Mark Huffman, M.D., a 1998 University of Notre Dame graduate and a cardiology research fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg 91��Ƶ of Medicine, will present at the Global Health Colloquium on Aug. 25 (Wednesday) at 4 p.m. in Room 283 of the Galvin Life Sciences building at Notre Dame.

Huffman, who recently spent nearly a year in India as an NIH Fogarty International Research Fellow, will speak on “A New World Order of Heart Disease: Trying to Telescope the Transition in India.”

India is in the midst of a public health transition common among developing countries, Huffman says. According to a theory of epidemiologic transition developed in the 1970s, medical issues shift as societies advance in ways that allow people to live longer. The results of poor diets and bad habits such as tobacco use leave many with heart disease, lung disease and diabetes where such basic issues such as maternal-child and infectious disease had been more prominent. In India, Huffman says, “poor rural parts are still battling measles. Other parts like New Delhi that are wealthier have plenty of heart disease, diabetes, etc.”

Other countries, including China, Brazil and parts of sub-Saharan Africa are at a similar stage in development, he says. A two-pronged approach can help. The population approach uses public health measures such as tobacco taxation to reduce consumption and food-manufacturing regulation to reduce sodium in the food supply. The high-risk approach screens the population for individuals who are at particularly high risks for diseases and treats them aggressively with medicine as well as lifestyle changes.

“You need that combined, complementary approach to really address the problem,” Huffman says, adding that access to primary care is critical, and India has a poor distribution of physicians with a surplus in cities and shortages elsewhere.

Rather than focusing on a particular disease such as heart disease alone, Huffman aims to promote changes that can improve other conditions as well. “That’s why I try to focus on things like tobacco and primary care,” he says. “These will have benefits above and beyond heart disease.”

Huffman seeks to find solutions that cut across different fields.

Contact: Katherine Taylor, Eck Institute for Global Health, Katherine.A.Taylor.192@nd.edu, 574-631-1029

, the George and Winifred Clark professor of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, has received a $1.9-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance tuberculosis research. The epidemic tuberculosis infects an estimated 14.4 million people and kills some 4,500 every day. Many strains of the disease have become resistant to the standard treatment that involves taking multiple drugs for several months.

Miller and his research group aim to understand TB’s essential iron sequestration machinery to discover new targets and exploit this pathway for developing novel anti-TB agents. The synthesis of the iron sequestering siderophores from mycobacteria allows for the exploitation of a “Trojan Horse” drug treatment with new and existing drugs. The grant also will help the lab advance its current lead small molecule anti-TB agents, which are nanomolar inhibitors of drug-resistant strains, through in vivo pre-clinical development, patenting, and potential partnering with industry to bring new treatments to the marketplace.

More than four-fifths of TB cases are in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, although 12,898 cases were provisionally reported in the United States in 2008. The airborne bacterium that causes the disease can spread from person to person in close contact and can lie dormant for years. It kills mostly poor, HIV-infected, immunologically-compromised and elderly people. The standard treatment worldwide involves the administration of isoniazid, pyrazinamide, ethambutol and rifampin for two months followed by four additional months of rifampin and isoniazid.

“Armed only with long dosing regimens of antiquated drugs, we cannot hope to win the war against TB,” Miller says.

The lab’s TB research includes collaborations with researchers at the NIH, DowAgroScience, the Eli Lilly TB Initiative, as well as researchers in India, China and Germany.

Miller, co-founder of PracticaChem LLP, has more than 260 peer reviewed publications and 20 issued patents. He is a consultant to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries as well as an expert witness in medicinal and organic chemistry, synthesis and analytical interpretation.

Contact: Marvin Miller, the George and Winifred Clark professor of Chemistry, 574-631-7571, mmiller1@nd.edu

of the Department of at the University of Notre Dame has received a five-year, $5.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to conduct translational research aimed at the discovery and development of drugs to fight serious gram-positive bacterial infections, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

The award, significantly greater than typical grants at the research level, required a product development plan for moving a compound towards commercialization in addition to the usual scientific plan.

Large pharmaceutical companies no longer invest in basic and translational research on antibiotics as they once did in their laboratories. The return on investment for such drugs, used by patients only occasionally and briefly because they actually cure the disease, is far less than potential returns from drugs required for managing chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol. While drug development and clinical trials typically costs more than $1 billion, antibiotics typically return only $200 million to $300 million a year for each illness they treat.

