CHASS Faculty Named Association Chairs

Robert Hanneman, professor of sociology, has been elected chair of the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. The nonprofit, founded in 1905, is dedicated to advancing sociology as a scientific discipline and profession serving the public good, according to the association Web site.

David Swanson, professor of sociology, has been elected chair of the Census Advisory Committee for Professional Associations (CACPA), which serves as a sounding board for the U.S. Census Bureau.

The committee makes recommendations on major programs, such as the decennial census of population and housing, the agriculture and economic censuses, current demographic and economic statistics programs, and survey research, according to the committee Web site.

Swanson recently presided over the fall meeting of CACPA, held Oct. 8-9 in Suitland, Md.

Turning Stem Cells into Neurons

Xuejun Parsons, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience and a stem cell biologist, has received a two-year $418,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Award) to study the molecular cues that direct human embryonic stem cells into neurons.

“I developed a technique to turn human embryonic stem cells into neurons,” she said. “The new funding will not only help us understand how brain cells form in human development, but also allow us to generate a large supply of replacement human neurons for neural-repair in a wide range of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer disease and spinal-cord injury.”

Parsons’ research is currently supported by a human stem cell career development award from the National Institute on Aging.

New Window into Deep Earth

Geologists Larissa Dobrzhinetskaya and Harry Green and colleagues report in the Oct. 26-30 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences their discovery of ultrahigh-pressure minerals from a paleoocean-spreading center, a place “forbidden” for such mineral associations according to existing geological concepts.

The authors describe a fragment of metallic alloy and aluminum-silicate rock extracted from a chromite ore deposit of a Tibetan ophiolite (a section of the Earth’s paleooceanic crust and the underlying upper mantle), which consists of unusual minerals. The mineral assemblage is the first record of a highly reduced (low-oxygen concentrations) mantle environment occurring at a depth of at least 300 km, which not been seen before in any terrestrial rocks.

The researchers ruled out that the discovered minerals are formed as the result of a meteorite impact and propose a mechanism of large-scale mantle convection that “amalgamates” the deep-mantle fragment with shallower host rocks of ophiolite formation. They emphasize that ophiolites, therefore, are a new “window” into the Earth’s deep interior.

Dobrzhinetskaya and Green were joined in the research by scientists at GeoForschungsZentrum, Germany; the Institute of Geology, China; and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif.

Yeast Could Enable One-Step Bioprocessing

Professor of Chemical Engineering Wilfred Chen is co-author of a paper “Functional Assembly of Minicellulosomes on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Cell Surface for Cellulose Hydrolysis and Ethanol Production,” in the October 2009 issue of the American Society of Microbiology’s journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The paper was co-authored by UCR students Shen-Long Tsai and Shailendra Singh, post-doctoral researcher Jeongseok Oh, and Ruizhen Chen, associate professor at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The paper describes how Chen and his team have constructed, for the first time, a synthetic cellulosome in yeast, which is much more ethanol-tolerant than the bacteria in which these structures are normally found. The yeast cellulosome could enable efficient one-step “consolidated bioprocessing” by maximizing the catalytic efficiency of cellulosic hydrolysis with simultaneous fermentation.

The federal Energy Policy Act has mandated the production of a billion gallons of renewable fuel, such as bioethanol created from biomass. This process of using engineered yeasts that Chen and his team have developed can potentially make this production more efficient and economical.

Chill Out

Alexander Balandin, professor of electrical engineering and chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Program, had work published in the October issue of IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The article, titled “Chill Out,” is the first invited paper for IEEE Spectrum by a member of the UCR faculty.

In the paper, Balandin describes the potential of graphene to help cool microprocessors, which are vulnerable to errors due to the excessive heat they can generate. Balandin has done extensive research on graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Its high electron mobility and high thermal conductivity could lead to chips that are faster and better able to dissipate heat.

Plant Cell Viewing

A research team led by Julia Bailey-Serres, a professor of genetics, reports in the Oct. 12-16 online editions of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the implementation of a method they devised to view activities of individual types of cells in a complex plant organ, such as root or a leaf.

The question that was addressed was how different cells of a plant respond to reduced oxygen availability, a situation encountered when a plant is partially or completely submerged.

The study deciphered a unified stress response that allows better energy management in all cell types evaluated. Each cell type also displayed a unique response signature, providing an unprecedented view of plant gene regulation and the response to an environmental stress.

The project, funded by the National Science Foundation, involved a collaboration between biologists and bioinformaticists. Bailey-Serres was joined by Angelika Mustroph, M. Eugenia Zanetti, Charles J. H. Jang and Thomas Girke of UCR as well as scientists from Mendel Biotechnology, Inc (Hayward, Calif.) and the University of Arizona.

Parker Admitted into Sociological Honor Society

Robert Nash Parker, professor of sociology and co-director of the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, has been admitted to the Sociological Research Association, an honor society of sociological scholars.

Parker also has been elected incoming chair of the Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. The nonprofit, founded in 1905, is dedicated to advancing sociology as a scientific discipline and profession serving the public good, according to the association Web site.

Research on Genomes and Disease

Frances Sladek, a professor of cell biology, has received a two-year exploratory grant of $750,000 from the National Institutes of Health to use cutting-edge technology designed to identify binding sites in the human genome that are associated with disease.

Along with colleagues she published work Oct. 5 in the journal Hepatology that describes a process her lab has developed to identify, in a high throughput fashion, potential associations between disease and specific proteins that turn genes on and off. The research could help accelerate genome-wide studies to identify why some people are more susceptible than others to certain diseases, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

“We adapted technology called ‘protein binding microarray’ in a way that is more representative of what goes on in a cell,” Sladek said. “Our research is the culmination of about 20 years of work by cell biologists who study how proteins turn genes on and off. Research in this field has now matured to a point where we can apply knowledge about gene expression to disease susceptibility.”

The research was driven by Sladek’s graduate student Eugene Bolotin (the first author of the paper). Other authors on the paper include Hailing Liao, Tuong Chi Ta, Chuhu Yang, Wendy Hwang-Verslues, Jane R. Evans, as well as Tao Jiang, a professor of computer science and a co-PI on the grant.

Kronenfeld Literary Laureate

Judy Kronenfeld, creative writing lecturer emerita, read selections of her work at an Oct. 14 event announcing the creation of the Inlandia Institute’s Literary Laureate program.

Kronenfeld, who won the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, is associate editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, which held its fourth annual poetry reading at the event at the Sweeney Art Gallery.

The Literary Laureate program is intended to encourage public awareness of the literary arts through community involvement, said Marion Mitchell-Wilson, executive director of the Inlandia Institute. Every two years the program will recognize one regionally based author for contributing to the region’s rich and distinctive literary heritage, she said.

Nominations for the first Literary Laureate appointment are due Dec. 15. Nomination information and forms are available at www.inlandiainstitute.org/laureate.php.