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Physicist Laura Fields granted a Presidential Early Career Award

2025-02-05T16:00:00-05:00

Laura Fields, an associate professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her research studying the properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos.

Fields was among the nearly 400 researchers who were named awardees by President Joe Biden on January 14. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Neutrinos are produced in many places in the universe, and the ones Fields studies are created using particle accelerators. Her research grant from the DOE in 2020, while she was a staff scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), funded several measurements that will help scientists better understand neutrino beams. She has continued that work at Notre Dame since 2021.

“We currently have a surprisingly poor understanding of the number of neutrinos created in accelerator-based neutrino beams,” she said, adding that her reaction to the recent honor is one of gratitude.

“The research I proposed was not the most glamorous work; it will not directly answer any of the big outstanding questions about how our universe works,” she said. “But it will help turn our accelerator-based neutrino beams into the precise tools we need to answer some of those questions.

“So I'm glad this type of work is being recognized and hope it encourages more people to work on this important (and fun!) topic.”

Fields earned her bachelor’s degree in physics and math from the University of Arkansas, a certificate of advanced study in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and her master’s and doctorate degrees in physics from Cornell University. She was an associate scientist at Fermilab before being named an associate professor at Notre Dame.

“We were lucky to recruit Dr. Fields to join our department,” said Morten Eskildsen, chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy. “Laura has, in a short amount of time, been able to revitalize our research in the field of neutrino physics, and I am pleased that she is being recognized with the PECASE.”

Established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their research careers. The award recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology and expands awareness of careers in science and engineering. This year’s awardees are employed or funded by 14 participating agencies within the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.

While grateful for the recognition, Fields said that none of her research would be possible without the support of her department, students and postdoctoral fellows. She said she appreciates the support of many collaborators on projects including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the Experiment to Measure the Production of Hadrons At a Testbeam In Chicagoland, and SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on January 17, 2025.

In memoriam: Frank H. Collins, professor emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences

2024-11-22T15:39:00-05:00

Frank Hadley Collins, professor emeritus in the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame, died Nov. 16 in Tucson, Arizona. He was 80.

Collins, the former George and Winifred Clark Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences, retired in 2019 after a long career as one of the country’s leading researchers in vector biology. He performed genome-level studies of arthropod vectors of human pathogens, and completed field and laboratory research on the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, the primary vector of malaria parasites in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Someone once said that if you think you are leading and turn around to see no one following you, then you are just taking a walk. Frank was always running a few steps ahead of others in his field and definitely was not just taking a walk,” said Bernard Nahlen, director of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health. “He was a remarkable thinker and leader but also a very humble guy who never turned around to look behind, since he was always looking forward to addressing the most challenging questions in his field.”

Collins joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1997 after 14 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, where he was chief of the Vector Genetics Section of the Center for Parasitic Diseases. He earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Johns Hopkins University, held a master’s degree in English literature from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and earned his doctorate in entomology from the University of California, Davis.

Collins directed the Anopheles gambiae genome project VectorBase — a bioinformatics resource center for arthropod vectors. He also started the Global Health Strategic Research Initiative at Notre Dame that developed into the Eck Institute for Global Health.

Nahlen met Collins in 1986 when Collins was the lead entomologist in the Vector Genetics Section at the CDC.

“I saw firsthand how he went well above and beyond the call of duty when I was asked to go to his apartment to check on him, since he had fallen ill with falciparum malaria,” Nahlen said. “This was a result of Frank feeding wild-caught anopheline mosquitoes from western Kenya on his arm while transporting them back to Atlanta.”

Over his career, Collins published more than 230 papers and sat on numerous boards, committees and panels. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. A highly decorated researcher, he took special pride in supervising 15 postgraduate students and mentoring 30 postdoctoral scientists during his career. In 2019, the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene awarded Collins the Harry Hoogstraal Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Medical Entomology.

“He was a good listener and had a knack for bringing people together, be it for purposeful discussions or in collegial fellowship over beverages,” said Crislyn D’Souza-Schorey, the Morris Pollard Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “Part of his success was that he recognized the importance of building community to move things forward.”

Late in Nahlen’s career, Collins persuaded him to return to Notre Dame. Both Nahlen and D’Souza-Schorey described Collins as generous with his time, whether professionally or personally.

Collins was married to fellow researcher Nora J. Besansky, the Martin J. Gillen Professor of Biological Sciences. He seemed happiest when watching birds from the deck of their home in South Bend or when observing javelinas and other desert wildlife from their living room after moving to Tucson, Nahlen said.

“Frank had a memorable impact on his field of science, on all whom he trained and all of us who had the privilege to have him as a friend,” Nahlen said.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on Nov. 22.

Nobel laureate Michael Levitt to receive the 2024 Carrier Medal

2024-08-26T13:00:00-04:00

Michael Levitt

Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, will be awarded the Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C. Science Medal by the University of Notre Dame’s College of Science on Sept. 9 (Monday).

Levitt won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2013, shared with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for developing the first method to calculate chemical reactions using computers — while integrating features of classical physical and quantum mechanics. Their work, the majority of which was performed in the 1970s, led to new insights into how proteins fold or misfold, and how enzymes catalyze. By looking at the structure of molecules, the trio revolutionized the field of biochemistry and research into the structural basis of diseases.

Levitt’s lecture will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Dahnke Ballroom on the seventh floor of Duncan Student Center. He will focus on the fusion of the three types of intelligence: biological intelligence, human intelligence and artificial intelligence. His talk, titled, “Multidisciplinary Revolution in Biology and Artificial Intelligence,” will describe how AI and computational biology have revolutionized our approach to disease, making drug development faster and more cost-effective. Levitt will also underscore the critical role of multidisciplinary collaboration that will drive the next revolution in biology and AI.

Levitt, the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford, said he was honored and pleasantly surprised to be named the 2024 Carrier Medal recipient.

“Usually, after the Nobel Prize, you don’t get prizes . . . and I was very complimented,” he said. “This is, I think, the largest American prize I have ever received, and I’m excited to come to Notre Dame to give my talk.”

Levitt started his career in computers during the 1960s when computers were as large as rooms. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he earned his undergraduate degree in physics at King’s College in London, and his doctoral degree in computational biology from the University of Cambridge.

The framework behind computational structural biology began around the same time Levitt embarked on his research. His mentor at Cambridge, John Kendrew (who had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962), requested that Levitt spend a year with Schneior Lifson, a professor of chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, before beginning his doctoral program. Lifson had several theories about atomic interactions, but proving them required a computer.

“(Kendrew) wouldn’t accept me as a Ph.D. student until I went to Israel for a year, sort of like a gap year, and I didn’t understand why,” Levitt said. “But as a result, at the end of that first year in Israel, I was able to complete a computer model that would explain the energetics of a protein structure.”

During the research at the Weizmann Institute, Levitt, Karplus and Warshel combined their expertise to develop computer programs that could simulate the behavior of complex molecular systems. Creating hybrid models that integrated classical physics and quantum mechanics allowed them to describe chemical reactions in large molecules like proteins. Most of the work was finished by the time Levitt was 25.

Over time, Levitt became more and more fascinated with the field. But, “I was never somebody who had a five-year plan,” he said. He first became interested in science because of television. He watched television for the first time during a visit with his aunt and uncle in Great Britain. One program that caught his interest was a science show featuring Kendrew.

“I knew then that, basically, this is the person I wanted to do a Ph.D. with,” Levitt said.

That one television program led Levitt to science — highlighting the importance of continuing to make science “visible” even among today’s crowded choices. Given annually for sustained, outstanding achievements in any area of science, the Rev. Carrier Medal exemplifies one way to bring science to the public’s attention, Levitt said.

“We’ve always lived in a society of celebrities, and in some ways, it’s just a way to focus on a certain area: A sports celebrity probably makes young people keener about sports,” he said, adding that there can also be science celebrities. “If you look at how our society has changed as a result of science and technology, it’s important to actually encourage people to become scientists.”

Notre Dame’s award is named after Rev. Joseph Celestine Basile Carrier, C.S.C., who is recognized as the first director of the science program at the University in 1865, when the College of Science was established as a department.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Jason Rohr wins 2024 International Frontiers Prize for innovative public health and sustainability research

2024-06-27T14:30:00-04:00

Jason Rohr, the Galla Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, is one of three international winners of the 2024 Frontiers Planet Prize for his research that helps improve public health, agriculture, sustainability and poverty in Senegal.

Rohr was presented with the honor during a ceremony June 26 at the Villars Symposium in Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. His research was selected from among the 23 national champions of the prize, which is administered by the Frontiers Research Foundation. Rohr, representing the United States, along with Pedro Jaureguiberry, representing Argentina, and Peter Haase, representing Germany, each received a prize of 1 million Swiss francs, equivalent to about $1.1 million. The money will be used to further his research.