“The easy picks have already been found,” Chang says. “It is harder to come up with a new template, one you can still protect with patents. By the time the compound makes it to the market, in a couple of years or so, you’re going to have a resistance problem. Bacteria are going to mutate, and they are going to develop resistance to any antibiotic. Because there are no financial incentives for large pharmaceutical companies to do this, it’s a big problem. You need other mechanisms to address this unmet medical need.”

Chang has already developed a lead template for the new class of compounds and started the process of optimizing its pharmaceutical properties, such as solubility, efficacy, pharmacokinetics and dosage requirements.

“You’ll always need some new classes of compounds to combat resistance,” she says. “The NIH recognizes that something else needs to be done for these serious bacterial infections and other diseases like tuberculosis.”

With the grant, Chang’s multidisciplinary research team will design and synthesize variations of the compound, impart drug-like properties, and test them for antibacterial activity in animal models of infection, continuing work they have already started. The team includes Chang, Shahriar Mobashery, Sergei Vakulenko, Mark Suckow, all of Notre Dame; and Juan Hermoso of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain.

“We’re very hopeful and optimistic that we’ll come up with a compound that we can take into preclinical development and ultimately into clinical trials,” Chang says. “I think we have a very good opportunity here at Notre Dame in terms of the critical mass in drug discovery. We can do everything from the computational aspects to synthesis to imparting drug-like properties. We can test these in vitro against different kinds of bacteria and take these into animals to optimize the pharmacokinetics and to be able to test in animal models of infections. Many other academic places cannot do this.”

The risk of dead-end research is highest at the beginning of a project. Of 10,000 compounds discovered, 250 make it to preclinical development, and five reach clinical trials. The more the potential drug is developed, weeding out failed attempts through in vitro methodologies and animal testing to identify compounds for clinical trials, the more attractive it becomes to large pharmaceutical companies that are willing to partner with the researcher or purchase the compound for preclinical development and clinical trials.

Early results suggest that Chang’s lead antibiotic shows comparable results to linezolid, marketed as Zyvox, which is the “drug of last resort” on the market for treating MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE). Unlike linezolid, which prevents bacterial growth, the compound kills bacteria. Linezolid has sales of some $1.1 billion a year, but bacterial resistance to the 10-year-old drug is expected to grow.

_*Contact*: Mayland Chang, professional specialist, chemistry and biochemistry, 574-631-2965, mchang@nd.edu

A new study by a team of researchers led by , assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, is using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), to move drug design into groundbreaking consideration of the dynamic flexibility of drugs and their targets.

The research, which was published by the , contributes to the growing attention given toward the shape-shifting movement of molecules, a feature that potentially could help drug designers overcome issues of resistance, transportation of drugs to targets and oral bioavailability.

“The new focus is that it’s not enough just to look at the protein motion,” Peng said. “Of course, we’ve studied protein motions for some time, as many disease-related proteins are flexible. But we’ve also realized that in order to impact drug discovery, we also have to look at the candidate drug molecule that is being designed, that is, the ‘ligand.’ It can move too.”

Drug design involves iterative changes of a ligand to optimize its drug-like properties, which include, among other issues, the ability to cross biological membranes and bind specifically to a drug-target, usually a protein. The rules for doing this are well-established for rigid ligands, but much less so for flexible ligands, which turn out to be common starting points for many drug-targets.

“Understanding that lets us predict how flexibility can affect drug-like properties, and how that flexibility should be manipulated in drug design is still elusive,” Peng said.

“We need experimental methods that can tell us, systematically, how architectural changes in the candidate drug molecule can change its flexibility relevant for drug-like properties. These methods would benefit not just one particular kind of disease but basically drug design in general,” including therapies for cancer, AIDS and MRSA.

“The paper is a beginning of how to systematically understand how we should make ligand molecules, candidate drug molecules, floppy or not floppy, in order to best interfere with the target protein. For example, we can test the idea that some residual ‘floppiness’ in a drug may help it co-adapt with a protein target site that ‘morphs’ over time, on account of drug-resistant mutations. We can also study how drug ‘floppiness’ can affect its ability to cross biological membranes and reach its protein target.”

Peng, who worked as a biophysicist at a pharmaceutical company for 10 years before he came to Notre Dame, said the study of flexibility-activity relationships (FARs) adds another dimension to the longstanding structure-activity relationships (SARs) that scientists have studied. Addressing the dynamism of both the target molecule and the drug molecule can provide important resources for drug designers.

