Perlmutter Wins Shaw Prize for Work on Expansion of Universe

University of California , Berkeley, physicist Saul Perlmutter has been awarded the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his role in discovering that the universe is expanding faster than previously thought.

Perlmutter is a UC Berkeley physics professor, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project.

He shares the $1 million prize with Adam Riess of NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute and Brian Schmidt of Australia's Mount Stromlo Observatory, all recognized for their leadership of two teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search. In 1998, the teams reported the acceleration of the universe.

The Shaw Prizes, called the Nobel Prizes of the East, have been granted annually since 2004 in the fields of astronomy, medicine and life sciences, and mathematical sciences. The prizes were established by Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong motion picture and television producer.

The prize will be presented in a ceremony in Hong Kong on Sept. 12.

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UCLA's Tony F. Chan to Head Math and Physical Sciences at NSF

The National Science Foundation has named Dr. Tony F. Chan, Dean of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, to be Assistant Director for Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS) at NSF. In that position, Dr. Chan will guide and manage research funding totaling approximately $1 billion a year to support astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, materials science and multidisciplinary activities. He assumes the position Oct. 1, 2006.

Since becoming Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UCLA in 2001, Dr. Chan has overseen six departments and several research institutes comprising more than 200 faculty, 1,700 undergraduates, and 700 graduate students. The division receives over $60 million annually in research awards. His responsibilities there included policy, planning, budget, faculty recruitment, retention and promotion, education and research programs, and fund raising.

Chan's current chief research interests involve interdisciplinary mathematics in such fields as image processing and computer vision, multiscale computational methods, optimization and multilevel methods for electronics design, and computational geometry for brain mapping.

Chan has been an active member of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees and Committee on Science Policy and previously served on the SIAM Council and the Committee on Human Rights. He has served on the Editorial Board Committee and Committee on Committees of the American Mathematical Society, and is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Chan has also served on a number of national and professional panels, including the National Academies' National Committee on Mathematics, NSF's MPS Advisory Committee (1999-2002), the search committee for the director o NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences (chair, 2002), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Computation Directorate Advisory Committee (2000-2004), the NSF's Division of Mathematical Science Committee of Visitors, and the University Space Research Association's Science Council for Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. He is one of five delegates representing the United States at the General Assembly of the International Mathematics Union to be held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, this year.

He received a B.S. in engineering and an M.S. in aeronautics from Caltech in 1973, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1978. He taught at Yale University from 1979 to 1986, and joined the Mathematics Department at UCLA in 1986. He served as Department Chair from 1997 to 2000. In that capacity, he led the proposal to establish the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA -- the only new NSF-funded national math institute at that time, and served as its director from 2000 to 2001.

Chan has over 200 research publications, has won two best paper awards from IEEE and is one of the top 300 most-cited mathematicians in the world according to isihighlycited.com. He has supervised over 25 Ph.D. students and 15 post-doctoral fellows. Besides NSF, his research is currently funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Institutes of Health.

He is also co-director of UCLA's NIH Center for Computational Biology

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Deborah Fitzgerald Named MIT Interim Dean of SHASS

Deborah K. Fitzgerald, associate dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, has been named the interim dean for the school while a special committee conducts the search for a permanent replacement for Kenan Sahin Dean Philip S. Khoury.

Provost L. Rafael Reif has announced that Fitzgerald will take office July 1, when Khoury, who headed the school for 15 years, becomes associate provost.

A leading historian of American agriculture, Fitzgerald has taught at MIT since 1988 and is a professor of the history of technology in the Program in Science, Technology and Society. From 1996 to 2001, she chaired the Ph.D. program in history, anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society, which is administered by the Program in Science, Technology and Society jointly with the history faculty and the anthropology program.

Fitzgerald has also chaired the Gender Equity Committee in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) and has been involved in a variety of Institute-wide committees, including those on academic performance, discipline and graduate school policy. She has served as the associate dean of SHASS since April 1, 2005.

