University News
'Father of Molecular Medicine,' Vernon Ingram Dies at 82
Vernon Ingram, an MIT biology professor known as the "father of molecular medicine," died Aug. 17 from injuries suffered during a fall. He was 82.
A memorial service has been scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 10th at 2 p.m. in Wong Auditorium (E51). A reception will follow at Ashdown House.
Ingram was best known for his discovery, during the 1950s, that a single amino acid substitution is responsible for the molecular abnormality that leads to sickle cell anemia.
The find was "one of the absolutely seminal discoveries in the history of molecular biology," said Graham Walker, MIT professor of biology.
Walker, who was Ingram's friend and colleague for 30 years, said that Ingram was "one of the greatest men I have met in my life. An extraordinary scientist, an extraordinary intellect, and an absolutely wonderful human being."
In recent years, Ingram focused his research on neuroscience, especially Alzheimer's disease. Though in his 80s, he still ran a small laboratory at MIT and was constantly pursuing new research, Walker said. "He was a dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate experimentalist," Walker said. "He was going at full speed right up until the end."
Ingram and his wife, Elizabeth, served as housemasters at Ashdown House from 1985 until a few years ago.
Ingram was also a dedicated teacher and had served as director of the Experimental Studies Group (ESG).
Holly Sweet, current director of ESG, described Ingram as an "inspirational teacher, and a compassionate and spirited man who promoted the professional growth of his staff. As far as his legacy to ESG is concerned, he was the guiding force behind our ever-growing seminar series. He truly put the 'experimental' into the Experimental Study Group. We will miss him a great deal."
Ingram was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1924. He studied at Birkbeck College at the University of London, earning his B.Sc. in chemistry in 1945 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1949. He then spent two years in the United States preparing and crystallizing proteins at the Rockefeller Institute and studying peptide chemistry at Yale.
In 1952, Ingram returned to England, where he studied protein chemistry in the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. He focused on the genetics of hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood. Those studies led to his discovery that the misshapen hemoglobin molecules that characterize sickle cell anemia are caused by a single mutation.
Ingram joined the MIT faculty in 1958 and was one of a distinguished group of professors who started a world-renowned center for the study of molecular and cell biology. He originally planned to stay at MIT for only one year, but "I liked it so much that I stayed," he told the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the year he was elected to that society.
In 1961, Birkbeck College awarded him the D.Sc. degree.
He enjoyed art, music and photography, and was very involved with the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (RCMF).
RCMF Artistic Director David Deveau, who is also a pianist and a senior lecturer in music at MIT, worked closely with Ingram for the past decade.
"Vernon served with great distinction on the board of directors of the RCMF and brought a wonderful energy and commitment to our enterprise. He and Beth attended most of the festival concerts, enjoyed hosting musicians, talking music and throwing wonderful parties. Vernon brought his natural scientific curiosity to everything he undertook, and music was no exception. We often had substantive conversations about the merits of a given performance or composition," Deveau said.
Ingram is survived by his wife; a son, Peter; and a daughter, Jennifer.
[ FYI Index ]
NSF Awards $75.3 Million for Five New Engineering Research Centers
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded US$75.3 million for five new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) that will develop cross-disciplinary research programs to advance technologies that address major societal problems and provide the basis for new industries.
For more than two decades, the ERC program has fostered interdisciplinary research and education collaborations, in close partnership with industry, based on the realities of technological innovation and the development of new products and services. Scientists and engineers from a variety of disciplines collaborate on broad-based high-risk engineering research, developing fundamental engineering knowledge and test beds for important emerging technologies.
NSF supports ERCs for a maximum of 10 years while the centers develop a strong network of collaborations with industry leaders and a base of financial support that can sustain the center after "graduation" from the NSF program.
Including the new awards, NSF supports 22 Engineering Research Centers in the fields of bioengineering; earthquake engineering; design, manufacturing and processing systems; microelectronic and optical systems and information technology.
Brief descriptions of the new centers follow.
Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC)
SynBERC will focus on synthetic biology, fabricating new biological components and assembling them into integrated, miniature devices and systems such as microbial drug factories or tools for seeking out and destroying cancerous tumors, pollutants or airborne warfare agents. Center researchers envision devices that incorporate "off-the-shelf" biological parts--whether enzymes, cells or even genetic circuits--with standardized connections that can even be integrated into non-biological systems.
The ERC will push synthetic biology engineering from time consuming, one-of-a-kind development efforts to the rapid creation of new products from standardized components. The efforts could impact the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, genetics and chemical fields, potentially leading to an entirely new landscape of diagnostic, therapeutic, and synthetic chemical industries.