“If you could know, atom by atom, which parts have to move and which do not have to move to bind to a target protein, that’s information a chemist can use,” he says. “They can change the ligand as chemists do, repeat the activity assay, and see if it has improved.”

The research was funded by the and is part of a collaboration between the Peng laboratory and the laboratory of Felicia Etzkorn at Virginia Tech.

Contact: Jeffrey Peng, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, 574-631-2983, jpeng@nd.edu

Thomas Loughran, research professor of physics, guides local high school students in analyzing particle physics research data through the Masterclass program hosted by the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center.

High school students from the United States and 22 other countries will participate in particle physics research through an international Particle Physics Masterclass managed by the QuarkNet Center at the University of Notre Dame.

The class will allow some 400 high school students at 23 sites in the United States to work directly with sophisticated physics data involved in critical research at the CERN collider in Europe. The students will work with particle physicists to analyze measurements from the Large Electron Positron Collider, the predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a tunnel at the French-Swiss border, to determine how the Z-boson decays into other particles. Although scientists provided the original analysis, the high school students will conduct their own independent analysis.

Student groups will present their results to one another through a national videoconference moderated by scientists at Fermilab.

“They will look at events, make determinations and come to their own conclusions,” said Kenneth Cecire of QuarkNet, who facilitates the Masterclass in the United States. “They will analyze the same data online, but will come to individual, independent conclusions.”

The Masterclass, started in Europe, is a main educational activity of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group. QuarkNet, a federally-funded program bringing particle physics and education reform to high school classrooms, manages the project in the United States.

On Feb. 26 (Friday) at Notre Dame’s QuarkNet Center, high school students and teachers led by Randy Ruchti, professor of physics, and Dan Karmgard, research assistant professor of physics, will conduct the analysis and share their results.

For additional information on the Masterclass, visit .

Contact: Kenneth Cecire, 574-631-3343, kcecire@nd.edu

A discovery by associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry Brian Baker and his research group at the University of Notre Dame reveals the importance of dynamic motion by proteins involved in the body’s immune response. Results of the study were published in Immunity, the leading research journal in the field of immunology.

Scientists have long known that receptors on the immune system’s T-cells are important for discovering and destroying cells that are infected with viruses or other pathogens. Baker’s group studied cross-reactivity, the ability of different T-cell receptors which number perhaps a few hundred million in the body to recognize the vastly larger number of possible antigens produced by other cells. The process is important for dealing with viruses, cancers, autoimmunity, transplant rejection and other issues related to the immune system.

Most past studies considered the receptors on each cell as static components, but in fact the molecules move and adopt multiple structures. Baker’s group found that the success or failure of the T-cell receptor to attach to a target cell’s antigen involves complex movements in search of a compatible final structure. Different antigens produce different kinds of motion.

“What we’re adding to the equation is how motion is involved,” Baker said. “It both complicates as well as simplifies how we think about recognition. Different extents of motion can exist when you have different antigens being presented. It complicates our thinking about how diversity is presented to the immune system, yet simplifies our thinking about how diversity is accommodated by the immune system.

“Overall, we’ve got to consider flexibility when we think about structures in the immune system and structures in biology in general.”

The static view long-favored in structural biology is shifting to a greater emphasis on protein dynamics, he says. For example, scientists have discovered that vaccines can help the immune system fight cancer, but vaccines that mimic biological structures can still fail if they do not take into account flexibility and dynamics.

“It probably will be one of the defining areas of biochemistry over the next 10 to 15 years – getting at the role of how biological molecules move and how that movement influences biology,” Baker said.

Contact: Brian Baker, associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, brian-baker@nd.edu, 574-631-9810

The shows, which are free and open to the public, will begin at 7 and 8 p.m. Free tickets, which are required for the show, are available at the LaFortune Student Center box office.

The Digital Visualization Theater will take viewers on a journey to the center of our galaxy and unveil unprecedented mural-sized images of the Milky Way’s core as seen by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Notre Dame also will unveil a matched trio of Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra images of the Milky Way’s center on a large 3-by-4-foot panel. Each image shows the telescope’s different wavelength view of the central region of our galaxy that illustrates not only the unique science each observatory conducts, but also how far astronomy has come since Galileo.

