University News

Nanotechnology Trio at UT Dallas Named To Prestigious Scientific American 50 List

A trio of nanotechnologists from The University of Texas at Dallas has been named to the 2006 Scientific American 50, a prestigious list published annually by the respected magazine that recognizes outstanding contributions in the fields of science and technology during the past year.

Included in the list are Dr. Ray Baughman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas, and two of his colleagues, research scientists Dr. Mei Zhang and Dr. Shaoli Fang. The trio was recognized for their research contributions to the development of nanotube yarns and sheets made of carbon nanotubes, cylinders of carbon molecules with remarkable properties that are over ten-thousand times smaller in width than a human hair.

"The Scientific American 50 pays tribute to individuals and organizations who, through their efforts in research, business and policy-making, are driving advances in science and technology that lay the groundwork for a better future," said John Rennie, the magazine's editor-in-chief. "Not only does our list honor these prime movers, it shines a spotlight on the critical fields that are benefiting from their achievements."

The Scientific American honor is the latest for scientists at the UT Dallas NanoTech Institute for their breakthroughs in fabricating carbon nanotube yarns and transparent nanotube sheets that promise important industrial applications. Last June, Baughman and his colleagues shared the prestigious NanoVic Prize and a $10,000 cash prize from Nanotechnology Victoria Ltd., a venture involving three universities and the government of the Australian state of Victoria. On Nov. 9, the UT Dallas scientists will receive a Nano 50 award, which recognizes the top 50 technologies, products and innovators in the field of nanotechnology, at NASA Tech Briefs' National Nano Engineering Conference.

Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. Editorial contributors to the magazine have included more than 100 Nobel laureates, including Albert Einstein.

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Top European Scientist and Nobel Trustee Named NTU Provost

Prof Bertil Andersson, the Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation and former Rector of Linköping University, will be second in command at NTU as chief academic and budget officer when he assumes office in April 2007.

After an extensive international search, NTU has appointed Prof Bertil Andersson to the post of Provost. This is a new position at NTU. Prof Andersson will assume office on April 1, 2007.

Dr. Andersson, a well-published biochemist, is Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation (ESF)- an association of 78 scientific agencies in 30 European countries. He is also a Trustee of the Nobel Foundation and serves as Vice President of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB).

Prior to his appointment at ESF, Andersson held the position of Rector- equivalent to the post of President- of Linköping University in Sweden. He is a Professor of Biochemistry at Linköping University as well as a visiting Professor and Fellow of Imperial College London.

Andersson is also Advisor to the Swedish Minister of Education and Science. From 1989 to 1997, he was a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry and served as its Chairman in 1997.

Andersson will play a key role in strengthening NTU's interdisciplinary efforts through integrated programs. Besides helping the different teams to come together and talk to each other", he will lead in faculty renewal, ensuring NTU successfully recruits about 100 high-caliber academics from around the world each year. Prof Andersson also hopes to put more resources into research through fund-raising, and will leverage his networks to promote interaction between NTU and research institutions in Europe.

During his visit to NTU earlier this year, as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation, Prof Andersson was "deeply impressed with the university's achievements and promise".

Clearly excited about NTU's strong engineering focus, he feels that a Nobel Prize is attainable within the next 15 to 20 years, "with the right investments."

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Ludwig Fund Donates $120 Million For Cancer Research

Representatives of The Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research, created by American billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig, announced that it has donated $20 million to each of six leading cancer research institutions to create Ludwig Centers for cancer research. This $120 million donation will provide an immediate boost to cancer research. Subsequent distributions from the Ludwig Fund over the next seven years should enable each Ludwig Center to build a self-sustaining endowment.

The six Ludwig Centers will be located at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, MA), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY), The University of Chicago (Chicago, IL) and Stanford University School of Medicine (Stanford, CA). Although each center will have its own specific focus, all six will work closely together to share theories and discoveries about the nature of cancer and better ways to treat it.

Born in South Haven, Mich., in 1897, Daniel Ludwig invented the super-tanker, and made successful investments in oil, gas, mining, forestry, real estate, agriculture, ranching and luxury hotels around the world. In the 1960s and 70s, he was consistently ranked among the richest men in the world.

