University News
$30 Million Gift Establishes Princeton's McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience
James S. McDonnell III and John F. McDonnell have joined with the JSM Charitable Trust to make a $30 million gift to Princeton University to establish the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience.
Teaching and research conducted by the center, which will be housed within the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, will investigate how the brain acquires, modifies and stores information during cognitive processes.
James McDonnell III, a University trustee, is a member of Princeton's class of 1958; John McDonnell is a member of the class of 1960. Together, the brothers have been among Princeton's most generous donors. Their many gifts to the University include two given in honor of their late father, James S. McDonnell '21, a pioneer of the American aerospace industry: James S. McDonnell Hall, a building for teaching physics; and six James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professorships.
The senior McDonnell had a keen interest in understanding the workings of the human mind, a trait shared by his sons, who believe that neuroscience is emerging as a singularly important field.
The Princeton Neuroscience Institute, co-directed by Jonathan Cohen, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, and David Tank, the Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology, draws on Princeton's strengths in quantitative analysis, theory and fundamental science. Launched in 2005, the institute is expected to expand basic knowledge about the brain, gaining insights that could lead to breakthroughs in treating diseases such as schizophrenia and epilepsy. It also is making significant contributions to developing, and using, new imaging and microscopy technologies as well as biochemical and genetic tools.
Systems neuroscience refers to the study of how networks of nerve cells are organized and operate to produce behavior. At Princeton, research focuses on neural coding, which refers to the way that information is represented in the electrical and biochemical signals in neurons (perception and short-term memory) and the patterns of synaptic connections (long-term memory), and on neural dynamics, which refers to patterns of nerve cell electrical and chemical activity in which information is created, manipulated and stored. Neural dynamics are involved in decision-making or in planning and executing sequences, such as in speaking or playing tennis.
The McDonnell gift will fund advanced technology in systems neuroscience and establish an endowment to support the highly trained specialists needed to run it. It also will set up an endowed fund for innovation in systems neuroscience, create a new faculty position and four graduate fellowships, and provide for a new systems neuroscience teaching laboratory.
Cohen, who works in the field of cognitive neuroscience, said the McDonnell Center will enhance the institute as a whole because the work of Princeton's systems neuroscientists is sure to cross-pollinate the work of others in the University's highly interdisciplinary approach to the field.
The McDonnell brothers spent their careers at the McDonnell Douglas Corp., which was founded by their father in 1939 and went on to build America's first carrier-based naval jets as well as the first spacecraft -- the Freedom 7 -- to carry an American into orbit. James McDonnell III served as a vice president of McDonnell Douglas; John McDonnell was its chairman and chief executive officer and today is a director of the Boeing Co., which merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Both majored in aeronautical engineering at Princeton and both have master's degrees in the field as well -- James McDonnell from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and John McDonnell from Princeton in 1962. Their father received an honorary degree from Princeton in 1960.
The McDonnell brothers' grandfather, John M.T. Finney, a pioneer in medical research and a Princeton trustee who was once offered the presidency of the University, was a member of the class of 1884.
Both McDonnells have been annual giving volunteers for Princeton. James McDonnell also has served on the University's advisory council for engineering and applied science.
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University of Pennsylvania Awarded DOE Funding to Increase Use of Solar Power
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded part of a $22.7 million grant to improve the capture, conversion and use of solar energy. The project is a multi-center effort funded by the Department of Energy and aimed at increasing the amount of solar power in the nation's energy supply.
Research at Penn will involve theoretical and computational design of new materials for solar light harvesting, solar production of chemical fuels and fuel cell electrochemistry. Following a "materials by design" approach, Andrew M. Rappe, professor of chemistry and principal investigator for the grant, and his team will explore the use of semi-conducting ferroelectric materials for direct conversion of sunlight to hydrogen.
Current, additional Penn ERG projects are designed to improve U. S. energy competitiveness in many areas including fuel cell research, renewable energy conversion, hydrogen storage and the creation of novel composite materials.
