January 9, 2012

Yusuke Nakamura, MD, PhD, Secretary General in the Japanese Government’s Office of Medical Innovation and a professor of molecular medicine at Tokyo University’s Human Genome Center, has stepped down from his leadership position in the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat. He will join the faculty at the University of Chicago in April 2012.

Nakamura was actively recruited by the University of Chicago for a faculty position in the Department of Medicine to continue his innovative program in anticancer drug discovery and development, as well as his internationally recognized research in genomics and pharmacogenomics.

“Dr. Nakamura has made major contributions to modern genetics and genomics,” said Kenneth Polonsky, MD, Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. “We are extremely gratified by his interest in continuing his illustrious career at the University of Chicago.”

“This was a wonderful opportunity for me,” said Nakamura. “I have long enjoyed a collaborative relationship with colleagues at the University of Chicago, which has very strong programs in cancer, pharmacogenomics and human genetics. I strongly wish to bring discoveries in basic medical science to the bedside, and improve the quality of life of cancer patients. I look forward to the opportunity to work closely with scientists as well as physicians there who take care of patients with cancer.”

Nakamura, 59, is a leading authority on using large-scale genomic research to understand various genetic diseases and cancer, and to develop cancer peptide vaccines and targeted anticancer drugs. He has done fundamental work on developing the tools for genetic mapping. He discovered genetic variations associated with common diseases or those related to drug responses as well as genes responsible for several inherited disorders. And he played an important role in the International HapMap Consortium, one of the most important biomedical achievements of the last decade because it laid the groundwork for modern genomic medicine.

Nakamura has also focused on applying genetic information to improve the care of cancer patients, working to bring his laboratory’s discoveries into the clinical arena. His cancer research at the University of Tokyo led to the formation of OncoTherapy Science in 2001, a highly successful public Japanese biotechnology company that concentrates on new cancer therapies.

“We are very excited to add such an internationally prominent scientist to our faculty,” said cancer specialist Everett Vokes, MD, chairman of the Department of Medicine. “We look forward to the profound impact Dr. Nakamura’s recruitment will make through his own work and by providing many collaborative opportunities.”

Nakamura began his career in 1977 as an abdominal surgeon. Frustrated by the shortcomings of available cancer treatments–he lost his mother to colon cancer–he entered a PhD program at Osaka University in molecular genetics in 1981. After completing his PhD, he spent five years as a research fellow and then as a faculty member at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Utah, an international center for gene mapping.

He returned to Japan in 1989 as head of the biochemistry department at the Cancer Institute, in Tokyo. In 1994, he was invited as a professor in the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo and named director of the newly created Human Genome Center at the University of Tokyo in 1995.

When the Japanese government launched its Millennium Genome Project in 2000, Nakamura was named group leader for the genetic diversity program at the renowned RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine. He became the director for the RIKEN genomic center in 2005. In January 2011 he was appointed Special Adviser to the Cabinet and Secretary General of the Office of Medical Innovation by the Japanese Government.

Nakamura has received many awards for his work on cancer genetics, gene mapping and other projects, including the Princess Takamatsu Cancer Research Award in 1992, the Keio Medical Science Prize in 2000, the CHEN Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research in 2010, and the Japanese Medal with a Purple Ribbon, for contributions to education and culture.

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January 9, 2012

Much of what living cells do is carried out by “molecular machines” — physical complexes of specialized proteins working together to carry out some biological function. How the minute steps of evolution produced these constructions has long puzzled scientists, and provided a favorite target for creationists.

In a study published early online on Sunday, January 8, in Nature, a team of scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon demonstrate how just a few small, high-probability mutations increased the complexity of a molecular machine more than 800 million years ago. By biochemically resurrecting ancient genes and testing their functions in modern organisms, the researchers showed that a new component was incorporated into the machine due to selective losses of function rather than the sudden appearance of new capabilities.

“Our strategy was to use ‘molecular time travel’ to reconstruct and experimentally characterize all the proteins in this molecular machine just before and after it increased in complexity,” said the study’s senior author Joe Thornton, PhD, professor of human genetics and evolution & ecology at the University of Chicago, professor of biology at the University of Oregon, and an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“By reconstructing the machine’s components as they existed in the deep past,” Thornton said, “we were able to establish exactly how each protein’s function changed over time and identify the specific genetic mutations that caused the machine to become more elaborate.”

The study — a collaboration of Thornton’s molecular evolution laboratory with the biochemistry research group of the University of Oregon’s Tom Stevens, professor of chemistry and member of the Institute of Molecular Biology — focused on a molecular complex called the V-ATPase proton pump, which helps maintain the proper acidity of compartments within the cell.

One of the pump’s major components is a ring that transports hydrogen ions across membranes. In most species, the ring is made up of a total of six copies of two different proteins, but in fungi a third type of protein has been incorporated into the complex.

To understand how the ring increased in complexity, Thornton and his colleagues “resurrected” the ancestral versions of the ring proteins just before and just after the third subunit was incorporated. To do this, the researchers used a large cluster of computers to analyze the gene sequences of 139 modern-day ring proteins, tracing evolution backwards through time along the Tree of Life to identify the most likely ancestral sequences. They then used biochemical methods to synthesize those ancient genes and express them in modern yeast cells.

Thornton’s research group has helped to pioneer this molecular time-travel approach for single genes; this is the first time it has been applied to all the components in a molecular machine.

The group found that the third component of the ring in Fungi originated when a gene coding for one of the subunits of the older two-protein ring was duplicated, and the daughter genes then diverged on their own evolutionary paths.

The pre-duplication ancestor turned out to be more versatile than either of its descendants: expressing the ancestral gene rescued modern yeast that otherwise failed to grow because either or both of the descendant ring protein genes had been deleted. In contrast, each resurrected gene from after the duplication could only compensate for the loss of a single ring protein gene.

The researchers concluded that the functions of the ancestral protein were partitioned among the duplicate copies, and the increase in complexity was due to complementary loss of ancestral functions rather than gaining new ones.