SynBERC is based at the University of California at Berkeley, in partnership with Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prairie View A&M University, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The ERC will also partner with the University of California Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) and the California Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) at Berkeley and UCSF to increase involvement of underrepresented minority students in the field.
The ERC has industry partners that include 12 firms committed to membership and representing suppliers of genetic tools and custom DNA components, pharmaceutical and chemical firms, and firms interested in developing simulation software and computational tools. Venture capital firms will advise SynBERC on start-up business opportunities.
Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center (QoLT)
QoLT will develop a range of technologies that will allow people with limited mobility or other physical and mental restrictions to live more independent and productive lives. Working in design partnerships with older adults, people with disabilities and their care providers, the ERC will target new technologies advance machine perception, intelligent robotics and miniaturization to craft devices ranging from wearable health monitors for older people to novel "intelligent" home systems that allow people with restricting disabilities to operate household appliances or drive a car. The center will also develop modifications, such as navigational aids, for wheelchairs and other existing technologies. The ERC includes a strong partnership between engineers and computer scientists, social and cognitive scientists and rehabilitation practitioners to help assure the technologies will meet user needs.
QoLT is based at Carnegie Mellon University with the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) as its core partner. Through this partnership, the center engages faculty from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, and the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy & Management, along with the Pitt Center of Assistive Technology in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, Pitt's Human Engineering Research Laboratories at Highland Drive VA Medical Center, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and several residential and institutional facilities for older adults and people with disabilities. To increase the diversity of engineers and scientists engaged in this field, the ERC will partner with the Florida/Georgia LSAMP, Chatham College, Howard University and Lincoln University.
Industry partners include 18 companies representing various fields including robotics, medical devices, consumer electronics, information technology and assistive technology.
Engineering Research Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power (CEFP)
CEFP will develop compact, low cost next-generation, fluid-powered devices--systems that use pressurized liquids or gases to transmit power. Fluid power is already a multi-billion dollar global industry with uses in aerospace, agriculture, construction, health care, manufacturing, mining and transportation. Researchers intend to develop a range of new technologies, such as hybrid vehicles with efficient fluid power components and wearable fluid-power assisted devices that run for extended periods without external energy sources--ideal mobility aids for people with disabilities or power sources for compact machines such as rescue robots.
CEFP is based at University of Minnesota in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University and Vanderbilt University. Outreach universities include the Milwaukee School of Engineering and North Carolina A&T State University (NCAT). Outreach institutions include the National Fluid Power Association, Project Lead the Way, and the Science Museum of Minnesota. The ERC will form partnerships with the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Partnership (LSAMP) headquartered at NCAT, the Tennessee LSAMP headquartered at Tennessee State University; and the AGEP headquartered at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Industry partners will augment NSF funding with $3 million. With help from the National Fluid Power Association, more than 50 companies have agreed to provide support for the research center.
Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE)
MIRTHE researchers will develop technologies that use mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers as the backbone for a wide range of next-generation air-monitoring sensors. Mid-infrared light reveals the presence of key gas molecules--such as carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and benzene--to specialized sensors. Such sensors have the potential to be accurate, extremely compact, affordable and easy for non-specialists to operate. In widespread use, such systems could revolutionize how people understand the air around them, revealing toxins released by smokestacks, monitoring greenhouse gasses and even alerting governments of possible chemical attack. The systems would also introduce a new class of affordable breath analyzers for routine diagnostics by primary care physicians. Doctors could monitor breath for byproducts of protein metabolism, indicators of kidney dysfunction, liver dysfunction, cancer detection or stress.
MIRTHE is based at Princeton University in partnership with Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Rice University, Texas A&M University and the City College of New York.
The center is collaborating with dozens of industrial partners and several educational outreach partners, including the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, a competitive program at UMBC that challenges gifted, underrepresented minority students to become leading research scientists and engineers, the UMBC and Rice University AGEPs, LSAMPs, Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education and others.
Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Composites (C-SOC)
C-SOC will study the nature of finely ground granular materials and other substances that form the core of drug tablets, processed foods, agricultural chemicals and other "composite organic" products. In addition to improving the quality and consistency of such materials, the center will develop more consistent and cost-effective manufacturing techniques than methods based largely on trial and error.
C-SOC is based at Rutgers University in partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Purdue University and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. Outreach partners include the City University of New York (CUNY) AGEP; the Midwest Crossroads AGEP; the University of Puerto Rico AGEP; and the Indiana, Puerto Rico, and CUNY/NYC LSAMPs. Pre-college outreach programs include high schools near the partner universities in New Jersey, Indiana, and Puerto Rico and a vocational high school in Puerto Rico.