Rohr’s winning research, “A planetary health innovation for disease, food, and water challenges in Africa,” was recommended by the National Academy of Sciences to a jury of 100 renowned sustainability and planetary health experts for the prize.

“My team and I are so shocked and thrilled to win this international prize,” Rohr said of the honor, which rewards and promotes breakthroughs that show the greatest potential to keep the earth from crossing what are known as “planetary boundaries.” These are processes that regulate the stability and resilience of earth systems, such as climate change, freshwater change and land system change.

“The Frontiers Planet Prize is a tremendous honor for Professor Rohr’s transformative research,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame. “We are deeply grateful for this award, which will enable Professor Rohr and his team to continue advancing scalable solutions that have the potential to enhance the lives of millions of people.

“As a leading global Catholic research university, Notre Dame is committed to caring for our common home and pursuing innovative solutions to the complex social and environmental crises our world is facing.”

Published in Nature in 2023, Rohr’s research focuses on reducing schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease affecting more than 250 million people worldwide that causes organ damage and death, and is transmitted to humans from freshwater snails that are infected with parasitic flatworms.

The snails that transmit the flatworm prefer to live in vegetation that proliferates partially because of fertilizer runoff. People can become infected multiple times when using waterways for washing and leisure, Rohr said.

However, Rohr and collaborators study more than ways to reduce disease. Their interdisciplinary approach includes removing snail-loving vegetation at water access points, composting the vegetation, feeding the vegetation to livestock and providing economic opportunities from the profitable compost and livestock feed.

“The generous grant that accompanies this prize will allow us to hone our remote sensing techniques for detecting the vegetation, testing whether communities sustain the intervention after education and training, scaling the innovation to other parts of Africa, and developing commercially viable scaling approaches,” said Rohr, who is affiliated with Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health and the Environmental Change Initiative. “This research has the potential to improve millions of lives because it equips these marginalized communities with the knowledge to develop sustainably, and to escape disease-poverty traps.”

Now in its second year, the prize is awarded by the Frontiers Research Foundation, based in Switzerland. The foundation has received prize nominations from 20 academies of science and 475 leading universities and research institutions among 43 countries. Launched by the foundation on Earth Day 2022, the Frontiers Planet Prize aims to mobilize science for a global green renaissance. The prize is endorsed by the International Science Council in its efforts to accelerate the most impactful scientific solutions.

Before being named as one of the three international prize winners, Rohr shared about his research in front of policy, practice and philanthropy thought leaders at the symposium led by the Villars Institute, an international nonprofit foundation dedicated to accelerating the transition to net-zero emissions. Rohr and the other national champions engaged with key planetary health experts, all of whom have the capability to shape policy and influence civil society.

The symposium also included a global cohort of system- and solution-oriented high school students from schools all over the world, which offered an additional chance to foster intergenerational collaboration and prepare the next generation to combat climate change.

“The remarkable contributions of the three international winners underscore the critical importance of interdisciplinary research in safeguarding our planet’s future. Their innovative approaches exemplify the spirit of the Frontiers Planet Prize, fostering a deeper understanding of planetary boundaries and providing a roadmap for a more sustainable and resilient world,” said Johan Rockström, chairman of the jury and pioneer of the Planetary Boundaries framework, in a news release.

Rohr’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute and a Stanford University seed grant. A complete list of co-authors on the paper can be found at Nature.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on June 26.

In memoriam: Charles Kulpa, professor emeritus of biological sciences

2024-05-10T13:00:00-04:00

Charles “Chuck” Frank Kulpa Jr., professor emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences, died April 30 in South Bend. He was 80.

Kulpa was a respected scholar and professor of environmental and applied microbiology for 40 years. He studied the metabolism of microbes, including bacteria, and investigated topics including their ability to degrade toxic pollutants in the environment.

“Chuck used a novel combination of molecular, biochemical and cellular approaches to determine how microbes detoxified these pollutants, and he was among the first microbiologists to embrace the new field of ‘biotechnology’ that is now so fundamental to science,” said Professor Gary Lamberti, whose office was next to Kulpa’s in Galvin Life Science Center.

A triple graduate of the University of Michigan (with bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees) and avid Wolverine football fan, Kulpa began working as a professor at the University of Notre Dame in 1972 and retired in 2012.

“He was an experimentalist. He enjoyed talking about the details of all sorts of lab procedures and was curious about everything in the science news and enjoyed discussing current topics with colleagues,” said Professor Joseph O’Tousa. “This was key to how he approached his course and lab teaching assignments.

“Yet he would also want to talk to me about family news and other things going on outside of work. His friendship provided an important perspective for me in balancing these life activities. I imagine his students benefited from this as well.”

Intellectually curious, Kulpa frequently took advantage of novel opportunities. For instance, when Kulpa studied how to remediate polluted areas by “seeding” them with microbes, he speculated that he would not find suitable microbes in the Midwest because much of the soil has been polluted by industry.

When Lamberti mentioned that he was traveling to Alaska for some research, Kulpa had an idea.

“One day he asked me, ‘Gary, can you bring me some dirt from Alaska?’” Lamberti said. “He explained that he needed the dirt to search for bacteria that he can culture because Alaska has low pollution.

“Dutifully, I brought him back vials of soil from remote areas of Alaska, and he was thrilled to find some new microbes to test in his lab.”

At the same time, Kulpa was down to earth and, when he was department chair, he allowed students to throw pies in his face for a fundraiser, Lamberti shared. “I think Chuck enjoyed it more than the students.”

According to Kulpa’s obituary, he was an avid golfer and played on the green of St. Andrew’s in Scotland, an experience that held deep meaning for him. He also enjoyed traveling and sharing his travel stories with all who would listen. Kulpa is survived by his wife, four children, 18 grandchildren, a great-grandchild, a brother and a sister.

“He cherished his family,” O’Tousa said. “ He was beaming whenever he talked of the many times he and Loretta and their farm would be the destination spot for a summer week with their grandkids or their treks to the east coast to visit their grandchildren.”

Visitation will be from 12 to 2 p.m. Saturday (May 11) at Brown Funeral Home, 521 E. Main Street, Niles.

Component of keto diet plus immunotherapy may reduce prostate cancer

2024-04-26T13:00:00-04:00

Xin Lu

Adding a pre-ketone supplement — a component of a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet — to a type of cancer therapy in a laboratory setting was highly effective for treating prostate cancer, researchers from the University of Notre Dame found.

Recently published online in the journal Cancer Research, the study from Xin Lu, the John M. and Mary Jo Boler Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and collaborators tackled a problem oncologists have battled: Prostate cancer is resistant to a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy. ICB therapy blocks certain proteins from binding with other proteins and paves the way for our body’s fighter cells, T cells, to kill the cancer.

“Prostate cancer is the most common cancer for American men, and immunotherapy has been really influential in some other cancers, like melanoma or lung cancer, but it hasn’t been working almost at all for prostate cancer,” said Lu, who is affiliated with the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases. Adding a dietary supplement might overcome this resistance, the lead author in the study, Sean Murphy, suggested.

Murphy, a ’24 alumnus who was a doctoral student in Lu’s lab, had been following a keto diet himself. Knowing that cancer cells feed off of sugar, he decided that depriving mouse models of carbohydrates — a key component of the keto diet — might prevent cancer growth.

He divided the models into different groups: immunotherapy alone, ketogenic diet alone, a pre-ketone supplement alone, the ketogenic diet with the immunotherapy, the supplement with the immunotherapy, and the control. While the immunotherapy alone had almost no effect on the tumors (just like what happens to most patients with prostate cancer), both the ketogenic diet with the immunotherapy and the pre-ketone supplement with the immunotherapy reduced the cancer and extended the lives of the mouse models.

The supplement with the immunotherapy worked best.

“It turned out this combination worked really well,” Lu said. “It made the tumor become very sensitive to the immunotherapy, with 23 percent of the mice cured — they were tumor-free; in the rest, the tumors were shrinking really dramatically.”

The evidence points to the possibility that a supplement providing ketones, which are what is produced in the body when people eat a keto diet, might prevent the prostate cancer cells from being resistant to immunotherapy. This may lead to future clinical studies that examine how ketogenic diets or keto supplements could enhance cancer therapy.

While keto diets allow for minimal carbohydrates, the success of this study is not about the lack of carbohydrates, Murphy and Lu stressed. It is about the presence of the ketone body, a substance produced by the liver and used as an energy source when glucose is not available. The ketones disrupt the cycle of the cancer cells, allowing the T cells to do their job to destroy them.

The discovery was also exciting on a molecular level, Lu said. Any type of dietary study can suffer from the potential issue of causation: Are the results from the diet or other changes made because of the diet? But Lu and his collaborators confirmed their results using single-cell RNA sequencing, which examines the gene expression of single cells within the tumor.