The DOE's Advanced Energy Initiative will focus on fundamental science and technology development that advance the use of sunlight as a practicable solution for the nation's energy needs. Priorities for the program include a more efficient conversion of solar energy to electricity, as well as the conversion of solar energy to chemical fuels, a concern raised by the very nature of day/night variations in available sunlight.
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Noted Technologist Magaly Spector to Join UT Dallas as VP for Diversity, Community Engagement
Noted technology innovator and leader Dr. Magaly Spector, one of the most visible Hispanic females in the fields of science and engineering in the United States, has been appointed to the newly created position of vice president for diversity and community engagement at The University of Texas at Dallas. Her role will be to promote diversity at all levels of the university.
Spector, a Cuban-born émigré to the U.S., is a physicist and engineer by training. She is a Bell Labs Fellow who has held key research and development management positions during her 25-year career at Alcatel-Lucent. She was also deeply involved in a number of diversity initiatives for the company, a successor to AT&T.
Spector will begin working with colleagues on a consulting basis in September and will assume her full appointment on January 7, 2008. She will be a member of the UT Dallas cabinet, reporting to university President David E. Daniel.
From humble beginnings in Cuba, where her family was "very poor," Spector pursued academics with a passion. She graduated with highest honors from high school and won the Cuban Scholar Chess Championship.
As a young mother with an infant daughter, she enrolled full-time as a student at Havana University, where she earned a License in Physics degree in 1977. She continued to hone her chess skills during that period, winning the university's chess championship every year during her undergraduate studies, and eventually taking the national Cuban chess crown.
Spector came to the U.S. with her daughter by boat in 1980 as a political refugee. A year later, she was hired by Bell Labs as a senior technical staff member. While at Bell Labs, she enrolled in the graduate program at Lehigh University, where she earned a master's of science in electrical engineering in 1985 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1993. In 2000, she enrolled in business studies at Harvard University Business School.
Spector held increasingly responsible research and development positions at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies, including global manager for product quality and reliability. She was responsible for pioneering many new technologies that enabled high-speed Internet, optical and wireless networking communications and holds patents on her work.
For years, she was active in numerous diversity efforts at the Fortune 500 company, including a mentoring program for Hispanic employees, educational outreach programs for women and minorities and a corporate diversity committee, among others.
Spector has received numerous awards and honors for her achievements. She was named to Hispanic Business magazine's list of Elite Women for 2005; was Reader's Digest's national Orgullo Hispano Award recipient in 2004; was selected by Latina Style magazine as one of 2004's greatest Hispanic achievers; was named one of the most distinguished women of the new millennium by Glamour magazine in 2001; and received a professional achievement award from the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards corporation in 2000. She was also one of nine women selected by the National Science Foundation to represent the U.S. on a mission to Mexico as a role model for extraordinary accomplishments by women in technology and business.
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Nottingham Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Centre to Open
Nobel laureate Professor Sir Harry Kroto will officially open the Nottingham Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Centre (NNNC) at The University of Nottingham on Monday June, 18. The new £3.2million (US$6.3 million) interdisciplinary research center is based at University Park and houses state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities.
It is estimated that the global market for nanotechnology could be worth more than £500 billion ($986 billion) by 2013.
Having already identified nanotechnology and nanoscience as an area where its world-leading research and interdisciplinary approach can cross academic boundaries to forge important breakthroughs, The University of Nottingham has established the centre to co-ordinate and promote its expertise in this field.
The new center will be headed by Professor Clive Roberts.
Although it can't be seen with the naked eye or even normal microscopes, nanotechnology is playing an ever-more important role in our daily lives. Scientists and engineers at The University of Nottingham are at the cutting edge of nanotech developments in healthcare, transport, lifestyle, electronics and manufacturing.
The centre will act as a hub for nanotechnology activities across the university and is a joint initiative between the schools of Pharmacy, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering. In conjunction with the official opening these schools have founded a new taught Masters in Nanoscience.