By cleverly engineering a set of ancestral proteins fused to each other in specific orientations, the group showed that the duplicated proteins lost their capacity to interact with some of the other ring proteins. Whereas the pre-duplication ancestor could occupy five of the six possible positions within the ring, each duplicate gene lost the capacity to fill some of the slots occupied by the other, so both became obligate components for the complex to assemble and function.

“It’s counterintuitive but simple: complexity increased because protein functions were lost, not gained,” Thornton said. “Just as in society, complexity increases when individuals and institutions forget how to be generalists and come to depend on specialists with increasingly narrow capacities.”

The research team’s last goal was to identify the specific genetic mutations that caused the post-duplication descendants to functionally degenerate. By reintroducing historical mutations that occurred after the duplication into the ancestral protein, they found that it took only a single mutation from each of the two lineages to destroy the same specific functions and trigger the requirement for a three-protein ring.

“The mechanisms for this increase in complexity are incredibly simple, common occurrences,” Thornton said. “Gene duplications happen frequently in cells, and it’s easy for errors in copying to DNA to knock out a protein’s ability to interact with certain partners. It’s not as if evolution needed to happen upon some special combination of 100 mutations that created some complicated new function.”

Thornton proposes that the accumulation of simple, degenerative changes over long periods of times could have created many of the complex molecular machines present in organisms today. Such a mechanism argues against the intelligent design concept of “irreducible complexity,” the claim that molecular machines are too complicated to have formed stepwise through evolution.

“I expect that when more studies like this are done, a similar dynamic will be observed for the evolution of many molecular complexes,” Thornton said.

“These really aren’t like precision-engineered machines at all,” he added. “They’re groups of molecules that happen to stick to each other, cobbled together during evolution by tinkering, degradation, and good luck, and preserved because they helped our ancestors to survive.”

The paper, “Evolution of increased complexity in a molecular machine,” appears in the January 18, 2012, issue of Nature [doi: 10.1038/nature10724]. The work was a collaboration of Thornton’s molecular evolution lab with the research group of Tom Stevens, a yeast geneticist at the University of Oregon. Other authors include Gregory C. Finnigan and Victor Hanson-Smith, of the University of Oregon.

Funding for this work was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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Summary 

University of Chicago is a private research institution that was founded in 1892. Located in the community of Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, just 15 minutes from the city center, the campus rests on 211 acres of beautiful urban landscape. University of Chicago is ranked fifth in the 2012 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities and ranked ninth in Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

The University of Chicago is comprised of the College and a number of graduate and professional schools. Its postgraduate programs include the highly ranked Booth School of Business, Harris School of Public Policy Studies,Law School, Pritzker School of Medicine, Department of Geophysical Sciences and a highly acclaimed Divinity School.

Life On Campus

The College of the University of Chicago grants Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees in 49 academic majors and 22 minors.

It is compulsory for undergraduate students to take the Common Core, a distribution of courses to satisfy university criteria. The majority of Core courses contains approximately 25 students, and are generally led by a full-time professor (as opposed to a teaching assistant).  Undergraduates are required to pass 15 courses, tested proficiency in a foreign language, a swim test, and up to three physical education courses .

Freshmen are required to live on campus, and about 60 percent of students choose to remain on campus. On-campus students are allocated “houses” in their dorm, forming close  communities which provide academic and social support. University of Chicago offers more than 400 student organizations, and about 10 percent of students join the small but active Greek life community.

University of Chicago offers a number of student services including non-remedial tutoring, health service, and health insurance. University of Chicago also offers campus safety and security services like 24-hour foot and vehicle patrols, late night transport/escort service, 24-hour emergency telephones, lighted pathways/sidewalks, and controlled dormitory access (key, security card, etc). Alcohol is permitted for students of legal age at University of Chicago.

Applying

The application fee at University of Chicago is $75. Application deadline for University of Chicago is January 3. Scores for either the ACT or SAT test are due February 1. The admission is rated as extremely rigid, with an acceptance rate of 18.8 percent and an early acceptance rate of 28.4 percent. Its tuition and fees are $42,783 based on the 2011-2012 academic period.

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The UIC faculty believes their salaries, working conditions, and voice in university decisions would improve if they unionized. More than half of the faculty reportedly submitted union cards.

The unionization plan is a combined effort by the American Association of University Professors, the UIC United Faculty campaign, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of Teachers.

Howard Bunsis, the chairman of the Collective Bargaining Congress of the AAUP and an accounting professor at Eastern Michigan University, recognizes how significant this move is for the UIC faculty.

“In the face of tremendous anti-union fervor nationwide, these faculty members chose to unionize,” he declared.

Mark Rosati, the associate chancellor of public affairs at the UIC, says he has not yet heard any details from the labor board about the filing.

Should the labor board conclude that a majority of eligible faculty members delivered signed union cards, the union will be certified.

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Huberman, who holds a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, is being honored for his public service to Chicago.

Huberman’s public service career began when he joined the Chicago Police Department as a patrol officer who attended night classes at the University of Chicago to complete master’s degrees in both Business and Social Service Administration.

He has headed a number of city departments and government agencies in the City as well as Mayor Daley’s Chief of Staff and his recent appointment as the Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools.

“His commitment to addressing the multitude of problems that cause student failure and contribute to  student violence in and around the schools exemplifies social work values.  No simple solution is offered—rather he is advocating a systems approach which includes changing the culture of the schools and offering support to families.  We are pleased to celebrate his achievements by this conferment,” said Dr.  Amy Eldridge, Dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work.

The Institute for Clinical Social Work is the nation’s first and only free standing, fully accredited institution offering a Doctorate in Clinical Social Work.

The June 5 Commencement ceremony will mark twenty years of graduating clinical scholars who have gone on to serve as educators, clinicians and administrators in a variety of settings.

The Ceremony will be held at 10 am at the Standard Club of Chicago.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Amy Eldridge, 847-650-8347
The Institute for Clinical Social Work

CEO of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman to Receive Doctor of Humane Letters | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

A team of four plastic and reconstructive surgeons from the Medical Center will leave Chicago on Saturday, Feb. 6, for a pre-arranged week-long humanitarian visit to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.

