University News
Columbia Scientist Wally Broecker Awarded 2006 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences
Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The prize is widely regarded as the discipline's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. In its citation the Academy noted Broecker's "innovative and pioneering research on the operation of the global carbon cycle within the ocean-atmosphere- biosphere system, and its interaction with climate."
Broecker, a resident of Closter, N.J., was born November 29, 1931, in Chicago. He received his undergraduate degree in physics at Columbia College in 1953 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University in 1958. Broecker joined the Columbia faculty in 1959 and has remained there to this day.
As a young graduate student at Lamont-Doherty, Broecker was inspired by the late Maurice W. Ewing, the founding director of the Observatory. He began his scientific career with a study of the geological and oceanographic applications of radioactive carbon-14 -- the beginning of a long path of research along which he has made many pioneering discoveries that have had a profound impact on our understanding of the ocean, as well as of its role in global climate change. His research has been instrumental in developing the use of a wide range of geochemical tracers to describe the basic biological, chemical and physical processes that govern the behavior of carbon dioxide in the oceans, and its interactions with the atmosphere.
Broecker has also played an active role in the environmental policy debate. He has been a leading voice warning of the potential danger of increased greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. He has written articles for the popular press, testified before Congressional committees and briefed officials at the highest levels of government in an effort to bring scientific insights to bear on policy issues.
A prolific researcher, teacher and author, Broecker has also published more than 400 scientific articles and is the author or coauthor of several textbooks. Among his many awards and citations, Broecker was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1979. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of both the American and European Geophysical Unions. In 1996, he was presented with the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton.
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Baughman, Zakhidov Win Prestigious Medal From Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Two researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas last week were awarded the prestigious Kapitza Medal by the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences for the pair’s breakthroughs in the field of nanotechnology. The medal is the highest award given by the academy for a major scientific discovery.
Dr. Ray Baughman, director of the UT Dallas NanoTech Institute, and Dr. Anvar Zakhidov, associate director of the institute, were honored at a ceremony in Moscow before an audience of nearly 400 scientists and engineers from approximately 40 universities and research institutes throughout Russia.
Baughman was cited for “the discovery and development of the artificial muscles phenomena in conducting polymers and nanotubes,” while Zakhidov was recognized for “prediction and discovery of ultra-fast charge transfer from polymer to fullerene molecule C60, and for development of plastic photovoltaic solar cells based on this phenomena.”
Zakhidov, a native of Uzbekistan, part of the former Soviet Union, was also inducted into the academy as a foreign member. Baughman was similarly honored a decade ago.
The honor is the latest of many bestowed on personnel from the NanoTech Institute for their discoveries in the cutting-edge science of nanotechnology. Most recently, Baughman and two of his colleagues, Dr. Mei Zhang and Dr. Shaoli Fang, were named to the 2006 Scientific American 50, a list published annually by the respected magazine that recognizes outstanding contributions in the fields of science and technology during the past year. The list appeared in the magazine’s December 2006 issue.
The Kapitza Medal is named for Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitza, a Russian physicist and engineer who is considered one of the top scientists of the 20th century. Kapitza, who died in 1984, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978 and was inducted into the Royal Academy of Great Britain and the Russian Academy of Sciences for his research in low-temperature (superfluidity) physics. He was founder and director of the Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Atkins Foundation Pledges $10 Million to Center for Weight and Health
The Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Foundation has pledged $10 million to the Center for Weight and Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to support nutrition research and obesity prevention programs.
The announcement was made January 24 at the 2007 California Childhood Obesity Conference in Anaheim. In recognition of the unrestricted bequest, the center will be renamed the Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Center for Weight and Health.
The center was founded at UC Berkeley in 1999 by Pat Crawford and Joanne Ikeda, both UC cooperative extension nutrition specialists, and Sharon Fleming, UC Berkeley professor of nutritional sciences and toxicology. It was based solely at the College of Natural Resources until 2005, when it became jointly administered by the School of Public Health. Today, the co-directors of the center are Crawford and May Wang, adjunct assistant professor of community health and human development at the School of Public Health.
The Atkins Foundation was established in 2003 following the death of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, whose pioneering, yet often controversial, clinical work and writings popularized a low-carbohydrate lifestyle. The foundation, which is unaffiliated with and operates independently of Atkins Nutritionals Inc., funds independent, evidence-based research examining the role of nutrition and metabolism in obesity, diabetes, cancer and other major health conditions, as well as educational programs, public health advocacy initiatives and endowed professorships.
The center, which does not conduct research evaluating diet plans, brings together experts from multiple disciplines in recognition of the complex mix of contributors to the obesity epidemic. Center researchers emphasize that solutions must involve many sectors of society, including food production and distribution, community safety and design, the health care system, schools and the media.
The center is currently home to some 30 active research projects, including a community intervention program to lower Type 2 diabetes risk among overweight, low-income, African-American children; evaluation of state laws taking effect this year that phase out sodas and sweetened beverages in public schools; and a prospective study evaluating the relation of the timing of food intake to weight among teenage girls.
