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Volume 6, Issue 33
Sept 22, 2006
Circulation: 20,096
Editor: Beth Keithly

Friday FYI

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

University News

Charles M. Vest Nominated As Next National Academy of Engineering President

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) 2007 nominating committee1 has unanimously recommended Charles M. Vest, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to stand as the sole candidate2 to be the next president of the NAE. Voting by the NAE membership will take place in March 2007 for a six-year term to begin on July 1.

If elected, Vest will succeed Wm. A. Wulf, whose second term as NAE president will end on June 30, 2007. Wulf is ineligible to run for a third term under the NAE bylaws, and he will return to his previous position as a Chaired University Professor at the University of Virginia.

The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies, which also include the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. These independent, nonprofit institutions serve as advisers to government and the public on issues related to science, engineering, and medicine. NAE's membership consists of the nation's premier engineers, who are elected by their peers for their distinguished achievements. Established in 1964, the NAE operates under the congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. The NAE president is a full-time employee of the organization at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and also serves as the vice chair of the National Research Council, the principal research arm of the National Academies.

Vest served as MIT's president from 1990 through 2004. During that time, he worked to strengthen federal-university-industry relations and undertook a number of initiatives to bring education and research issues to broader public attention. Vest placed special emphasis on enhancing science and engineering in undergraduate education. While stressing the importance of racial and cultural diversity among faculty and students at MIT, Vest also worked to build a stronger international dimension to the university's programs.

Selected as a member of the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which completed its report in 2005, Vest brought a strong science and engineering background to the analysis. He led a U.S. Department of Energy task force on the future of science programs in 2002-2003 and chaired a presidential advisory commission on the redesign of the International Space Station in 1992-1994. Vest was vice chair of the Council on Competitiveness for eight years, is a former chair of the Association of American Universities, and serves on the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Vest was elected to the NAE in 1993 "for technical and educational contributions to holographic interferometry and leadership as an educator," and he currently serves on the NAE Council. Among Vest's career honors is the NAE's Arthur M. Bueche Award in 2000 "for his outstanding university leadership, commitment, and effectiveness in helping mold government policy in support of research, and forging linkages between academia and industry."

Vest earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1963. He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1964 and 1967, respectively, where he later held the positions of dean of engineering, provost, and vice president for academic affairs. He is the recipient of 10 honorary doctoral degrees.

[ FYI Index ]

25 New MacArthur Fellows Announced

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 25 new MacArthur Fellows for 2006 on Tuesday. The new Fellows work across a broad spectrum of endeavors. They include a developmental biologist, a sculptor, a country doctor, a jazz violinist, and a deep-sea explorer. All were selected for their creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future. This past week, the recipients learned by a phone call from the Foundation that they will each receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years.

"Selection for a MacArthur Fellowship is the culmination of an intensive review of the creative efforts and promise of each Fellow. Our call comes as a complete surprise and offers the new Fellows the gift of time and an unfettered opportunity to reflect, explore, and create," said MacArthur President, Jonathan Fanton.

MacArthur Fellowships come without stipulations or reporting requirements, offering the opportunity for Fellows to accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions. The unusual level of independence afforded to Fellows underscores the spirit of freedom intrinsic to creative endeavors. Fellowships are awarded to women and men of all ages and at all career stages; the extraordinary creativity of MacArthur Fellows knows neither boundaries nor the constraints of age, place and endeavor.

Recipients this year include:

The MacArthur Fellows Program was the first major grantmaking initiative of the Foundation. The inaugural class of MacArthur Fellows was named in 1981. Including this year's Fellows, 732 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named MacArthur Fellows since the inception of the program.

The selection process begins with formal nominations. Hundred of anonymous nominators assist the Foundation in identifying people to be considered for a MacArthur Fellowship. Nominations are accepted only from invited nominators, a list that is constantly renewed throughout the year. They are chosen from many fields and challenged to identify people who demonstrate exceptional creativity and promise. A 12-member Selection Committee, whose members also serve anonymously, meets regularly to review files, narrow the list, and make final recommendations to the Foundation's Board of Directors. The number of Fellows selected each year is not fixed; typically, it varies between 20 and 25.

[ FYI Index ]

LLNL Researchers to Play Key Role in $60 Million DOE Program to Advance Scientific Computing

More than 40 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers working on 14 multi-institutional scientific computing projects will benefit from $60 million in funding awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

DOE's Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing program, or SciDAC, announced last week the selection of 30 computational science projects for funding over the next three to five years. The $60 million for fiscal year 2007 will be divided among science applications, centers for enabling technology, institutes and other computing infrastructure projects.

