FACULTY/STAFF NEWS

Matt Andrews, professor and head, Department of Biology, received a $192,978 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to study “Ketones and Peak Soldier Performance,” This is Andrew's second grant from DARPA and his third federal award in the last 18 months.

Jay Austin, assistant professor, Department of Physics with a joint appointment in the Large Lakes Observatory, has had a grant for the development of interactive circulation models for classroom use funded by Minnesota SeaGrant. The co-PIs are Mike Dinniman and Jessica Crouch at Old Dominion University. Austin also presented an invited talk, “A century of warming in Lake Superior”, to the Minnesota Waters conference in September.

Steven Berry, assistant professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is the recipient of a $10,000 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Supplemental Award of the Scholar/Fellow Program for Undergraduate Institutions. The award provides support to new faculty at the beginning of their first full-time academic appointment.

Tricia Bunten, development director, CSE, co-presented a seminar titled, “The Top 5 Things all Development Officers Need to Know about Planned Gifts” in September at the 30th Annual Minnesota Planned Giving Conference in St. Paul.

John Goodge, professor, Department of Geological Sciences, and Vervoort, J. D., recently published a paper entitled “Origin of Mesoproterozoic A- type granites in Laurentia: Hf isotope evidence: Earth and Planetary” in Science Letters, v. 243, p. 711-731. This paper presents one of the first attempts to use Hf isotopes on a continent-scale magmatic province in order to better understand the origin of magmatism and potential use as a provenance tracer.

John Goodge, professor, Department of Geological Sciences, was an invited keynote session speaker and discipline group leader at a National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop on “Transantarctic Mountains: New Opportunities for Multi-disciplinary Research," at Ohio State University, in September. He presented a paper “The future of basement geology research in the central and southern Transantarctic Mountains.” This workshop was convened in order to bring scientists from geology, geophysics, paleontology, glaciology and glacial geology, biology, and atmospheric science under one roof to discuss new opportunities for interdisciplinary research in the Transantarctic Mountains.

Richard Gran, assistant professor, Department of Physics, has been selected to a one-year term as co-convener of the MINOS Near Detector Physics Analysis subgroup. The Near Detector is located at Fermilab, where the MINOS neutrino beam is created and sent toward the Far Detector in the Tower-Soudan mine.

B. Izgec, C.S. Kabir (Chevron), Zhu, D. and Rashid Hasan presented their paper on “Transient Fluid and Heat Flow Modeling in Coupled Wellbore/Reservoir Systems,” at the 2006 International Conference of the Society of Petroleum Engineers at San Antonio, Texas, in September.

Taek Kwon, professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded a Mn/DOT research project entitled “Development of Data Warehouse and Applications for Continuous Vehicle Class and Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) Data” in the amount of $91,388.

Howard Mooers, professor and head, Geological Sciences, attended the annual meeting of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in Chicago, Il. The CIC includes the Big 10 Universities and UMD, University of Chicago, University of Illinois - Chicago, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The annual meeting of heads of geoscience departments discusses trends in geoscience education, undergraduate and graduate curricula, teaching and research expectations for graduate students, recruitment of underrepresented groups, curricular problems, hiring trends, budget allocations, and facilities

John Swenson, associate professor, Department of Geological Sciences, presented two papers entitled “What is the shelf edge: Morphodynamic modeling of the spatiotemporal relation between sea level, shoreline, and subaqueous clinoform rollover” and “Relative importance of fluvial input and wave energy in controlling the timescale for distributary channel avulsion” in August at the 17th International Sedimentologic Congress in Fukuoka, Japan. The Congress was sponsored by the International Association for Sedimentologists and drew nearly one thousand researchers from around the globe.

NRRI NEWS

Subhash Basak and colleagues presented the following posters at the UMD Sigma Xi Poster Session in September: “Proper Use of Cross-validation While Descriptor Thinning: Naive versus True q2,” by Ramanathan Natarajan, Basak, Jessica J. Kraker (Department of Applied Statistics, TC Campus), and Douglas M. Hawkins (Department of Applied Statistics, UM Twin Cities Campus). “Prediction of Biological Partition Coefficients: Calculated Molecular Descriptors versus Experimentally Determined Properties,” by Denise Mills, Basak, Brian D. Gute, and Moiz M. Mumtaz (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA). “A Novel Approach for the Numerical Characterization of Molecular Chirality,” by Terrence S. Neumann, Ramanathan Natarajan, and Basak. “Map Information Content: An Information-Theoretic Biodescriptor for Characterizing Toxic Response in Proteomics Maps,” by Brian D. Gute, Basak and Frank A. Witzmann (Indiana University School of Medicine). “A Comparison of Arbitrary Versus Tailored Similarity Spaces in Property/Toxicity Estimation,” by Brian D. Gute, Basak, Denise Mills and Douglas M. Hawkins.

Subhash Basak, Brian D. Gute and Denise Mills published the invited review article “Similarity Methods in Analog Selection, Property Estimation and Clustering of Diverse Chemicals” in the international journal ARKIVOC, 2000(ix) pp.152-210.

Alexandru T. Balaban (Texas A & M University, Galveston, TX), Denise Mills, Varsha Kodali (Microsoft Corporation, WA) and Subhash Basak published the paper “Complexity of Chemical Graphs in Terms of Size, Branching, and Cyclicity” in the international journal SAR and QSAR in Environmental Research, vol. 17, pp. 429-450 (2006).

PHARMACY NEWS
See next months issue

MINNESOTA SEA GRANT NEWS
Several Minnesota Sea Grant staff gave presentations and hosted activities for the 2006 Minnesota Lakes and Rivers Conference, which was held at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center during September. Jesse Schomberg, coastal communities and land use planning educator, and Cindy Hagley, environmental quality educator, hosted a “View From the Lake” boat trip. Schomberg gave the presentation “A View From the Lake: Education From a New Perspective,” and co-presented “Stormwater: It’s Not Just Rain,” in conjunction with Marion Lonsdale, City of Duluth, and Mindy Granley, Minnesota’s Lake Superior Coastal Program. Hagley gave two presentations, “Water Quality 101,” and “Water Quality 102.” Douglas Jensen, aquatic invasive species program coordinator, was session chair and speaker for “Aquatic Invasive Species: What Can We Do To Stop Their Spread?” Marie Zhuikov, communications coordinator, chaired the session, “Lake Superior: Our Shining Resource.”

Dale Bergeron, maritime transportation extension educator, and Schomberg led a group of Augustana College students on a tour and discussion of maritime transportation issues, water quality, and development patterns in the Duluth area in August as part of a geography summer program.

Schomberg presented “Stormwater on the North Shore” to the North Shore Watershed Watch citizens group in Beaver Bay, during August. Schomberg also presented “Rip Currents in Lake Superior” at Lincoln Park Center in Duluth during September.

UM MEDICAL SCHOOL-DULUTH NEWS
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