Mary Butkus/WUSTL

Gary Wihl, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, presents evolutionary biologist David C. Queller with the medallion that symbolizes his installation as the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

Evolutionary biologist David C. Queller, PhD, was installed Oct. 16 as the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences in a ceremony in Holmes Lounge.

“We’re here to celebrate David Queller and officially bestow the highest award that a university can bestow on a faculty member, a named professorship,” Gary Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, said. He said he was proud to have been part of the effort to bring Queller and his colleague and spouse Joan Strassmann to Washington University. “It was a great triumph for the biology department and Arts & Sciences that we were able to recruit them.”

Queller was introduced by Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of Biology. “He is one of the country’s foremost evolutionary biologists, and one of the leading scholars investigating the emergence of cooperative behavior in social organisms,” she said.

Queller graduated from the University of Illinois in 1976 with bachelor’s degree in the history and philosophy of science. He earned a PhD in biology in 1982 from the University of Michigan. He was a faculty member at Rice University in Houston from 1989 to 2011, becoming the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in Natural Sciences.

“Together Queller and Strassmann are a remarkable couple and research team,” Schaal said, “and they’ve brought a very lively intellectual dialog to the biology department.”

Their work has led to a long array of publications in the best journals of the field. “There is an astounding series of papers in Nature that talk about their work both with social insects and now with the newer system Dictyostelium,” Schaal said.

Their research with the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is shedding light on the earliest stages of the evolution of cooperation, she said.

Among other honors, Queller won the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Award in 1985, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1988. He is an elected member of American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Following the formal installation and the presentation of the professorship medallion, Queller spoke on the evolution of cooperation. “Life comes organized in chunks we call organisms,” he said, “and the organism is the main dividing line in biology. An organism’s interactions with life outside itself are at best indifferent and often hostile. On the other hand, inside the border of the organism, everything is happy and cooperative.”

Queller then made two “forays” that bend the limits of this idea of the organism. “Some people think that social insect colonies, at least the most advanced ones, are themselves organisms, distinguished by the willingness of individuals to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony,” he said.

The theory of kin selection often predicts what will happen when conflicts arise: that cooperation is more likely among close relatives than more distant ones. Or as J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of kin selection, jestingly said, he would jump in a river to save two brothers or eight cousins. Degrees of kinship, for example, predict that stingless bees will allow their sisters to lay eggs unmolested but that honeybees will eat eggs if their sisters lay them.

“Social insects are a great example of the evolution of cooperation among organisms,” Queller said, “but I would suggest that they might also be a great example of the opposite: the lack of cooperation within an individual body.” The key mechanism here is imprinting, a process by which the parents mark the genes they give to their offspring so that a gene from the father (a patrigene) is distinguishable from a gene from the mother (a matrigene).

“The theory that patrigenes and matrigenes butt heads within organisms has not been well tested, Queller said, but social insects provide an ideal model system to test it, because they’re surrounded by relatives their entire lives and they interact in many different ways, so there are many opportunities for imprinting conflict.

“Social insects have always been a paradigm for cooperation above the level of the individual, the colonies,” he said, and “we think they’re going to be one of the coolest paradigm systems for studying conflict with the individual between the matrigenes and the patrigenes.”

About Ann W. and Spencer T. Olin

The professorship Queller now holds was established in 1996 with a bequest from Spencer T. Olin, a longtime member of the WUSTL Board of Trustees.

Spencer Olin graduated in 1921 from Cornell University and began his career working in the family business, Western Cartridge Company in East Alton, Ill. With several mergers and acquisitions the company grew throughout the 21st century, diversifying into chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paper products, plastics, mining, home construction and automotive specialties. In the 1950s the Olin Corporation had 35,000 employees working in 46 domestic and 17 overseas plants.

The Ann Whitney Olin Women’s Building is named for Olin’s wife, Ann Whitney Olin. Spencer and Ann Olin also directed their generosity toward the Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellowship program for Women in Graduate Study, the Olin conference in women in higher education and the professions, and the Olin residence hall at the School of Medicine.

The Olins endowed seven professorships, including two in biology and others in mathematics, engineering and medicine.

Ann Olin died in 1976; Spencer Olin in 1995.

A young girl at last year’s Amazing Brain Carnival listening intently to psychology graduate student Jasin Cox’s instructions on the proper way to touch a real human brain, an experience she is unlikely to forget, no matter what she grows up to be.

One thing about neuroscience: there’s no question but that it’s relevant to your life. “What you think, what you do, how athletic you are, how academic you are, it’s all down to your nervous system,” says Erik Herzog, PhD, a neuroscientist in the biology department at Washington University in St. Louis.

At a recent brain carnival, the WUSTL exhibit space at the St. Louis Science Center was divided into rooms like a little house. A student who was studying sleep and daily rhythms was in the “bedroom,” and one studying the sense of smell and taste was in the “kitchen.” Each student would welcome a visitor to his or her room and explain their research and how it related to daily life, says Herzog.

That relevance makes brain science, or neuroscience, an ideal way to hook kids on science, even—or especially--those kids who are statistically unlikely to be interested in science, technology or math.

The students involved in outreach are recruited from those enrolled in the Cognitive, Computational and Systems Neuroscience (CCSN) pathway, a specialization for graduate students in psychology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering that has an outreach component.

The Festival of Science and NeuroDay
Herzog has served as president of the St. Louis chapter of the Society for Neuroscience for the past six years. As part of his efforts, he has worked with CCSN students to create a set of novel outreach activities for the community. Activity development has been student-driven, he is quick to add, and his role has been as a facilitator—although it is clear science outreach is very important to him.

The students designed the Amazing Brain Carnival, or ABC, Herzog says. Each year ABC is premiered in October or November at the St. Louis Science Center as part of the Festival of Science. (This year the festival is on Saturday, Nov. 10., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.)

In their room at the Science Center students set up hands-on activities that are related to the research they’re doing at the university.

One exhibitor, for example, hands visitors jelly bellies, instructs them to plug their noses and pop the jelly bellies in their mouths.

“You can’t taste anything,” says Herzog. You just get texture, a bunch of sugar. “

Then they’re told to unplug their noses and instantly their eyes light up and they say, ‘Wow, it’s lime,’ or ‘Wow, it’s cherry.’ Once the exhibit demonstrates that we integrate different senses to understand our environment, the exhibitor shows visitors on a model brain the neural circuits that make that happen.

“We do it again in March,” Herzog says, “at an event called NeuroDay where we take over the whole Science Center and invite in neuroscientists from other St. Louis universities.”

