Faculty

Anseth earns international recognition with L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science award

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:21:16 +0000

Anseth earns international recognition with L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/18/2020 - 10:21

Jonathan Raab

�� Boulder Professor Kristi Anseth has received one of the most prestigious recognitions in the life sciences: a L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science award.

Anseth, a distinguished professor and Tisone professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, is being recognized for her “outstanding contribution in converging engineering and biology to develop innovative biomaterials that help tissue regeneration and drug delivery,” according to UNESCO.

She is one of only five women in the world, and the only recipient in North America, to receive the recognition this year.

“I am tremendously honored and feel so very fortunate to be part of the broader University of Colorado community,” Anseth said. “However, I must first acknowledge that this is a shared honor. I have the pleasure of mentoring an amazing group of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral associates in my laboratory, and these individuals have contributed tremendously to the basis for this recognition. I am so thankful to them for their dedication and ��’s commitment to supporting not only the education of these individuals but their transition to future leaders.”

Anseth said she’s eagerly anticipating the opportunity to celebrate women scientists and engineers and to play a more visible role for the next generation. The mother of a 12-year-old daughter, Anseth said she hopes her daughter’s generation is inspired to pursue careers in STEM and that girls see no bounds to their possible careers.

She also commended her colleagues in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the BIoFrontiers Institute for their support.

“I am fortunate to work in an environment with such brilliant colleagues who work tirelessly to advance our fields and educate students to develop technologies and ideas for supporting the well-being of people, society and the planet,” Anseth said.

Anseth, who is also the associate director of the BioFrontiers Institute, has a long and storied career in applying the principles of chemical engineering to the biomaterials field, authoring over 330 papers of extensive, highly impactful research and earning numerous awards and recognitions. She is one of only a handful of individuals worldwide elected to all three national academies: the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. She also has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors and the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering.

“Professor Anseth has proven time and again, through her stellar career of research and achievement, as well as her teaching and mentoring, that she is a world-class scientist and engineer,” said Keith Molenar, interim dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science. “The L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards recognize the best of the best, and she is absolutely deserving of that honor. We’re proud that she calls the �� Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science home, as she brings immeasurable value to the research and education happening here.”

“Kristi Anseth has been a leader in cutting-edge biomaterials research for over two decades,” said Charles Musgrave, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “Her work in the tissue engineering and drug delivery fields has led to the development of key technologies that will have an incredible impact on regenerative medicine and drug delivery. I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this award than her. My colleagues and I are proud of her many accomplishments.”

Anseth earned her doctoral degree in chemical engineering from �� Boulder in 1994 and joined the faculty shortly thereafter, focusing her research on developing biomaterials for medical applications.

Rob Davis, dean emeritus of the College of Engineering and Applied Science and Tisone endowed chair in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, nominated Anseth for the award. He cited her unparalleled research accomplishments in biotechnology and cell biology and the translation of her technologies into medical products, including in-situ-forming materials for enhanced bone regeneration, hydrogels for chondrocyte delivery and more.

He also emphasized her dedication to her students, recalling his first observation of her after she completed her PhD. She had volunteered to teach an 8 a.m. undergraduate course, winning over the sleepy and skeptical students with her enthusiasm and passion for the material.

Support for the nomination also came from other distinguished leaders in academia, including professors Paula T. Hammond and Robert Langer of MIT, Provost David A. Tirrell and Professor Mark E. Davis of the California Institute of Technology, and Professor Nicholas A. Peppas of the University of Texas at Austin.

The international For Women in Science awards, now in their 22nd year, recognize the accomplishments of women who work in the biotechnology, ecology, epigenetics, epidemiology and infectiology research fields. The L’Oreal Foundation and UNESCO bestow five of these awards each year, recognizing one researcher each from Africa and the Arab States, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, Latin America and North America. Fifteen additional “Rising Talents” are recognized from these regions as well.

Anseth and the other awardees will be honored at a ceremony March 12 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Each award recipient will receive €100,000 (about $109,000). The awards seek to increase the representation and awareness of women in science and their achievements to inspire more women to consider careers in the sciences.

The late Deborah Jin, a professor of physics and JILA fellow at �� Boulder, also received the award in 2012.

