First ARRA Awards Received!
Dr. Constantine Tsoukas
Congratulations to Dr. Constantine Tsoukas, SDSU professor of biology and recipient of two NIH ARRA awards. Dr. Tsoukas's work focuses on thymus-derived Lymphocytes (T lymphocytes) and the study of signal transduction events with emphasis on protein tyrosine kinases. His first award, in the amount of $406,175, tests the feasibility of a novel technology of cell penetrating peptides as an approach to probe signaling pathways in live cells, and could lead to the design of drugs in the treatment and management of lung allergies. His second award for $408,651 will study one of the molecules inside immune cells known as the Inducible T cell Kinase (ITK), which may improve our ability to design ways to control the action of ITK and other similar molecules, in disease conditions.
SDSU's Technology Transfer Office has protected Dr. Tsoukas's research with a patent focused on developing non-steroid based compounds for the treatment of bronchial asthma, one of the most common disease states impacting our country.
Dr. Shelli McAlpine
Dr. Shelli McAlpine, associate professor of chemistry & biochemistry, has received ARRA funding in the amount of $643,173 for two years, with an additional two years of funding from regular appropriations in the amount of $630,800 slated for 2011-2012.
Cancers have continued to evolve and have become resistant to most known chemotherapuetic agents. There remains a serious and immediate need for the development of antitumor agents that target drug-resistant cancers. Dr. McAlpine's work involves developing potent new anticancer agents that may be useful in treating cancer. Her proposal to develop a novel chemotherapeutic agent based on a promising structure called sansalvamide A (San A), has been funded by the National Cancer Institute.
The Technology Transfer Office at SDSU has been working with Dr. McAlpine for several years and filed three patents to protect the anti-tumor compounds she has developed to allow for their eventual development into life-saving drug therapies. These grants will allow Dr. McAlpine to continue to develop the data necessary for moving her compounds to the next stage of eventual drug development.
Dr. Fridolin Weber
Dr. Fridloin Weber, professor of physics, has received an ARRA award through the National Science Foundation. Dr. Weber's $315,000 grant will support his project entitled "Neutron Stars and Probes for the Structure of Compressed Baryonic Matter." Dr. Weber and his students are exploring the properties of neutron stars.
With a mass of around twice the mass of our Sun but a radius of only 10 km, neutron stars contain matter in their cores that is 10 to 20 times more dense than atomic nuclei. A thimble full of such matter would have a mass of one billion tons! More than that, neutron stars possess electric and magnetic fields that are many trillion times stronger than on the Earth, rotate at incredible speeds (up to around 1000 rotations per second), and have temperatures that are millions of times greater than the surface temperature of our Sun. Because of these most extraordinary properties, neutron stars have become fascinating laboratories for nuclear, particle, and astrophysicists. They hold the key to our understanding of the properties of matter at the most extreme physical conditions imaginable.
Dr. Elizabeth Waters
Dr. Elizabeth Waters, associate professor of biology, has received an ARRA award of $583,415 through the National Science Foundation. Dr. Water's work focuses on the origin of land plants and the heat shock response, as well as the origin and evolution of the small heat shock proteins. The heat shock (HS) response is found in nearly all organisms and is a very highly conserved response to high temperature stress. Components of the HS response are found in all domains of life, making it among the most ancient of biological processes. Dr. Waters’s project, entitled “Evolutionary Studies of the Heat Shock Response and Thermotolerance in Boechera: Transcriptomics, Physiology and Gene Evolution,” will examine how the HS response has evolved among closely related Boechera plant species that vary in thermotolerance; determine if HS has differential effects on photosynthesis, and will explore the Boechera transcriptome and examine the possibilities that there are additional genes not yet indentified as heat-inducible that are differentially regulated in thermotolerant species. Dr. Waters’s studies will provide important insights into the evolution of this crucial and ancient process.
Dr. Jianwei Chen
Dr. Jianwei Chen, professor of mathematics and statistics, has received ARRA funding in the amount of $89,472 for his project entitled “Statistical Inferences for Deterministic Dynamic Models Containing both Constant and Time-varying Parameters with Applications to Infectious Diseases.” Dr. Chen’s areas of research interest include statistical methods in medical/public health research, viral dynamic modeling and simulation, and statistical inference for nonlinear differential equations with applications to HIV infectious and bio-defined immune modeling. Deterministic dynamic models have become very popular in modeling human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) dynamics, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic analysis, tumor cell kinetics, and genetic network. Dr. Chen’s project looks to develop new and efficient statistical estimation, inference methods and computational algorithms for the deterministic dynamic models containing both constant and time-varying parameters.
NIH Supplements
NIH has made the following awards under its "Recovery Act Administrative Supplements Providing Summer Research Experiences for Students and Science Educators" program. These grants provide additional funding to existing NIH projects to support summer research experiences for students.
Dr. Roberta Gottlieb, biology. "Rescue and Role of Complex I in Myocardial Ischemic Injury" $22,423 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. "Subcellular Regulation of Autophagic Flux in Cardiomyocytes and the Heart" $22,425 from the National Institute on Aging
Dr. Edward Riley, psychology. "Behavioral and MRI Evaluation of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure" $45,095 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Dr. Jennifer Thomas, psychology. "Fetal Alcohol Effects and Choline Intervention" $33,638 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Dr. Nader Amir, psychology. "Attention Disengagement Training for Social Phobia" $20,404 from the National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Karen Emmorey, speech, language & hearing sciences. "Language, Modality and the Brain" $10,872 from the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.
Dr. Claire Murphy, psychology, "Chemosensory Perception and Psychophysics in the Aged" $33,010 from the National Institute on Aging.