Talking about science

Psychology graduate student and CCSN outreach student facilitator Melanie Bauer engaging visitors at the Amazing Brain Carnival last year. Her exhibit was the Corsi block task: kids watched her touch a sequence of blocks in the arrays in front of her and then had to touch the same blocks in the same sequence. The task measured working memory, which has limited capacity, and distinguished it from long-term memory, which has much greater capacity. Bauer then brought that concept back to neuroscience by talking about H.M., a famous patient who, after surgery to treat intractable epilepsy, had normal short-term memory but could not form new long-term memories.

“Part of the purpose of the carnival is to help the ABC students with their  communication skills as scientists,” Herzog saysThe Science Center provides a workshop on talking to the public, the students go to the center and watch professionals at work, and they practice their exhibits with local teens before they get out in front of the public formally.

“The Science Center has done a really nice job helping us understand how to capture and keep the public’s attention,” he says. “Understanding your audience is the first step. Our students are told to think of the audience as a typical 10-year-old with an attention span of about four minutes.”

The exhibit is actually more sophisticated than that implies, however. When visitors enter the room they are given a brain map and encouraged to get stickers at each landmark on the map, which moves them through brain science all the way from the cellular level to the behavioral level.

The experience can be transformative for the graduate students. Some of them have actually modified their thesis topic because of the outreach work, Herzog says. They see what interested people or they discover questions that seem more interesting in talking about their exhibits.

It’s the neatest experience, says Melanie Bauer, a third-year psychology graduate student who last year took over as the student facilitator for CCSN outreach. “In fact, I’m probably going to be doing my dissertation research on informal science communication, evaluating this program to see how effective it is.”

But the main goal of outreach is to engage kids with science. Herzog gives five motivators he uses to recruit WUSTL students for public outreach. One is that the U.S. ranks 27th in the world in the number of students receiving bachelor’s degrees in the sciences, engineering and math.

Another is the state of the St. Louis public schools. Ninety percent of the students in those schools, which were  unaccredited from 2007 until this fall, have science skills rated basic or below basic on national tests.

It turns out that informal science is the most effective way to get people interested in science, Herzog says. When asked, people often say it was Bill Nye, the Science Guy, or Mythbusters that first piqued their interest.

Jeffrey Gamble, a second-year graduate student in biomedical engineering studying brain plasticity who will be exhibiting at the carnival this year, admits he watched Bill Nye as a kid.

“ All the kids who come to our exhibits leave with information about how they can get paid to do summer research at Washington University and elsewhere in St. Louis,” Herzog says. For example, we give pamphlets to about Washington University' s Young Scientist Program to any kid who’s interested, because you never know where that pamphlet’s going to go.

YES teens and the St. Louis Brain Bee
The ABC students also go to the Science Center on Saturdays to meet with a group of teenagers called YES teens, a group of low-income St. Louis kids dedicated to going to college.

Roughly 40 of the 250 YES teens (YES stands for Youth Exploring Science) are in the neuroscience group, and the ABC students help them prepare for a competition called the Brain Bee that is held in February. The St. Louis Brain Bee winner goes on to a national brain bee and the winner of the national bee goes to an international bee.

We’ve been helping with YES teens for three years, Herzog says. Two years ago our local winner took ninth at the national bee and won the national spelling bee. As she prepares her college applications, she says she wants to study neuroscience. Last year our local winner did well in the national competition and then matriculated at Princeton. “So we feel we’ve been able to give these kids a valuable experience that shapes their lives,” he says.

The ABC students show their brain carnival exhibits to the YES teens and the teens give them feedback about what works and what doesn’t work. That helps the ABC students, Herzog says, but it also empowers the YES teens because they understand what’s going on, and they can give our students useful feedback.

Gamble has yet to take his exhibit out for a spin but says he has enjoyed working with the YES teens. “A lot of my friends are outside of science, so I know there is a huge gap between what’s actually happening in science and the public’s understanding of what’s happening,” says Gamble, who often finds himself in the role of a one-man Mythbuster. I like the opportunity to talk to kids, not just to bridge the gap in understanding but also to get kids excited about science. I think both of those are great things.”

Incidentally Bill Nye is currently at work on a documentary series on the neuroscience of childhood development.

Roch Guérin, PhD, has been named chair of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, effective July 1, 2013.

Roch Guérin

“I am delighted to welcome Roch Guérin to the School of Engineering & Applied Science,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean and the Spencer T. Olin Professor. “He has an exceptionally strong national and international reputation and visibility, not only for his research but for his experience in the private and entrepreneurial sectors. Coupled with his commitment to both undergraduate and graduate education, he will lead the department to partner with other educational and research initiatives within engineering and other departments on the Danforth and Medical campuses.”

The Department of Computer Science & Engineering has an exceptional reputation for interdisciplinary education, innovative research and exceptional faculty. One-third of its faculty has earned the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. With more than $5 million in annual research expenditures, together with the impact of its technology on industry and research, the placement of graduates and its close connection to the School of Medicine, the department has established an unmatched environment to train the next generation of leaders in computer engineering.

Guérin will succeed Jeremy Buhler, PhD, who has been interim chair since July 1, 2011, when former chair Gruia-Catalin Roman, PhD, became dean of engineering at the University of New Mexico. Buhler will continue as interim chair until Guérin’s arrival.

Guérin also will be named the Harold B. and Adelaide G. Welge Professor of Computer Science at Washington University. He expects to add several new faculty over the next two years.

Guérin is an international leader in the field of computer networking, both for his major research contributions and his dedication to serving the community. He is widely recognized for his contributions to understanding the fundamentals of data network design and how networks can be designed to provide desired quality of service guarantees. His work was among the earliest in this area and is credited with laying the foundation for later work. He also made early contributions in wireless and cellular networks.

From 2001-04, Guérin was on leave from Penn to start Ipsum Networks, which pioneered the concept of route analytics for managing IP networks.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, he was in a variety of technical and management positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

A Paris native, Guérin earned master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree from ENST Paris.

He received the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) INFOCOM Achievement Award and the IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award in 2010; the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) Outstanding Service Award in 2009 and was elected an IEEE Fellow in January 2001. He was elected an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Fellow in 2006, and received the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award in 1994.

He has published research in a variety of journals and served on advisory boards of international telecommunications companies. He is now on the scientific advisory board of Simula Research Laboratory in Norway.

Joe Ackerman, PhD, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, headed the search committee that selected Guérin.

“We are incredibly fortunate to have attracted a computer scientist of Roch Guérin’s stature and accomplishments to Washington University,” Ackerman says. “He brings not only deep academic research credentials in the workings of networked systems and applications therein, but also knowledge of industry’s keen interest in this critically important arena gained from his years at the IBM Watson Research Center and as founder of Ipsum Networks. Familiar and comfortable with academic and corporate research cultures, Roch will leverage the best ideas from both worlds as he takes on the leadership of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.”