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Do plants have social networks?

Anonymous — Wed, 15 May 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Do plants have social networks? Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2019 - 00:00

Josh Rhoten

Humans interact in social networks every day around the office coffee pot, online with Facebook and in their communities through political elections. The structure and connections within these networks and others shape how information is shared. That in turn defines much of our modern life and collective behavior, though little is known about how or why these processes work.

That is because it’s difficult to study how these systems, with so many inputs and variables, actually work or affect one another in humans. The same goes for animals where small factors like touch, sight and sound can similarly change the whole dynamic of a network. Research being led by �� Boulder Assistant Professor Orit Peleg is trying to untangle this question by studying social systems in sunflowers through an award from the Human Frontier Science Program.

Peleg acknowledges most people don’t think of plants as having social networks – that is, they don’t think of plants being alive in that way. But for her, that kind of philosophical question is one of the most important aspects of the project.

“There are basic science and philosophical questions to be answered in this work,” said Peleg, who is a member of the Multi-Functional Materials and Autonomous Systems IRTs. “We will be using methodology from physics, engineering and math to understand problems in biology. How do you define a living organism? How do you differentiate between physical and social interactions?”

The Human Frontier Science Program links researchers from different continents and backgrounds. Peleg is joined in the project by Alex Jordan from the University of Konstanz in Germany and Yasmine Meroz from Tel Aviv University in Israel. Their $1.1 million, three-year grant is one of only nine 2019 Young Investigator Grants awarded this cycle to researchers specifically within five years of establishing their independent research group and no more than 10 years from their doctoral degree. In total, the program selected just 34 teams from more than 800 applications representing 60 countries.

Portrait of Orit Peleg

Orit Peleg

Peleg’s team is using sunflowers for this project because they are known to adjust their flower heads and leaves to earn maximum sun exposure, throwing shade on nearby plants in the process. Those neighboring plants then move to avoid being shaded themselves. The ripple effect from this dynamic creates a large network of interactions in the neighboring community of plants.

Peleg said plants are also great for this work because they do not move from location to location like humans or animals, making it easier to collect data. It also opens up agricultural applications for the work in the future as well for things like maximizing planting space.

Peleg, who is based in the BioFrontiers Institute and the Computer Science Department in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, will be working on computer modeling for the project. Her team will be looking at different planting arrangements of the sunflowers, comparing their growth to different light sources.

“By comparing those inside a model, we can say something a bit more microscopic about the interactions between the plants,” she said. “How do they communicate? Is there a benefit to the entire collection from their actions? We may be able to use this knowledge to project on to more complicated networks in the future.”

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Biochemists untangle mysteries of cellular form, function

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Biochemists untangle mysteries of cellular form, function Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/25/2019 - 00:00

Trent Knoss

The complex inner workings of cells, from their architecture to their signaling, underlie much of multicellular organic life. How are they built? How do their proteins interact? And most crucially, how can understanding these functions improve our knowledge of biological outcomes such as disease?

University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professors Karolin Luger and Natalie Ahn have studied questions such as these for decades. Last year, both were elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious honors a scientist can receive. The duo will be formally inducted on Saturday, April 27 at the organization’s annual meeting.

“It’s a high honor because it comes from peers,” said Luger, the endowed chair of �� Boulder’s Department of Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “It’s primarily a wonderful acknowledgement of the collective work of all the former and present students, post-docs and technicians who have contributed to this research.”

Like an archeologist piecing together the origins of ancient structures, Luger and her students examine the fundamental building blocks of genomic processes and untangle their cellular machinery.

Luger began her career with an interest in x-ray crystallography, a technique used to discern 3D molecular structures. Eventually, her focus shifted to chromatin, the material that holds DNA, RNA and proteins together in a compact package within eukaryotic cells. As recently as the late 1980s, before the advent of the Human Genome Project, chromatin was thought to be unimportant, similar to packaging material that only serves to hold more valuable items inside.

“It was a binary mentality back then, but it turned out to be much messier, with lots of variation between individual cells,” Luger said. “The packaging, so to speak, has very important implications for how cell types differentiate.”