The goal of SciDAC is to advance the state-of-the-art in scientific simulation in DOE-relevant mission areas by creating multi-disciplinary teams comprised of mathematicians, computer scientists and applied science experts from national labs and research universities. SciDAC has been expanded to include the development of new data management and knowledge discovery tools for large data sets resulting from both experiments and simulation. The program is being called "SciDAC-2" to reflect its expanded scope. Initiated in 2001, SciDAC already has resulted in significant new advances in astrophysics, particle accelerator design, climate, combustion, fusion and other fields.

Livermore will participate in 14 projects including seven centers for enabling technology (CETs), one institute, and six scientific applications. Two of the centers are led by LLNL researchers.

CET project areas include visualization, scalable data management, interoperable meshing/geometry tools, scalable linear and nonlinear solvers, structured AMR algorithms, component technologies, and the Earth System Grid (ESG). The institute project is focused on performance engineering research. The biggest area of expansion for LLNL researchers is in the area of scientific application partnerships.

The CET projects led by LLNL include:

Current efforts in climate modeling and climate science are generating massive amounts of data that are distributed across the globe. Under SciDAC-1, the ESG was developed and deployed to make climate simulation data easily accessible to the climate modeling community. The ESG currently has 2,300 registered users and manages 140 terabytes of data.

It is estimated that more than 200 scientific publications are under way from analysis of ESG-delivered data in the past year alone. Despite these successes, ESG faces significant challenges in coming years as the size, complexity and the number of climate data sets grow dramatically. The goals of this proposed five-year project are to: sustain the successful existing ESG system; address projected scientific needs for data management and analysis; extend ESG to support the major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment in 2010; support the Climate Science Computational End Station at the DOE Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL; and support climate model evaluation activities under the proposed SciDAC-2 climate application.

An additional 40 Livermore lab researchers will participate as co-investigators in SciDAC science applications, CETs or institute projects. Science application projects range from astrophysics, fusion science and climate modeling and simulation to simulations of stress corrosion cracking and turbulent flows. For details about applied science, institute and CET projects not mentioned here, see the DOE press release and SciDAC fact sheets posted at the SciDAC Web site.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission to ensure national security and to apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

[ FYI Index ]

Caltech Gets $18 Million from NHGRI to Map Vertebrate Development

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded an US$18-million grant for creation of a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at the California Institute of Technology.

According to Marianne Bronner-Fraser, the Ruddock Professor of Biology at Caltech and principal investigator of the five-year program, the goal will be to image and mutate every developmentally important gene in vertebrates--that is, animals with backbones.

The work will be performed together with co-investigators Sean Megason and Scott Fraser from the Division of Biology, and Niles Pierce, an assistant professor of applied and computational mathematics and bioengineering. The research willl combine real-time analysis of gene expression on a genome-wide scale with the ability to mutate genes of interest. Initially, the research team will focus on the zebrafish, which is ideal for this type of work because of its transparent embryo and its rapid development.

The researchers will use new "in toto" imaging and genetic tagging tools invented by Megason and Fraser and new molecular detection methods being developed in the Pierce lab to analyze gene expression and function in the developing embryos. They will digitize this molecular data on a genomic scale by capturing thousands of time-lapse videos as the animals develop.

Once the approach is worked out on zebrafish, it will also be applied to the Japanese quail to make a "digital bird," because bird embryos develop in a fashion very similar to human embryos.

The Caltech grant is part of a $54-million grant portfolio awarded by the NHGRI for funding interdisciplinary work in genomic research. The NHGRI is best known for spearheading the Human Genome Project, which completely mapped the genetic blueprint of humans.

Now that the sequence of the genome for humans and many other species has been determined, the challenge ahead is to figure out how the genome functions during development and disease which is the goal of the CEGS (Center for Excellence in Genomic Science) program.

[ FYI Index ]

Yahoo! Funds International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford

A $1 million gift from Yahoo! Inc. will enable Stanford's John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists to create a new international fellowship.

The new Yahoo! International Fellowship will be aimed at journalists from countries where there are restrictions on freedom of the press, either by governmental agencies or other forces, according to James Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships. The first Yahoo! International Fellow will be Imtiaz Ali, a reporter for the BBC Pashto Service in Pakistan.