Although it typically focuses on children with birth defects in the biannual trips, this year the team expects to perform reconstructive surgery for patients flown in from Haitian clinics.

On Sunday, Feb. 7, a 12-member team of physicians, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, plus a pharmacist and administrative support staff, will travel to the small town of Fond Parisien, Haiti, about 30 miles east of Port-au-Prince.

There they will replace a team of nurses and physicians who helped organize and run a field hospital for the last two weeks.

The relief camp, based at the 60-acre site of the Love A Child Orphanage, currently provides medical care, food and shelter for almost 300 patients injured by the earthquake, plus their families. The camp is surrounded by a growing tent city of more than 500 displaced Haitians.

In separate trips on Feb. 8 and 11, three physicians and three nurses will go to Port-au-Prince to participate in medical relief missions established there by the International Medical Corps.

“It’s astonishing how many injuries we are seeing,” said Richard Cook, Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago, who has been at the Fond Parisien site since Jan 26.

He reports that they have been “diagnosing every possible illness you can imagine and treating all sorts of things in a rough way.”

Most of the patients, particularly those with serious orthopedic injuries, have come from areas in and around Port-au-Prince, Cook said. There are also local people who need medical care, but the significant ongoing and post-surgical cases have arrived by bus from the capital, or via helicopter.

This week the team began receiving patients needing post-operative care from the Navy’s hospital ship, the USS Comfort.

“I’ve seen more pediatric amputations in my nine days here than I have in the rest of my career combined,” Cook said during a phone call earlier this week. “The devastation is almost incalculable.”

The teams have been recruited and organized by University of Chicago emergency medicine specialists Christian Theodosis, and Chrissy Babcock, who worked with non-governmental agencies on the ground in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to assess needs and select and equip the appropriate teams.

The Medical Center has donated medications, supplies and diagnostic and treatment equipment, including a portable X-ray machine and two ultrasounds. Philips Medical is supplying two mobile “C-arms,” advanced X-ray imaging systems. More than 200 faculty and staff have volunteered to help.

Some of the supplies requested seem odd for 21st-century academic medicine, but reveal the basic medical needs the teams are providing.

Besides multiple medications, especially antibiotics, analgesics and antimalarials, a note from pharmacist Dima Awad stressed: “Babywipes! Babywipes! Probably the most important thing.” Earlier requests called for measles vaccines, vitamin A, thousands of trash bags and 500 pairs of adult crutches. As the patient population grew, the team asked for tools to distribute medicines, such as small empty bottles and Ziploc bags.

For their own comfort, staff requested pre-cooked mac and cheese and anything to improve the taste of the water. Awad also warned the incoming teams to bring bathing suits, because “neither the bathrooms nor the showers are private.”

Members of the initial Haiti Relief team began returning to Chicago this week. A multi-institutional team of emergency medicine specialist returned from Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, and most of the Medical Center team now in Fond Parisien returns to Chicago on Monday night.

Theodosis, who has served as medical director of the Fond Parisien medical relief camp since Jan 26, plans to stay in Haiti through the end of February.

Babcock helped organize and prepare the follow-up teams from Chicago and will join Theodosis there with the new team, which will remain in Haiti for two weeks.

Despite the hardships, challenges and the sparse resources, the volunteers have found the experience enormously rewarding. “We haven’t lost a single patient yet,” Theodosis said, despite the rapid influx of complex injuries.

“Late last night,” he wrote in a Feb. 5 e-mail, “a terribly injured 23-year-old female with profound crush injuries to her left arm and leg, arrived in camp, barely conscious.” She had left Port-au-Prince seeking medical care and weeks later turned up at a relief camp in the Dominican Republic.

The staff there “felt she needed a higher level of care,” Theodosis wrote, “and they sent her and her family overland looking for us.”

She barely made it, he notes, but “we were able to keep her alive overnight, she responded to resuscitation efforts … and this morning the military medics flew her to the USS Comfort.”

“These are the cases,” he wrote, “that remind us why we are here.”

“The Haitian people are a constant inspiration to the people who are working here,” said Cook.

“They are stoic, gracious, polite, optimistic and deeply faithful. They are responding as well as any community possibly could to such a disaster. The children are beautiful beyond belief, and the wounds will break your heart.”

University of Chicago sending second round of medical teams for Haitian relief effort | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston invite community members to a public meeting on Thursday, Feb. 11 to discuss advance planning for a possible expansion of the Lab Schools’ early childhood facilities.

The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Laboratory Schools’ Large Group Room, 126 Judd Hall.

Entry is through the double doors on South Kimbark Avenue, just north of East 59th Street.

As part of a proposed expansion now under consideration, Laboratory Schools administrators have identified the need for an early childhood center that would be dedicated to children from nursery school through second grade.

Those children are currently spread among several buildings.

One option for locating a new early childhood center would be on University-owned land at 5800 S. Stony Island Ave.

The meeting will offer an opportunity for members of the community to hear more about the early childhood program, possible design features and the sites under consideration, as well as to ask questions.

Laboratory Schools and Alderman Hairston invite community to meeting on proposed expansion | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

CCSR is part of the University’s Urban Education Institute, which in addition to undertaking research on Chicago Public Schools, operates four charter schools serving children across Chicago’s South Side and develops teachers and leaders for urban schools.

“The Urban Education Institute is an essential part of the University’s effort to create knowledge to improve lives,” said University President Robert J. Zimmer.

“We are extremely pleased the consortium will have such a well-regarded leader at the helm.”

In his new position, Goren will serve as the Lewis-Sebring Director of CCSR.

Goren has been senior vice president since 2001 of the Spencer Foundation, which focuses its work on supporting research on education.

He has spent the past 25 years at the intersection of education research, policy and practice. He began his career as a middle school teacher and later trained as an education policy analyst and school administrator.

He has served as director of the Education Policy Studies Division of the National Governors’ Association; executive director of Policy and Strategic Services for the Minneapolis Public Schools; and director of Child and Youth Development for the Program on Human and Community Development at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where he was responsible for grants that included support for Chicago school reform.