Professor Kroto, a Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State University, was one of the winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It was shared with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of C-60, a new form of carbon which heralded a new era of novel 21st century material.
Among the other leading figures in international nanoscience attending Monday's formal opening will be Professor Colin Humphreys CBE, Goldsmiths Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge University. His research includes all aspects of electron microscopy and analysis, semiconductors, ultra-high temperature aerospace materials and superconductors.
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Professor Hazel Sive Named MIT's Associate Dean of the School of Science
Professor Marc Kastner has announced the appointment of Biology Professor Hazel Sive to the position of associate dean for the School of Science, effective July 1. Sive will be the first associate dean in the school's history. In her new role she will focus on educational issues and initiatives.
Sive is currently chair of the undergraduate program in the Department of Biology. "Hazel has done an outstanding job running the undergraduate program in biology--she has good ideas and is very effective in bringing them to fruition," said Professor Chris Kaiser, head of the Department of Biology. "I look forward to working with her on educational initiatives in the School of Science in her new role as associate dean."
Sive is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She will continue to run an active research program in the Whitehead that focuses on two major topics: development of the extreme anterior (front) of the embryo and development of the nervous system, including the genetic basis for formation of correct brain structure. She uses frogs and zebrafish to probe these basic processes, which give insight into human birth defects and mental health disorders.
In addition to her research and departmental activities, Sive is program director for a new MIT/South Africa Program. Previously, she served as the co-chair of the MIT Global Education and Opportunities Committee and chair of the Committee on Student Life at MIT. She serves on National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grant review panels, as a journal editor and on the Board of the American Association of Anatomists.
Sive earned her Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1986 and performed postdoctoral research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. She was named a Searle Scholar and received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. She arrived at MIT and Whitehead in 1991.
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Caltech Seismologist Hiroo Kanamori Awarded Kyoto Prize by Inamori Foundation
Hiroo Kanamori, one of the world's leading authorities on earthquakes, has been awarded the 23rd annual Kyoto Prize by the Inamori Foundation of Japan. The announcement was made today in Kyoto.
According to the Inamori Foundation, Kanamori is being awarded the honor for his "significant contributions to understanding the physical processes of earthquakes and developing seismic hazard mitigation systems to protect human life."
Kanamori is the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. A former director of the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech, he is widely known among earthquake scientists for a variety of important contributions. In 1977 he devised a moment-magnitude scale for determining the magnitudes of very large earthquakes, based on the amount of energy they release. Known as energy magnitude measurements, the method accounted for the effect of seismic waves with very long periods that were not accounted for by earlier methods.
Using the improved method, scientists were able to obtain more precise measurements of the energy of large earthquakes that occurred in the past, such as the 1960 Chilean earthquake and the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, as well as a better means of studying and analyzing seismic events when they occur.
Kanamori has also worked on the nature of tsunamis, particularly the relationship between ground motion and generation of giant sea waves that can have devastating consequences for coastline habitation. These "tsunami earthquakes" release most of their energy in very long-period seismic waves that do not necessarily cause precipitous shaking, but can nonetheless create huge ocean waves. He has also been a longtime advocate of automated early-warning systems to let populations know when a seismic event has occurred that could result in a tsunami.
Kanamori earned his doctorate in geophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1964. He came to Caltech as a postdoctoral researcher the following year, and after stints at MIT and the University of Tokyo, returned to Caltech as a full professor in 1972.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a past president of the Seismological Society of America, and winner of the National Academy of Sciences Day Prize and the Japan Academy Prize.
Kanamori will share this year's Kyoto Prize with Pina Bausch, director and choreographer of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and Hiroo Inokuchi, a materials scientist who has made fundamental contributions to organic molecular electronics. Kanamori, Inokuchi, and Bausch will each receive a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately $410,000 at the current exchange rate), a Kyoto Prize Medal of 20-karat gold, and a diploma, and will be feted at a special weeklong event at Kyoto beginning November 9.