“We found that this combination of the supplement and the immunotherapy reprogrammed the whole immune profile of the tumors and recruited many T cells into the tumors to kill prostate cancer cells,” Lu said.

The successful therapy also reduced the number of a type of immune cell called neutrophils. Once in the tumor microenvironment, neutrophils’ natural properties become greatly distorted, and they become largely responsible for inhibiting T cell activities and allowing more tumor progression. Dysregulation of neutrophils is also associated with many other diseases.

“With the main ketone body depleting neutrophils, it opens the door for investigating the effects of the keto diet and the ketone supplement on diseases ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to arthritis,” Murphy said.

Lu agreed.

“What’s exciting is that we’re getting closer to the mechanism, backed up by genetic models and what we’re seeing in the tumors themselves, of why this works,” he said.

Co-authors include Sharif Rahmy, Dailin Gan, Guoqiang Liu, Yini Zhu, Maxim Manyak, Loan Duong, Jianping He, James H. Schofield, Zachary T. Schafer, Jun Li and Xuemin Lu, all from the University of Notre Dame.

The research was supported by a grant from the American Institute for Cancer Research, funding from the National Institutes of Health and a core facility grant from Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. Other support included the Department of Defense and the Boler Family Foundation at the University of Notre Dame. A provisional patent application has been filed based on this study by the IDEA Center at Notre Dame.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Paul Bohn named director of the University of Notre Dame Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative

2024-02-26T14:00:00-05:00

Paul Bohn, the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, has been named the inaugural director of the new Bioengineering & Life Sciences (BELS) Initiative.

A joint initiative of the College of Engineering and College of Science and a key priority in the University’s strategic framework, the BELS Initiative will advance human health and wellness through interdisciplinary biomedical research and training — from fundamental advances through detection, prevention and treatment of disease.

“Notre Dame is well-positioned to lead this transformative initiative and to spearhead discoveries that will directly improve human health, particularly for vulnerable and underserved populations,” said Patricia J. Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of the College of Engineering. “I can think of no better inaugural director than Paul Bohn, whose deep experience and expertise span across the life sciences and engineering.”

Bohn is an internationally known leader in the field of analytical chemistry. He has served as director of what is now the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health since 2008 and also directs the National Science Foundation-supported Center for Bioanalytic Metrology. His research focuses on molecular nanotechnology, personal health monitoring, and imaging of microbial communities. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, has authored or co-authored more than 300 publications and holds nine patents.

Bohn will work closely with an executive committee that includes Culligan; Santiago Schnell, the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of the College of Science; and Vice President of Research Jeffrey F. Rhoads to direct significant new investments in infrastructure and instrumentation over the next decade; work with academic units across campus to recruit faculty scholars to advance research and training in bioengineering and life sciences disciplines; and implement cross-disciplinary graduate and postdoctoral training programs.

“I am excited about this initiative because we are going to be addressing problems that very few other academic institutions are trying to solve, including rare diseases and global health disparities, which align with our Catholic mission,” Schnell said. “We are trying to think strategically about how we can investigate biomedical problems by identifying the tools and technologies we can develop for better diagnostics and treatments anywhere around the world.”

More than 80 Notre Dame faculty and professionals are involved in bioengineering-related research and training in both of the colleges and in multiple dedicated institutes with thriving research portfolios. They study and build everything from engineering models of heart tissues to new drugs to treat cancer and diseases. The Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative will build on that strong foundation, facilitating the kind of collaborative, cutting-edge research that leads to impactful results.

“Instead of funding one idea from an individual researcher in a silo, now we are funding entire biomedical research projects as an enterprise,” Schnell said. “This kind of innovation doesn’t happen overnight. The work of the initiative — from identifying the specific research challenges to major breakthroughs — is a multiyear process. But over time, this University-wide effort will make Notre Dame a stronghold of world-changing biomedical research.”

Roughly half of the world’s population has limited access to essential health services, because of distance, poverty or both. The BELS Initiative will pay particular attention to these marginalized groups, and undertake research that can have a broad impact outside of a traditional hospital or medical facility setting. Notre Dame researchers are uniquely positioned to work with medical professionals around the world to identify and tackle the challenges they face in the field.

“What excites me most about the Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative is that it will be a great program in the spirit of Notre Dame’s mission to be a powerful means for doing good in the world,” said Bohn, who earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Notre Dame in 1977 and his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is an opportunity to work at the frontiers of biomedical research, and that’s exactly where Notre Dame should be.”

Speaking about Bohn’s service to the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, Rhoads said, “Paul has been one of our most effective institute directors. Through his directorship of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, Paul used his exceptional, forward-looking leadership skills to grow the institute and help people produce their best work. Paul, thank you for your commitment to Notre Dame and its research mission. We cannot wait to see what you do next with BELS.”

An acting director of the Berthiaume Institute will be named in the coming weeks. To learn more, visit precisionhealth.nd.edu.

To learn more about the Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative, see strategicframework.nd.edu/BELS.

Solar eclipse-focused events lead up to watch party on April 8

2024-02-08T08:00:00-05:00

Plan on rocking some eclipse glasses on the afternoon of April 8 (Monday) as Notre Dame and the surrounding community experience an almost total solar eclipse.

The College of Science at the University of Notre Dame has public lectures and eclipse-themed planetarium shows planned both on and off campus in the weeks and days leading up to the eclipse. An eclipse watch party is scheduled on April 8. Each event is free and open to the public.

“We’re excited to bring everyone together to learn about eclipses, and then enjoy the event together,” said Keith Davis, director of the Digital Visualization Theater at Notre Dame. “The next total solar eclipses in North America won’t happen until 2044 and 2045, so this will be a rare opportunity for many of us.”

More details about each event can be found on the College of Science website for the following:

Planetarium show, “Get Ready for the April 8 Solar Eclipse!” 6:30 p.m. Tuesday (Feb. 13) in the Digital Visualization Theater, Room 100, Jordan Hall of Science.
Discussion of historical solar eclipses at 6:30 p.m. March 19 (Tuesday), Room 105, Jordan Hall of Science.
Lecture, “What if the Sun Doesn’t Come Back?” Talk begins at 6:30 p.m. March 27 (Wednesday) at the St. Joseph County Public Library Main Branch Auditorium, 304 S. Main St., South Bend.
Lecture, “Eclipses in Outer Space: How Astrophysicists Use Eclipses of other Stars to Find New Planets.” Talk begins at 6:30 p.m. April 2 (Tuesday) at the St. Joseph Public Library Main Branch Auditorium.
Planetarium show, “Into the Shadow.” 6 and 7:30 p.m. April 4 (Thursday) and 7 p.m. April 5 (Friday), Room 100, Jordan Hall of Science.
Eclipse watch party on the Irish Green from 1 to 4:30 p.m. April 8. The entire eclipse event in South Bend will begin at 1:53 p.m., reach 97 percent totality at 3:09 p.m. and end at 4:08 p.m.

At each event, attendees will have the opportunity to pick up some eclipse glasses, which are crucial for viewing the eclipse. Davis emphasized that people should never look at the sun directly, not even during a partial eclipse event, or they can permanently damage their eyesight.

During a total solar eclipse, the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun, casting the darkest parts of its shadow on regions of the Earth. This completely blocks the face of the sun from those regions. Although the moon is between the sun and Earth during every new moon, it’s usually not perfectly aligned, so its shadow doesn’t usually land on the Earth.

During this year’s eclipse, the moon will block the sun in certain areas from Mexico to Maine, and the sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk. Indiana will experience totality, or 100 percent blockage of the sun, in an approximately 115-mile-wide stretch diagonally from Evansville to just south of Fort Wayne.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on Feb. 1.

Astrophysicists publish Kepler Giant Planet Search, an aid to ‘figure out where to find life’

2023-12-18T15:24:00-05:00

Lauren Weiss

A team of astrophysicists led by Lauren Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, created the first-ever catalog of small, Earth-like planets with Jupiter-like siblings (planets that share the same star) — a critical component in the search for life elsewhere in our universe.

Forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal, the Kepler Giant Planet Search took a decade to complete.

“This catalog is the first of its kind and an unprecedented opportunity to explore the diversity of planetary systems that are out there with things that are like the solar system, but not exactly the solar system, and it gives us a chance to rewrite the story of how the planets form,” Weiss said. “The science question that I’ve been trying to answer over the past decade is: Of the other small planets like Earth that are out there, which of them have Jupiter siblings? Because this might be an important characteristic to look for, if we want to figure out where to find life.”

Previous research over the past several years has singled out Jupiter as one of the reasons for life on Earth. During the formation of the solar system, Jupiter slingshotted rocky and icy debris and embryonic planets toward Earth’s current location. Jupiter still hurls debris in Earth’s direction today. The debris may have carried water to our planet intact, creating the oceans and later, fostering life.