Goren holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a master of public affairs degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and a B.A. from Williams College.

“We are thrilled with his appointment,” said Timothy Knowles, the John Dewey Director of UEI.

“Paul understands that creating reliably excellent schools for children growing up in urban America depends on good evidence—for teachers, for school and district leaders, and for the public. Paul brings national perspective, a deep knowledge base and an appetite to ask hard questions. The Urban Education Institute is enormously fortunate to have drawn Paul to our midst.”

A Chicago native and graduate of the Chicago Public Schools, Goren has worked closely with the CCSR during his tenure at Spencer.

“It is a tremendous honor to be chosen to lead an organization I have long admired,” he said, noting that CCSR has become a national model for how research can be utilized to improve education policy and practice.

“The consortium and the Urban Education Institute reflect the University’s commitment to improving urban education by actually working on the front lines of urban education.”

With research organizations modeled after CCSR proliferating in school districts, cities and states nationwide, Goren said he looks forward to managing CCSR’s growing national influence while maintaining its primary focus on the Chicago Public Schools.

“The new CPS administration is focused on using data and information as the cornerstone of its decision-making. This provides the consortium with obvious opportunities to continue to be of assistance as an independent lens on CPS.”

Goren succeeds John Q. Easton, who led CCSR from 2002 until May 2009, when he accepted an appointment from President Obama to run the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

“Paul’s experiences working in large urban school districts and with policymakers and top researchers across the country make him the perfect person to lead CCSR,” Easton said.

“I expect Paul will expand CCSR’s national presence, maintain the highest quality research and work closely to inform new initiatives in Chicago Public Schools.”

University of Chicago names Chicago policy expert to lead its education research unit | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

There the team will help staff a hospital that has been overrun with refugees and displaced persons from the earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Jimani’s hospital, now surrounded by a city of tents, has 10 operating rooms and hundreds of post-operative cases, mostly amputations and complex fractures with external fixations.

These require extensive follow-up care, much of which will be delivered in makeshift quarters, including tents.

The University of Chicago team will serve for two weeks and then be supplemented and gradually replaced by a backup team, also based out of the University.

After that, teams of five to eight members will alternate every two weeks, at least through the end of February. Members of the next teams to deploy are being selected and vaccinated.

More than 100 volunteers stepped up for the opportunity to help, said team leaders Christian Theodosis and Chrissy Babcock, emergency medicine physicians at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

But the relief agencies in Haiti and the Dominican Republic had very specific requests for personnel and medical supplies.

“Surgical and post-operative care providers and those, especially Haitians, fluent in Haitian Creole, were on the top of the list,” said Theodosis.

“These immediate needs, for trauma and orthopedic teams, will shift as the initial flurry of crush injuries and broken bones evolves into wound complications, infections and other public health issues,” he added.

“We will tailor our follow-up teams to match the medical needs in the field,” said Babcock, who plans to join her colleagues next week in Jimani.

Members of the initial Jimani team are: team leader, emergency medicine specialist Christian Theodosis; chief medical officer, anesthesiologist Richard Cook; orthopedic surgeon Rex Haydon; Nichole Muse, neonatal intensive care nurse at the Medical Center; and Elvire LaPlanche, an intensive care unit nurse from South Shore Hospital. Both nurses are from Haiti and speak fluent French and Haitian Creole.

Theodosis and Babcock worked with non-governmental agencies on the ground in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to make the connections, assess their needs, and select and equip the first team.

Carolyn Wilson, Hospital Chief Operating Officer, and Funmi Olopade, Associate Dean for Global Health, allocated the resources.

Information technology specialist Michael Sorensen helped with supplies and, perhaps most important, connected the team with the Holt family of Kenilworth, who offered to fly the team down in their private jet.

This enabled the medical team to carry far more supplies than a commercial flight would allow.

The University of Chicago also is helping other hospitals in the Chicago area connect with relief agencies in the field and pulling together teams from multiple sites.

They arranged for a second team of three emergency medicine physicians from North Shore University Health System, Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University, to be deployed to a hospital in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. That team also left on Jan. 25.

A separate team of plastic and reconstructive surgeons from the Medical Center will follow Feb. 6 with a pre-arranged annual humanitarian visit to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.

Although it typically focuses on children with birth defects, the team this year expects to provide care for patients flown in from border clinics.

“We are making a major commitment to this recovery effort,” said Olopade, Director of the University’s Global Health Initiative and an expert on global patterns of cancer risk.

“This isn’t just one medical team for a week or two. We plan on making a lasting contribution in responding to the development needs of our poorest neighbor in the Western Hemisphere.”

University of Chicago medical team in place for Haitian relief effort | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

University of Chicago chemists published an article in the Journal of Chemical Physics three years ago that described an early step in the process for efficiently converting methane into synthesis gas, which is useful for producing liquid fuels and hydrogen.

Such developments could be critical if the nation is to take better advantage of its abundant methane reserves, said Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry and the James Franck Institute, whose research group conducted the study.

Now Sibener and his associates at four partner universities have established a center for chemical innovation to pursue a broader range of similar research aimed at spurring innovation and economic competitiveness.

A $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation supports the work.

The new Center for Energetic Non-Equilibrium Chemistry at Interfaces (CENECI) is a team effort of UChicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Montana State University, Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Additional partners who endorsed the center proposal are Argonne National Laboratory, Cabot Microelectronics Corporation of Aurora, Ill., and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

“The people we’ve grouped together at these five schools are acknowledged leaders in the kind of science that was important for successfully tackling this challenging class of problems,” said Sibener, who heads the center.

Energetic chemical reactions

The new center will explore the chemical reactions that unfold under conditions infused with more energy than would normally occur. “One hopes to find new chemistries or more efficient ways of doing known processes,” Sibener said.

The syngas experiments are but one example of non-equilibrium chemistry. In the experiments, the UChicago team collided beams of molecules traveling at supersonic speeds onto a modestly heated metal surface.

The high-energy collision breaks the bonds between the methane molecule’s carbon atom and its hydrogen atoms, an important step in the process of turning methane into syngas.