Imagine a space filled with labeled cardboard boxes full of books, she says. By reading the labels on the boxes, humans can discern which boxes they’ll need soon and which ones they can safely stash away. Chromatin operates similarly: A fertilized egg cell needs everything—all the genomic information it can get—whereas a more mature cell, such as a liver cell, can read the packaging and know what it can safely ignore.

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Orit Peleg Wings HFSP Young Investigator Award

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 19:26:19 +0000

Orit Peleg Wings HFSP Young Investigator Award Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/28/2019 - 13:26

HFSP

Congrats to Orit Peleg on the announcement of her Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award for the dynamics of information flow in a social network of mutually shading plants project!

The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) announced today some $35 million to support the top 4% of the HFSP Research Grant applications over the coming 3 years. The 34 winning teams of the 2019 competition for the Research Grants went through a rigorous year-long selection process in a global competition that started with 814 submitted letters of intent involving scientists with their laboratories in more than 60 different countries. This year, 9 Young Investigator Grants and 25 Program Grants were selected for funding. Each team member receives on average $110,000 - $125,000 per year for 3 years.

HFSP's collaborative Research Grants are given for a broad range of projects under the umbrella theme "Complex mechanisms of living organisms". The program funds only cutting-edge, risky projects and it is the only international program that funds teams of scientists globally "without borders". HFSP Program Grants appeal to the innovative and creative potential of the research teams. Frontier life science knows no limits as winning teams propose, for example, to investigate fluid trade in hyphal networks extending from the soil into plants, seasonal reversible changes in brain size in shrews, or to image memory storage in the octopus brain.

The HFSP Young Investigator Grants are for applicants within 5 years of establishing their independent research group and no more than 10 years from their doctoral degree. This group of investigators also challenges intriguing concepts such as paradoxical responses of the immune system following injuries, or trying to understand fear generalization across different scales in the brain.

The 2019 HFSP investigators display remarkable depth in approach and innovative thinking as they start their intercontinental collaborations. The lists of all 2019 HFSP awards are available at http://www.hfsp.org/awardees/newly-awarded.

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Dan Larremore Receives DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Dan Larremore Receives DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/26/2019 - 00:00

The Department of Defense continued its history of strong support for fundamental research by selecting 12 faculty investigators for awards through the FY2018 Minerva Research Initiative.

This initiative supports basic research that focuses on topics of particular relevance to U.S. national security. Through its network of faculty investigators, the Minerva Research Initiative also strengthens the department’s connections with the social science community and helps DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges, including National Defense Strategy priorities such as great power competition.

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Do all networks obey the scale-free law? Maybe not

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 23:22:48 +0000

Do all networks obey the scale-free law? Maybe not Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2019 - 16:22

Daniel Strain

As Benjamin Franklin once joked, death and taxes are universal. Scale-free networks may not be, at least according to a new study from �� Boulder.

The research challenges a popular two-decade-old theory that networks of all kinds, from Facebook and Twitter to the interactions of genes in yeast cells, follow a common architecture that mathematicians call “scale-free.”

Such networks fit into a larger category of networks that are dominated by a few hubs with many more connections than the vast majority of nodes—think Twitter where for every Justin Bieber (105 million followers) and Kim Kardashian (60 million followers) out there, you can find thousands of users with just a handful of fans.

Key takeaways

A popular theory claims that all networks are “scale-free”—meaning that the patterns of connections coming into and out of nodes follows a precise mathematical structure called a power law distribution.
�� Boulder researchers set out to test that idea, analyzing more than 900 networks from the realms of biology, technology, transportation and more.
They found that only about 4 percent of networks met the strictest definition for being scale-free—and close to half didn’t fit the bill at all.

In research published this week in the journal Nature Communications, �� Boulder’s Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset set out to test that trendy theory. They used computational tools to analyze a huge dataset of more than 900 networks, with examples from the realms of biology, transportation, technology and more.

Their results suggest that death and taxes may not have much competition, at least in networks. Based on Broido and Clauset’s analysis, close to 50 percent of real networks didn’t meet even the most liberal definition of what makes a network scale-free.

Those findings matter, Broido said, because the shape of a network determines a lot about its properties, including how susceptible it is to targeted attacks or disease outbreaks.

“It’s important to be careful and precise in defining things like what it means to be a scale-free network,” said Broido, a graduate student in the Department of Applied Mathematics.