Other members of the search committee were Mark Anastasio, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering; Michael Brent, PhD, professor of computer science & engineering; Patrick Crowley, PhD, associate professor of computer science & engineering; Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, assistant professor, computer science & engineering; Chenyang Lu, PhD, professor of computer science & engineering; Arye Nehorai, PhD, the Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor and chair of electrical & systems engineering; Gary Stormo, the Joseph Erlanger Professor and professor of genetics, of biomedical engineering and of computer science & engineering; and Herbert “Skip” Virgin, MD, PhD, the Mallinckrodt Professor and head of Pathology and Immunology.

Maria Zuber, PhD, the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts, speaking to students about the eight MoonKAMS on the two GRAIL satellites, a mission that is making a detailed gravity map of the moon and on which she is principal investigator.

Maria Zuber, PhD, the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the fifth annual Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in Room 100, Whitaker Hall, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The talk is free and open to the public.

Zuber has been involved in 10 planetary missions to the Moon, Mars, Mercury and several asteroids and is the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission, which is currently mapping the moon’s gravity in unprecedented detail. The maps will help scientists understand how the moon formed and evolved.

The earliest observers thought the dark areas on the Earth-facing side of the moon were seas, which is why they are named mare, after the Latin word for sea. Scientists later learned the dark areas are smooth lava flows in massive impact basins. When the first Apollo samples were analyzed, the moon was thought to be bone dry, because the rocks were depleted in all volatiles, not just water. But more recent observations suggest that the surface of the moon is “dewy,” and that water evaporates and redeposits on the surface each day, and that there is more water in the interior in the form of hydrated minerals than previously thought.

Zuber will review the science, explain it has altered and complicated our understanding of water on and inside the moon, and what it implies about how the water got there, and moon’s history.

Zuber earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and geology from the University of Pennsylvania and a masters’ and doctorate in geophysics from Brown University.

She worked at Johns Hopkins University and served as a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before becoming a professor at M.I.T in 1995. In 2003 she was named the head of the department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at M.I.T., the first woman to lead a science department at M.I.T.

Her work focuses on the analysis of altimetry, gravity and tectonic data to determine the structure and dynamics of Earth and other solid planets.

Speaking at one of Google’s Zeitgeist events, which feature top thinkers who are shaping our world today, she said that “for a long time I said to myself that if I ever got the opportunity to lead a mission that I was going to take as many young people as I could along with me for a ride. “The GRAIL satellites each carry four rocket cameras, called MoonKAMs, controlled by middle-school students, an idea Zuber developed together with the Sally Ride, America’s first women in space. Zuber’s Zeitgeist talk about the MoonKAMs is available on Youtube. 

Zuber is the recipient of many honors, including, this year alone, the American Geophysical Union awarded her the Harry H. Hess Medal for ““for outstanding achievements in research of the constitution and evolution of Earth and other planets;” the NASA Outstanding Public Leadership Medal; the NASA Group Achievement Award for the GRAIL Science Team; and the M.I.T. James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.

In 2008, U.S. News & World Report nameed her one of America’s Best Leaders, together with Fiona Harrison, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology. Zuber and Harrison were the first two women to be selected as scientific leaders of NASA robotic missions.

Washington University’s McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences is sponsoring the lecture as part of the Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture Series in memory of Robert M. Walker, PhD, the center’s inaugural director from 1975-1999.

Walker, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was a pioneering physicist who played a decisive role in shaping research in the space sciences, not only at the university but also worldwide, according to Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics and director of the McDonnell Center.

The McDonnell Center, which was established in 1975 through a gift from the aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, is a consortium of WUSTL faculty, research staff and students coming primarily from the departments of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Physics, both in Arts & Sciences, who are working on the cutting edge of space research.

Martin Israel, PhD, professor of physics, recalled that the Walker lecture series was initiated by Cowsik to memorialize the role of Walker in establishing the McDonnell Center as a leading institution for research in astrophysics and planetary sciences. Thanks to the example set by Walker, the Center has been a vehicle for productive research cooperation between departments, Israel said.

Zuber also will deliver a colloquium, titled “Perspectives on the First Billion Years of Lunar Evolution from Spacecraft,” as part of the lecture series, at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Room 203, Rudolph Hall. In the colloquium she will talk about what can be deduced from the GRAIL high-resolution gravity measurements about the role of impacts in shaping the lunar crust.

Refreshments will follow the colloquium. The colloquium and reception also are free and open to the public.

For more information on the talks, contact Trecia Stumbaugh either at trecia@WUSTL.EDU or (314) 935-5332.

For decades, author, educator, environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben has been telling us things we don’t want to hear — presenting scary scorched Earth scenarios due to carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Unlike many other climate experts, he also is leading a global grass roots campaign to try to stop this from happening. His initiative, 350.org, is a global call to action to solve the climate crisis.

McKibben

Since McKibben established 350.org in 2009, he has mobilized millions of people to bring attention to this serious condition. Phil Valko, director of sustainability for the university, says he hopes that McKibben’s speech will inspire the community to think seriously and creatively about solutions.

“The first eight months of 2012 were the hottest on record for the United States, accompanied by an arctic ice melt unprecedented in recent history,” Valko says. “Nonetheless, meaningful discussion and problem-solving around climate change has been conspicuously absent from our national dialogue. Bill McKibben will elevate this important dialogue in St. Louis Nov. 1 to kick off the Sustainable Cities Conference.”

With the publication of The End of Nature in 1989, McKibben became firmly established as an important environmental writer known for his ability to present scientific information to the general public. It is now considered a classic. 

Several best-selling books followed, shaping public perception and deepening understanding of the way culture feeds the machinery that contributes to the destruction of the planet. Through his books, website, essays and op-ed statements, McKibben strives to send his message to the masses. He is a frequent contributor to several national magazines and newspapers, as well as popular online news sites, such as the Huffington Post.

McKibben graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he is now a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. In addition to being inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, his honors include being awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships.

For information on URBANISM(S), visit

Kevin Lowder

Cassandra Galluppi (right), a junior in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shares her research at WUSTL’s annual Undergraduate Research Symposium Oct 20. Galluppi first learned of WUSTL and a career in environmental biology fieldwork as a high school student through the Institute for School Partnership’s SIFT & TERF program.

Courtesy Photo

Cassandra Galluppi
SIFT 2008-09, TERF 2009-10 while at MICDS; junior in biology at WUSTL.
“My incentive to come to WashU stemmed solely from the fact that I wanted to keep working at Tyson. ...The wonderful community encountered at our field station was enough for me. I owe the trajectory of my life over the past four years to SIFT and TERF.”