Complementing this, the catalyst held at modest temperatures ensures high selectivity in subsequent surface reactions.

The NSF center for chemical innovation will pursue three research themes: new chemical transformations and catalysis under energetic conditions; materials growth, initially focusing on diamond growth for technological applications; and reactions in liquids.

“I am hopeful and enthusiastic about the center,” said Cliff Spiro, Vice President of Research and Development at Cabot Microelectronics. “In my 30 years of industrial research across many disciplines, this is a theme that comes up time and time again, and is truly fertile ground for breakthroughs of real significance.”

Impatient for discovery

Spiro said that when Sibener first told him about the center’s mission, “I couldn’t stop peppering him with examples from my world of combustion, diamonds, metallurgical coatings, optical films, and semiconductor processes. I can’t wait to learn of their discoveries.”

The new center will offer education and outreach activities in addition to research.

In the outreach component, the five CENECI institutions will provide chemistry education programs to underrepresented Hispanic and African-American K-12 students in Chicago, Madison and Boston, as well as to Native American students in Montana (K-14, including tribal colleges).

The center also will arrange collaborative research exchanges, giving graduate students and postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to receive co-mentoring from a senior scientist who supervises a CENECI laboratory at one of the other institutions. Other opportunities target undergraduate participation.

In addition to the CENECI funding, Sibener also recently received two Department of Energy grants to support other projects. One of them is a three-year, $885,000 grant for Single Investigator and Small-Group Research to study emergent behavior in chemistry and physics.

Interactive behavior

The study’s goal is to understand how new chemical and materials behavior emerges from the various interactions of their atoms and molecules. “Sometimes when you put things together they behave differently than when they’re alone,” Sibener explained.

Sibener’s team will analyze chemical reactions as they occur, molecule by molecule. The researchers then will change the chemical environment for small groups of molecules sitting on an atomically tailored surface to see if they react differently than would an isolated molecule.

Another step would entail attempting to influence the growth of chiral materials—materials that are right- or left-handed at the molecular level—which determines their optical properties and alters their chemical reactivity.

The third grant is extending the Sibener group’s collaboration with Lance Cooley and other researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Together they seek to improve the fundamental understanding of superconducting materials needed for advancing linear collider technology.

Sibener received notification of all three grants within a recent six-week period. “It was an amazing six weeks,” he said.

University of Chicago establishes new center for chemical innovation | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The University’s Human Rights Program is launching a photography series aimed at exploring how photography is used in human rights discourse.

The first exhibit in the Looking at Human Rights series will feature Canadian photographer V. Tony Hauser’s portraits of children who survived land mine injuries.

Taken in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in May 2006, the 16 stark, life-sized portraits are intended to humanize the continued suffering caused by armed conflicts across the globe.

Hauser will introduce his exhibition, Living with Land Mines, at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 22 at Harper Commons‘ Stuart Reading Room. The images will be on display through Winter Quarter.

Upcoming exhibits in the series will include photographs made by youth in a project in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as a human rights photo competition open to UChicago students.

A UChicago Arts Council grant has funded the series, and fourth-year Jasmine Heiss has curated it, with the support of the Human Rights Program.

Hauser’s work was selected because it illustrates the potential of the medium to bring marginalized groups and individuals to public attention. The children in his photographs live at the Cambodia Land Mine Museum, which also serves as a rescue center for land mine amputee children.

It provides a dormitory and a school, and has a medical clinic, rehabilitation center and a training facility for land mine accident prevention and safety.

“I purposely chose to isolate them from their natural surroundings,” says Hauser, who photographed the children using a 4 x 5-inch view camera, Polaroid film and a seamless canvas backdrop.

“I hoped this would elevate them and, at the same time, reveal my admiration for their strength.”

Living with Land Mines is the first exhibit to be displayed in the recently revamped Harper Commons, which is working to build a permanent and circulating artwork and photography collection as part of its reprogrammed space.

This event is free and open to the public. Stuart Reading Room is located at 1116 E. 59th St.

University of Chicago exhibit focuses attention on land mine survivors | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Andrew Grene, 44, a senior United Nations official in Haiti with longstanding ties to the University of Chicago community, was among those killed in the Jan. 13 earthquake, officials with the UN and the Irish government said Tuesday.

Through his career in public service, Grene was “a true humanitarian,” said Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, TD, in a statement Tuesday.

Grene, who graduated from the College in 1987 with a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures, was based in Port–au–Prince and served as assistant to the head of the UN’s special representative in Haiti, Hedi Annabi, who also died in the earthquake along with numerous UN workers. Grene held citizenship in the U.S. and Ireland.

“Andrew is part of a long and honourable Irish tradition of public service with the United Nations,” Martin said in a statement. “His family, and indeed Ireland, can be very proud of his work.”

Two of Grene’s children currently are students at the University of Chicago — Alex, a second–year student; and Patrick, who is in his third year. Andrew Grene’s father, David Grene, was a University faculty member and an internationally recognized expert on the classics. He was among the founding members of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. A native of Ireland, he died in 2002.

Andrew Grene was born in Chicago and raised here and in Ireland. In a brief note to University colleagues, Grene’s son Alex said his father had inspired many people through his example.

“He was a hero to me in every sense of the word, but it wasn’t just me; he inspired everyone around him,” Alex Grene wrote.

“The amount of love and joy in his heart was more than anyone could fathom; so much so that when I looked at my 44–year–old dad, I could see clearly in him the youthful 18–year–old college student who wandered the University of Chicago with wonder in his eyes, and the young boy who once ran and played amid the soft, green, rolling hills of Cavan.”

In addition to his two sons, Andrew Grene is survived by his wife, Jennifer; and a daughter, Rosamund. Services will be held in Ireland.

Andrew Grene, UN official with University of Chicago ties, among victims of Haiti earthquake | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Kolb and Turner are cited “for their joint fundamental contributions to cosmology and their development of the field of particle astrophysics, which have resulted in a vibrant community effort to understand the early universe.”

Kolb, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Astronomy & Astrophysics, focuses his research on understanding the physical processes that occurred in the very earliest moments of the big bang.