Clauset, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute, agrees.

“The idea of scale-free networks has been a unifying but controversial theme in network theory for nearly 20 years,” he said. “Resolving the controversy has been difficult because we lacked good tools and broad data. What we’ve found now is that there is little evidence for classically scale-free networks except in a few specific places. Most networks don’t look scale-free at all.”

Power law

Deciding whether or not a network is “scale-free,” however, can be tricky. Many types of networks look similar from a distance.

But Scale-free networks are special because the patterns of connections coming into and out of nodes follows a precise mathematical form called a power law distribution.

“If human height followed a power law, you might expect one person to be as tall as the Empire State Building, 10,000 people to be as tall as a giraffe, and more than 150 million to be only about 7-inches-tall,” Clauset said.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a handful of researchers made a bold claim that all real-world networks follow a universal structure represented by such giraffe- and inch-sized disparities.

There was just one problem: “The original claims were mostly based on analyzing a handful of networks with very rough tools,” Clauset said. “The idea was provocative, but also, in retrospect, quite speculative.”

To take scale-free networks out of the realm of speculation, he and Broido turned to the Index of Complex Networks (ICON). This archive, which was assembled by Clauset’s research group at �� Boulder, lists data on thousands of networks from every scientific domain. They include the social links between Star Wars characters, interactions among yeast proteins, friendships on Facebook and Twitter, airplane travel and more.

Their findings were stark. By applying a series of statistical tests of increasing severity, the researchers calculated that only about 4 percent of the networks they studied met the strictest criteria for being scale free, meaning the number of connections that each node carried followed a power-law distribution. These special networks included some types of protein networks in cells and certain kinds of technological networks.

A multitude of shapes

But not all researchers use those exact requirements to decide what makes a scale-free network, Broido said. To account for these alternative definitions, she and Clauset adapted their tests to account for each of the variations.

“Wherever you’re coming from, one of our definitions should be close to what you’re thinking,” Broido said.

Despite the added flexibility, most networks still failed to show evidence even for weakly scale-free structure. Roughly half of all biological networks and all social networks, for example, didn’t look like anything close to a scale-free network, no matter how flexible the definitions were made.

Far from being a let-down, Clauset sees these null findings in a positive light: if scale-free isn’t the norm, then scientists are free to explore new and more accurate structures for the networks people encounter every day.

“The diversity of real networks presents a mystery,” he said. “What are the common shapes of the networks? How do different kinds of networks assemble and maintain their structure over time? I’m excited that our findings open up room to explore new ideas.”

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2 researchers awarded 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 07:00:00 +0000

2 researchers awarded 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/19/2019 - 00:00

Assistant Professors Edward Chuong (left) and Sandeep Sharma. Photo: �� Boulder

�� Boulder assistant professors Edward Chuong and Sandeep Sharma have been awarded prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships for 2019, one of the highest honors for early-career researchers.

The fellowships, awarded yearly by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955, mark Chuong and Sharma as among the most promising researchers in their fields. The 2019 recipients include 126 scientists from across 57 research institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

“I’m very pleased to represent �� Boulder with this award,” said Sharma, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. “I’m grateful to my senior colleagues, many of whom have been very supportive and helped me build a strong, thriving lab group.”

Sharma’s research focuses on developing algorithms to perform computer simulations that can help understand and predict the unusual and intriguing properties of quantum materials and enzymes. This will potentially help in the development of materials for high-density computer memory, quantum qubits and efficient catalysts.

Edward Chuong, an assistant professor of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology, studies ancient genetic parasites known as “transposons,” which latch on to a host’s DNA and replicate themselves throughout the genome and rewire the expression of genes.

Collectively, the virus-like bits of genetic material constitute about 50 percent of the human genome sequence, and they are believed to have—over tens of millions of years—played a key role in the evolution of gene networks controlling immunity and development.

“We are interested not only in how these transposons have influenced our biology and helped us adapt as a species, but also in how they may contribute to disease today,” he said. “This grant provides much needed support for that line of inquiry.”

Chuong, who is also an evolutionary geneticist with the BioFrontiers Institute, uses modern gene-editing and computational tools to determine whether transposons have played a similar role in the evolution of other species, including mice, dogs and cows.