In 1971, he established the international Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, which since then has expended more than $1.1 billion in support of cancer research, and today has an endowment worth more than $1.2 billion. The Ludwig Fund has expended $50 million for endowed chairs at the six beneficiary institutions. Ludwig died in 1992.

According to Lloyd J. Old, M.D., Chairman of the Ludwig Fund's Trustees, Ludwig considered cancer to be one of humanity's great challenges. His business model was "to engage great minds from around the world and provide resources for them to work together," said Old. "He thought the most effective way to make real progress against cancer was to apply this same model for human benefit."

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MIT Forms New Energy Council

MIT President Susan Hockfield announced Wednesday the formation of the new MIT Energy Council, which will serve as an executive group charged with implementing MIT's plans to meet the energy needs of the nation and the world. The council is a key organizational element of the Institute-wide MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) led by Professors Ernest J. Moniz and Robert C. Armstrong, who serve as Director and Associate Director of MITEI, respectively.

The members of the new council are:

• Professor Angela M. Belcher, materials science and engineering and biological engineering
• Institute Professor John M. Deutch, chemistry
• Professor Leon R. Glicksman, architecture and mechanical engineering
• Professor Rebecca M. Henderson, MIT Sloan School of Management
• Professor Paul L. Joskow, economics
• Professor Emanuel M. Sachs, mechanical engineering

President Hockfield thanked the members of the new council for their willingness to play a leading role in MIT's response to one of our era's great challenges. "The success of our new energy initiative will depend on the active involvement of our faculty, students and staff. The members of the Energy Council will help us catalyze bold new ventures while coordinating the myriad activities already under way."

One of the council's priorities will be to engage additional faculty, students and staff in MITEI. Among its first tasks, the council will establish a number of task forces that will be charged with developing major institutional research agendas with respect to specific energy challenges. Two additional task forces will focus on education and campus energy management. Faculty from across the Institute, as well as students and staff in some cases, will serve on the task forces. The new council will also address a wide range of other issues, including faculty recruitment, industrial and institutional partnerships, and campus programs and events.

An External Advisory Committee of leaders from industry, government and the academy will also be named soon and will provide guidance, advice, and direction to MITEI leadership and to Vice President for Research and Associate Provost Claude R. Canizares, to whom MITEI reports.

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UTA Computer Science & Engineering Department Welcomes New Chairperson

Fillia Makedon, Ph.D., is the new chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department in The University of Texas at Arlington's College of Engineering. She comes to the college from Dartmouth College, where she was a professor of computer science and the director of Dartmouth's Experimental Visualization Laboratory.

Dr. Makedon's research interests include bioinformatics, pervasive computing, cybersecurity, human/computer interaction, sensor networks and image processing. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and held faculty positions at UT Dallas and the Illinois Institute of Technology in addition to Dartmouth. The Dartmouth Experimental Visualization Laboratory is a multimedia research laboratory specializing in multimedia technology, data analysis, information retrieval, multimedia database, video analysis, medical imaging and electronic commerce.

In addition to being director of the Experimental Visualization Laboratory, she was also a program officer in the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The Office of Cyberinfrastructure coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services – supercomputers, high-capacity mass-storage systems, system software suites and programming environments, etc. – essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education.

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Project Director Appointed for New Secondary Math, Science and Engineering School, Set to Open Sept. '07

In a joint commitment to educate future mathematicians, scientists and engineers, Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger and New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein have announced that José Gabriel Maldonado-Rivera will serve as the project director for the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering, a new secondary school being developed in the Manhattanville area of West Harlem, where the University has proposed building an expanded urban academic community.

The school, which will be operated by the New York City Department of Education (DOE) in close collaboration with Columbia­, is set to open in September 2007, initially in a transitional space and accepting sixth graders. Eventually, it will have its own building and a total enrollment of approximately 650 students from grades six through 12.