In these very early moments, the density, energy and pressure of the universe resembled the conditions obtained in the collisions of particles at high–energy accelerators.

Turner, the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics, applies modern ideas in elementary particle theory to cosmology and astrophysics.

His work on inflation showed how quantum fluctuations seeded galaxies and other structures in the Universe and he predicted the existence of the mysterious dark energy that is causing the Universe to accelerate.

The National Academy report he led, Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos, laid out the vision for the field of particle astrophysics and cosmology.

Kolb and Turner wrote the handbook for the field, their monograph entitled The Early Universe, and initiated the Fermilab astrophysics group which has grown to a vibrant set of activities that link the University and Fermilab, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Dark Energy Survey, and the Pierre Auger Observatory.

Kolb and Turner, along with the late David Schramm, the Louis Block Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics, helped to pioneer this field and make Chicago one of the world centers of cosmology.

Two University of Chicago Scientists Garner Heineman Prize for Astrophysics | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The results emerged from a study of 390 Chicago public elementary schools over a seven-year period following the implementation of a 1988 law that increased decision-making at the local school level.

The authors of the study, current and former researchers with the Consortium on Chicago School Research, part of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, said those five essential supports are school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, a student-centered learning climate and a coherent instructional plan.

They were effective in a wide variety of schools, including especially troubled ones. By looking closely at the social context in which schools are embedded, the book provides new insight into why schools in communities with high rates of crime and poverty struggle with improving student outcomes.

These findings are helpful as states vie for billions in federal “Race to the Top” funds designed to spur school reform. They are drawn from the kinds of robust data that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has encouraged states to use in developing their reform plans.

The authors suggest that when looking for ways to improve learning in urban schools, leaders should resist the temptation to look for “silver bullets” and think instead about “baking a cake.” Just as several ingredients are needed in the right proportions to bake a cake, so too are several ingredients ― the “five essential supports” ― required to boost student achievement.

The research team will present their findings to educators on Thursday, Jan. 14 at a symposium at the University’s Gleacher Center, 450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive.

The study team found some improvements since Chicago decentralized its public school system in 1988. More than 80 percent of the system’s elementary schools showed at least some gains in mathematics, and close to 70 percent gained in reading.

More importantly, schools that were strong in all five essential supports were at least 10 times more likely to show substantial improvement in reading and mathematics than schools that were strong in only one or two of the essential supports. Follow-up studies conducted from 1997 to 2005 validated the findings of the first round of research.

The book, published by the University of Chicago Press, was written by:

• Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and founding senior director of CCSR;
• Penny Bender Sebring and Elaine Allensworth, interim co-executive directors at CCSR;
• Stuart Luppescu, chief psychometrician at CCSR; and
• John Q. Easton, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, and former executive director of CCSR.

For nearly 20 years, CCSR has built a massive, one-of-a-kind longitudinal data archive on Chicago public schools, and that archive made the research possible.

The CCSR team visited schools, interviewed principals and did extensive surveys of principals, teachers and students to get behind what was leading some schools to progress and others to remain stagnant.

In addition to measuring local demographic characteristics, CCSR investigated community characteristics like community cohesiveness and crime rates to uncover reasons for success or failure.

In taking this approach, which looks at neighborhood effects and the influence of parents, the book draws heavily on the work of other scholars currently or formerly at the University of Chicago.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard University, did seminal work on poverty at the University of Chicago and coined the expression “the truly disadvantaged” in a book by the same name. James Colemen contributed definitive thinking on the role of social capital in schools to show the value of parents working with teachers to improve learning.

Sociologist Robert Sampson, now at Harvard, and Steven Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Sociology and chair of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, studied the dynamics of Chicago neighborhood interactions to identify differences in dealing with crime and other issues.

In assessing student performance, the team devised a “value-added” approach. Rather than simply looking at the percentage of students in each class who met or failed to meet state standards, the team looked at the progress of each student.

The authors also identified 46 very low-performing schools, serving more than 40,000 students, which they labeled “truly disadvantaged schools.” Even in a school district where disadvantage is the norm, these schools stood apart, serving neighborhoods characterized by extreme poverty and extreme racial segregation.

On average, 70 percent of residents living in these neighborhoods had incomes below the poverty line. The schools had virtually no racial integration.

But demographics tell just part of the story. Moving beyond an analysis of racial and economic descriptors, the authors examined these communities against other social indicators.

They found the communities of truly disadvantaged schools had the highest crime rates and the highest percentages of children who were abused, neglected or living in foster care.

Residents of these communities were the most likely to live in public housing and the least likely to attend church regularly or believe they could bring about positive change in their community.

A small number of these schools improved in reading and math, primarily because they were strong in the essential supports. But nearly half of them proved nearly impervious to systemic reform and had a lack of progress that contrasted sharply with many other schools.

These schools were seven times more likely than racially integrated schools, for instance, to stagnate in math and two times more likely to stagnate in reading.

Landmark University Study of Chicago Public Schools Points to “Five Essential Supports” for School Reform | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The event will take place at Rockefeller Chapel at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 15, and will feature a keynote address by Melissa Harris-Lacewell of Princeton University. The event is open to the public.

According to Ana Vazquez, Deputy Dean of Students in the University and Director of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, this year’s commemoration differs slightly from those in past years.

“Students, both undergraduate and graduate, were very engaged in the planning of the MLK Commemoration Service this year,” Vazquez said.

Students were involved in every aspect, including choosing a theme, which had a new twist this year.

“For example, this is the first time we’ve had a theme that did not come directly from a quote from Dr. King,” she said.

Instead, the theme came from Angelou’s poem:

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Angelou’s work speaks to the ongoing issues of violence that young people around the nation face, even as progress is made toward King’s vision. Vazquez said students “wanted a speaker who could address the issues of youth and violence that are devastating so many communities as well as someone who could link this important issue to King’s non-violent approach in fighting for civil rights.”

The students chose Harris-Lacewell, an Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University, author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, a frequent guest on national television shows and a past Political Science faculty member at UChicago.

