University News
Board of Regents Names Dr. Michael D. McKinney Sole Finalist for Chancellor Position
Dr. Michael D. McKinney, senior executive vice president and chief operating officer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, was named the sole finalist for the position of chancellor of The Texas A&M University System by the Board of Regents during a special telephonic meeting Wednesday.
McKinney, a family physician, has served in leadership positions at the UT System since 2002, in his current position since Sept. 2003, and previously as vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System administrative offices in Austin. He also served as acting dean of the medical school earlier this year. He is a former chief of staff to Governor Rick Perry and served as commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission for three years and as a member of the Texas House of Representatives for eight years.
At the UT Houston Health Science Center, McKinney has managed operations of the university's eight components, as well as the medical school's clinical practice plan, with specific focus on meeting financial challenges; addressing organizational planning and development; achieving institutional efficiencies; advancing the educational, research and ethical mission of the Health Science Center; and building a strong clinical practice.
From 2002-03, he served as vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System, where he concentrated on business management and financial issues related to the System's six health science institutions.
During 2001 and 2002, McKinney served the State of Texas as chief of staff to Governor Rick Perry. From 1995 to 1998, he was Texas commissioner of health and human services. In this role, he oversaw 11 state agencies, a staff of 64,000 and a budget of $24 billion. He was appointed to that position by then-Governor George W. Bush. From 1984 to 1991, he represented Leon, Madison, Grimes, Houston and Montgomery Counties in the Texas House of Representatives. He was speaker pro-tempore of the House from 1989 to 1990.
McKinney earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Houston and an M.D. from the U.T. Medical Branch in Galveston.
His other career experiences include serving as CEO of a Medicaid health care plan; a member of the Physician Payment Review Commission in the Federal Office of Technology; and a family practitioner for 16 years in Centerville, Texas.
A member of both the American Medical Association and Texas Medical Association, McKinney serves on the Memorial Hermann Hospital System Board of Directors, Harris County Public Healthcare System Council and the Statewide Task Force on Access to Health Care in Texas, "Code Red."He is vice chair of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's Formula Advisory Committee for Health-Related Institutions.
His many honors and achievements include receiving the Physician's Recognition Award from the American Medical Association earlier this year and the Presidential Award of Merit for Exemplary Service from the Texas Academy of Family Practice. As a state representative, he was recognized as one of the top 10 best legislators by both Texas Monthly magazine and The Dallas Morning News, and as an outstanding legislator by the Texas Medical Association and the Texas Department of Commerce.
His areas of focus in his numerous projects, publications and presentations have included organizational planning and development; financial management of complex organizations; public and health policy; children's health; border health initiatives; indigent care; long-term care; managed care; and Medicaid reform.
The Board of Regents may consider the appointment of McKinney to the position of chancellor after the 21 days required by state law for public notice of the appointment with the Texas Secretary of State. Current A&M System Chancellor Robert D. McTeer announced his retirement in August.
[ FYI Index ]
Fermi Research Alliance, LLC to Manage Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, a partnership between the University of Chicago and Universities Research Association Inc., has been chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to operate Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, effective Jan. 1, 2007. The Alliance is a new corporation that was formed in response to the DOE's competition to manage Fermilab and is dedicated solely to the laboratory's management.
Fermilab has been operated by URA since the laboratory's inception in 1967, and scientists at the laboratory have made many crucial discoveries about the fundamental nature of matter and energy. The University of Chicago has managed the nearby Argonne National Laboratory since Argonne's founding in 1946. The DOE's Office of Science is the nation's major supporter of federally funded research in particle physics, and much of the past century's extraordinary progress in the understanding of the elementary structure of matter comes directly from DOE-funded research.
Piermaria Oddone, Director of Fermilab and President of FRA said that FRA is committed to bringing the International Linear Collider to Illinois. The ILC is a proposed new particle accelerator that would allow physicists to explore phenomena far beyond the reach of today's accelerators. Scientists expect that the ILC, in partnership with the Large Hadron Collider now under construction in Europe, would radically change our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.
While laying the groundwork for the ILC, Fermilab scientists will continue their headline-making discoveries with the Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. They also will extend their investigations of neutrinos, mysterious subatomic particles with no electric charge and only the tiniest of mass. The Fermilab neutrino experiments will help to reveal how these elusive particles shaped the universe. In astrophysics, a third major area of the laboratory's research program, Fermilab scientists will further probe the deep connections between the inner space of subatomic particles and the outer space of cosmology.