One of the hallmarks of the center is the close connection researchers form with the community.
Funding for the center has come from grants to the researchers and administrative support from the College of Natural Resources and the School of Public Health. Upon the death of Veronica Atkins, the center will receive the $10 million gift from the foundation. Until then, UC Berkeley will continue to provide $500,000 per year in support for the center.
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Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Receives $6.5 Million Grant to Study Tumor Environment
Like a seed needs soil to grow and flourish, a tumor relies on its environment to grow and spread in the body – something the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center will be exploring more closely with the help of a new $6.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
This is a new type of grant from the NCI, sparked in part by a new wave of interest and attention to the microenvironment of a tumor, making it the latest hot-button word in cancer research.
“We have been looking specifically at what was inside the cancer cell. We were really focused on the seed and we forgot about the soil,” said Lynn Matrisian, Ph.D., chair of Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt-Ingram.
But Matrisian said the tide has turned and experts are focusing attention on the “soil,” or tumor environment, something that could alter cancer outcomes if the soil is tended well.
Matrisian said some drugs on the market already focus on the tumor environment. “The angiogenesis drugs target the microenvironment and the body’s response to the tumor and don’t target the tumor itself,” explained Matrisian. Avastin, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat advanced, non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer, and studied at Vanderbilt-Ingram, is one of those drugs.
The NCI grant will allow Vanderbilt-Ingram to become a key player in a new network of investigators looking at the microenvironment and researching different areas related to the soil where the tumor sets up camp. Members of the network will meet twice a year to share discoveries.
Other groups in the network include Harvard-MIT, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Columbia University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Albert Einstein Cancer Center, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Vanderbilt-Ingram will also work closely with a group from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as part of the project.
Vanderbilt’s participation will involve three research projects zeroing in on a molecule called TGF-? that Matrisian said could prove to be the key to host-tumor interactions. “We went with a molecular focus because we think this molecule is really important. If we can find out how the microenvironment reacts to TGF-? in these three settings, it could apply to many cancers.”
Vanderbilt-Ingram’s proposal was funded, in part, because of the supporting technology available here. “A lot of people are looking at genes or genomics. We’re looking at proteins or proteomics.” Matrisian said the researchers will work closely with John Gore, Ph.D., professor and director of the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science, to merge proteomics, oxygen and blood flow images into one picture of the tumor and its environment.
Matrisian said this is discovery research, not translational, meaning, don’t expect to see the findings in these projects applied to treatments and patients next month.
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Cornell and BTI Receive $1.8 Million from National Science Foundation to Continue Tomato Sequence Project
An international project led by Cornell and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) at Cornell has received $1.8 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue sequencing the tomato genome and to create a database of genomic sequences and information on the tomato and related plants.
The grant for the International Tomato Sequencing Project, a collaboration of researchers from nine other countries, will enable U.S. researchers to continue their work. In 2004 the NSF provided $4 million for the U.S. part of the research.
Sequencing the tomato genome is the first step in creating the comprehensive International Solanaceae Genomics Project (SOL) Genomics Network database. This will tie together maps and genomes of all plants in the Solanaceae family, also called nightshades, which includes the potato, eggplant, pepper and petunia and is closely related to coffee from the Rubiaceae family.
The public database will help researchers ask fundamental questions: Have changes from a common ancestor brought about the attributes of crop species? What are the functions of specific genes? How has domestication changed genes? Which plants might be good candidates for genetically engineered improvements for growing crops?
Cornell researchers are close to completing a toolkit of resources about tomato and solanaceae species (some currently available in the database) to make the sequencing possible. These resources include genetic maps, DNA libraries, individual gene sequences, DNA markers and associated information, comparative mapping data to go from one species to another as sequences are added, and tools to query and search this information.
"The intention is to create an entirely public database," said the project's principal investigator, James Giovannoni, a plant microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Station and BTI, both based at Cornell, and an adjunct professor in Cornell's Department of Plant Biology. As information is released, it is put online, he said.
In sequencing the 12 chromosomes that comprise the tomato's genome, researchers from each of the nine other countries in the project (China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom) will sequence one chromosome, with U.S. researchers sequencing three. As sequences are completed, they will be analyzed by researchers in the laboratory of Steven Tanksley, co-principal investigator and Cornell's Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Breeding. The database is housed in Tanksley's lab.
Because it is difficult and expensive to sequences all of a species' genome, the researchers will just focus on gene-rich areas at the end of each chromosome, where 80 to 90 percent of the genes reside.
Lukas Mueller, a senior research associate in plant breeding and genetics at Cornell, and Joyce Van Eck, a senior research associate at BTI, are co-principal investigators on the project.
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New Fund to Provide $1.1 Million for Collaborative Research in the Humanities
In an effort to stimulate new research endeavors among the university's humanities faculty, Stanford University President John Hennessy last week announced a $1.1 million program to fund collaborative, multidisciplinary projects.
