University of Notre Dame alumnus Norbert Wiech founded Lysomics LLC to manage the clinical development needed to bring to market a promising new treatment for people with Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disease. FDA support is being sought for early clinical exploration of an approved drug to fight this rare disease that has no cure or treatment.

Lysomics is based on the work of Notre Dame professors of chemistry and biochemistry Olaf Wiest and Paul Helquist, and Frederick Maxfield at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College, to find treatments for NPC. NPC disease is a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disease that primarily strikes children before and during adolescence.

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Ten University of Notre Dame faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in honor of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

AAAS, founded in 1848 as a nonprofit association, is the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of the prestigious journal Science.

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One of the emerging, and soon to be defining, characteristics of science research is the collection, usage and storage of immense amounts of data. In fields as diverse as medicine, astronomy and economics, large data sets are becoming the foundation for new scientific advances.

A new project led by University of Notre Dame researchers will explore solutions to the problems of preserving data, analysis software and computational work flows, and how these relate to results obtained from the analysis of large data sets.

Titled “Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS),” the National Science Foundation-funded $1.8 million program is focused on high energy physics data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Fermilab Tevatron.

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Faculty members of the Eck Institute for Global Health have placed three recent doctoral recipients at the United States’ National Institute for Health (NIH). Having received offers for these prestigious global research-training opportunities, the trio is now in Maryland.

“Notre Dame has a long history of producing strong PhD candidates in the sciences,” says Robert Bernhard, Vice President for Research. “Having three doctoral students coming out of Notre Dame this fall on their way to NIH says a lot about the strength of our faculty and their ongoing research at Notre Dame.”

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Boldizsár Jankó, professor of physics and director of the Institute for Theoretical Sciences, has accepted an invitation to serve on the advisory board of Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications, a journal that reports on novel developments in the field of superconductivity. The advisory board of Physica C is made up of esteemed researchers in superconductivity, and Jankó was selected for his specific scientific expertise and knowledge of the research community.

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Two Department of Physics faculty members have been named 2012 APS fellows: Professor Bruce Bunker and Professor Zoltan Toroczkai.

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University of Notre Dame astrophysicist Grant Mathews will give three presentations of his popular program titled “What and When was the Christmas Star?” in the Digital Visualization Theater of Notre Dame’s Jordan Hall of Science.

The programs, which are free and open to the public, will take place at 7 p.m. Dec. 7 (Friday), 3 p.m. Dec. 8 (Saturday) and 3 p.m. Dec. 9 (Sunday).

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Five faculty from the University of Notre Dame have been named fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2013. Fellows include William G. Dwyer, Julia F. Knight, Mei-Chi Shaw, Andrew J. Sommese and Nancy K. Stanton. They are part of the inaugural class of fellows that includes mathematical scientists from 600 institutions around the world.

The fellows designation recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics. Through the program, fellows create an enlarged class of mathematicians recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the profession and to honor excellence.

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Scientia, the undergraduate journal of scientific research, held a seminar entitled “Talk Science” on Thursday, Nov. 8 in the Jordan Hall of Science. Approximately 60 students attended the seminar to hear research presentations from a faculty member and a fellow undergraduate researcher.

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“Diversity, Culture and Religion in Science,” a full-day course in the Professionalism in Science series, attracted 84 undergraduates to the Jordan Hall of Science on Nov. 10. Speakers from across the campus and community, as well as national leaders on diversity in science, emphasized the importance of diversity in individual attitudes and organizational practices as the global economy accelerates and significant minorities grow in the United States.

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MurphyKate Montee, a senior honors mathematics and music double major at the University of Notre Dame, has received the 2013 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, an honor awarded to only one undergraduate woman in the U.S. each year.

Montee is a member of the Seminar for Undergraduate Mathematical Research (SUMR), a program designed for the most talented mathematics students at Notre Dame. Montee is completing a senior honors thesis, titled “On the Construction of the Chern Classes of Complex Vector Bundles.” Montee has already authored or co-authored three research articles, two of which have been submitted for publication and have appeared on the Mathematics ArXiv.

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The University of Notre Dame will host a regional final of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, the nation’s premier science research competition for high school students, Friday and Saturday (Nov. 9 and Nov. 10).

The New Jersey-based nonprofit Siemens Foundation created the competition to enhance science and mathematics education in America. It is open to individuals and teams of high school students who develop independent research projects in the physical or biological sciences or mathematics. Competitions in six regions across the United States are being held throughout November. Regional scholarship winners advance to the national competition Dec. 1-4 in Washington, D.C., for a top individual prize of $100,000. Members of the top winning team will share a $100,000 scholarship.

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Using a new $4 million particle accelerator, University of Notre Dame researchers are probing the mysteries of the universe.

"We're focusing on the origin of the elements in the universe," physics professor Michael Wiescher said.

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Stuart Jones, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, recently received an award for high-throughput DNA sequencing from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.  Part of the DOE’s Community Sequencing Program, the award will aid Jones and his colleagues in their characterization of freshwater microbial communities in the Great Lakes.

As global demand increases, uncontaminated fresh water has become a limited resource, which could spell long-term trouble for humans and the environment.  Jones is interested in the microbes specific to freshwater ecosystems because of their ability to process carbon and greenhouse gases in the environment.

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