Steven Corcelli, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, attended the 17th German-American Kavli Frontiers of Science symposium in California. His participation identifies Corcelli as a Kavli Fellow, a group that has included more than 100 National Academy of Science members and eight Nobel Prize winners since it started in 1989. The event is sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

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Mark Alber, the Vincent J. Duncan Family Professor of Applied Mathematics and director of the Center for the Study of Biocomplexity, has been appointed to editorial boards for two prestigious journals. This year, Alber became an associate editor of PLoS Computational Biology and a member of the editorial board of theBulletin of Mathematical Biology. He has been on the board of the Journal of Statistical Physics for about two years.

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Ani Aprahamian, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Physics, has been appointed to Armenia’s Expert Advisory Committee. The committee will advise Armenia’s Minister of Economy and the director of A.I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (AANL) in developing a science strategy for the laboratory, in establishing an evolving administrative structure, and in evaluating scientific programs. Aprahamian was also invited to give a talk at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in the Republic of Armenia on April 14.

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A team of researchers in the laboratory of Paul Helquist, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was published in the American Chemical Society’s Organic Letters. The team included Asia Adams Thomas, a high school student in South Bend; Pablo Cabrera, a visiting undergraduate Guatemalan student from Regis University in Denver; Katherine Byrd, a graduate student in the lab; and Casey Cosner, a graduate student who co-mentored the students with Paul Helquist.

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Patricia Clark, the Rev. John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, has received two NIH grants totaling $3.36 million for studies on protein folding. Clark, who has been a member of the faculty since 2001, won a $1.86 million competitive renewal of her previous five-year NIH grant for research on the influence of protein synthesis on folding mechanisms for newly synthesized proteins. She also won a new $1.5 million NIH grant to continue research in her laboratory first funded by an NSF CAREER Award and a National Research Development Award from the American Heart Association.…

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The authors of the most-accessed articles from ACS Nano and Nano Letters in 2010 were each invited to create a video highlighting their work. The following two videos illustrate graduate research by the Kamat group related to energy conversion.

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A University of Notre Dame entrepreneurial team developing a nanocomposite bone substitute claimed the $30,000 top prize March 25 in the inaugural Nanotechnology New Ventures Competition, sponsored by Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame.…

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Andrew Sommese, professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, has received the 2010 Most Valuable Colleague Award from General Motors Research and Development for his work with Charles Wampler. Wampler, a GM senior researcher and adjunct professor in the department received the General Motors Research and Development prestigious Campbell Award. Sommese, the Vincent J. and Annamarie Micus Duncan Chair in Mathematics, and Wampler worked together for over a decade on numerical algebraic geometry and kinematics.

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A paper announcing a breakthrough discovery in the fight against Niemann-Pick Type C, coauthored by Olaf Wiest and Paul Helquist of the University of Notre Dame’s Department Chemistry and Biochemistry and Frederick Maxfield, Chair of Biochemistry at Cornell University Weill College of Medicine, appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science this week. The paper shows how use of a histone deacetylase inhibitor corrects the damage done by the genetic disorder and allowed once-diseased cells to function normally.

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Sean Walsh, who graduated from the University of Notre Dame in January with a Ph.D. in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, won one of five Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowships, two-year awards worth 100,000 Euros (about $140,000). Walsh’s project is titled “The Limits of Arithmetical Definability.” The fellowships honor the legacy of Gödel, a pioneering logician who was born in Austria and emigrated to the United States.…

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Malcolm J. Fraser, Jr., professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorary leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology. The election recognizes Fraser’s long record of teaching and innovative research, especially in the fields of virology and transgenic engineering.

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Inspired by last summer's Desert to Dome bike ride by Greg and Renate Crawford, the Notre Dame Cycling Team will host the Midwest Collegiate Cycling Race on March 26-27, 2011 to raise money for the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation to fight Niemann Pick Type C disease.

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Mana Espahbodi has received the 2011 Norbert L. Wiech Outstanding Junior Award. The award, established by Weich, a 1960 Notre Dame graduate who became a leading biochemist and drug developer, honors academic excellence and accomplishments in undergraduate research.

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Jessica Hellmann, associate professor of biological sciences, has been named a 2011 Leopold Leadership Fellow. Hellman is among 20 mid-career academic environmental scientists named as Fellows this year. The group was selected through a highly competitive process on the basis of their exceptional scientific qualifications, demonstrated leadership ability, and strong interest in communicating science beyond traditional academic audiences.

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Sophomore science-business major, Marie Forte recently attended the Business Today International Conference and competed in a Harvard Business School case competition in November 2010. Marie was one of 160 students to be selected from over 1,000 applicants worldwide to participate in the conference, a three-day, all-expenses-paid event held at the Grand Hyatt in New York City.