University of Chicago faculty members and graduate students have been heavily involved in Fermilab research programs since the early days of the laboratory, helping design and build the first detector (the Collider Detector at Fermilab) for proton-antiproton collisions, often leading major experiments, and initiating the astrophysics program and the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory.
The FRA Board of Directors for Fermilab includes internationally renowned scientific, academic and industrial leaders, including three current or former directors of major research laboratories around the world and the presidents of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois.
FRA's corporate parents (the University of Chicago and URA), URA's member universities and Illinois universities have made commitments to Fermilab totaling $12 million over five years to support joint appointments and research collaborations, scholarships for children of FRA employees, executive education for FRA employees and joint education programs.
The FRA team includes EG&G, a division of URS Cororation, as prime subcontractor. EG&G/URS will provide support and best practices activities throughout Fermilab.
Fermilab is the nation's preeminent center for high-energy physics and an international center for scientific research in elementary particle physics and astrophysics. The laboratory has a staff of 1,900 employees on a 6,800-acre site near Batavia, Illinois, about 30 miles west of Chicago. Some 3,000 scientists from 260 universities and laboratories in 37 states and 31 countries collaborate in Fermilab's experiments to explore the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time, as well as the origin, evolution and destiny of the universe.
Much current understanding of the basic building blocks of nature, as well as the origin and evolution of the universe, has grown from work at Fermilab under URA's management. Two of the six quarks were discovered at Fermilab, and one of the three neutrinos was first detected there. On a vastly larger scale, Fermilab has contributed to the three-dimensional mapping of more than a million galaxies and other celestial objects as a participant in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Fermilab's work also has medical applications. In 1999, for example, Fermilab built a proton accelerator to be used for medical treatment at the Loma Linda Medical Center in California. Fermilab's own Neutron Therapy Facility has treated more than 3,000 cancer patients since 1976.
[ FYI Index ]
UT Dallas Names Professor-Researcher VP for Research, Economic Development
Dr. Bruce E. Gnade, a highly regarded professor in the Electrical Engineering and Chemistry departments at The University of Texas at Dallas, will become UT Dallas' vice president for research and economic development Nov. 1.
Gnade's strong record of research in materials science and his experience coordinating a major campus construction project are key aspects of his qualifications for the role. He will report to UT Dallas President Dr. David E. Daniel.
Gnade was selected from a "rich pool of talent"consisting entirely of internal candidates, said Daniel. "The entire group was stellar, and choosing among them was a difficult task."
Dr. Robert Helms, dean of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, served as chair of the search committee. "We faced a challenge most institutions would be very lucky to have – an extraordinarily talented group possessing superb qualifications. I'm very enthusiastic about Bruce's potential as a collegial leader of our growing research effort."
Gnade will be instrumental in helping UT Dallas dramatically expand its funded research portfolio, which will lead to an increase in the number and quality of Ph.D. candidates attending the university, the president said. "Bruce's unique combination of experience as a scholar, researcher and administrator in university, industry and government settings will serve UT Dallas well as it pursues its goal of becoming a top-tier research institution,"Daniel added.
Gnade will continue his own research program at UT Dallas, which involves nearly 20 graduate students and post-doctoral researchers studying novel applications for electronic materials such as flexible display screens.
"The lifeblood of a great research university is the innovative work done by faculty members, researchers and graduate students from many disciplines in laboratories across the campus,"Gnade said. "I wanted to be able to continue my own work, which is immensely rewarding, as well as to help enhance and expand the research environment at UT Dallas. This new assignment will permit me to do both."
UT Dallas' stated goal is to join the ranks of the nation's elite public research universities – those institutions whose research expenditures exceed $100 million annually. That will require nearly tripling research dollars.
"Although the numbers appear daunting, we have an excellent chance of achieving that goal in coming years, during which the university expects to hire hundreds of new faculty members, many of whom will be conducting funded research,"Gnade said. "We have to make certain that, coming in, these new colleagues understand that UT Dallas both demands and supports research."
In the near term, one potential draw for researchers may be the new Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory nearing completion on the north end of the UT Dallas campus. The $100-million, 182,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility has taken shape over the past two-and-one-half years with leadership from Gnade, who has served as the faculty liaison to the project.