Industry partners include 28 companies that are providing a total of $2.5 million in research funding in the first year. They include pharmaceutical and food manufacturers along with suppliers of manufacturing and analytical equipment.
[ FYI Index ]
Pataki Brings $12 Million for Cornell Accelerator
Making his second visit to the Cornell campus in a week, New York Gov. George Pataki again brought funding, this time $12 million for preliminary work on the proposed Energy Recovery Linac (ERL), which will help create the brightest source of X-rays in the world.
Construction of the ERL, in a 1.3-kilometer-long tunnel under university parking lots, is scheduled to begin at the end of this decade, at an estimated cost of about $400 million.
Cornell scientists are currently developing critical components of the ERL, and in 2008 expect to complete construction and testing of a prototype, for which the National Science Foundation (NSF) has provided $18 million and Cornell $10 million.
The money will help support the engineering design of the ERL, according to Sol Gruner, Cornell professor of physics and director of X-ray science for the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education (CLASSE), which will oversee the project. "That's the kind of thing the NSF doesn't support," Gruner said.
In the linac, or linear accelerator, electrons will be pushed to almost the speed of light, then fed into the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR). At various points around the ring, facilities of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) will convert them into high-energy X-rays. CHESS will become what Robert Richardson, Cornell vice provost for research, who shared the podium with Pataki, called "the brightest X-ray source in the history of the world."
With the ERL in operation, CHESS will provide X-ray beams that can be focused down to one nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) in diameter to analyze the structure of biological molecules and advanced materials. It will create pulses so short that researchers expect to use them to make movies of chemical reactions that take place in tiny fractions of a second.
The $400 million spent on the ERL, Pataki said, will attract another billion dollars in investments and help create a "critical mass" of science and technology that will attract more scientists and high-tech business to the state.
During a previous visit to campus Aug. 14, Pataki announced a grant of $50 million in funding for renovation and consolidation of the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine.
[ FYI Index ]
NIH Funds $2 Million Magnetic Resonance System at Yale
Yale will receive a $2 million High-End Instrumentation (HEI) grant from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to fund the purchase of a 7-Tesla human magnetic resonance (MR) system that will facilitate ultra-high resolution studies of diabetes, epilepsy, psychiatric disease, and learning disorders.
Under this program, the NCRR makes one-time awards to support the purchase of sophisticated instruments costing more than $750,000 to advance biomedical research and increase knowledge of the underlying causes of human disease.
Led by Douglas L. Rothman, professor of diagnostic radiology and biomedical engineering, the MR system will be a shared resource for several investigators who are funded by the National Institutes of Health. Yale has recruited two new faculty members, Professors Hoby Hetherington and Jullie Pan, to develop new methods of biochemical image-guided neurosurgery using the system.
The Yale School of Medicine will support approximately half of the system cost, as well as the cost of installation in the recently constructed 30,000-square-foot Magnetic Resonance Research Center in the Anlyan Center.
[ FYI Index ]
Andrei Okounkov Wins Prestigious Fields Medal for Mathematics Work
Princeton's Andrei Okounkov has received one of this year's Fields Medals, widely considered to be the math world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The awards for outstanding mathematical achievement were presented earlier on August 22 at the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.
Okounkov, a professor of mathematics at Princeton since 2002, has been lauded for his ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated fields, such as algebraic geometry in mathematics and statistical mechanics in physics. Andrew Wiles, chair of the mathematics department, said his colleague has a talent for bridging far-flung topics in math.
Another colleague, Peter Sarnak, said that Okounkov has made breakthrough contributions in a number of fields.
This year's other winners are Terence Tao of the University of California-Los Angeles, who received his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton in 1996, and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud. Famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman also was named a winner, but has declined to accept his award.
Fields Medals are awarded every four years to mathematicians no older than 40, and two to four mathematicians can receive them each time they are presented. Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields created the medals, which were first awarded in 1936. Along with a gold medallion inscribed with the winner's name, the awards bring a cash prize of about $13,300.
Okounkov, who was born in Moscow in 1969, received his bachelor's degree and doctorate in mathematics from Moscow State University, and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2000. Okounkov also has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California-Berkeley. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and has been a research fellow in the Dobrushin Mathematical Laboratory at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
[ FYI Index ]
Terence Tao Awarded the Fields Medal
Terence Tao became the first mathematics professor in UCLA history to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, often described as the "Nobel Prize in mathematics," during the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid on Aug. 22. In the 70 years the prize has been awarded by the International Mathematical Union, only 48 researchers ever have won it.
Christoph Thiele, UCLA professor and chair of the mathematics department, said outstanding graduate students from as far as Romania and China, as well as throughout the United States, have come to UCLA for the chance to study with Tao.