"For a great urban university whose mission is teaching, research and public service, nothing could be more important than making sure that the young people in our own neighborhoods have the opportunity for an education that provides a pathway to the highest levels of achievement in the classroom and beyond," said President Bollinger, referring to the fact that the school will give priority to high-performing local students from northern Manhattan above 106th Street. At least half of the school's total enrollment will comprise students from northern Manhattan.

Chancellor Klein commented on the qualifications that Maldonado-Rivera, who holds a degree from Teachers College and for many years directed the Environmental Education project of Puerto Rico, a non-governmental organization devoted to training teachers and offering field learning experiences to K­–12 students, brings to the new post.

"José is precisely the kind of educator we need to lead this innovative partnership between our public schools and Columbia," said Klein. "He has deep expertise in New York City education issues and significant experience as both a teacher and an administrator."

In addition to his NGO work, Maldonado-Rivera has served, most recently, as assistant principal of the TASIS K­–12 school in Dorado, Puerto Rico and as chair of the Department of Education at Hartwick College. After graduating from Teachers College in 1998, he spent two years as an associate researcher at Columbia University's Institute of Urban and Minority Education.

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Nobel Laureate Russell Hulse of UT Dallas Named Director of Science, Technology Firm

Nobel laureate Dr. Russell A. Hulse, associate vice president for research and economic development at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been elected to the board of directors of Battelle, the world's largest independent research and development organization. As part of its wide-ranging activities, Battelle manages or co-manages a number of national laboratories for the federal government.

Hulse shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the first binary pulsar, considered by many to be among the top scientific discoveries of the 20th Century.

Hulse is a principal research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. He began a concurrent relationship with UT Dallas in 2004 as a visiting professor of physics and of science and mathematics education. He later assumed the additional role of associate vice president for research and economic development at UT Dallas.

In recent years, Hulse has become deeply interested in improving the state of science and mathematics education in this country, both as provided by community-based resources such as museums and science centers as well as through the schools. At UT Dallas, Hulse has worked with the university's Science/Mathematics Education Department, developing a close collaboration between UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science and pursuing various innovations in science education applicable to museums, schools and the university's undergraduate curriculum.

A native of the Bronx, N.Y., Hulse earned a B.S. degree in physics in 1970 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan. He received a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1975 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle oversees 20,000 employees in more than 120 locations worldwide, including five national laboratories it manages or co-manages for the U.S. Department of Energy. Battelle conducts $3.7 billion in research and development annually through contract research, laboratory management and technology commercialization.

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New Advanced Degrees Establish Texas' First Ph.D. Criminology Program

The University of Texas at Dallas is answering the state's increasing demand for crime and justice experts by developing Texas' first doctoral criminology program.

The university has received approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to add master's and doctorate degrees to its criminology offerings as of January 2007.

Texas consistently ranks high among states in the amount and severity of crime. It also ranks high in terms of the size, complexity and cost of the correctional system necessary for incarcerating and punishing these criminals. Yet the state has a comparatively small number of doctoral programs for training criminologists and no program devoted specifically to that mission.

They also will make up the next generation of faculty who teach criminology and criminal justice in the state's community colleges and four-year institutions, as well as nationally.

The graduate criminology program is an extension of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences' criminology baccalaureate program, formerly designated Crime and Justice Studies. This program was started in 1998 and, as of fall 2004, was the largest major in the school with 230 majors and ranked in the Top 10 majors at UT Dallas.

Applicants to the new program would not be expected to have an undergraduate degree in criminology or a related field, but they should have a passing grade in an undergraduate statistics course or they would be admitted conditionally for one semester during which they would fulfill that prerequisite. A grade point average of at least a 3.2 is also required, and a combined verbal and quantitative Graduate Records Examination score of 1,200 is advisable.

Criminology is the scientific study of crime, criminals and society's reaction to both. It represents a policy-analytic approach while also maintaining a parallel focus on the race/ethnicity, gender, population growth, poverty and related social problems in urban America. Courses include crime, criminals and societal responses; etiology of crime; and criminality law and social control.

The process to obtain the graduate program was started nearly four years ago by Dr. Paul Tracy. The coordinating board approved the new degrees on Oct. 26