According to Gnade, the new building will promote interdisciplinary, collaborative research by housing scientists from such disparate areas as chemistry, biology, physics, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, and behavioral and brain sciences side-by-side. Approximately one-third of the space in the facility will be reserved to help lure new faculty members and researchers to UT Dallas following the building's expected opening in early 2007.
Gnade expects that the bulk of increased research funding at UT Dallas in coming years will come from federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. As funding grows, so, too, will the number of Ph.D. students graduating from the university – a number he expects to eventually grow to 300 annually from the current 125.
Gnade came to UT Dallas in 2003 from the University of North Texas where he was chair of the Materials Science Department. Prior to that, he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense, and a visiting scientist at the University of Maryland at College Park. He also served as a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal technology agency.
From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Gnade held a number of technical and managerial positions in research and development functions at Texas Instruments Incorporated in Dallas.
He earned a Ph.D. degree in nuclear chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B. A. degree in chemistry from St. Louis University.
Gnade replaces Dr. Da Hsuan Feng. Feng last August moved to a new position, assistant to the president for global strategies and international relations, responsible for advancing UT Dallas' visibility and impact on the world stage. Feng was the university's first vice president for research and economic development.
[ FYI Index ]
National Science Foundation Awards UGA $4.1 Million Grant To Study So-Called "Jumping Genes"in Maize
Transposable elements, popularly called "jumping genes"when they were discovered more than half a century ago, are sequences of DNA that can move around chromosomes in a cell. At first thought to be molecular "junk,"they are now recognized as important, even crucial parts of the blueprints of plants and animals.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $4.1 million to the University of Georgia to identify all the transposable elements (TEs) in maize and to generate an annotated database that will assist all future research in this crop plant crucial across the globe.
Other principal investigators for the newly funded grant include, from UGA: Jeffrey Bennetzen, department of genetics and Kelly Dawe, departments of plant biology and genetics. Participating from the UGA Museum of Natural History is Byron Freeman. Other co-principal investigators include Nin Jiang of Michigan State University and Phillip SanMiguel of Purdue University.
All information from the project, which is expected to take five years, will be made freely available to the Maize Genome Sequencing Project and to long-term repositories such as the Maize Genome Database.
"The scientific goals of this project and the familiarity of maize also provide outstanding opportunities for student training and for connections between the research community and the broader public," said Wessler. "This project will dedicate more than 15 percent of its resources to the development of web-based, traveling and local museum exhibits that describe the history of maize as a crop, as a model organism for research and as a key component for many Native American cultures."
To this end, collaborations have been established with the UGA Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Botanic Garden.
Genomes differ dramatically in the percentage of TEs in their genomes. For instance, half of human DNA is transposable elements, while in some plants, the amount is more than 90 percent. About 80 percent of maize genomic DNA is derived from TEs.
The project also has an in-lab minority outreach component. Each participating institution has a commitment to the education of undergraduates, high school students and other members of the broader community, especially in the representation of under-represented groups.
Scientist Barbara McClintock discovered the first TEs in maize in 1948, work that led to her winning the Nobel Prize in 1983.
[ FYI Index ]
UCSF Discovery is Major Focus of $46 Million Grant to Combat Diarrhea
A $46 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop new treatments for severe diarrhea will focus much of its initial support on potential, new drugs discovered at UCSF. Diarrhea is a leading killer of children under the age of 5 worldwide and kills about 5 million people a year.
The San Francisco-based Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), which received the Gates Foundation grant, aims to accelerate development of drug candidates recently discovered at UCSF by Alan Verkman, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and physiology. Preclinical studies in Verkman's laboratory over the last few years have identified potential drugs that are hundreds of times more effective than prior compounds at blocking the major route of fluid loss from some life-threatening forms of diarrhea.
Adults with diarrheal disease can lose fluid equal to their total body weight in a day. The fluid loss can kill an infant in an hour. The young, old and weak are particularly vulnerable.
Many diarrheal diseases are caused by toxins from bacteria attacking cells that line the intestine. Two of the major infectious bacteria involved are Escherichia coli and Vibrio cholerae, both ingested by eating contaminated food or water. The result can be rapid fluid loss and severe dehydration. The standard treatment is to provide high volumes of fluid, but this is often not successful in children in developing countries. No drug is currently available to stop the fluid loss.
Verkman's laboratory sought potential drugs that could control the final step in fluid movement into or out of the intestine – secretion through channels in the membrane that makes up the inside lining of the intestine. The channel for fluid secretion by the intestine is known as the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, or CFTR.