The stunning photographs of the central region of our galaxy commemorate the International Year of Astronomy 2009, which is the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning a telescope to the heavens. Since Galileo’s spyglass, telescopes have grown ever larger and better, and have moved to mountaintops and into space. NASA’s Great Observatories represent the crowning achievements of astronomy four centuries later and are honoring this legacy with a national image unveiling.

A giant 6-by-3-foot image presents a unique view that showcases the galaxy in near-infrared light observed by Hubble, infrared light observed by Spitzer, and X-ray light observed by Chandra. This combined image was carefully assembled from mosaic photo surveys of the core by each telescope. It provides the most wide-ranging view ever of our galaxy’s mysterious hub.

Within these images one can trace the spectacle of stellar evolution: from vibrant regions of star birth, to young hot stars, to old cool stars, to seething remnants of stellar death called black holes. This activity occurs against a vivid backdrop in the crowded, hostile environment of the galaxy’s core, the center of which is dominated by a supermassive black hole millions of times more massive than our sun.

These multi-wavelength views provide both stunning beauty and a wealth of scientific information that could not have been dreamed of by Galileo.
More information is available at on the Web.

Contact: Keith Davis, director, Digital Visualization Theater, dvt_info@nd.edu, 574-631-3952

Robert Kirshner, the Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University, will speak on “Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Cosmos: Einstein’s Blunder Undone” on Thursday (Oct. 8) at the University of Notre Dame.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in the Hesburgh Library’s Carey Auditorium.

Kirshner will discuss recent observations of exploding stars located halfway across the universe that reveal that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It appears that the universe is dominated by a mysterious “dark energy” that drives cosmic acceleration. Kirshner will explain the picture of the universe through a richly illustrated presentation including drawing his own first-hand account of the discovery.

Kirshner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2007, Kirshner and his colleagues of the High-Z Supernova Team shared the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. His award-winning book “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos” has been translated into four languages.

Kirshner’s lecture is part of the 2009 international year of astronomy events at Notre Dame. The lecture is sponsored by the Charles Edison Lecture Fund.

Contact:From: Marissa Runkle, College of Science, mrunkle@nd.edu, 574-631-4465

The University of Notre Dame is hosting the fourth Regional Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium today (July 31) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Jordan Hall of Science. More than 150 undergraduate researchers from Notre Dame, Hope College and the University of Michigan will present the results of their summer research at the symposium.

Sponsored by the College of Science, the event provides a forum for students in physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, mathematics and engineering to present their research. Students from all three institutions have participated in a wide variety of programs including the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the National Science Foundation. Their research has applications to a broad range of fields including human health, finance, nuclear physics and ecology.

Student participation has grown significantly since the three schools launched the symposium three years ago. At the first symposium in 2006, 54 students presented and at the second symposium 98 students gave poster and oral presentations. Last year’s event was held at the University of Michigan with some 100 presentations, including cyber-presentations from REU students in Beijing.

Undergraduate researchers will be presenting at the following times in the Jordan Hall of Science:

Oral Presentation Session I
9 a.m. – noon Physics (Room 322)
11 a.m. – 12 noon Chemistry and Biochemistry (Room 101)
11 a.m. – 12 noon Biology (Room 105)

Poster Presentation Session
1 – 3 p.m. Galleria

Oral Presentations Session II
2 – 4:30 p.m. Physics (Room 322)
3 – 4 p.m. Chemistry and Biochemistry (Room 101)
3 – 4 p.m. Biology (Room 105)

The event is free and open to the public and more information is available at: .

Contact: Dominic Chaloner, College of Science Undergraduate Research Coordinator, Chaloner.1@nd.edu, (574) 631-2441

Jacek Furdyna, professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the Nicolaus Copernicus Medal by the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. The medal is the Academy’s highest honor.

Furdyna, who holds the Aurora and Thomas Marquez Chair of Information Theory and Computer Technology in Notre Dame’s Department of Physics, was recognized for his world-renowned contribution to the design and development of new semiconductor materials, including magnetic semiconductors aimed at performing new and extremely fast functions in computers.

The new functionality of these semiconductor materials is based on the use of the electron spin, in addition to its charge, in the design of electronic circuits, which is expected to lay the groundwork for non-volatile magnetic memories for the next generation of computing systems. In addition to his work on magnetic semiconductors, Furdyna also has focused on two other semiconducting systems: quantum well structures for use in blue and blue-green light emitters, including semiconductor lasers, and semiconductor nanostructures, such as self-assembled quantum dots, quantum wires and their arrays. All of the structures are fabricated at Notre Dame by molecular beam epitaxy.