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Literature and films have left us with vivid images of the grasshopper plagues that devastated the Great Plains in the 1870s. Although commonly referred to as grasshoppers, the infestations were actually by Rocky Mountain locusts.

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David Severson, director of the Eck Institute for Global Health and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, was an invited speaker and co-chair of the vector biology session for a scientific meeting sponsored by the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to explore opportunities for dengue research collaboration in the Americas. The meeting, titled “A Re-Emerging Challenge in the Americas: Opportunities for Dengue Research Collaboration” was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico on February 16-18, 2011 and brought together around 100 researchers from around the world.

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Marvin Miller, the George and Winifred Clark Chair in Chemistry, and Michael Ferdig, associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame are co-authors of a recently-published study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on a potential breakthrough in the fight against tuberculosis and malaria—global diseases that each kill some 2 million people a year.

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The Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame has established a lecture in honor of Paul P. Weinstein (1920 Ð 2008). Weinstein, a leading authority on parasitology, vector biology and public health, joined the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in 1969 as a professor and department chair.

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A paper on fluorescence imaging titled, "Understanding fluorescence blinking is the first path to an imaging solution," by Boldizsar Janko’s theory group in the Department of Physics and Ken Kuno’s experimentalist group in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is the cover story of Laser Focus World. Another article, "Vortex manipulation in superconducting films with tunable magnetic topology," by Janko with Belgian colleagues M.V. Milo?evi? and F.M. Peeters, is the cover story of Superconductor Science and Technology.

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“Docs in Pink,” a Pink Zone Luncheon sponsored by the College of Science in collaboration with the Notre Dame women’s basketball team and two South Bend physicians, brought together researchers, doctors, nurses and cancer survivors to build relationships and raise money for the fight against cancer.…

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Prashant V. Kamat, the Reverend John A. Zahm Professor of Science, has been listed among the Top 100 Chemists, based on average citations for papers published in chemistry journals since 2000. Kamat is No. 58 on the list, with an average of 64.9 citations per paper. The list was compiled by Times Higher Education of the United Kingdom.

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John Engbers, Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics, received the award for best entry in the sciences at the Graduate Student Union’s 2011 Research Symposium. Engbers presented "The Typical Structure of Proper Colorings of the Discrete Hypercube." Patrick Shirey, Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences, received second place for his research titled, "An Interdisciplinary Approach to Informing Ecological Restoration and Environmental Management."…

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University of Notre Dame biologist Michael Pfrender is the coauthor of a paper appearing today in the prestigious journal Science describing the sequencing of the species Daphnia pulex, often referred to as the water flea. Daphnia, a small freshwater crustacean, is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced. It contains more than 31,000 genes, as compared to 23,000 genes of humans.

“Daphnia has long been a model for ecology and early in the last century significant biological findings had their origin in Daphnia ,” Pfrender said. “For example, the concept of phenotypic plasticity, the dose-response curve central to toxicology and the effects of inbreeding to name a few.”

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Physics Professor John LoSecco has been part of an international team on the Double Chooz experiment in France for five years, including three as software director. The experiment, aimed at better understanding fundamental properties of particles called neutrinos, recently started collecting data with its detector. The detector is slightly more than 1 kilometer away from two of the largest nuclear reactors in the world, near the France-Belgium border, and records data on neutrinos that escape from the reactor. 
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People are increasingly obtaining endangered or threatened plants, often illegally, and moving them outside their native range, according to an article published today in the journal Nature by Patrick Shirey and Gary Lamberti in the department of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame.
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More than 120 K-12 teachers and administrators attended the fourth annual Notre Dame extended Research Community (NDeRC) Forum titled, “Collaborating for Education and Research” on Jan. 22 in the Jordan Hall of Science. The event offered opportunities for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) educators to exchange ideas and learn about more teaching tools and resources. U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., told the group that he supported the focus on education by taking the state teacher of the year, Penn High School physics teacher Stacy McCormack, to the State of the Union address.…

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Viktor Krchnak, a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 2003, has recently become director of a new research group at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, expanding a collaborative effort that has brought four Czech doctoral candidates to Notre Dame in recent years. The research will be dedicated to high throughput organic synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, an important area in drug discovery. A grant of more than $1 million from the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports will support the group, which will include 10 to 12 doctoral candidates and postdoctoral fellows, for three years.…

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The University of Notre Dame will launch a master’s of science in global health degree program in fall 2011. The program will provide basic science-centric training in the emerging field of global health. The program, including classroom and experiential learning, aims to prepare students for improving human health around the world, especially for the poor and under-served, a reflection of the University’s Catholic mission.

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Six College of Science faculty members have been named Fellows of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in honor of their efforts to advance science or its applications. They are among 503 new Fellows who will be honored at the AAAS annual meeting on February 19 in Washington, D.C.…

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