The scientists screened for compounds that inhibited CFTR function and thereby blocked fluid loss out of the intestine. They sought compounds that either directly blocked the channel opening or chemically bound to the CFTR protein, preventing it from functioning as an ion channel.
In a high-throughput screening of about 200,000 compounds, they discovered several classes of potent CFTR inhibitors and confirmed their effectiveness in animal studies. The Institute for OneWorld Health now intends to help optimize compounds discovered by the Verkman lab as potential drug candidates to treat severe diarrheal disease.
One class of compounds that Verkman's lab discovered may offer particular promise for development, since it acts on cells lining the intestine, and therefore need not be absorbed by the body to treat diarrhea. A drug that doesn't enter the bloodstream poses far less potential risk of toxicity, and so can be tested and developed more quickly, Verkman pointed out.
UCSF holds the patents for the drug candidates discovered by Verkman's laboratory.
Verkman's laboratory discovered the promising drug candidates as an outgrowth of a related effort: a search for potential drugs to treat cystic fibrosis. In the lungs, a mutation in the CFTR protein prevents the regulator protein from releasing enough watery fluid, leading to chronic lung infection and deterioration of lung function, Verkman explained. In the intestine, infectious bacteria can have the opposite effect, releasing fluids in debilitating volumes.
Verkman's lab is also using the high-throughput screening process to search for drugs to treat other major diseases, including polycystic kidney disease, heart failure and glaucoma.
[ FYI Index ]
Jonathan Moreno and Christopher Murray Join the University of Pennsylvania as the Newest PIK Professors
Jonathan D. Moreno from the University of Virginia and Christopher B. Murray from the IBM research division have been named Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professors at the University of Pennsylvania.
PIK is a University-wide initiative, launched in 2005 by Penn President Amy Gutmann, to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines.
Moreno will hold appointments in medical ethics in the School of Medicine and in the history and sociology of science in the School of Arts and Sciences. He will hold the David and Lyn Silfen University Professorship, named in recognition of a Silfen family gift. David Silfen, a Penn trustee, is senior director of The Goldman Sachs Group.
At U.Va., Moreno is a professor of biomedical ethics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D. C.
Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and serves on the Institute's Board on Health Sciences Policy. He is also a member of the Council on Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is a bioethics advisor for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.
Moreno received his bachelor's degree from Hofstra University in 1973, with highest honors in philosophy and psychology. He was a University Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1977, and was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in cooperation with the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
Christopher B. Murray will hold appointments in chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences and in materials science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He will hold the Richard Perry University Professorship, named in recognition of a gift from Richard Perry, a Penn trustee and founder of the investment management firm Perry Capital.
At IBM since 1995, Murray is manager of the Nanoscale Materials and Devices Department and researches the synthesis characterization and integration of nanostructured materials with an emphasis on the exploration of finite size effects in nanoscale magnets and semiconductors.
Murray is a Master Inventor and patent evaluator at IBM. He received his B.Sci. degree in 1989 from Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before pursuing graduate studies in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, he developed methods for the synthesis and characterization of semiconductor nanocrystals and nanocrystal superlattices, earning a Ph.D. in 1995. His work on semiconductor nanocrystals was honored with the American Chemical Society's 1997 Nobel Laureate Signature Award.
The Technology Review recognized Murray's innovation in the development of nanocrystalline materials with his selection in 2000 as one of the most influential innovators younger than 35.
Cherie R. Kagan, Murray's spouse, will join Penn as an associate professor of electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Kagan, a 1991 graduate of Penn with both a B.S.E. in materials science and engineering and a B. A. in mathematics, earned her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering and electronic materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.
Kagan is manager of IBM's Molecular Assemblies and Devices Group, where her work on the creation of flexible transistors earned her recognition as an innovator of one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies in The Technology Review. In 2002, she was named one of the Top 12 Young Women at the Forefront of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society.
[ FYI Index ]
Princeton's Krueger to Receive IZA Prize in Labor Economics
Princeton economist Alan Krueger has been named a winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in recognition of his influential research on education and labor-market issues.
Krueger will share the award with David Card, a University of California-Berkeley economist and frequent collaborator who served on the Princeton faculty from 1983 to 1997.
The prize, which is worth 50,000 euros (approximately US$64,000), honors research that addresses important public policy concerns. It is awarded annually by Germany's Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), with support from the Deutsche Post Foundation. Krueger and Card will receive the prize at a Nov. 8 ceremony in Berlin.