Based on data collected from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Waimea, Hawaii, Weiss and collaborators recorded almost 3,000 radial velocities of 63 stars like our sun that host 157 known, small planets. The 157 small planets range from the size of Mars to the size of Neptune, and some of them have rocky surfaces that might be suitable for life. During the study, the team discovered 13 Jupiter-like planets, eight planets closer to the size of Neptune, and three companion stars.

Perhaps counterintuitively, large, gas-filled giant planets outside of our solar system are difficult to find because some common detection methods don’t work. The Kepler space telescope, which retired after nine years in 2018 after it ran out of fuel, had been an excellent tool for scientists to find small exoplanets that orbited close to their stars. It used the transit method, which measures tiny dips in the brightness of the companion star to indicate the presence of a planet as it orbits its star.

Gas giants, however, are usually much farther from their stars and don’t cross in front of them with any practical regularity for astronomers. Jupiter, for instance, takes 12 years to orbit the sun. Also, unlike planets close to their stars, distant planets often have slightly tilted orbits as seen from Earth, making the dips in brightness less prominent.

Weiss and collaborators used the radial velocity method, which uses Doppler spectroscopy. The team measured the “wobble” of a star as the waves appear to pull slightly closer and away from Earth based on the gravitational tug from a large, orbiting planet.

“Jupiters are large and they pull a lot on the stars we can measure. We can find them if we take many, many measurements over time, which is exactly what I had to do,” Weiss said. For every star in the sample, she and collaborators observed the Doppler shift of the star’s light waves for a minimum of 10 nights and in some cases up to hundreds of nights.

“It varies depending on the star,” she said, adding that “observing” the stars wasn’t done by directly looking through the telescope. Astronomers control the Keck telescope from remote observing stations worldwide, including at Notre Dame.

Though Weiss was excited about the discovery of the Jupiter-like planets, the catalog of Earth-and-Jupiter-like planetary systems is the aspect that will help astronomers in years to come. This paper, for instance, is the primary paper in the Kepler Giant Planet Search for which future papers will be based. Some will describe architectural patterns observed in planetary systems, the efficiency of detection of planets, and the joint occurrence of giant and small transiting planets.

“Probably the thing I’m most excited about is revisiting this story of how the Earth formed,” Weiss said. “Now that we have more information about what other kinds of planetary systems are out there, we’re looking for patterns, finding new discoveries, and these possibilities really excite me.”

In addition to Weiss, other collaborators on the study include astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Southern Queensland, Australia; California Institute of Technology; IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Chicago; University of the Pacific; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Nevada Center for Astrophysics; Pennsylvania State University; University of California, Irvine; University of Hawaii; Princeton University; University of California, Riverside; University of California, Santa Cruz; Gemini Observatory/National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab; and the University of Kansas.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director, media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof to accept 2023 Rev. Carrier Medal

2023-10-19T09:16:00-04:00

The University of Notre Dame’s College of Science will award the 2023 Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C., Science Medal to Dr. Thomas Südhof, Stanford University’s Avram Goldstein Professor Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor in both the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology and the Department of Neurosurgery.

Südhof was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 for his work from the 1990s in which he studied sac-like structures, called vesicles, that transport substances to different places inside the cell and then send molecules from the cell’s surface as signals to other cells in the body.

By studying brain cells from mice, he showed how vesicles are held in place, ready to release signal-bearing molecules at the right moment, according to the Nobel Prize website. He shared the prize with James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schekman.

Südhof will accept the Rev. Carrier Medal at 5 p.m. Monday (Oct. 23) in the Dahnke Ballroom, on the seventh floor of the Duncan Student Center at Notre Dame. His lecture, “Toward a Cell Biology of Alzheimer’s Disease,” will describe his laboratory’s recent studies that illustrate how investigations into the cell biology of neurons and glia have the potential to provide insight into the molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, and might lead to better therapies. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

The annual Carrier Medal is the most prestigious award presented by the College of Science, and is given for sustained, outstanding achievements in any field of science. The medalists are invited to give a lecture on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. The award is named after Rev. Joseph Celestine Basile Carrier, C.S.C., who is recognized as the first director of the science program at the University in 1865, when the College of Science was established as a department.

The inaugural Rev. Carrier Medal and Lecture was first awarded in 2022 to Donna Strickland, a 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and a professor at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

For more about Dr. Thomas Südhof and the award, visit the College of Science website.

Eliminating public health scourge can also benefit agriculture

2023-07-12T11:14:00-04:00

Schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that causes organ damage and death, affected more than 250 million people worldwide in 2021, according to the World Health Organization.

One of the world’s most burdensome neglected tropical diseases, schistosomiasis occurs when worms are transmitted from freshwater snails to humans. The snails thrive in water with plants and algae that proliferate in areas of agricultural runoff containing fertilizer. People become infected during routine activities in infested water.

Researchers from the University of Notre Dame, in a study recently published in Nature, found that removing invasive vegetation at water access points in and around several Senegalese villages reduced rates of schistosomiasis by almost a third. As a bonus, the removed vegetation can also be used for compost and livestock feed.

“Disease, food, energy, water, sustainability and poverty challenges intersect in many ways, but are typically addressed independently,” said lead author Jason Rohr, the Ludmilla F., Stephen J. and Robert T. Galla College Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. “We sought to break down these silos and identify win-win solutions, while demonstrating their cost effectiveness so that residents would hopefully adopt them widely.”

Rohr and his team spent seven years on the project, with research conducted in 23 villages and clinical trials in 16. They found that villages with substantial fertilizer use had more submerged vegetation. These villages had more snails and a higher prevalence of schistosomiasis infection in children, said Rohr, who is affiliated with the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative and the Eck Institute for Global Health.

Researchers hypothesized that removing vegetation could reduce infections while providing greater access to the open water that is crucial for daily activities and recreation. So, they conducted a three-year randomized controlled trial in 16 communities, where children were treated for their infections and the researchers removed more than 400 metric tons of vegetation in water access points from half the villages. These removals resulted in a decline in snail abundance as well as schistosomiasis infection rates being nearly a third lower than those observed in control villages.

[Learn more about Rohr's research on schistosomiasis and fighting infectious disease at its source.]

Rohr’s team also tried to profitably improve food production by partly closing the nutrient loop, returning nutrients captured in the removed plants back to agriculture. So, they worked with local farmers to compost the vegetation for use on pepper and onion plants, increasing their yields, and demonstrated that the vegetation could be effectively used as cattle, sheep and donkey feed. Alexandra “Lexi” Sack, who worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Rohr’s lab from 2021 to 2023, assisted Senegal’s in-country team with the care and design of the sheep-feeding trials, and performed much of the analysis of the vegetation removal results.

“This is important work because it encompasses many different disciplines by combining schistosomiasis prevention and food security,” Sack said. “Often these interventions are separate when the neglected tropical diseases, which includes schistosomiasis, are contributing both to and resulting from poverty.”

With the expertise of co-authors Christopher B. Barrett, an economist at Cornell University, and Molly Doruska, a doctoral student also at Cornell, the research team demonstrated that the benefits of removing the vegetation and using it in agriculture were nearly nine times higher than the costs.

“We took this public nuisance, which is reducing health, and converted it into a private good that improves income,” Rohr said.

The team was also able to illustrate how to scale the project using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to identify snail habitat and thus hotspots for schistosomiasis, which will allow them to target their intervention training to areas that need it the most.

Villagers helped with removing vegetation once they understood the public health benefits of the intervention, but in the long run, relying on voluntary labor may not be as effective as the researchers removing the vegetation.

“In the next steps, sociologists and economists on the project will quantify how the innovation affects quality of life and whether it is biased based on wealth, gender and/or age,” Rohr said.

The team will also investigate how biodigesters might be implemented to turn the aquatic vegetation into fertilizer and gas that can be used for cooking or to fuel generators for electricity production. Rohr said they hope to leverage investments by the Swiss government, which has committed to installing 60,000 biodigesters in Senegal for carbon credits.

The ongoing research could not be accomplished without all of the partners who contributed, especially the Senegalese citizens, Rohr said.

Christopher Haggerty, a postdoctoral student at Notre Dame during the study, contributed to this research. A complete list of co-authors can be found on the paper at Nature.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute and a Stanford seed grant.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director, media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Novel process leads to discovery of gas giant orbiting distant star

2023-05-04T10:20:00-04:00

Astronomers in 2020 detected and took a direct image of a gas giant planet that orbits a star about twice as massive as the sun. A recent publication in the journal Science describes the breakthrough process that led to the discovery.

