It's not as simple as 1, 2, 3...
Bob Bird and Reiji Mezaki (MS ’61-Chemistry, PhD ’63) have published Ichi, Ni, San: Adventures with Japanese Numbers (ChemTec Publishing, Toronto, Canada, 2009). Reiji was the first student to come to our department from Japan after WWII and has stayed in touch ever since. The book tells how numbers are used in Japanese, which is often quite different from their use in English. For example, many Japanese have given names that contain numbers, and family names often contain numbers. Numbers pop up in poems, such as “haiku” and “tanka,” and also in proverbs. And some ordinary nouns have numbers in them: 7-faced-bird (turkey), 100-surnames (farmers), 10,000-year-brush (fountain pen), eight-hundred-shop (grocery). The book also tells how to use an abacus, and how to count on your fingers in Japan!
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FACULTY NEWS
Former faculty member Douglas Cameron was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is Managing Director and Chief Science Advisor for Piper Jaffray & Co. Before that he served as Chief Scientific Officer for Khosla Ventures, LCC, helping to establish and operate a number of start-up biotechnology companies, and he served as Chief Scientist and Assistant VP, BioTDC, Cargill.
Juan de Pablo and Paul Nealey received the Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Award, which is given to researchers whose intellectual property contributions have the potential to play a major role in semiconductor and device manufacturing.
Jim Dumesic is among 210 leaders nationwide in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector to be elected this year as fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their outstanding contributions to society. In other news, Jim presented a plenary lecture at the ProcessNet Annual Meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany on catalytic production of fuels and chemicals from biomass-derived oxygenated hydrocarbons, as well as a keynote lecture at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
Mike Graham presented a keynote lecture at the 5th Annual European Society of Rheology Conference in Cardiff, UK on the subject of transport and collective dynamics in suspensions of swimming microorganisms.
Tom Kuech gave an invited presentation on direct growth approaches to epitaxial materials integration using full-wafer nano-lithographic processes at the DARPA workshop on composite platforms for IR focal plane arrays in Chicago. Electrical engineer Leon McCaughan, his student Chad Staus and Tom have been issued a patent on a bright, tunable, continuous wave coherent terahertz (THz) source. THz radiation holds tremendous potential for applications ranging from medical imaging technology to security and public safety. The use of THz radiation beams has been limited by a lack of powerful, compact sources and detectors. Tom and Duke collaborators have also filed a patent application for GaN-based nitric oxide sensors.
Manos Mavrikakis is among nine UW-Madison faculty to receive a Romnes Faculty Fellowship. Presented by the Graduate School and funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the fellowship recognizes recently tenured faculty and provides $50,000 in flexible research funding. Manos has also been appointed to the editorial board of Catalysis Today, and was honored by UW residence hall students with the University Housing Honored Instructor Award.
In other news, his research group’s paper, “Molecular and atomic hydrogen interactions with Au-Ir near-surface alloys,” was recently featured on cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, and Manos presented two invited talks at the recent ACS National Meeting in Salt Lake City: one at the G. Somorjai Award Symposium honoring past Hougen Professor Jens Nørskov, and another at the G. Olah Award Symposium honoring Professor Cynthia Friend of Harvard University.
Regina Murphy presented an invited lecture at the AIChE Annual Meeting on the subject of incorporating process synthesis into introductory chemical engineering courses.
Sean Palecek and collaborators have applied for three patents. The first is for use of a yeast-based promoter and reporter gene as a substitute for bacteria when testing new drugs for genotoxicity. Unlike bacteria, yeast are eukaryotic and their gene regulation and biochemical pathways for responding to DNA damage are more similar to those of higher organisms like humans. A second patent application is for beta peptides with antifungal activity, which may provide a less toxic alternative for treating yeast infections than the widely used drug, Ampho-tericin B. Finally, together with Juan de Pablo and others, Sean has applied for patent protection on a method of cryopreservation of human embryonic stem cells in microwells that improves cell survival.
Brian Pfleger was invited to present progress on engineering bacteria for hydrocarbon production at the 13th Annual Symposium on Industrial and Fermentation Microbiology hosted by the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Jim Rawlings presented the opening keynote lecture at the International Workshop on Assessment and Future Directions of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control in Pavia, Italy. He has also presented invited talks on chemical process control and optimization at the University of Southern California, MIT and the University of Texas at Austin, on supply chain optimization at Praxair in Tonawanda, New York, and on extending the tools of chemical reaction engineering to the molecular scale at the University of Notre Dame and Sandia National Laboratories.
Jennie Reed and Christos Maravelias recently received $125,000 from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center to develop computational models and methods for designing E. coli strains to produce ethanol. Jennie also gave an invited talk at the American Physical Society meeting on using models of bacterial metabolism as tools for data analysis and hypothesis generationl.
Eric Shusta received $100,000 from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to study novel antibodies for the delivery of Parkinson’s therapeutics. Eric also gave an invited presentation on antibodies and the blood-brain barrier at the Keystone Symposium on Antibodies and Drugs in Whistler, British Columbia and another invited talk on engineered green fluorescent protein-based biosensors endowed with nanomolar binding capability at the Society for Biological Engineering International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Santa Barbara. Eric and his students have also applied for two patents: one on a method to enhance heterologous protein secretion in yeast for industrial or therapeutic uses, and a second on novel fluorescent biosensors.
John Yin’s pre-proposal to establish a focus area of Systems Biology within the new Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) is one of 12 pre-proposals to advance to the full proposal stage. From these 12, five will be selected as the core research themes of WID. The successful pre-proposals are all interdisciplinary in nature and fall within the three broad categories of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology. John has assembled a group of biologists, mathematicians and engineers who propose to: (1) advance an integrated understanding of complex biological systems, (2) promote training of the next generation of systems biologists, (3) translate the research and training into practical discoveries that will improve human health and well-being, and (4) support educational outreach activities.