Pakistan is where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in 2002, and journalists there report disturbing patterns of economic pressure, threats and attacks, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based nonprofit organization. Two Pakistani journalists were killed in February 2005 when gunmen opened fire on a bus filled with journalists, and in June the body of a Pakistani journalist abducted in December was found. He was the eighth journalist slain in Pakistan since 2002, according to the CPJ.

The Yahoo! gift will fund the new fellowship for 10 years. Bettinger said the new fellowship is the first in the program specifically aimed at journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. "People in this country are often unaware of the dire pressures under which journalists in many countries work," he said. "The Yahoo! International Fellowship will help us identify outstanding journalists in those countries, and give them the chance to withdraw from those environments for a year while studying with other Knight Fellows at Stanford."

Like all other International Knight Fellows, the Yahoo! Fellow is selected by the Knight Fellowships program administrators.

The Knight Fellowships program annually brings 12 journalists from the United States and as many as eight from other countries to study for an academic year at Stanford. In addition to attending classes, Knight Fellows attend a series of discussions and seminars organized for them, and some pursue individual projects as well. At the end of their year they return to their news organizations. The program began in 1966.

[ FYI Index ]

MIT Center to Tackle Energy Crisis

MIT President Susan Hockfield has announced the establishment of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), in line with the recommendations of an Institute-wide group of faculty convened in June 2005 to help MIT understand how best to tackle the world's energy crisis.

Hockfield thanked the members of the Energy Research Council (ERC) for articulating recommendations that will allow MIT, with its unique talents and capabilities, to address what she called "one of the most urgent challenges of our time."

According to Hockfield, in a Sept. 20 letter to the MIT community, MITEI will address "the science, technology, policy, and systems design required to meet the global energy challenge." As a "virtual center," it will progressively build focused research programs, coordinated educational offerings and the necessary campus infrastructure, leading over several years to the establishment of a new interdepartmental laboratory or center that will involve researchers from all five schools.

Hockfield noted that the breakthrough contributions of MIT faculty and students to energy issues will have even greater impact as parts of a coherent answer to the world's energy problems. "When MIT focuses on large issues of great public importance, we are able to get things done," she said.

Commenting that "vision and direction will be critical to the success of this effort," Hockfield announced that MITEI will be led by Ernest J. Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems and co-director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, and Robert C. Armstrong, the Chevron Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Moniz and Armstrong, who served as co-chairs of the ERC, will be director and associate director, respectively, of MITEI. They will coordinate existing energy activities across the Institute and guide the development of relationships with other institutions, industry and government agencies, Hockfield said.

Moniz and Armstrong will play key roles in developing both the agenda and the resources needed to build a major center on campus, said Canizares.

An Energy Council made up of faculty from all five schools will help implement the research and educational goals outlined in the ERC report. Hockfield said its membership would be announced later this semester.

Additionally, two new task forces will focus on education and campus operations. The Energy Education Task Force will work closely with the dean for undergraduate education and academic department chairs to coordinate cross-listed educational offerings, recommend new subjects and begin designing possible core subjects from the undergraduate core to graduate level.

[ FYI Index ]

Princeton to End Early Admission Following Harvard Announcement

Princeton University will end its early admission program and admit all undergraduates through a single process, beginning next year with students applying for the class that will enter Princeton in September 2008.

In making a similar announcement last week, Harvard pointed to the inequities of early admission programs for less advantaged students and concerns about early admission that many secondary schools have expressed with increasing urgency in recent years.

Princeton's decision was made by Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman, Dean of Admission Janet Lavin Rapelye and Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel. It follows a series of annual reviews in recent years that have included assessments of the impact of early admission programs. The decision to end Princeton's early program was discussed at length this past weekend by the Board of Trustees at its regularly scheduled September meetings. The trustees expressed strong support for the decision.

Princeton has had some form of early admission program for almost 30 years. Since 1996 it has had an "early decision" program that requires students who apply early to Princeton as their first-choice school to commit to enroll at Princeton if admitted. This year 598 applicants were admitted early to the freshman class, accounting for almost 49 percent of the 1,231-member class.

This year's freshman class includes 37 percent minority students and 11 percent who are the first in their family to attend college. More than 55 percent of the class is receiving financial aid, and under Princeton's landmark financial aid policy, students receive their aid as grants that do not have to be repaid, not as loans. The average award for a student on financial aid is almost $30,000.

Princeton's new policy will take effect with the admission process for students applying to enter Princeton in September 2008. According to Rapelye, next year's deadline for applications has not yet been established, but it could be set in mid- to late December to allow her office adequate time to carefully consider all applications prior to an early April notification date.