“I read over the program description and thought, ‘I’m not doing anything else this summer — I might as well apply,’ ” Galluppi says. “That might have been the best decision of my life.”

Galluppi, now a junior at WUSTL majoring in biology, has her sights set on a career as a field ecologist and owes it all, she says, to a pair of programs through WUSTL’s Institute for School Partnership called SIFT and TERF.

Originated in 2008 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, SIFT (Shaw Institute for Field Training) and TERF (Tyson Environmental Research Fellowships) are a collaboration between WUSTL’s Tyson Research Center and the Shaw Nature Reserve to give high school students experience in environmental research.

“This program gives pre-college students authentic engagement in the environmental sciences,” says Susan K. Flowers, assistant director of the Institute for School Partnership, who has overseen the program since its inception. “They work alongside our scientists, doing actual fieldwork and research. These students are doing exactly what our undergraduates are doing.”

Participants must first go through SIFT, a one-week summer field training experience at Shaw Nature Reserve with additional training and paid fieldwork activities during the following school year.

Courtesy photo

Jessica Plaggenburg
SIFT 2009-10, TERF 2010-11 while at Incarnate Word Academy; sophomore in biology at Truman State University.
“The programs showed me a different side of biology by not only training me in the skills of field biology, but by giving me the opportunity to help in real research projects. Working with actual research teams gave me an experience that I never would have gotten in high school.”

Then they can apply — and many do — for the TERF program at Tyson, a field research internship program that involves small learning groups, near-peer mentoring and student-scientist partnerships in environmental biology.

Armed with the skills learned at SIFT, students are ready to dive into ongoing field research projects at Tyson and other sites. TERF teens work as paid members of research teams alongside undergraduate students and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and WUSTL faculty members. School-year activities are designed to provide important community outreach, emphasizing the value of research.

“The programs are complementary to each other and are a true collaboration between Tyson and Shaw,” Flowers says. “It has cemented the relationship between two field stations that are doing wonderful work in environmental sciences.”

Lydia Toth, manager of the SIFT program at Shaw Nature Reserve, says these programs provide a unique opportunity for high school students.

Courtesy photo

Alex Samuels
SIFT 2009-10, TERF 2010-11 at Parkway South High School; sophomore in biology and math at Warren Wilson College.
"As a child, I always wanted to learn about the living things I saw outside my window, and with SIFT & TERF, I was given the knowledge to learn new thing through experiments. It gave me a way to learn outside of books.”

“The idea that TERF builds upon SIFT is key,” Toth says, “because students who are really committed during the first year with SIFT have an avenue to delve deeper the following year in TERF. The program also introduces them to students from other area high schools who share similar interests.”

The program is reaping some unseen benefits as well. The faculty members, in dealing with the younger students, are learning how to present and discuss their research for a broader audience. The students, in turn, learn how to present the research through posters and participation in research symposiums.

“This program has changed how we mentor our undergraduates too,” Flowers says.

“Everyone is disconnected from the natural world, whether you live in an urban, suburban or rural area,” she says. “For kids who have a natural inclination toward science, SIFT and TERF works.”

“SIFT & TERF was a big part of my education,” Samuels says. “I wouldn’t be where I am without it.”

http://youtu.be/Gzu_srwsBdE

Schaal, PhD, becomes WUSTL’s next dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in January.

On Nov. 8, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the appointment of three new science envoys, including Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Schaal becomes WUSTL’s next dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in January.

The other two envoys are: Bernard Amadei, PhD, who holds the Mortenson Endowed Chair in Global Engineering and is professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Susan Hockfield, PhD, who served recently as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she remains on the neuroscience faculty.

“These preeminent scientists,” the State Department release said, “will seek to deepen existing ties, foster new relationships with foreign counterparts and discuss potential areas of collaboration that will help address global challenges and realize shared goals.

“The science envoys travel in their capacity as private citizens and advise the White House, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. scientific community about the insights they gain from their travels and interactions.”

The envoys named this year are the third cohort of science envoys since the program’s inception in 2009. The U.S. Science Envoy program is part of President Obama’s “New Beginning” initiative with Muslim communities launched in a June 4, 2009, speech in Cairo, Egypt.

He pledged that the United States would “appoint new science envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water​ and grow new crops.”

Although the original intent was to bolster science and technology collaboration with Muslim communities, the program has since expanded beyond the Muslim world, Schaal says.

This international freemasonry, she says, is particularly valuable today when so many of the problems science is being asked to tackle — such as biodiversity loss, food and water shortages and global warming — are global rather than national in scope.

Schaal hopes to help knit together the international fabric of science —beginning friendships and forging collaborations with each visit.

Schaal earned a PhD in population biology from Yale University in 1974. She joined Washington University in 1980 as associate professor in biology; she became a full professor in 1986. She is recognized for her work in evolutionary biology, particularly for studies that use DNA sequences to understand evolutionary biology. 

She holds the distinction of being the first woman elected to the vice presidency of the National Academy of Sciences and is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 

Amadei’s main research and teaching interests have focused on rock mechanics and engineering geology. He is the founding president of Engineers Without Borders and is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

In addition to her appointment at MIT, Hockfield serves as the Marie Curie Visiting Professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. She has focused her research on brain development and a specific form of brain cancer and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Detecting whether a patient will have acute kidney injury could become as simple as dipping a paper test strip printed with gold nanorods into a urine sample, a team of Washington University in St. Louis researchers has found.

Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of engineering, along with Evan Kharasch, MD, PhD, and Jerry Morrissey, PhD, at Washington University School of Medicine, have developed a biomedical sensor using gold nanorods designed to detect the elevation of the protein neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), a promising biomarker for acute kidney injury, in urine. Biomarkers are typically small molecules or proteins in the body whose concentration changes in response to disease or therapy.

Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, and the research team used a process called biomolecular imprinting to create the plasmonic biosensor. This process involves attaching the target proteins to the surface of the nanorods, then adding small molecules around the proteins to form a polymer layer around the outside of the nanorods. The target proteins are removed to leave cavities on the surface of the nanorods, which are the artificial antibodies. When the nanorods with the artificial antibodies are exposed to a substance, such as urine, that contains the target protein, those proteins settle into the cavities, similar to a puzzle piece fitting into a jigsaw puzzle.

Acute kidney injury, which occurs when the kidneys become unable to filter waste products from the blood, develops rapidly over a few hours or a few days. It is common in people who are hospitalized, particularly in those critically ill people or who have had heart surgery. To date, there have not been any sensors that can easily detect if a person will experience acute kidney injury.

“If we can find an inexpensive technology that could be used more efficiently, we can catch this much earlier and save a lot of lives,” says Singamaneni, an engineer in materials science and mechanical engineering. “Our goal is to be able to print this sensor on a piece of paper with an everyday inkjet printer so physicians and clinics have an inexpensive test available when they need it.”