The Inamori Foundation was established in 1984 by Kazuo Inamori, founder and chairman emeritus of Kyocera and KDDI Corporation. The prize was created in 1985, in line with Inamori's belief that individuals have "no higher calling than to strive for the greater good of society," and that humanity's future "can be assured only when there is a balance between our scientific progress and our spiritual depth."
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Chemist Gabor Somorjai to Receive Priestley Medal
The American Chemical Society announced last week that it will bestow its highest honor, the Priestley Medal, on Gabor A. Somorjai, University Professor and professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, for his "extraordinarily creative and original contributions to surface science and catalysis."
The annual award will be presented at the society's spring 2008 national meeting.
"I am delighted to receive this prestigious award, following in the footsteps of several distinguished faculty members from our chemistry department," said Somorjai. "It honors pioneering research in surface chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis by our 40 years of research with more than 300 outstanding Berkeley graduate students and postdoctoral fellows."
"Professor Somorjai could be considered the father of modern surface chemistry and to have almost single-handedly set the molecular foundations of heterogeneous catalysis," said Francisco Zaera, a chemistry professor at UC Riverside. Zaera, who conducted his doctoral research with Somorjai in the early 1980s, noted that Somorjai's contributions are far-reaching, but have made an especially strong impact on hydrogenation, hydrocarbon conversion, polymerization, ammonia synthesis, and syngas processes.
Somorjai was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 4, l935. He was a fourth-year student of chemical engineering at Technical University in Budapest in l956 at the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution. He left Hungary and emigrated to the United States, where he received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley in l960. He became a U.S. citizen in 1962.
After graduation, he joined the IBM research staff in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he remained until l964. At that time, he was appointed assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley. In 1972, he was promoted to professor. Concurrent with his faculty appointment, he is also a faculty senior scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of the College of Engineering, and group leader of the Surface Science and Catalysis Program at the Center for Advanced Materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Somorjai has trained and mentored more than 300 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows, published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed journal articles, and has written three textbooks. His recent honors include the 2007 Langmuir Prize from the American Physical Society, the 2006 Remsen Award from the Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society, and the 2002 National Medal of Science.
The Priestley Medal is named in honor of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), who is best known for the discovery of oxygen. Like Somorjai, Priestley fled his homeland to avoid political persecution and emigrated to the United States, where he made many vital contributions to the science of chemistry.
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Yale University To Expand Medical and Scientific Research
Programs With Acquisition of Bayer Complex
President Richard C. Levin announced that Yale University's efforts to expand and strengthen its medical and scientific research programs will take a major leap forward with the acquisition of the Bayer HealthCare complex in West Haven and Orange, Connecticut.
The purchase of the facility — which features approximately 550,000 square feet of laboratory space, as well as office buildings, warehouses, and other facilities — will dramatically increase the University's ability to launch research programs addressing crucial issues affecting human health and quality of life. Financial details of the transaction will be disclosed at the time of closing.
As part of the acquisition of the Bayer complex, Yale will be making voluntary payments to West Haven and Orange in proportion to the voluntary payment made to New Haven. The municipalities will receive additional PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) funds from the state in recognition of the property's future nontaxable academic status.
Yale will also invest $1 million over the next three to four years to enhance and strengthen the professional development of middle and high school science teachers in the Greater New Haven area.
The Bayer HealthCare complex is located on 136 acres in West Haven and Orange. The complex features 17 buildings — all built between 1968 and 2002 — in three categories: research lab space (550,000 square feet), administrative office space (275,000 square feet) and manufacturing and warehouse (600,000 square feet). The oldest of these are the manufacturing facilities, which were built for Miles Laboratories, a former division of Bayer HealthCare. One of the newest buildings is a 125,000-square-foot chemical research facility, used for the development of drugs to treat cancer, diabetes and obesity.
The acquisition of the Bayer complex also adds to the University's presence in West Haven. For over a century, the University has held 50 acres of property in the city, including Yale Field. Yale also has longstanding research and teaching programs at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System in West Haven.
Yale is currently developing plans for how best to use the facilities at the Bayer complex.