Born in Poland, Furdyna was deported to Siberia at age six by the Soviet government. After his release, he lived in the Middle East and England. Upon arriving in the United States, he attended Chicago’s Holy Trinity High 91��Ƶ, operated by the Congregation of Holy Cross. Nearly all of his high school teachers were Notre Dame alumni, so his first academic contact after arriving in this country was with Notre Dame.

Furdyna was graduated from Loyola University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in physics summa cum laude. He went on to earn his doctoral degree in physics at Northwestern University and joined the staff of the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Purdue University, where he directed the Materials Research Laboratory.

Furdyna joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1987. For his achievements in science, he was awarded honorary doctorates by Warsaw University in 2002 and by Purdue University in 2007. Furdyna is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Physics of the United Kingdom.

The Copernicus Award’s past recipients are renowned scientists and engineers in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and other areas of science and technology including a number of Nobel Prize winners, whose work in the opinion of the Polish Academy of Sciences has had significant impact on science and technology in Poland.

Contact: Jacek Furdyna, professor of physics, 574-631-6741, furdyna@nd.edu

Traditional cell phones have been immune to viruses because they lack standardized operating systems. However, as smart phones rapidly increase in market share, viruses pose a serious threat to mobile communications.

A new study in the journal Science that is coauthored by University of Notre Dame physics doctoral student Pu Wang and researchers from Northeastern University suggests that the risk of mobile phone virus attacks will increase as a few operating systems gain more market share. The study also analyzes the pattern and speed of the spread of infection for Bluetooth and multimedia messaging services (MMS). The researchers used anonymous billing records of 6.2 million mobile subscribers and tracked calling patterns using the location of the closest mobile phone tower.

Smart phones, which can share programs and data, could attract virus writers at a level more disruptive than computer viruses. Mobile viruses can be spread by either Bluetooth or MMS communications protocols. Bluetooth viruses can infect phones with the technology within a local area, comparable to the spread of contact-based disease. The infected phone must be moved into another tower’s range in order to infect a new set of phones. The slow spread provides time to develop protection from the virus.

MMS viruses, like computer viruses, can send copies to everyone in the infected phone’s address book and copy themselves into a new handset in about two minutes, but the underlying call network is so fragmented that viruses can access only a fraction of susceptible phones. Since 2005, virus writers have developed hybrids that spread with both Bluetooth and MMS connections.

Wang, who is part of Notre Dame’s Center for Complex Network Research, notes that the increasing dominance of some operating systems for smart phones leaves the technology vulnerable to attacks by sophisticated virus writers.

“We believe that the understanding of the basic spreading patterns presented here could help estimate the realistic risks carried by mobile phone viruses and aid in the development of proper measures so as to avoid the costly impact of future outbreaks,” he said.

The other authors of the study are Marta C. González and Albert-László Barabási of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University.

Contact: Pu Wang, Department of Physics, 574-329-2113, pwang2@nd.edu

The University of Notre Dame has received a three-year Fogarty International Research Collaboration Award (FIRCA) grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund an international research collaboration to investigate the transmission of dengue fever.

David Severson, professor of biological sciences and director of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, will lead the study with the University of Pune in India. The research, which will primarily be conducted in India, will focus on the midgut bacteria in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The proposed research will provide new information regarding the influence of midgut bacteria on the biology of the mosquito, including the ability to support and transmit the dengue virus to humans. With no existing vaccine to counter it, dengue is a threat to 2.5 billion people, with estimates of 50 million cases of dengue fever each year.

The FIRCA grant provides $40,000 annually over three years to support the work of Severson and his collaborators in India. The grant will serve as seed funding to start research collaborations which are expected to lead to long-standing partnerships that generate future grants with larger funding. The University’s award was one of only five grants which were given jointly to universities and an overseas collaborators in low- and middle-income countries. The FIRCA program is intended to benefit the research interests of both U.S and foreign collaborators while increasing research capacity at the foreign site.

Severson is optimistic about the new opportunities that the award will create for Notre Dame to expand research partnerships in India.

“Collaboration has always been an essential component of effective global heath research,” said Roger Glass, director of the Fogarty International Center. “These newest FIRCA awards continue this trend, providing an enormous opportunity for the international exchange of methods, information and perspectives, as well as creating career opportunities for scientists in their home countries.”