Researchers, including those at the University of Notre Dame, discovered the gas giant planet by combining two approaches: First, they inferred the planet’s existence using a data-driven method. Next, Notre Dame researchers captured and confirmed the image of the planet using the Subaru Telescope operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the Keck Observatory, both located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

“This is very exciting,” said Jeffrey Chilcote, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who specializes in observing and building the highly sensitive instruments to directly image exoplanets and whose lab members imaged the planet at Keck. “Discovering this planet means that using this method, we’re going to continue to find more planets using this technique.

“It also gives us a new planet for astronomers to test atmospheric models on, to understand what planets look like.”

Astronomers have detected more than 5,000 exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our sun, through indirect methods. When using indirect methods, astronomers infer the existence of a planet because of a “wobble” detected by analyzing the star’s spectrum, or identifying changes in the star’s brightness as the planet passes between Earth and a distant star. However, only about 20 planets — including this latest planet, HIP 99770 b — have been imaged directly, partially because the technology is new, and also because it takes a long time to find the planets to image in the first place.

Chilcote is part of the team that built the Coronagraphic High Angular Resolution Imaging Spectrograph (CHARIS), which is coupled to the NAOJ’s Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics instrument that imaged the planet. Traditionally, astronomers who wanted to directly image planets did blind searches, looking for the presence or absence of stars in an “unbiased” way.

In the new strategy, Thayne Currie, of the NAOJ, the University of Texas at San Antonio and Eureka Scientific, first used an indirect method. Using the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalog of Accelerations to determine the precise location of stars in the sky, a process called astrometry, he and collaborators identified a star that appeared to change position in the sky. This catalog combines data from two star-mapping missions, Hipparcos and Gaia, separated by 25 years, at which point astronomers can determine which stars appeared to be moving in an abnormal way — suggesting a gas giant planet was orbiting them.

Next, researchers turned to the Subaru telescope (that includes Chilcote’s CHARIS) to directly image HIP 99770 b.

The new planet is larger than Jupiter, and is further from its star than Jupiter is from the sun. But because the sun HIP 99770 b orbits is significantly larger, its conditions could be similar to those in our outer solar system.

“The most exciting thing in finding this planet is that this new technique works, and this ‘biased’ method of finding planets is going to expand the number of planets we can directly image, allowing us to see the spectrum of the planet and measure its atmosphere,” Chilcote said.

And there will be more discoveries to come from this method. HIP 99770 b was one of the first stars observed from the Gaia candidates. The team is analyzing data from around 50 other stars, and they expect that there will be more discoveries in the future.

“[HIP 99770 b] is a proof of concept of this new strategy for finding imageable planets that will get far better in the next five years,” Currie said in a news release.

Discoveries like this are the epitome of what astronomers hope to see right now, and even though it takes time to verify and publish results, each new discovery leads to information about where we came from and whether there’s other life in the universe.

“This planet is going to give future astronomers, essentially, a target they can study for many, many years, to learn about its history and where it fits into the space of planetary physics,” Chilcote said.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on April 26.

Rapid plant evolution may make coastal regions more susceptible to flooding and sea level rise, study shows

2023-01-26T14:01:17-05:00

Evolution has occurred more rapidly than previously thought in the Chesapeake Bay wetlands, which may decrease the chance that coastal marshes can withstand future sea level rise, researchers at the University of Notre Dame and collaborators demonstrated in a recent publication in Science.

Jason McLachlan, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, evaluated the role evolution plays in ecosystems in the Chesapeake Bay by studying a type of grass-like plant, Schoenoplectus americanus, also called chairmaker’s bulrush. The research team used a combination of historical seeds found in core sediment samples, modern plants, and computational models to demonstrate that “resurrected” plants were allocating more resources in their roots below ground, allowing them to store carbon more quickly than modern plants.

“We think this surprising reduction in below-ground growth might be a response to increased pollution in Chesapeake Bay,” McLachlan said. “Decades of pollution have resulted in higher levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the waters, and since these are plant nutrients, evolution might now favor plants that ‘invest’ less in expensive roots.”

The seeds from the historical plants had remained underground on the property of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the bay, dormant since the mid-1900s. McLachlan and other researchers collected them and allowed them to germinate and grow. Known as resurrection ecology, this type of research provides direct evidence that can support assumptions about evolutionary change.

Computational models had previously established the threat of sea level rise to coastal wetlands, and have incorporated scientists’ understanding of how flooding affects plant growth and how plant growth affects stability. While modern plants and samples from the mid-1900s grew similarly above ground, the modern plants invested less resources into rooting deeper below ground. This created less biomass below ground and could reduce the capacity of wetlands to withstand flooding.

Jason McLachlan

McLachlan and collaborators showed, through computational models, that the modern plants store carbon in soils 15 percent slower than the plants did in the mid-1900s.

McLachlan was astounded by the speed with which evolutionary change occurred in Schoenoplectus americanus.

“The research shows the role evolution plays as ecosystems are increasingly stressed by the impacts of human society,” he said.

First author Megan Vahsen, a doctoral student at Notre Dame, had discovered the importance of below-ground plant traits as early as 2017 as a first-year graduate student at Notre Dame. Though the researchers cannot specifically say that plants are investing relatively more of their energy above ground and less below ground because of pollution, she believes the combination of techniques used in the current research provides novel predictions about the impact of evolution on ecosystems. She expects the study will motivate researchers to study the causes that drive evolutionary change.

“For reasons of inconvenience, science has often ignored what happens below ground,” she said, noting that she and undergraduates at Notre Dame spent about 500 hours washing and sorting plant roots. “But we have learned so much in this study; there are so many secrets happening below ground.”

McLachlan said the research further demonstrates the role evolution plays as ecosystems are increasingly stressed by the impacts of human society.

“Evolutionary change over almost a century played a destabilizing role for coastal ecosystems. Other species in other ecosystems might have responded differently to human environmental impact, perhaps providing more resilience to ecosystems, or perhaps having no impact at all,” he said. “Now that we've shown that evolutionary change can be fast enough and large enough to affect ecosystem resilience, we hope other researchers will consider this component of biological response to global environmental change.”

Other collaborators in this research include Michael Blum and Scott Emrich of the University of Tennessee, Jim Holmquist and Patrick Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Brady Stiller of the University of Notre Dame and Kathe Todd-Brown of the University of Florida, Gainesville. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the United States Coastal Research Program.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

College of Science introduces Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C., Science Medal; Nobel laureate Donna Strickland first recipient

2022-10-13T10:00:19-04:00

The University of Notre Dame College of Science has introduced its Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C., Science Medal to recognize sustained, outstanding achievements in any field of science. The medal will be awarded annually, alternating between the mathematical, physical, chemical and biological sciences, and will be accompanied by a monetary award.

The Rev. Carrier medalist will be invited to give a public lecture on campus as part of the award presentation.

The medal is named after Rev. Joseph Celestine Basile Carrier, C.S.C., who is recognized as the first director of the science program at the University in 1865, when the College of Science was established as a department.

“In creating the Rev. Carrier Medal, we will honor world-class achievement in the sciences and inspire Notre Dame students to strive for the same level of greatness as that of Father Carrier and our medalists,” said Santiago Schnell, the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of the College of Science.

Father Carrier was born in France in 1833 and was interested in the natural sciences from an early age. He immigrated to the United States, joined Notre Dame in 1860 and was ordained in 1861. He solidified the science program at the University, which at that time was a six-year program that included two preparatory years and four collegiate years.

The inaugural Rev. Joseph Carrier, C.S.C., Science Medal will be presented in November to Donna Strickland, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018.

Strickland, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, will accept the award and present a lecture at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 3 (Thursday) in Room 105, Jordan Hall of Science. The event is free and open to the public.

Strickland was awarded the Nobel Prize for her part in inventing a technique called chirped pulse amplification, which has allowed doctors to perform corrective eye surgery and manufacturers to cut glass for cellphones. She shared the 2018 prize with her doctoral adviser, Gérard Mourou, for work they published in 1985 while she was at the University of Rochester in New York.

“Professor Strickland has changed modern science and helped to revolutionize laser physics,” Schnell said. “Thanks to her discoveries, laser technology allows humanity to tackle new and challenging scientific and technological problems. We are now able to explore complex interactions between light and matter, accelerate atomic particles or develop new sources of radiation to treat cancers. We are very pleased that she has agreed to accept our inaugural Carrier Science Medal and look forward to her lecture.”

Strickland was the third woman, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Andrea Ghez later won the prize in 2020.

Strickland’s Nobel-winning research was outlined in her first-ever scientific paper. She began work at the University of Waterloo in 1997 after working as a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and as a member of the technical staff at Princeton University.

In addition to the Nobel Prize and Carrier Medal, Strickland has received the Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell Scholar Award. She received the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement and holds numerous honorary doctorates.

Strickland is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Companion of the Order of Canada, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is also an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics.