Hennessy discussed the program, called the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities, during Thursday's Faculty Senate meeting.
Stephen Hinton, senior associate dean for the humanities, will serve as co-chair of the faculty committee overseeing the program.
Hinton said a request for proposals would be sent to faculty within a few days. Guidelines for the fund state that:
- Professors from all seven schools may apply.
- Cross-school proposals are encouraged.
- Preference will be given to projects jointly proposed by faculty in two or more departments.
- Student participation is encouraged.
The eight-member committee, co-chaired by Hinton and John Bender, director of the Humanities Center, will review proposals and make awards.
The other committee members are Michael Friedman, Philosophy; Roland Greene, English; Heather Hadlock, Music; Josiah Ober, Political Science; Aron Rodrigue, History; and Gabriella Safran, Slavic Languages and Literatures.
The committee will award "seed fund" grants ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 for up to one year, and project grants ranging from $25,000 to $50,000 per year for a maximum of three years.
The deadline for submitting proposals is April 1. Grants will be announced in May.
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Carnegie Mellon Professor Jeannette Wing Chosen to Head Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate at NSF
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen Jeannette Wing, president's professor and head of the Computer Science Department in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS), as assistant director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF. She will begin her new position on July 1, 2007.
In the post, Wing will guide and manage funding for the federal agency that supports research in computer and information science and engineering. With a budget of over $527 million, CISE provides 86 percent of all federally funded research in computer science. In addition to research support, the CISE directorate contributes to the education and training of future generations of computer scientists and engineers.
Wing has been the head of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department since 2004, overseeing an operation that includes 90 faculty, 150 doctoral students, 540 undergraduates and 35 administrative staff. She is highly regarded for her outstanding contributions in research and teaching, as well as administrative service.
In research, Wing is an international leader in the area of formal methods--the use of mathematical models and logics to specify and reason about computing systems. Wing and her colleagues have made fundamental contributions to many areas of computer science, including abstract data types, object-oriented programming, concurrent systems and fault-tolerant distributed systems. Since 2001, she has been director of Carnegie Mellon's Specification and Verification Center, which conducts research in new advances in formal methods and their applications to safety-and mission-critical systems.
More recently, she has turned her attention to trustworthy computing with a focus on software security. She is especially interested in how system components not originally designed to work in concert can lead to surprising behavior when combined. Computer hackers can exploit these unexpected interactions to their advantage. These kinds of software design vulnerabilities are of great interest to companies like Microsoft Corporation, where Wing worked during a sabbatical in 2003.
Wing is an alumna of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in 1979, and a doctorate in computer science in 1983. She began her career as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1985. She has worked or consulted for AT&T Bell Laboratories, Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp., USC/Information Sciences Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Microsoft Corp.
Wing is the author or co-author of more than 100 refereed publications and has presented more than 200 talks before academic, corporate and government audiences. She has been or is on the editorial boards of nine scientific journals, including the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. She is an elected member-at-large on the ACM Council.
Wing has served on many advisory boards, including those for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NSF. She is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa. She is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
Wing greatly enhanced the educational programs offered in Carnegie Mellon's SCS, revamping curricula and developing courses that are being taught to this day in far-flung distance learning programs.
Prior to becoming department head, Wing served five years as SCS associate dean for academic affairs, overseeing and standardizing the school's nine doctoral and 12 master’s programs. She also served nine years as associate department head for the doctoral program in computer science.
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UT Dallas Appoints Dr. James B. Gary Vice President, Chief Information Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas announced the appointment of Dr. James B. Gary as vice president and chief information officer, a new position responsible for operating, upgrading and securing the university’s entire information technology infrastructure. The appointment is effective Feb. 1.
An alumnus of UT Dallas, Gary has been an employee of the university for nearly a decade, most recently as assistant vice president for information resources. Gary’s appointment followed the completion of an extensive search for candidates for the cabinet-level position. The new position replaces that of executive director for information resources.
Gary will lead a staff of more than 100 in six units that support the university’s computing and telecommunications activities for its students, faculty and staff.
Gary joined UT Dallas’ IT organization in 1998 as a UNIX systems administrator. After that, he held a series of increasingly responsible positions at the university, including network administrator, director of communications and technical services and assistant vice president for information resources.
Gary’s higher education training and experience is in physics. He earned a Ph.D. degree and an M.S. degree, both in physics, from UT Dallas and a B.S. degree in the same discipline from Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas.
Before coming to work for UT Dallas, Gary was a physicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins University, where he conducted space science research. He also served as an astronomy instructor at Richland Community College in Richardson, Texas, a chemist at Scientech Incorporated in Carrollton, Texas, and, while a Peace Corps volunteer, was a science coordinator at Vaipouli College in Western Samoa. He also served as a graduate research assistant while pursuing his graduate education at UT Dallas.