“Melissa Harris-Lacewell was selected by the committee because she has well-established connections to the University of Chicago, is a well-known national scholar, and would be an engaging and provocative speaker,” said Vazquez.

Immediately following the service at Rockefeller, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs will host its annual MLK Reception at Ida Noyes Hall, featuring the musical group Soul Umoja, spoken-word artists as well as student performances.

Vazquez said the University’s MLK celebration also will kick off events for Black Heritage Month that will take place in January and February.

“We’re hoping that this commemoration will launch a great month of interesting events for the entire campus,” Vazquez said.

Chicago MLK Commemoration to Focus on Addressing Youth Violence, Connecting to Dr. King’s Vision | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The University received 19,306 applications for the class entering in the fall of 2010, a 42 percent increase from last year’s total of 13,564.

There were increases in applications from minority students, as well as increases from all income levels, from every geographic region of the U.S. and from outside the country.

Leaders at the University said the increases reflect a larger number of talented students becoming familiar with the distinctive opportunities available at UChicago.

“Our students and faculty place great value on intellectual curiosity, diversity of thought and openness to the world,” said John W. Boyer, Dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in History.

“Attracting more students who share our values enriches our academic culture of constantly testing ideas and arguments. At Chicago we are fortunate to have students at all levels who share our devotion to the core academic enterprise of the University.”

This year’s increase continues a trend that has built for two decades and accelerated in recent years, including a doubling of College applicants since 2006. University leaders said the growth stems, in part, from a broadening of academic programs and enhanced student life opportunities.

For example, the Chicago Studies program has created new avenues for intellectual engagement with the city, the College has significantly expanded support for student research projects supervised by faculty and it also has created many new study-abroad options, including the five-year-old Center in Paris and a new initiative in China.

Additional student life initiatives have included the recent construction of new residence halls and athletics facilities, the growth of cultural options in the Hyde Park neighborhood and a renewed emphasis on the arts as an integral part of campus life.

The Odyssey Scholarships program also has helped more students benefit from a UChicago education by reducing loans and supplying grants for students who qualify.

Enthusiasm among prospective students continues to grow, as shown by this year’s rise in early-action applications, which increased by 32 percent over the previous record in 2007.

Because early applicants tend to view the University as a first choice, the increase suggests a growing group of students who are passionate about the institution, said James G. Nondorf, Vice President and Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid.

“By every measure, this is a highly accomplished and diverse group of young scholars,” Nondorf said.

Nondorf said the school’s adoption of the Common Application in 2008 likely contributed to the increase in applications.

“What’s most encouraging is that so many talented students and their families are learning about this University’s distinctive strengths,” Nondorf said.

University of Chicago Applications to College Increase Significantly | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The City of Chicago and the University of Chicago on Thursday announced that Vermilion Development has been selected to redevelop the Harper Court retail complex in Hyde Park.

Vermilion, which has extensive experience in mixed–use developments, was recommended by a joint committee comprised of Department of Community Development planning staff and staff at the University of Chicago.

Vermilion was selected from among 12 development firms who responded to a Request for Qualifications that described the development opportunity and requirements for submitting a proposal for the 128,000–square–foot site.

“This creates an exciting opportunity to redevelop this portion of 53rd Street by creating commercial and retail space that complements the surrounding community,” acting DCD Commissioner Chris Raguso said.

“The proposed development will complement and enhance other nearby revitalization efforts, helping to ensure Hyde Park’s future economic viability.”

“As a result of thoughtful and creative input from Hyde Park residents and business owners, we have an excellent development proposal that will serve both the neighborhood and the many visitors to Hyde Park from throughout the city and beyond,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, Vice President for Civic Engagement at the University.

“The commitment to Hyde Park’s vitality by both the city and the university is very strong, and this project is a powerful demonstration of that commitment.”

“I am grateful to my staff, DCD personnel and University of Chicago staff for their hard work over the last year on this project,” said 4th Ward Alderman Toni Preckwinkle.

“The development team which was chosen will transform commercial development in Hyde Park.”

The project is a partnership between the City, which owns an adjacent parking lot on South Lake Park Avenue just east of Harper, and the University, which owns the current retail properties.

Vermilion’s proposal calls for redeveloping the 40–year–old shopping center located at 5211 S. Harper Ave. by demolishing the existing center and replacing it with a mixed–use development.

The proposed $200 million development will be built in three phases that may include a mix of unique dining, entertainment, retail and office uses.

The City and the University will enter into negotiations with Vermilion and prepare a redevelopment agreement for approval by the City Council at a later date.

City of Chicago and University of Chicago Announce Developer for Harper Court | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Gilliam, the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Genetics and a Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute and Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, will assume responsibility for the strategic planning and quality control of research and graduate education throughout the Biological Sciences Division.

As dean for research, he will ensure that faculty in the Division have effective advocacy for their academic missions.

An authority on the identification and characterization of heritable mutations that affect the nervous system, Gilliam studies rare disease mutations and common heritable traits and disorders, such as fear-learning and autism, using mouse models as well as genomic and bioinformatic approaches.

A 1977 graduate of Clemson University with a 1981 PhD in biochemistry from the University of Missouri, Gilliam completed postdoctoral training in human genetics at the University of London before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1983.

He moved to Columbia University in 1986, where he was a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Genetics & Development. He was named Director of the Columbia Genome Center in 2000. He came to the University of Chicago in 2004 as chair of human genetics.

Since he first arrived at the University, Conrad Gilliam has “demonstrated a talent for tactful handling of difficult academic issues and assembling teams of leading scholars that often cross departmental and divisional boundaries,” said Everett E. Vokes, MD, interim dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and CEO of the Medical Center.

“He has been a strong voice for the faculty and for research during difficult times, deft at building consensus and sensitive to the best interests of our research community.”

Conrad Gilliam Named Dean for Research at the University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Setting out to determine the survival of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center and their colleagues also discovered that an equation used for more than 20 years to predict survival is outdated.

Accordingly, they developed and recently published a new survival prediction equation that will impact clinical practice and the drug development process.