Tao was awarded the Fields Medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory." In honoring Tao, the organization said, "Terence Tao is a supreme problem-solver whose spectacular work has had an impact across several mathematical areas. He combines sheer technical power, an other-worldly ingenuity for hitting upon new ideas, and a startlingly natural point of view that leaves other mathematicians wondering, 'Why didn't anyone see that before?' "
Like the summer Olympics and the World Cup, the Fields Medal is awarded every fourth year. Along with Tao, the Fields Medal also was presented to Andrei Okounkov, professor of mathematics at Princeton University; Grigori Perelman, formerly a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley; and Wendelin Werner, professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.
Tao's genius at mathematics began early in life. He started to learn calculus when he was 7, at which age he began high school; by 9 he was already very good at university-level calculus. By 11, he was thriving in international mathematics competitions. Tao, now 31, was 20 when he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and he joined UCLA's faculty that year. UCLA promoted him to full professor at age 24.
One of the branches of mathematics on which Tao focuses is theoretical field called harmonic analysis, an advanced form of calculus that uses equations from physics. Some of this work involves, in Garnett's words, "geometrical constructions that almost no one understands." Tao also works in a related field, nonlinear partial differential equations, and in the entirely distinct fields of algebraic geometry, number theory and combinatorics — which involves counting. His research has been supported by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the Clay Mathematics Institute.
Discover magazine praised Tao's research on prime numbers, conducted with Ben Green, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bristol in England, as one of the 100 most important discoveries in all of science for 2004. A number is prime if it is larger than one and divisible by only itself and one. The primes begin with 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 17.
Euclid proved that the number of primes is infinite. Tao and Green proved that the set of prime numbers contains infinitely many progressions of all finite lengths. An example of an equally spaced progression of primes, of length three and space four, is 3, 7, 11; the largest known progression of prime numbers is length 24, with each of the numbers containing more than two dozen digits. Green and Tao's discovery reveals that somewhere in the prime numbers, there is a progression of length 100, one of length 1,000, and one of every other finite length, and that there are an infinite number of such progressions in the primes.
To prove this, Tao and Green spent two years analyzing all four proofs of a theorem named for Hungarian mathematician Endre Szemerédi. Very few mathematicians understand all four proofs, and Szemerédi's theorem does not apply to prime numbers.
Tao is also well-known for his work on the "Kakeya conjecture," a perplexing set of five problems in harmonic analysis. One of Tao's proofs extends more than 50 pages, in which he and two colleagues obtained the most precise known estimate of the size of a particular geometric dimension in Euclidean space. The issue involves the most space-efficient way to fully rotate an object in three dimensions, a question of interest to theoretical mathematicians.
[ FYI Index ]
UCSD Science Dean Has Minor Planet Named After Him
Mark Thiemens has spent an entire career studying and analyzing meteorites, chunks of space rock that survive the fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. Now he has an orbiting space rock—an asteroid or “minor planet”—to call his very own.
Thiemens, dean of the University of California San Diego (UCSD)’s Division of Physical Sciences, was recently informed that a minor planet orbiting the inner part of the main asteroid belt has been designated (7004) Markthiemens in honor of his work with meteorites.
Brian Marsden, head of the minor planet center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the clearinghouse for naming the tiny orbiting bodies, said Thiemens’ asteroid was discovered in 1979 in Australia, but given a numbered designation only a few years ago when its orbit was confirmed. It was first spotted by Schelte J. Bus, II, an associate astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who officially named it last week in honor of Thiemens.
The asteroid has an orbit of 2.3 astronomical units, the mean distance from the Earth to sun, and extends almost to the orbit of Mars. The amount of light it reflects from its surface suggests it is less than 10 kilometers, about six miles, in diameter.
Marsden said that of 134,000 asteroids that have been found by astronomers, only about 13,000, or about 10 percent, have thus far been named.
The designation of (7004) Markthiemens is the second major scientific honor Thiemens has received this year. In April, he was one of three UCSD professors elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists.
The founder and director of UCSD’s Center for Environmental Research and Training, Thiemens has done research on a wide variety of problems—from ozone chemistry to global warming to questions about the prospect of life on Mars. His most recent work has focused on understanding climate change from chemical clues embedded in the ice at the South Pole. He has twice received the Alexander Von Humboldt awards and won the E.O. Lawrence Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1998. In 2002, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Thiemens received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Miami and his Ph.D. in oceanography from Florida State University. Shortly after coming to UCSD in 1980 from his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, he made discoveries that overturned conventional theories about the formation and evolution of the solar system.