An annual call for nominations for the Carrier Medal will be open to national and international senior scientists. Any candidate nominations will remain valid and shall be considered by the award selection committee throughout three nomination cycles. Teams or groups may be nominated for this award as well. See the College of Science website for more information about the Carrier Medal.

Astrophysicists find evidence for the presence of the first stars

2022-10-05T15:48:00-04:00

An international group of researchers, including a professor at the University of Notre Dame, has found evidence for the earliest stars in the universe, called Population III (Pop III) stars, in the spectrum of a distant quasar. The paper was published in September in The Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers in this international collaboration led by Yuzuru Yoshii, professor at the University of Tokyo and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and Timothy Beers, the Grace-Rupley Professor of Physics at Notre Dame, discovered that a distant quasar was highly enriched with iron, leading to an extremely low magnesium to iron ratio. The most likely explanation for this ratio of magnesium to iron in the quasar is that it was produced by an exotic supernova, called a pair-instability supernova (PISN).

“Stars that undergo a PISN explosion may be among the first to have been born, and be responsible for the rapid enrichment of distant galaxies now being studied with the James Webb Space Telescope,” Beers said.

Though predicted theoretically, until now convincing evidence for Pop III stars had not been found, even though astronomers have been interested in the possible existence of these stars for decades. Researchers had sought chemical evidence for a previous generation of such stars in the halo of the Milky Way, with at least one tentative identification discovered, Beers said.

Yoshii said he has been interested in the nature of the very first stars born in the universe for his entire career. “It has been a lifelong dream of mine that we might actually study the nature of the first stars from observations, and now it appears to be coming true,” he said.

However, “the clearest signature of a PISN is probably the extremely low magnesium/iron abundance ratio found in the quasar that is the subject of this study,” Beers said.

PISN supernovae are associated with stars that are 150 to 300 times the mass of the sun. These stars live only 2 to 3 million years — compared with the sun, which is more than 4 billion years old — so direct observations of them are not expected in the Milky Way. However, astronomers are hoping to identify them from studies of their light curves. Light curves show the rise and fall of the light generated in the explosion.

“This still would prove to be a very challenging observation, requiring long-term monitoring of many objects in hopes of catching their explosions ‘in the act,’” Beers said. “Alternatively, their presence can be inferred indirectly, from studies of the chemical fingerprints they leave behind when they explode.”

Beers said he and other collaborators suspect that individual stars formed from material enriched by PISN explosions in the early Milky Way might be found in the near future, based on extensive photometric surveys with specific filters capable of measuring the magnesium/iron ratios for tens of millions of individual stars. Beers’ Galactic Archaeology group is calibrating methods to estimate the this abundance ratio of stars in photometric surveys, such as the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) and Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS), currently underway in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

In addition to Yoshii and Beers, other researchers involved in the study include Hiroaki Sameshima and Toshikazu Shigeyama, University of Tokyo; Takuji Tsujimoto, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; and Bruce A. Peterson, Australian National University.

To the right is a diagram showing the stages of the development of a pair-instability supernova:

Stage 1: One of the universe's first generation of stars: A behemoth about 300 times the mass of the sun nears the end of its life.
Stage 2: In a cataclysmic explosion, the star utterly destroys itself in a PISN, which jettisons the star's entire contents, including the elements iron and magnesium in a distinctive ratio, into its primordial surroundings.
Stage 3: Over time, the stellar remains make their way to the regions surrounding a quasar, an active supermassive black hole. Billions of years later as the light from the quasar travels across the cosmos, astronomers using the Gemini North telescope on Hawaii, operated by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLAB, are able to detect and decode the telltale chemical remains of one of the universe's earliest stars.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on Sept. 28.

Two-ton Gemini Planet Imager arrives at Notre Dame for upgrades

2022-07-27T09:16:29-04:00

A key to potentially finding habitable planets rests in Nieuwland Hall of Science at the University of Notre Dame, after an extended journey.

Packed in six crates — one of which was only a half-inch smaller than the width of a wide-body freight plane door — the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) arrived at Notre Dame after a trip from its location several hours north of Santiago, Chile. It passed through Atlanta, then Chicago and finally Elkhart, Indiana, before being loaded onto a semitruck bound for South Bend, Indiana.

It’s fair to say that Jeffrey Chilcote, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who is heading up a project to revamp and upgrade the equipment, was anxious about the instrument’s trip — but he was also excited to get started, because it has been 14 years since GPI was commissioned and seven years since it was installed.

“GPI was designed and built with a bunch of (educated) guesses in mind,” he said. “Now, we can reconfigure it and get absolutely cutting-edge science.”

After Chilcote and collaborators complete the upgrades — at which time the instrument will be known as GPI 2.0, in late 2023 or early 2024 — the instrument will be installed at Gemini North in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the twin observatory to the one in Chile.

The instrument was built by a consortium of U.S. and Canadian institutions with Chilcote and Quinn Konopacky, associate professor of physics at University of California, San Diego, as well as astrophysicists at Stanford University, Cornell University and Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. GPI had been mounted to the telescope at the Gemini South Observatory in Chile since 2013, where it aided in the search for Jupiter-like planets until it was removed in August 2020. The instrument was slated to arrive in South Bend in 2020, but the global coronavirus pandemic delayed plans.

In 2017, Chilcote and others approached the broader astronomy community to ask what types of upgrades should be completed. “We asked, ‘What do you need, at a minimum, to go to the next step in your science, now that you’ve learned what directions might be interesting to pursue further?’” he said.

The first iteration of GPI allowed astronomers to observe large, warm planets through their infrared light, as well as faint disks of dust from comets and asteroid belts in faraway solar systems. The upgrade will allow astronomers to see lower-mass planets that orbit more closely to their stars.

“We were limited to something called ninth-magnitude stars, so with these upgrades we’re going to be looking at what are called 14th-magnitude stars, which are about 100 times fainter,” Chilcote said. The brightest stars in the sky are considered first magnitude, while the dimmest to the unaided eye are sixth.

The logistics for removing GPI from the Gemini in Chile were tricky enough, but by the time it arrived in Indiana, the day had to have an almost zero chance of precipitation. Although the telescope is open to the air when assembled, its parts cannot tolerate rain (or snow; originally GPI was scheduled to arrive during winter months).

Chilcote and others cleared out parts of Nieuwland’s machine shop, and they had to purchase a specific type of crane that fits inside the rooms on the ground floor but was still capable of holding the two-and-one-half-ton instrument. On a bright sunny day in June, a team transferred the crates from the truck to Nieuwland. The smallest crates fit through the door, but the largest one was never expected to fit while still in the crate. Chilcote and others opened the crate and, using heavy equipment, turned GPI on its side to get it through the door.

He found himself holding his breath. A lot. Thankfully, the transfer went smoothly.

Researchers have discovered more than 5,000 extrasolar planets, Chilcote said, but most were detected using the transit method. With that method, scientists must detect slight variations in the brightness of a star, caused when a planet crosses in front of it. Others have been detected using the so-called “wobble” method, or radial velocity method, where scientists detect shifts in the star’s spectrum using Doppler. But GPI finds planets by directly imaging them, based on the glare from the star. GPI allows astronomers to measure a planet’s size, temperature and even composition through spectroscopy.

By the time the GPI Exoplanet Survey Team completed its goal in 2019 to characterize exoplanets, more than 500 nearby stars had been reviewed. The instrument discovered seven new debris disks as well as 51 Eridani b, a Jupiter-like planet in the constellation Eridanus that takes 32 Earth years to complete the orbit of its star. The instrument also discovered brown dwarf/gas giant exoplanet HR 2562 B in 2016, currently known as the most massive exoplanet discovered.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Program and the Heising-Simons Foundation. In addition to Notre Dame, the University of California, San Diego, the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cornell, the Gemini program, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of California, Santa Cruz also contributed to the construction of and research for the instrument.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Lymphatics help ‘seed’ early brain cells in zebrafish

2022-07-19T13:01:03-04:00

During the embryonic stage of brain development, some neurons and synapses form properly and connect, but others don’t, causing some parts and pieces to be discarded. This leaves behind dead or dying cells and requires the central nervous system to employ a type of cleanup crew.

Microglial cells take on that challenge, “ingesting” the waste, and are therefore critical for brain development. However, scientists lack a full understanding of how they populate the brain. A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience by University of Notre Dame biologist Cody J. Smith demonstrated how lymphatics — which remove waste from the rest of the body — are also associated with microglia and brain development in zebrafish.

“Microglia, we know, are born outside of the brain but must somehow get inside the brain during development, which is called colonization,” said Smith, the Elizabeth and Michael Gallagher Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “We know that in humans this colonization is present by at least four weeks of gestation, and we went into this study with the idea of how we can find the pioneer microglia, and found the interplay between lymphatics and microglial development.”