For this year, Princeton's admission process remains unchanged, with early decision applications due by Nov. 1 for notification in mid-December and regular decision applications due by Jan. 1 for notification in early April.

Princeton is currently phasing in an increase in the size of its freshman class from the current 1,230 to just over 1,300, beginning with the class that will enroll in the fall of 2009.

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New Executive Director Named For UTD Callier Center

Saying "the time is ripe to create new initiatives that deal with highly needed research, education and service," Dr. Ross J. Roeser will step down as executive director of the acclaimed Callier Center for Communication Disorders at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) effective Oct. 1. Roeser will be replaced by Dr. Thomas Campbell, currently director of the Department of Audiology and Communication Disorders at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and a professor in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh.

Roeser has been at the center, which is renowned for its clinical, educational and research programs in communication disorders and is part of the university's School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, for more than 35 years. He has served as its executive director since 1988.

"We have achieved great success since opening the Callier Center in the early 1960s. I am particularly proud of the strides we have made in recent years in such areas as audiology, where we are ranked among the top five programs in the United States," Roeser said. "I look forward to seeing the center continue its rise to national prominence under Tom's leadership."

Roeser, who in 2005 received the Larry Mauldin Award for Excellence in Education, will serve as director emeritus of the center and will remain a professor of communication sciences at the university. He also will continue as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Audiology, a leading professional publication in the science of hearing and hearing defects and their treatment that boasts a worldwide circulation.

Dr. Bert Moore, dean of UTD's School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, stated that, though he was losing an accomplished leader in Roeser, he was gaining a new perspective in Campbell.

"Ross has done a wonderful job leading Callier for nearly 20 years, increasing the center's distinction, educating countless students and attracting top researchers who have made advances in the study and treatment of communication disorders," Moore noted. "That said, Tom, who brings with him vast experience, knowledge and respect, is ideally positioned to seamlessly step into the management role. I believe he has the ability and vision to bring the center's strategic goals to fruition."

Those goals include three main areas of focus: promoting awareness of Callier's programs, refurbishing and expanding the center's facilities and funding endowed chairs and professorships.

"I'm thrilled to join Callier at such an exciting time in the center's history," Campbell said. "An important aspect of my vision for Callier is to continue to develop the center into a world-class facility for clinical service delivery for both children and adults with hearing and communication disorders, and I believe that this goal can be achieved with carefully integrated, innovative clinical research and education programs."

A certified speech-language pathologist, Campbell has focused his research on understanding the environmental, physiological and behavioral markers that underline speech and language disorders in children. In recent years, he has studied both the genetic and physiological processes that are associated with childhood motor speech disorders. He holds a Ph.D. degree in communicative disorders from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Campbell's wife, Dr. Christine Dollaghan, who was a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh, also will join the Behavioral and Brain Sciences faculty at UTD. Dollaghan's research interests include child language development and language disorders, biologic and sociodemographic influences on speech and language development and evidence-based diagnosis and intervention in communication disorders.

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U.T. Dallas Adds Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering

The Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) will provide undergraduates with yet another degree option — a bachelor of science in computer engineering. Students can begin studying under the new program, which was recently approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, beginning in fall 2007.

A primary objective of the program is to train computer engineers to satisfy the design and development needs of both local and state industry, as well as prepare them to be innovators and policy makers. Under the program, faculty in the Jonsson School will provide the education needed to create engineers who are able to identify emerging problems and develop innovative solutions utilizing state-of-the-art technologies.

"A computer engineering degree is among the most sought-after degrees in academia today," said Dr. Cy Cantrell, associate dean for academic affairs in the Jonsson School. "The immediate result we'll see is increased enrollment, but more importantly, our students will now have a seamless transition to our existing master's degree program, and, ultimately the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering."

A strong existing graduate program in computer engineering was the catalyst for the new offering, and the need was reinforced by a report to the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System that was authored by the Washington Advisory Group in 2004. The group found that computer engineering was an area of emphasis that had been overlooked.

"There aren't any tier one schools with only two departments within their schools of engineering and computer science," Cantrell noted. "We are in the process of adding departments in other engineering areas, and this is a tremendous first step."

More importantly, he said, the new program will provide UTD students with a total of five degree programs within engineering and computer science that cover the education process from a bachelor's degree to a Ph.D.

"The new degree dovetails with UTD's long-range academic plans and will ensure that UTD continues to produce exceptional engineers who are well prepared for the workplace," Cantrell said.

The interim director of the new computer engineering degree program is Dr. William J. Pervin, a professor of electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics at UTD.

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