“Ultimately this work could help us understand what differences there are across mammals when it comes to immune response and how those differences evolved,” he said.

Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics—the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Winners receive a two-year, $70,000 fellowship to further their research.

“Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in a statement. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st century science.”

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Faculty in Focus: Tom Cech looks back on Nobel Prize in chemistry

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Faculty in Focus: Tom Cech looks back on Nobel Prize in chemistry Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/31/2018 - 23:00

Kenna Bruner

It’s been 30 years since �� Boulder Distinguished Professor Tom Cech received the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his findings that RNA in living cells is not only a molecule that encodes information but can also function as a catalyst. His discovery laid the foundation for advances in molecular genetics and gave rise to an expanding appreciation of the roles of RNA in biology.

Among his many awards and recognitions, Cech was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator in 1988 and served as president of the Chevy Chase, Maryland-based HHMI—the nation’s largest private supporter of basic biomedical research—from 2000 to 2009, while retaining his �� Boulder faculty positions and lab. He is an HHMI investigator and the director of the �� Boulder BioFrontiers Institute and also has a faculty appointment at the �� Anschutz Medical Campus.

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The ALSAM Foundation funds new Anschutz-Boulder collaborative research

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 20:20:28 +0000

The ALSAM Foundation funds new Anschutz-Boulder collaborative research Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/18/2018 - 13:20

Lindsay Diamond

The ALSAM Foundation, a generous long-time donor to the �� Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SSPPS), has provided $2M of funding for collaborative grants between the SSPPS and the BioFrontiers Institute. This donation supports the Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program that allows the SSPPS on the Anschutz Medical Campus to join forces with the BioFrontiers Institute on the Boulder Campus to encourage faculty collaboration in the development of innovative projects that will advance the health and wellness of people in our communities and around the globe.

“The ALSAM Foundation has been a transformative force for the SSPPS and for advancing therapeutic innovations through two therapeutic innovations research grant programs totaling over $5M in the past three years. We are enormously grateful to the Foundation for its continuing support and look forward to the outcomes of these multidisciplinary research projects that promise new insights into diseases with the goal of developing new therapeutics,” says SSPPS Dean Ralph Altiere.

Tom Cech, Director of the BioFrontiers Institute at �� Boulder adds, “This program will stimulate our BioFrontiers faculty and students to work with our SSPPS colleagues at Anschutz to develop new therapeutics in the areas of cancer, muscle disease and diabetes.”

The Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program will foster cross-disciplinary collaboration among pharmaceutical researchers at the SSPPS and the interdisciplinary bioscientists at the BioFrontiers Institute with the goal of transforming the development of a new generation of drugs by fueling discovery and translation of new therapeutics to the clinic to achieve better health outcomes for patients and families. The funded projects will address this goal by facilitating the collaboration of the best scientific and clinical research minds in Colorado in a manner that allows rapid testing of new ideas and approaches. This year’s Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program proposals included faculty from University of Colorado entities including SSPPS, BioFrontiers Institute, School of Medicine (SOM) and School of Public Health (SPH).

The newly funded projects address critical health issues related to cancer, vaccine design, diabetes, depression and alcoholism among others. The newly funded research partnerships aim to advance discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic.

Principle Investigator | Collaborating Investigators

Natalie Ahn (BioFrontiers) | Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS)
Jared Brown (SSPPS) | Tom Flaig (SOM), Myles Cockburn (SPH), John Adgate (SPH)
Carlos Catalano (SSPPS) | Robert Garcea (BioFrontiers), Ted Randolph (UCB)
Shaodong Dai (SSPPS) | Aaron Michels (SOM)
Dan LaBarbera (SSPPS) | Terry Fry (SOM)
Bradley Olwin (BioFrontiers) | Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS)
Amy Palmer (BioFrontiers) | Raj Agarwal (SSPPS)
Manisha Patel (SSPPS) | Diego Restrepo (SOM), Emily Gibson (SOM)
Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS) | Kristine Kuhn (SOM), Cathy Lozupone (SOM)
Michael Wempe (SSPPS) | Richard Johnson (SOM), B Vogeli (SOM)

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