In studies of both mice and zebrafish, scientists had learned that the precursors of microglia are formed in the yolk sacs, but they suspected there were other sources of these precursors. Using time-lapse imaging, researchers in Smith’s lab showed there were microglia-like cells, which express a gene called mrc1a+, that began populating the zebrafish brain within one day of brain formation. This was much earlier than expected.

More imaging revealed the precursor cells containing the mrc1a+ gene were migrating from lymphatics that surround the brain. When researchers disrupted the lymphatic cells, they noticed the number of microglia precursor cells was reduced.

“We discovered that if we disrupt the lymphatics, we screw up the colonization of microglia,” said Smith, who is affiliated with the Notre Dame Center for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine.

The team also noticed that the precursor cells that required the lymphatics were the ones that responded when the forming brains sustained a developmental injury.

Though Smith is excited about these findings, with his lab’s overall focus on how the nervous system is constructed, he also appreciated that this type of foundational research helps to create a blueprint that allows other researchers to understand why defects occur and how to fix them.

Also, Smith was encouraged by how the discovery was made. The researchers had set out to discover what allowed microglial cells to respond to injury, but they noticed during one last control test that there were more microglial cells than they had previously seen before. So, the lab investigated that part further.

“Understanding basic science is really important, but this is an example of where we were actually trying to go after one thing and ended up at something completely different,” Smith said.

The research was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Indiana Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research program with the Indiana State Board of Health.

In addition to Smith, other authors include former doctoral student Lauren A. Green, postdoctoral researcher Dana F. DeSantis, doctoral student Camden A. Hoover and former undergraduate student Michael R. O’Dea, all in Smith’s lab.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, Assistant Director, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Of faith and reason: Reflecting on Sister Kathleen Cannon’s 32 years at Notre Dame

2022-05-25T13:00:00-04:00

Sister Kathleen Cannon’s teachers in elementary and high school were supportive and excellent educators, fostering her love of mathematics — especially geometry — which she carried into college as she pursued a major in mathematics.

“I remember thinking that this was a lot bigger than just teaching second grade,” said Sister Cannon, who held the position of associate provost at Notre Dame from 1990 to 1997 before moving into the College of Science as an associate dean. “They were changing the world in some way.”But her teachers, Dominican sisters, were so much more than simply skillful. Sister Cannon, O.P., now associate dean in the University of Notre Dame’s College of Science, whose duties include advising students in the science-business, science-education and science-computing majors, saw how they made such an important contribution to the world. From watching and learning from them, she realized from the time she was in second grade that her vocations would be in teaching and religious life.

Sister Cannon grew up in Pittsburgh as the oldest girl and the oldest of 11 children. Like any child with a dream, she practiced for her future job, and began with her brothers, whom she implored to “play school” with her as the teacher. But although they all majored in mathematics like she did, she was the only one who entered religious life, choosing to join the Dominican Sisters of Peace as a religious sister.

As she plans for her retirement, her passion for everything — from advising, to preaching, to championing women and diversity — shines as brightly as her faith.

“Her background, not just in science but also in theology, means she has brought sensitivity to the ways that faith and reason complement each other and are necessary in the pursuit of truth,” said Rev. James Foster, C.S.C, associate dean of health sciences advising — who himself was a physician with board certification in internal medicine and infectious diseases before entering the Congregation of Holy Cross to become a priest.

Sister Cannon’s father, a conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her mother, a budding journalist who became a homemaker after Sister Cannon was born, didn’t treat her any differently from her brothers. When she was a junior in high school, her father told her, “You may not believe this, but it is really important for you to go to college.”

His advice was highly unusual at the time. But she listened, and after college she taught high school mathematics and religion at an all-girls academy in New Haven, Connecticut. Later, she taught at Albertus Magnus College, an all-women’s Dominican college also in New Haven. She taught men how to preach for years in her role as a Dominican — the O.P., after all, stands for Order of Preachers. Before arriving at Notre Dame, she served as a faculty member at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, where she taught preaching, and held visiting positions in preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary and Wesley Methodist Seminary.

In lectures recorded in 1987 and 2000, Sister Cannon strongly makes the case for the importance of women’s preaching. She engages her audience with a conversational, humble and even humorous tone, despite the serious discussion of her stance on female and lay involvement in the liturgy. Involving more groups into the liturgy can only benefit all members of the Church, she stressed, and her language was inclusive of men and women, laypeople and ordained clergy.

Her measured pace, steady voice and consistent eye contact give the audience confidence in her position. She takes into account theological and practical concerns, grounding her detailed-oriented argument in both its historical context and its relevance to the faithful today.

“I have a storage unit, and I actually kept her notes from 35 years ago,” said Rev. Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R., one of Sister Cannon’s former students and the first Black American to have earned a Catholic doctorate degree in preaching. “Kathleen was very particular about diction and enunciation, and was very critical of that with me, but she was kind and highlighted that I had a gift for preaching, and told me she knew I would be a good preacher.”

All Christians realize that their very first preachers were women — their mothers, Father Nutt said. It was previously common for women to teach preaching, even to Catholic priests, despite not preaching homilies in their parishes.

“Reflecting on this, I realize what a gift she gave me by teaching me to do something she couldn’t, which is the Eucharistic liturgy,” Father Nutt said. “She loved the Church so much that she made that sacrifice; there is no greater love for the Church than to give the best of your gifts.”

Sister Cannon may have been the first — and perhaps only — woman in the United States to be granted canonical faculties to preach whenever necessary. In 1976, while on the staff at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut, she approached then-Archbishop John Whelan about preaching because there was no priest chaplain. Archbishop Whelan allowed the exception.

The exception was a big deal, said Sister Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P., professor in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, who, like Sister Cannon, is a Dominican Sister of Peace. She explained that while women or lay people were increasingly involved in a variety of preaching ministries in the decade after the Second Vatican Council, it was rare for an archbishop to grant official authority to preach whenever needed.

Always a champion for women in academia, Sister Cannon more fully understood some of the differences in learning styles between men and women after being hired at Notre Dame. For instance, an engineering professor once asked for her guidance because he wanted more women to pursue advanced degrees.

“‘The women are doing better than the men, but the men have no hesitation; they say they are good enough for advanced degrees,’” Sister Cannon recalls him saying. “‘The women don’t believe they are.’”

Though the number of women in engineering and computing has increased, at the time, Sister Cannon noticed some of the issues are ingrained and reinforced; when people told women they are not good at computing, for example, women internalized those comments. And on tests, men who did poorly moved past their disappointment more quickly, deciding they would do better next time.

“But if a woman did poorly on a test, she’d say, ‘Oh, I’m not meant to be a mathematician, or an artist, or an engineer,’” Sister Cannon continued, adding that women are not internalizing critique as much as they did 25 years ago. “I found that women needed more check-ins along the way to assure them that they are on the right track.”

Similarly, Sister Cannon has been attentive to promoting diversity, even before many people discussed the importance of inclusion, Father Foster said, which led her to continually push for hiring and championing faculty members who are historically underrepresented in the sciences.

“Diversity is really important — it triggers or stimulates ideas when people who don’t think the same way that I do come together,” she said. “It sparks something. It’s also so important for both men and women to do science and engineering.”

To ensure diversity, Sister Cannon, in her role as associate provost, stressed that staff and faculty families needed to be supported, and that there was a work-life balance for everyone.

Sister Cannon had also been serving on the board for the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) at Saint Mary’s College, which was open to Notre Dame staff and faculty but had a hopelessly long wait list. She set up a committee with faculty and staff at Notre Dame and investigated how other universities handled day care, with the goal of providing the best service possible to the community.

“It was very important that it not be a place only for faculty children,” Sister Cannon said. “We developed a sliding scale, so that people who were administrators, or their salaries were higher, were required to pay more.

“When we unveiled this, people said, ‘That will never work; people will never want to pay different prices,’ but we had a waitlist that first year.”

The committee decided it was important to build the center on campus for more than simple convenience. Sister Cannon wanted students to see both men and women dropping their children off, or stopping by to have lunch with their children, or teaching an art class, “so that everyone can see that fathering is just as important as mothering.”

The doors of Notre Dame’s ECDC opened in 1997, and about a year later, Sister Cannon moved into the College of Science and took the reins of the science-business, science-computing and science-education sequence, which had fewer than 20 students. Students majoring in science-business enroll in 64 credit hours of science and take introductory business courses in accounting, finance, marketing and management, along with microeconomics and an upper-level elective. Students may decide to go into business at a health care agency, but many students also pursue physical therapy, physician assisting, global or public health, or health care consulting, Sister Cannon said.

During her tenure, Sister Cannon grew the majors from 20 students to more than 250.

“Some students’ parents who are physicians have said they would give anything to have had a curriculum like this, so they wouldn’t have had to have taught themselves everything,” she said.