The search committee for a new dean, chaired by Professor Pauline R. Maier, has begun its work, and the provost expects to identify a successor to Khoury in the coming months, according to an e-mail sent to the community today by Vice President and Secretary of the Corporation Kathryn A. Willmore.

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11 Members Join School of Social Work Advisory Council

Dean Jeanette Takamura recently announced the appointment of 11 new members to the Advisory Council of the Columbia University School of Social Work (CUSSW). The extension of the terms of five current members was also announced. The council was first created in 1959 to advise the dean on the strategic directions of CUSSW. Each member has been appointed to serve three-year terms commencing July 1.

The new council members are:

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Professor James Heckman Receives UCD Ulysses Medal

On June 7, 2006, James Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the Harris School of Public Policy, was awarded the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin (UCD) for his contribution to research in economics and human behavior.

The presentation of the medal was followed by a lecture entitled "The Economics of Child Development." The lecture was part of a week-long visit during which he also launched a collaborative research initiative into intervention design between the UCD Geary Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, funded in part by Atlantic Foundation and the Irish Government.

Heckman has taken a very strong interest in the economic benefits of investment in early child well-being. His work shows that the early childhood environment has a direct influence on the subsequent economic success of that child into adulthood. He argues that early intervention lowers the cost of later investment. His arguments for very early intervention for children from socially deprived backgrounds have not always been welcomed by those who advocate initiatives aimed at teenagers and adults.

In his current research, Heckman draws on neuroscience to demonstrate that factors including earnings, employment, college attendance, teenage pregnancy and participation in crime strongly depend on cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. In other words, they depend on the person’s formal skills and their personality traits. Influencing these personality traits (such as socialization) has as much an impact as formal education on these later-life outcomes. According to Heckman, "skills beget skills," so the earlier a child receives a foundation for learning (whether social or intellectual skills), the easier it is for that child to learn — and that in turn leads to self-reinforcement to learn more.

Put in terms of return on investment in human capital, Heckman shows that the earlier the intervention the higher the return. One study shows a 10-fold return on every dollar invested in 0-to-3-year olds. "Although investments in older individuals realize less return overall, such investments are still clearly beneficial. Indeed, the advantages gained from effective early interventions are sustained best when they are followed by continued high-quality learning experiences. So, due to dynamic complementarity, early investments must be followed by later investments if maximum value is to be realized."

UCD awarded the inaugural Ulysses Medal to Dr. Phillip Sharp (MIT) on March 10, 2005 for his outstanding contribution to biomolecular discovery and to advances in medical treatment of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, hepatitis and cancer. Dr. Sharp was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery that an individual gene does not have to be a single, continuous stretch of DNA, but instead can be made up of several DNA segments. This discovery had major implications for genetic discovery and research into heredity diseases.

Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, was awarded the UCD Ulysses Medal on May 13, 2006 in recognition of his work for entrepreneurship in the global public interest over the past 35 years. Professor Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 as a non-profit foundation, and under his leadership it promotes global partnerships as a means of tackling issues such as third world debt, international trade, the global TB epidemic and the Middle East peace process.

Professor James Heckman is the third recipient of the UCD Ulysses Medal.

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Wilson School Names Germany's Joschka Fischer Visiting Lecturer

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs has announced that Joschka Fischer, Germany's minister of foreign affairs from 1998 to 2005 and a member of the German national parliament, will join the school's faculty for a one-year appointment beginning in September 2006 as the Frederick H. Schultz Class of 1951 Professor of International Economic Policy, with the rank of lecturer of public and international affairs.

This fall Fischer is scheduled to teach the undergraduate course "International Crisis Diplomacy" with Wilson School lecturer Wolfgang Danspeckgruber. In spring 2007 Fischer is scheduled to co-teach with Wilson School Diplomat-in-Residence Ambassador Robert Hutchings and Princeton University politics professor Andrew Moravcsik an international relations graduate seminar on Europe, America and future policy challenges facing the transatlantic alliance.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Fischer will serve as a senior fellow at the Wilson School's Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination and as a fellow at Princeton's European Union Program.

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