Krueger and Card were cited for their analysis of the impact of education, training and human capital on earnings, such as research demonstrating that the quality of schooling has an enormous influence on future income.
They also have made pathbreaking contributions to the analysis of the minimum wage, showing that moderate increases do not have the destructive impact on employment that many critics fear. They received international attention for their 1994 study comparing fast-food employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before and after the New Jersey minimum wage increase.
Krueger's work also has included research on the controversial New York City school voucher experiment, in which he found that giving students vouchers to attend private school did not improve their performance on standardized tests.
Krueger, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy, has been a Princeton faculty member since 1987. He is the founding director of the University's Survey Research Center and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Institute for the Study of Labor.
[ FYI Index ]
Princeton's MacMillan Wins Awards for Organic Chemistry
David MacMillan, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Organic Chemistry, has been named a recipient two awards for his work.
He will receive the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award at the society's meeting in Boston in August and will speak at a symposium in his honor. In addition, he will be honored with the Mukaiyama Award, presented by the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, and deliver a lecture at that society's summer seminar in September.
The Cope Award, intended to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry, includes a $5,000 cash prize and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant. The $5,000 Mukaiyama Award is presented each year to an individual age 45 or younger who has made outstanding contributions to synthetic organic chemistry.
MacMillan's work involves the development of new chemical reactions that allow the rapid construction of biomedically important natural products, such as Diazonamide A, a potent inhibitor of cancer cells, and Frondosin B, a molecule that will be used in the study of autoimmune disorders such as arthritis and psoriasis.
MacMillan came to Princeton this summer from the California Institute of Technology, where he had been on the faculty since 2000.
[ FYI Index ]
Electrical Engineers Strive to Optimize Wireless Networks
When lives are on the line amid the terrifying fog of war or the desperate chaos of a disaster, fundamental questions of information theory don't seem all that urgent. But a better understanding of how wireless networks operate could help lift the fog and bring order to the chaos, thereby saving lives. With a new $6.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers from Stanford and three other universities have begun a large-scale research effort to understand and improve field communications for soldiers and first responders. The work could affect people in other ways through improved data security, automated homes and highways, novel biomedical applications and ubiquitous access to multimedia data and entertainment.
Wireless ad hoc networks are essentially decentralized federations of mobile transmitters that can route data among each other whenever they are in range. They are flexible and easy to establish. But they're not well optimized and their capacity is unknown. The reason is that unlike in a point-to-point connection on a fixed network, wireless ad hoc networks are characterized by energy and delay constraints, interference between transmitted signals, and rapidly changing conditions such as nodes entering and leaving the network and moving around. The result has been networks that, while quickly deployable, aren't nearly as reliable, fast or secure as they could be. Imagine a tank commander under fire but unable to call for air support, or a firefighter whose message about low water pressure ends up lost in a queue of less urgent messages.
To ultimately enable better network performance, Stanford electrical engineering Associate Professor Andrea Goldsmith and 11 colleagues from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the California Institute of Technology will work together to discover the theoretical underpinnings of ad hoc wireless networking. The other Stanford researchers are electrical engineer Stephen Boyd, the Samsung Professor in the School of Engineering, and Ramesh Johari, assistant professor of management science and engineering. This team will work in parallel with another DARPA-funded team led by the University of Texas-Austin.
The grants represent a rare and unusually large investment in basic theoretical research, Goldsmith says. The grant process was therefore unusually competitive.
For example, a needed innovation is giving the network the "intelligence" to detect when it is near full capacity and to give different kinds of messages (distress calls, for example) priority over others (routine surveillance video feeds). Another critical area of investigation is how to prolong the lifetime of networks with battery-powered nodes that cannot be recharged—for example, nodes deployed in remote locations.
Beyond that, a key question will be how to design a network to be as secure from hackers as possible within performance constraints (for example, encryption takes resources from communications). Other potential innovations could include developing new ways to route information around the network and methods for transmitters to cooperatively allocate resources such as power and bandwidth, either to bolster the network's stability or to optimize its performance. In addition to supporting military and first-responder communications, Goldsmith envisions commercial uses for improved networks, such as linking sensors along "smart" highways to enable automated driving. Cars could drive faster and with less congestion if they were intelligently controlled by a network that was aware of traffic and road conditions. Similar ideas can be used to design energy-efficient smart homes and buildings, intelligent security, and systems to assist the elderly and disabled.