To create the sensor, the team used a technique called plasmonic biosensing, which is capable of detecting very small quantities of biomarkers. However, natural antibodies have a short shelf life and are expensive and time-consuming to develop and apply, so Singamaneni and the team created artificial antibodies. To create the plasmonic biosensor, they used a process called biomolecular imprinting.

This process involves attaching the target proteins to the surface of the nanorods, then adding small molecules around the proteins to form a polymer layer around the outside of the nanorods. The target proteins are removed to leave cavities on the surface of the nanorods, which are the artificial antibodies. When the nanorods with the artificial antibodies are exposed to a substance, such as urine, that contains the target protein, those proteins settle into the cavities, similar to a puzzle piece fitting into a jigsaw puzzle.

“When you shine light on gold nanorods, the metal’s electrons get excited and start oscillating,” Singamaneni says. “There are two bands, or colors, of light in the gold nanorod’s spectrum that show what part of the light is being absorbed and scattered by the nanorod. When something sticks to the surface of the gold nanorod, it will shift the position of one of the bands and change the color. That color tells us if the protein biomarker has bound to the gold nanorod. Then we can measure the amount of biomarker by the amount of color change.”

The team plans to use its success using NGAL as the biomarker as a model for replacing natural antibodies with artificial antibodies for other proteins. In 2010, Kharasch and Morrissey, research professor of anesthesiology, found that the proteins aquaporin-1 and adipophilin were elevated in the urine of patients with the most common forms of kidney cancer.

# # #

Abbas A, Tian L, Morrissey J, Kharasch E, Singamaneni S. “Hot Spot-Localized Artificial Antibodies for Label-Free Plasmonic Biosensing.” Advanced Functional Materials. Advance online publication Nov. 2, 2012.

Funding for this research was provided by the Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs of the U. S. Department of Defense and by the St. Louis Institute of Nanomedicine and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Mantis shrimp, aggressive, predatory sea crustaceans, have among the most sophisticated vision of all animals. A group of researchers, including Viktor Gruev, PhD, want to recreate that vision to make a specialized camera that could bring more precision to biomedical imaging and weapon targeting in defense.

A Mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) defending its hole.

The interdisciplinary team, which includes Gruev, two marine biologists and a physicist, will study the animal’s visual sensory system to learn how it processes information. By sharing principles among the three disciplines, the team aims to decode the inner principles of stomatopod vision to create more efficient design of sensors, imaging devices and analyzers.

Stomatopods have 20 different photoreceptor types, or functional input channels, in their eyes, including 12 channels for color. Gruev and the research team are interested in the mechanisms that function to reduce and analyze the 20 data streams.

“The mantis shrimp are very small creatures, but they have very sophisticated image processing,” Gruev says. “We want to know if we can mimic these sensors or design them to create a specialized camera that has multiple applications.”

In the first two years of the grant, Gruev will develop two underwater polarization sensitive imaging systems housed in an underwater casing that he will design. In the final two years, he will design and build a custom imaging system using silicon dies that mimics the visual image processing of the stomatopod eye. His lab will also design and build printed circuit boards to test the imaging sensor.

Gruev says the camera could be used in biomedical imaging to better detect healthy cells from tumor cells, as well as in military aircraft to find a target in hazy or foggy conditions.

Gruev’s lab has already developed a sensor that can capture polarization properties of light. He went to the Great Barrier Reef, where his colleagues have an underwater optics lab where they can study the stomatopods and test their vision. This project will build on his previous work.

In recent years, more than $1.1 million funneled to Washington University scientists through the Bear Cub Fund program has helped move university technologies into the marketplace.

To encourage entrepreneurship, the Bear Cub Fund program now provides more hands-on guidance and incorporates other changes to help scientists commercialize their discoveries. The program, established a decade ago, supports innovative translational research not normally backed by federal grants.

“Many scientists have expressed an interest in the Bear Cub program, but they aren’t quite sure how to present their ideas or develop a proposal,” says Bradley Castanho, PhD, who heads the university’s Office of Technology Management (OTM), which oversees the program. “We think providing mentors and hands-on assistance is essential to cultivating entrepreneurs, and we are tapping into the resources of the university’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.”

The Bear Cub application process now involves two stages. Initially, researchers will submit a short, one-page application and give a two-minute oral “pitch” about their technology. Scientists will have the opportunity to attend a training session to learn how to craft their pitch.

The initial Bear Cub application is due Dec. 10, and researchers will pitch their ideas at a competition in early January. Up to eight winners will each receive $1,000 to help draft a full Bear Cub proposal that will be due in February. A key component of drafting the final proposal will be working with a business mentor. 

Bear Cub grants support scientists in proof-of-concept studies that are not typically funded by traditional sources but are key to generating commercial interest.

The five start-up companies founded around Bear Cub support since 2008:

• Vasculox focuses on developing humanized antibodies to treat ischemia reperfusion injury, the collateral damage to organs that occurs when blood flow is temporarily interrupted and later restored. The company is based on research by William Frazier, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics. 
• CardioWise, based on technology developed by Michael Pasque, MD, professor of surgery, and Brian Cupps, MD, seeks to advance a novel MRI-based cardiac imaging and analysis technique to create highly accurate 3D models of the heart.
• Retectix centers on creating a synthetic polymer mesh made of individual strands of nanofibers that could be used to repair injuries to the brain and spinal cord. The technology is based on the research of Matthew MacEwan, a Washington University MD, PhD student.
• RadTargX focuses on developing novel therapies for cancer treatment using monoclonal antibodies. The company is based on discoveries by Dennis Hallahan, MD, the Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Professor of Medicine.
• Acuplaq seeks to develop a new nanomedicine for the treatment of blood clots. The nanotherapeutic has the potential to detect abnormal clotting and deactivate thrombin, an essential clotting enzyme. The technology is based on research by Samuel Wickline, MD, the J. Russell Hornsby Professor of Biomedical Sciences.

In addition to these start-ups, three other Bear Cub technologies are being closely followed by a major pharmaceutical company and four others are closer to a working prototype, based on ongoing research and development.

In the past four years, Bear Cub funds have supported 26 projects, of which 15 have been completed. In all, the funding has supported emerging technologies in medical devices (5 projects); cancer therapy (3 projects); medical conditions (8 projects); diagnostics (5 projects); treatment of infectious diseases (3 projects), and imaging and data analysis software (2 projects).

Bear Cub funds are distributed by OTM through a competitive application process. To be eligible for submission, scientists must have filed with OTM an invention disclosure for their technology. Individual grants range from $20,000 to $75,000, and studies that are selected for funding must be completed within one year.