In her role, Sister Cannon has exhibited a kind, empathetic response to students and enjoys getting to know them beyond their academic needs. Father Foster, the associate dean of health science advising, said she even taught him — a priest and physician who already understood a holistic notion of engaging with people to determine their true needs — a different level of mentoring.

As an adviser, Sister Cannon, known as “Pastor Cannon” among her friends, has always shown a desire to know the students on a deeper level. Often, students will visit with an adviser with one question, but in truth have a deeper issue or just feel like venting.

“It’s not like she will probe, but she invites people into a relationship to be who they are,” Father Foster said. “She’s also very good at finding out connections she has with people, and is very sensitive to finding ways to provide opportunities equitably, so that all people feel welcomed and supported.”

The supportive environment Sister Cannon created was important to Rahul Ramani, class of ’18, who is now in medical school at Kansas City University in the doctor of osteopathic medicine program. Sister Cannon helped him navigate a circuitous path, rife with average grades primarily because he took on too many responsibilities. Ramani was a tour guide, a physics lab teaching assistant, a member of the Notre Dame Glee Club and Notre Dame Undertones a capella group, a student union board member, and an employee at WVFI Radio.

He’s someone who relies heavily on the advice of others, he said, so whenever he struggled, he visited Sister Cannon’s office to chat.

“I remember her always laughing because my nature in undergrad was very disorganized, and I would come into her office like a tornado,” he said. “And she would tell me, ‘You’re doing so much, and that’s really impressive, but I think you’re doing too much.’”

Sister Cannon helped him navigate his path to medical school since she knew he was a student who would not immediately be admitted, he said.

“She was always calm and centered, and faith plays a huge role there, but she also had many years of experience dealing with pre-med majors and that probably also lent her to having a calming presence.”

Before his cohort’s science-business degree ceremony, Sister Cannon reached out to him to perform a solo for the graduates. Ramani wasn’t the only musician, but she knew that many of the other students had already been accepted to medical school and had other victories to celebrate that day.

“That was really important to me,” he said. “She valued that I was accomplished outside of academics alone and saw Commencement as an opportunity to celebrate and showcase my other successes."

Sister Cannon also has a surprisingly wry sense of humor, Ramani said, but that’s well known to her friends, including Sister Hilkert and Susan Sheridan, associate professor of anthropology. Sheridan met Sister Hilkert and Sister Cannon through connections she made while completing research at a Dominican monastery in Jerusalem.

Sheridan, in her lab surrounded by skulls and drawers with every type of bone fragment possible, shared that the three of them — two Dominican sisters and herself, a Methodist —joked that Sisters Cannon and Hilkert were her spiritual mothers.

In part because of the coronavirus pandemic, their friend group hasn’t had a chance to get together. But Sheridan saw Sister Cannon recently during one of the lectures in a series Sister Cannon started — the Distinguished Women’s Lecture Series (which now bears her name, the Kathleen Cannon, O.P., Distinguished Women’s Lecture Series).

“She sponsored somebody that we brought in as a department, and I was just sitting there waiting for the lecture to begin, and she came in and just literally walked right up to me and gave me a Kathy equivalent of a bear hug,” she said.

Sheridan found it interesting that even though Sister Cannon established the series, she didn't mention this to speakers, and they had no way of knowing that her efforts paved the way for their lecture on campus.

“She doesn’t take credit, and maybe this is my Protestantism coming out, but I know I was always taught to make donations anonymously. … You do good works without having to bring a lot of attention to yourself,” Sheridan continued. “And she certainly embodies that.”

In addition, Sister Cannon also embodies the qualities needed in an effective facilitator. Carl Ackermann, the Nolan Professor for Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction and teaching professor in the Mendoza College of Business, joked that he gauges the importance of a meeting on whether Sister Cannon is attending.

Several years ago Ackermann was gearing up for a potentially contentious meeting, and wondered how the issue would be handled. Relief washed over him when he noticed Sister Cannon in the room to facilitate.

“I just laughed at myself because I thought, you know, whatever issues might be contentious to people at the moment, they're just going to disappear,” he said. “The skill set with which she facilitated that meeting and built consensus and community is something that I'll always remember.”

Though Sister Cannon said she believes her facilitation of the ECDC development is the most important mark she’s left at the University, it’s the little things — from writing prayer cards to advising students, to listening to colleagues and ushering guidance with a calm, steady hand — that others say are their fondest memories with her.

Sister Cannon, in her role as associate provost, shepherded Carolyn Woo, who served as dean of the Mendoza College of Business from 1997 to 2011, through Woo’s interview process in 1996. Sister Cannon’s warmth and hospitality put Woo at ease, and also gave her a sense of the culture and tone of the University, Woo said.

“When I got ready to leave, she realized that I had hardly eaten because the meetings during meals were taken up with conversation,” Woo said. “She was concerned about me, and I did not want to delay my return trip — and out of her desk drawer came some crackers.

“They provided sustenance not only as food, but the first of many gracious acts of support just when I needed.”

The example is just one of many that people shared when describing Sister Cannon’s overall demeanor; in fact, the list of people whose behavior Ackermann said he tries to emulate is short, and Sister Cannon is on that list. Father Foster agreed.

“She is a very good friend to everyone; very attentive. Very loyal. Very thoughtful. Very supportive,” he said as he looked back over her career at Notre Dame. “She is the voice of the integration of faith and reason, and how that informs our Catholic mission.”

Naya Tadavarthy '22 contributed to this report.

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on May 19.

New pathway for DNA transfer discovered in tumor microenvironment

2022-03-25T15:00:00-04:00

University of Notre Dame researchers have discovered another way tumor cells transfer genetic material to other cells in their microenvironment, causing cancer to spread.

In their latest study, published in Cell Reports, Crislyn D’Souza-Schorey, the Morris Pollard Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and collaborators discovered that DNA “cargo” is transported in small informational sacs called extracellular microvesicles. Their study is a continuation of work her lab has undertaken to further understand the sharing of information between cells.

“We’ve shown that DNA present in these microvesicles is related to metastasis, so now we have a great platform to assess for genetic aberrations,” said D’Souza-Schorey, who is also affiliated with the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases and the Harper Cancer Research Institute.

Cancer cells, unlike normal cells, are often filled with cytosolic DNA, which is DNA found in the jelly-like fluid outside of the cell’s nucleus. This DNA can be derived from multiple sources, but recent evidence suggests that chromosomal instability is a primary source of cytosolic DNA in tumor cells.

The research team used a cell model from a male cancer patient to show how Y-chromosomal DNA — present in the cytosol due to chromosomal instability — is carried by extracellular vesicles and transferred to a female mammary epithelial cell line.

“These female cells do not have Y-chromosomal DNA present without exposure to the male microvesicles,” said James Clancy, research assistant professor of biological sciences, who is the first author on the paper. “This is an accessible way to show people that the DNA was transferred, making it easier to prove this form of communication.”

The researchers demonstrated that cytosolic DNA is moved to microvesicles alongside an enzyme, cGAS, which was discovered in part because of its role during the immune response to bacterial and viral infections. Scientists have increasingly recognized that cGAS may play a part in tumor progression, and this new study delineated a way the DNA is modified to aid that progression.

Work published by D’Souza-Schorey’s lab in 2019 in Nature Cell Biology described how microRNA within tumor cells is moved to microvesicles just beginning to form at the cell periphery. Once shed, these vesicles are taken up by non-tumor cells in the microenvironment. Microvesicles can also be found circulating through the body in fluids like blood and urine, and can be used as biomarkers that point to the presence of cancer.

While microRNA can affect protein expression more quickly than DNA, the researchers were interested in the DNA content as it is the actual part of a person’s genome, including any tumor-associated mutations, Clancy said. It was also more difficult to prove that DNA has moved from one cell to another.

The lab’s continued foundational research in this area may lead to early detection of different types of tumors.

In addition to D’Souza-Schorey and Clancy, others who worked on the study include Colin Sheehan, class of ’19, and Alex C. Boomgarden, a fourth-year doctoral student at Notre Dame and recipient of a Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health predoctoral fellowship. Sheehan is now pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. The study was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute and the Boler Family Foundation.

Seizing the “Apollo moment”: Notre Dame scientists among the first to experiment with the James Webb Space Telescope

2022-02-24T14:00:00-05:00

During the last week of November 2020, with the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic raging and finals week underway at the University of Notre Dame, Christopher Howk, professor of physics, decided to hole up in a cabin and churn out a proposal to do research using the most highly anticipated astronomical tool in a quarter century.

The proposal involved using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study how galactic dust and gas is expelled from the plane of a disk galaxy similar to the Milky Way. If his proposal were to be accepted, he, along with Research Professor Nicolas Lehner and other collaborators, would be among the first astrophysicists to use the space-based infrared telescope as an aid to learn how our universe formed.

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