In PAH, the pulmonary arteries, which carry blood from the heart to the lungs to pick up oxygen, become restricted, forcing the lower right chamber of the heart to pump harder.

This leads to shortness of breath, limited exercise capacity, fatigue, heart failure and death.

Often the condition goes undetected until it is advanced. Untreated, patients with PAH have a very poor prognosis.

That prognosis is determined using an equation developed by a landmark National Institutes of Health study published in 1987, well before there were any Food and Drug Administration approved therapies for PAH.

The first such therapy was approved in 1995; today there are seven.

“Since 1987, great progress has been made in understanding and treating PAH, so a few years ago we decided that it was time to study contemporary survival,” said Mardi Gomberg-Maitland, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of Pulmonary Hypertension at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“Our results show that survival is vastly improved today. That led us to rework the NIH equation, which has been a standard measuring stick for more than 22 years.”

Gomberg and her colleagues at the Medical Center and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine studied the survival of 576 PAH patients in their registry.

Of these patients, 282 had idiopathic, familial, and anorexigen-associated PAH, which matches the conditions of the 187 patients in the pioneering NIH study.

Using the NIH equation, these 282 patients would have been expected to have one-, three- and five-year survival rates of 65 percent, 43 percent and 32 percent, respectively. In fact, their survival rates were much higher: 92 percent, 75 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

“This new formula is important for patients who want to know what, on average, to expect from their disease and for doctors who want to give accurate advice,” said Stephen L. Archer, MD, Harold Hines Jr. Professor and Chief of Cardiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center and co-author of the study.

“We hope others will test our work. If it is validated by others it could be a very useful tool.”

Patients survive longer

The researchers were not able to determine why PAH patients survive longer today than in the 1980s, even though they measured the survival impact of many factors, including pulmonary function, demographics, medications, exercise treadmill, laboratory markers, echocardiography, and hemodynamics as well as the cause of the disease, which includes heart and lung disease, genetics, blood clots, connective tissue disease and other conditions.

None of these factors or causes had a significant impact on survival in multivariate analysis (when tested together statistically) — except hemodynamics. This explains why the new equation only incorporates hemodynamic parameters.

“Based on this result, physicians should stop drifting away from cardiac catheterization, which is the gold standard test to determine exact hemodynamics,” Gomberg said.

“Providers have been using more echocardiography and less cardiac catheterization but we need to reverse that trend because until you know the hemodynamics you can’t accurately predict survival and or cure the disease.

“You can estimate hemodynamics with echocardiography but not accurately enough,” she added.

Many clinical trials in PAH used the NIH equation to suggest improvement in survival by comparing observed survival rates on a study drug versus survival rates predicted by the NIH equation, the study says.

Since the NIH equation understates contemporary survival, it has led to more favorable comparisons of clinical trials testing new drugs to treat PAH, according to Gomberg.

“Our research suggests a reason that the drugs currently approved to treat PAH do not always work as well as we hope — because they were not held to a higher contemporary standard during their development and post-approval,” Gomberg said.

“The new equation should ameliorate this bias.

“Although some of these drugs dramatically improve the condition of some patients, none of them improves hemodynamics to normal levels,” she added.

“Therefore, we, as a medical community, have to acknowledge the fact that we have not yet cured PAH.”

“This research would not have been possible without the collaboration of the entire PAH team at the University of Chicago and the tireless efforts of two young physician scientists, Thenappan Thenappan, MD, Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago, and Sanjiv Shah, MD, a former Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago and current faculty member at Northwestern,” Archer said.

Both are co-authors of the study, along with Gomberg, Archer, Stuart Rich, MD (Cardiology at The University of Chicago), and Lu Tian, ScD, (Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University).

The research team hopes that this report will motivate development of novel agents and epidemiologic research.

Called “Contemporary Survival in Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension:

A Reappraisal of the National Institutes of Health Risk Stratification Equation,” the study was published on line December 23, 2009, by the European Respiratory Journal.

University of Chicago Researchers Revisit Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Survival | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

“Frank’s mode of research is to identify critical problems, develop a fundamental, first-principles-based understanding, and then to delve deeply into the broader consequences and implications for the earth sciences,” said David Rowley, Professor in Geophysical Sciences, in his nominating citation.

In recent studies, Richter, the Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor in Geophysical Sciences, has focused his studies on the isotopic characteristics of rocks and minerals from the continents, oceans and meteorites.

Measurements of isotopes, which are varieties of a common element that differ only in their atomic mass, can be used to reconstruct a variety of Earth’s dynamic geological and oceanographic processes.

“His approach is to identify an earth science-related problem where he can make a significant contribution, work rather single-mindedly until he succeeds to some satisfying degree and then move on once he feels that further efforts would not yield as significant results as what he has already achieved,” Rowley said.

Consequently, Richter’s specialization defies classification. At various times in his career, he has conducted in-depth, influential research in fluid dynamics, geodynamics, geochemistry, experimental petrology and cosmochemistry.

In each of these areas, Richter has combined theoretical and analytical insight with experimental data “to better understand how physics and chemistry affect the evolution of natural systems,” according to Rowley.

On a personal level, Rowley said, “Frank is also a careful listener and reader, whose questions and input can often be transformative of his friends and colleagues.”

Richter became a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after completing his UChicago doctoral degree. He returned to the University on a faculty appointment in 1975.

An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Richter has received many honors for his work. These include the Arthur L. Day Medal and the George Wollard Award, both from the Geological Society of America, and the Norman L. Bowen Award of the American Geophysical Union.

He also is a fellow of the GSA, the AGU and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Previous recipients of the Hess Medal include Alexandra Navrotsky, PhD’67, the Edward Roessler Chair in Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of California at Davis, in 2006; Edward Anders, the Horace B. Horton Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, in 1995; the late George W. Wetherill, PhB’48, SB’49, SM’51, PhD’53, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in 1991; the late Julian R. Goldsmith, SB’40, PhD’47, the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences, in 1987; and Gerald J. Wasserburg, SB’51, SM’52, PhD’54, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, in 1985.

University of Chicago Professor Frank Richter Receives 2009 Harry H. Hess Medal for Evolution Research | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.