“The success of the Bear Cub program highlights the many ways in which academic institutions like Washington University can be engines of economic development,” Castanho says. “Commercializing new technologies not only benefits the university but has the potential to improve the lives of patients worldwide.”

In addition to start-ups that have emerged from Bear Cub-funded projects, eight additional start-ups have been formed in the past five years from Washington University research.

For more information about the Bear Cub grants, go to: http://research.wustl.edu/Offices_Committees/OTM/faculty/Pages/TranslationalResearch.aspx#bear_cub .

Daepp

Daepp. Download a high-resolution image.

Daepp, a native of Lewisburg, Pa., who is majoring in economics and in mathematics, both in Arts & Sciences, would like to pursue a career in agricultural policy.

“I would really like to mediate between farmers, researchers and policymakers to encourage the innovation and implementation of more sustainable food production practices,” she says.

The holder of an Arnold J. Lien scholarship,  a merit scholarship in social sciences, she was admitted to Washington University as part of the extremely comeptitive Honarary Scholars Program. 

At the end of her junior year she was awarded both Truman and Udall scholarships. The Truman scholarships are awarded for dedication to public service and the Udall scholarships for commitment to an environmental career.

As co-president of Burning Kumquat, a student-run garden, Daepp has led many efforts on campus and in the St. Louis community to raise awareness about the economic and environmental issues surrounding food production. She worked with members of the university administration and food service to supply produce from the student garden to the dining facilities and to facilitate a farmer’s market for the campus community during the growing season.

With the help of a Gephardt Institute for Public Service Civic Engagement grant, she developed and implemented a math and food education curriculum for the Amir Project, an environmental education and gardening project for inner-city youth in St. Louis.

She sought out interesting summer experiences, as well. In 2010 she worked at Biohof Schüpfenried, an organic farm in Bern, Switzerland. 

In the summer of 2011 she explored agricultural economics through a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) grant at the University of Minnesota. There she worked on two projects: one to evaluate whether informational labels on earthworms sold as bait would reduce their release in Minnesota's northern forest, where they are considered an invasive species, and the other to evaluate obstacles to establishing volunteer monitoring networks for invasive insect pests.

In 2012 she won an NSF REU grant and became an Edward A. Knapp Undergraduate Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she constructed mortality curves for companies based on a dataset of almost 30,000 publicaly traded U.S. companies. 

At Washington University she acts as the teaching assistant for professor of economic's Steve Fazzari's advanced-level macroeconomics course, as well as a research assistant for MuddyWaterMacro. wustl.edu, a web site Fazzari is building to explain macroeconomics to a broad audience.

She attributes her interest in sustainable food to her father. Both of her parents are mathematicians at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, but her father, who is from Bern, Switzerland, was raised in a culture where produce was eaten fresh and only in season.

Pivor

Pivor, a native of Concord, Mass., is majoring in environmental biology with a minor in public health. His goal is to become an advocate for the sustainable conservation and management of the world’s oceans.

Pivor. Download a high-resolution environmental shot.

Pivor was admitted to the Pathfinder Program in Environmental Sustainability, a four-year educational program at Washington Univesity that allows students to examine the issues surrounding environmental sustainability through case studies and field trips.

A J. Stephen Fossett Pathfinder Fellow, hebecame a Florence Moog scholar in his sophmore year. At the end of his junior year won a Udall scholarship for commitment to an environmental career.

Together with fellow student Jiakun (Summer) Zhao, Pivor founded Washington University Students for International Collaboration on the Environment (WUSICE). Through WUSICE, he organized Washington University's first U.S.-China Undergraduate Conference on Climate Change and Sustainability, inviting students from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, to St. Louis to discuss the challenge of climate change.

In 2011, Pivor organized the university’s first delegation to the United Nations climate-change conference in Durban, South Africa, where he also served as the Sierra Club’s student coalition’s international youth delegate.

Pivor spent the summer of 2010 working with bats at Washington University's Tyson Ecological Research Center, and the summer of 2011 studying oysters on an NSF REU grant at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences.

His junior year he traveled to Madagascar to work on marine conservation projects for Blue Ventures, a London-based NGO.

This experience left a deep impression on him. "The local people understand the ocean is changing," he says "and have taken local actions to protect the reefs. Yet even with their passionate work, I fear that climage change will eventually destroy their reefs and way of life. I left Madagascar with a desire to dedicate my life not just to solving issues but also to stand up for the millions of people around the world who depend on the ocean for their survival."

Immediately following his trip to Madagascar, Pivor traveled to Woods Hole, Mass. for a Sea Education Association (SEA) semester. The semester included intensive study at Woods Hole, and a five-week voyage on the SSV Corwith Cramer, a fully equipped blue-water oceanographic vessel that is also a tall ship. During the third phase of the semester, the students developed conservation plans for the Sargasso Sea.

Pivor attributes his commitment to service to having survived a brain tumor in childhood, an experience that left him with a strong desire to give back in recompense for all he had been given.

Naveen Gandra

Nanostructures called BRIGHTs seek out biomarkers on cells and then beam brightly to reveal their locations. In the tiny gap between the gold skin and the gold core of the cleaved BRIGHT (visible to the upper left), there is an electromagnetic hot spot that lights up the reporter molecules trapped there.

Called BRIGHTs, the tiny probes described in the online issue of Advanced Materials on Nov. 15, bind to biomarkers of disease and, when swept by an infrared laser, light up to reveal their location.

Tiny as they are, the probes are exquisitely engineered objects: gold nanoparticles covered with molecules called Raman reporters, in turn covered by a thin shell of gold that spontaneously forms a dodecahedron.

The Raman reporters are molecules whose jiggling atoms respond to a probe laser by scattering light at characteristic wavelengths.

The shell and core create an electromagnetic hotspot in the gap between them that boosts the reporters’ emission by a factor of nearly a trillion.

BRIGHTs shine about 1.7 x 10¹¹ more brightly than isolated Raman reporters and about 20 times more intensely than the next-closest competitor probe, says Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Goosing the signal from Raman reporters
Singamaneni and his postdoctoral research associate Naveen Gandra, PhD, tried several different probe designs before settling on BRIGHTS.

Singamaneni’s lab has worked for years with Raman spectroscopy, a spectroscopic technique that is used to study the vibrational modes (bending and stretching) of molecules. Laser light interacts with these modes and the molecule then emits light at higher or lower wavelengths that are characteristic of the molecule,

Spontaneous Raman scattering, as this phenomenon is called, is by nature very weak, but 30 years ago scientists accidently stumbled on the fact that it is much stronger if the molecules are adsorbed on roughened metallic surfaces. Then they discovered that molecules attached to metallic nanoparticles shine even brighter than those attached to rough surfaces.

The intensity boost from surface-enhanced Raman scattering, or SERS, is potentially huge. “It’s well-known that if you sandwich Raman reporters between two plasmonic materials, such as gold or silver, you are going to see dramatic Raman enhancement,” Singamaneni says.

Originally his team tried to create intense electromagnetic hot spots by sticking smaller particles onto a larger central particle, creating core-satellite assemblies that look like daisies.

“But we realized these assemblies are not ideal for bioimaging,” he says, “because the particles were held together by weak electrostatic interactions and the assemblies were going to come apart in the body.”

Next they tried using something called Click chemistry to make stronger covalent bonds between the satellites and the core.

“We had some success with those assemblies,” Singamaneni says, “but in the meantime we had started to wonder if we couldn’t make an electromagnetic hot spot within a single nanoparticle rather than among particles.

“It occurred to us that if we put Raman reporters between the core and shell of a single particle could we create an internal hotspot.”

That idea worked like a charm.

A rainbow of probes carefully dispensing drugs?
The next step, says Singamaneni, is to test BRIGHTS in vivo in the lab of Sam Achilefu, PhD, professor of radiology in the School of Medicine.

But he’s already thinking of ways to get even more out of the design.

Since different Raman reporter molecules respond at different wavelengths, Singamaneni says, it should be possible to design BRIGHTS targeted to different biomolecules that also have different Raman reporters and then monitor them all simultaneously with the same light probe.

And he and Gandra would like to combine BRIGHTS with a drug container of some kind, so that the containers could be tracked in the body and the drug and released only when it reached the target tissue, thus avoiding many of the side effects patients dread.

Good things, as they say, come in small packages.

That’s not a new parking meter or air pump for your tires outside of Stephen F. & Camilla T. Brauer Hall — it’s a charging station for electric vehicles.

E. Brook Haley

The new electric car charging station outside Brauer Hall.

Installation of the station, purchased by Washington University, stems from an independent study project by Elizabeth Mohr, a sophomore majoring in chemical engineering. Working with Biswas, Mohr did a lot of research and legwork before presenting the results.

“I learned a lot about electric vehicle charging stations and all of the features and different considerations that you have to look at when choosing one,” Mohr says.

The charging station can charge two vehicles simultaneously. Similar to the WeCar rental system, drivers of electric-powered cars will be able to register online with or visit Parking and Transportation Services and get a key fob with an RFID chip that they can hold up to a reader on the charger. Once recognized, the charging handle will unlock. Users may also call the toll-free phone number on the charging station to activate it. A full charge takes about four hours. There will be no cost to users.

“We hope that this will motivate our employees and students to drive electric vehicles to campus,” Biswas says. “In a few months, one of the WeCars available for rent will be electric-powered.”

The car-charging station is another step in the university’s commitment to sustainability and to use resources wisely in its operations. In addition, Brauer Hall is certified LEED Gold, a high rating by the U.S. Green Building Council for green building design and construction.

Phil Valko, director of sustainability, says the electric vehicles have the potential to reduce both carbon emissions and the reliance on fossil fuels for the transportation sector.

“Electricity is a currency,” he says. “You can create it using myriad different sources — coal, natural gas, sunlight, biomass, wind and other things,” he says. “Switching over to a currency-based form of transportation is important because it allows for flexibility and opens the door for renewables to power our vehicles.”

Another station is already planned for the Millbrook Parking Facility as part of the Bauer Hall building under construction. Depending on demand, the university may install additional charging stations in other parking locations, says Steve Hoffner, associate vice chancellor for operations.

While there are about 10 public stations within a 20-mile radius around the St. Louis metropolitan area, this is the second at a higher education institution; St. Louis Community College in Wildwood has four charging stations.

Mohr will collect data from the charging stations to compare with data from a gasoline-powered and a hybrid car. Preliminary analyses suggest that for the St. Louis region, common electric cars produce fewer carbon emissions than gasoline-powered cars that have a mileage of about 39 miles per gallon or less.

“We are doing this to connect to our research,” Biswas says. “We will get electricity from Ameren on the grid, but if we get sufficient resources, we might install a shed with solar panels and an energy storage unit, or battery system, to charge the station. The station also will be connected to the Internet, so people can see how much electricity is being used and how much it costs.”

Electric cars have several environmental benefits – they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants and reduce the dependence on imported foreign oil. Some even allow drivers to use their smartphones to track the battery’s charge and to save on energy costs by scheduling off-peak charging. Vehicles that run solely on electricity can run for up to 100 miles on a single charge, Biswas says, but only if the car is driven sensibly.

One of the drawbacks to an electric vehicle is the short battery life, Biswas says. But Venkat Subramanian, PhD, associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, is studying this with a $3.2 million grant to design a battery management system for lithium-ion batteries that will guarantee their longevity, safety and performance.

In conjunction with the Solar Energy Research Institute for India and U.S. (SERIIUS), a new $25 million initiative, the university with its partners, such as MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., expects to advance the use of solar energy systems. The university has also launched the Solar Energy and Energy Storage (SEES) initiative that will bring researchers together to work on renewable energy systems, coupled with storage, that will promote its use and development.

Sunscreen contains nanoparticles to protect our skin by reflecting hazardous ultraviolet radiation from the sun. But what happens to those nanoparticles when you wash the sunscreen away?

Young-Shin Jun, PhD, is studying nanoparticles as they are growing in water. In this illustration, the colored spheres are nanoparticles in water. The images on the left are the images produced by X-ray scattering. Jun and her team have developed a novel process that allows them to study in real-time how nanoparticles are forming, both on a surface and in a solution, and what shape they are taking while in water.

The goal is to determine whether nanoparticle transformation in wastewater treatment will introduce more adverse effects on the quality of the effluent water from wastewater treatment systems, how these nanoparticles can be removed from the system or how they can be further used to better remove toxic contaminants.

“We have spent so much time looking at how to create a nanoparticle, and we didn’t think much about their toxicity or potential hazardous problems,” says Jun, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “If we understand nanoparticle formation in these environments, we can better fine-tune our design of nanoparticles to minimize any adverse effects in the environment. If we do understand well, we can use these nanoparticles in engineering to potentially alleviate climate change.”

The team also will look at nanoparticles released into the environment that react with rare earth elements and toxic compounds.

“This will help us understand the impact of the transformation of exotic engineered nanoparticles in natural and engineered aqueous systems, which can potentially create hybrid nanoparticles that we don’t yet understand well,” Jun says.

Because nanoparticles are so small — especially when they are just forming — only highly sensitive and in situ imaging devices and methods, such as electron microscopies, X-ray scattering, infrared spectroscopy and nanoscale mass spectrometry will allow researchers to see them.

Jun’s team will be the first to use novel techniques to measure the nanoparticle sizes and mineral phases while they are still growing in water.

“These nanoparticles are very fragile, and once you remove them from water, they dry out and change shape,” she says. “Since we are studying wastewater and environmental systems, we want to look at the particles in water so we can see what’s happening when they are in that environment and stop the reaction when we see it happening.”

Jun’s lab also has special tools that will allow them to see the nanoparticles as they are growing.

“Our research group is uniquely positioned to do this because we will use grazing incidence small X-ray scattering and atomic force microscopy, which will provide real-time information about the kinetics and mechanisms of nanoparticle nucleation and growth,” she says. “These tools are very sensitive, so we can even catch the moment when the particles first start to form.”

For broader impact, Jun and her research team will conduct education for and outreach to students from middle school through graduate school, particularly encouraging groups traditionally underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. 

They will develop a group of educational kits about water quality in collaboration with teachers from University City High School, Brittany Woods Middle School and the university’s Science Outreach Office.

Washington University in St. Louis and its academic and corporate partners worldwide are putting research into action and leading a major initiative in Mumbai, India, Dec. 6-12 to address global energy and environmental solutions.

Wrighton

The symposium will bring together leaders in the field to not only think of creative solutions to the world’s energy needs, but also to challenge these leaders to think differently about how these problems are solved. The symposium also will challenge students to be the next generation of leaders and keep working collaboratively to solve these issues.

Biswas

“We know that by working together, we can address what are some of the most critical challenges facing our planet. We believe we have an opportunity and responsibility to the people of the world to work toward meeting these challenges,” he says.

Among the academic leaders at the conference include Wrighton and Devang Khakhar, director of IIT Bombay, and S. Parasuraman, director of TISS. Presidents and directors of five MAGEEP universities will join Wrighton, Khakhar and Parasuraman on the opening panel as well. Several dignitaries from India’s government will be in attendance at the opening session, along with the chairmen of the board of governors of both IIT Bombay and TISS and Sujeesh Krishnan, special advisor of the United Nations initiative Sustainable Energy For All.

Notable events of the symposium include:

• the launch of SERIIUS (Solar Energy Research Institute for India and US), a $125 million effort funded by the governments of India and the United States and matching funds from industry;
• launch of the MAGEEP Educational Network partnership, in which leaders from academia, government and industry will develop innovative collaborative energy and environmental educational programs;
• creation of a global network to address carbon dioxide mitigation and clean coal technologies involving India, United States, China and Australia;
• workshops and short courses addressing issues related to clean water and air and aerosol science and technology;
• student programs and video competitions related to campus clean energy programs; and
• a president and university leaders forum to highlight and launch new initiatives.

A key initiative will be related to development and utilization of solar energy. Through an environment of cooperation and innovation “without borders,” SERIIUS will develop and ready emerging and revolutionary solar electricity technologies — toward the long-term success of India's Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Energy Mission and the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative.

The initiative also is backed by a new Solar Energy and Energy Storage (SEES) initiative at WUSTL. A key corporate sponsor is MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., which has provided more than $1.25 million to promote solar energy and energy storage research.

Another key transdisciplinary project is related to biomass use in rural areas. More than 3 billion people worldwide rely on biomass combustion for their cooking needs. Gautam Yadama, PhD, associate professor of social work at WUSTL’s Brown School; Mario Castro, MD, WUSTL professor of medicine and of pediatrics who specializes in treating pulmonary diseases; and Biswas will launch a National Institutes of Health-funded study to evaluate the use of clean-burning stoves in a field study in Rajasthan, India.

Using novel, state-of-the-art aerosol instruments deployed in the field for the first time, coupled with respiratory health measurements and systems dynamics approaches, they plan to unravel and determine approaches that will promote the use of cleaner biomass combusting stoves.

Yadama

The university is scaling up its India-related activities with more than 25 collaborative research projects under way with its partner universities in India. Several faculty in multiple disciplines are working with counterparts in India, and the plans are to create a framework for many more to work collaboratively with India-based partners. Corporate entities in India such as IL&FS Inc. are supporting programs in energy and environment; and the university plans to expand the relationships with other organizations in India.

After the symposium, WUSTL will hold a meeting of its International Advisory Council for Asia (IACA) Dec. 12-15 in New Delhi. The IACA assists university leaders in expanding the university’s global presence. More than 20 alumni, parents and friends — including prominent educators and business leaders throughout Asia — are expected to join university leadership at the meeting.

U.S. Ambassador to India Nancy Powell will make a presentation, and panel discussions with key faculty members, deans and the directors of the partner universities will outline the plans for WUSTL-India collaborative activities.

About MAGEEP
The McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environment Partnership (MAGEEP) is a consortium of 28 premier universities from around the world, including WUSTL, which is working to advance energy, environmental and sustainability research and education. MAGEEP grew out of Washington University’s first McDonnell International Scholars Academy symposium in 2007. MAGEEP’s mission is to collectively identify and collaboratively tackle important global energy and environmental challenges in an integrated and holistic manner.

For more on MAGEEP, visit mageep.wustl.edu/

For more on the symposium, visit mageep.wustl.edu/Symposium2012

For more on WUSTL’s India activities: india.wustl.edu

The Super-TIGER cosmic-ray experiment had a perfect launch Sunday at 9:45 a.m. New Zealand Daylight Time. The enormous balloon that will carry it to the limits of Earth’s atmosphere was stretched out on the ice and then partially filled. (It rounds out nicely as it rises into the stratosphere.) 

As it came up off the ice, the balloon rose directly over the downstream instrument, which was held by a crane on an enormous truck named the Boss, after the polar explorer Shackleton. If the balloon isn’t overhead when it is released, it swings like a pendulum and bashes into the ice. In this case, everything went beautifully; the Boss barely moved, and the balloon lifted the two-ton instrument effortlessly into the sky.

http://youtu.be/2PASEbiH6R4Video of the Super-TIGER launch by Richard Bose

The video was shot by Richard Bose, an electronics engineer in the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. At the end of the video, you can hear people congratulating Robert Binns, PhD, research professor of physics at Washington University and the principle investigator on the Super-TIGER experiment, which is the work of a team from the California Institute of Technology, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Minnesota and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in addition to Washington University. The flawless launch was carried out by the crew of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, the world’s experts in launching stratospheric balloons.

To learn more about the experiment, see Rough Guide to Super-TIGER Watching. 

After an initial bobble, the balloon headed straight west. (To go round the South Pole counter-clockwise, it needs simply to continue to travel due west. This is a Google map version of the balloon track.

To keep an eye on Super-TIGER’s progress yourself, bookmark the tracking page for NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.