Contact: David Severson, director of the , 574-631-3826, dseverso@nd.edu

Nancy R. Hellyer, president and chief executive officer of Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center (SJRMC), will speak on “Catholic Ministry in Health Care” on Wednesday (April 8) at the University of Notre Dame.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 105 of the Jordan Hall of Science.

Hellyer will discuss the ministry of health care in light of Catholic teachings including the differences required under the Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. She will share SJRMC’s history and plans for future ministry to support this community including the latest information on the new SJRMC hospital.

SJRMC is a not-for-profit, multi-hospital health care system located in north central Indiana. SJRMC is constructing a new, world-class, $355 million hospital scheduled to open on Dec. 14.

“The medical and technological innovations at the new Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center will be unlike anything ever seen in healthcare throughout Michiana,” Hellyer said, adding that the new, 633,000-square foot facility will provide even greater opportunities for collaboration between the SJRMC and Notre Dame.

Hellyer earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from DePauw University and a master’s in business administration from the Keller Graduate 91��Ƶ of Management.

The lecture is sponsored by Notre Dame’s .

Contact: Marissa Runkle, College of Science, mrunkle@nd.edu, 574-631-4465

The University of Notre Dame extended Research Community (NDeRC) will host a forum titled"Partnering for Education and Research Forum II – An Invitation to Local K-12 STEM Teachers and Parents"on Saturday (Jan. 24) from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Jordan Hall of Science.

This forum will acquaint area teachers and parents with the educational outreach and research opportunities available through Notre Dame. After the initial informative presentations, there will be group discussions led by Notre Dame science and engineering faculty engaging teachers, parents and other community members about the opportunities and challenges facing the local Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) community.

Some 195 teachers, parents and school administrators are expected to attend the forum. Participating teachers are paid a professional development stipend of $100 for participating and schools are eligible to receive mini grants up to $250 for science expenditures.

A complete schedule is available at: .

TopicID: 31189

Michael Wiescher, the Freimann Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed to the National Academies Board on Physics and Astronomy for a three-year term beginning this month.

The Board on Physics and Astronomy seeks to inform the government and the public regarding significant scientific opportunities and issues in physics and astronomy and build bridges between evolving sub-disciplines of physics and astronomy and other areas of science.

As a member of the board, Wiescher will collaborate with other leading researchers to identify trends in research and new developments at the scientific forefronts. He will strengthen connections to technology and foster interactions with other fields and academic disciplines.

Wiescher is a world-leading scientist in experimental nuclear astrophysics who has made numerous contributions to the determination of key nuclear reaction rates for the understanding of stellar evolution and the synthesis of the elements in the Universe. He is particularly well-known for the use of novel techniques involving low energy ion beams in measuring nuclear reactions determining the lifetime and evolution of stars.

Wiescher is the director of the Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Notre Dame. He also serves as director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA), an institute in collaboration with Notre Dame, Michigan State University, and the University of Chicago that addresses a broad range of experimental, theoretical and observational questions in nuclear astrophysics. JINA is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Additionally, Wiescher has been reappointed to the advisory board of the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) for a three-year term beginning in September. The NRCC advances research and innovation through high-value information and publishing services in science, technology and medicine and provides Canada’s research and innovation community with tools and services for accelerated discovery, innovation and commercialization.

_ Contact: Michael Wiescher, 574-631-6788,_ " mwiesche@nd.edu ":mailto:mwiesche@nd.edu

TopicID: 28907

Twenty-one leading researchers from universities and pharmaceuticals around the world will present at a conference titledNovel Antibiotics, Old and New TargetsSaturday and Sunday (June 28 and 29) in the Jordan Hall of Science at the University of Notre Dame.

The conference assembles leaders from Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, Wyeth-Ayerst, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Gent, the University of Ljubljana, Northwestern University and numerous other institutions and pharmaceutical corporations who share an interest in developing antibacterial agents. Presenters will share their work on developments involving highly resistant bacteria, known assuperbugs,for which there are few, if any, treatments.

Nowadays, fewer pharmaceutical companies are involved in the development of drugs for these bacteria, because treatments for other diseases are more profitable. The conference will focus on old targetsthe sites of interaction of existing antibioticsand new targets that could provide opportunities for new classes of drugs to treat infections.

Presenters include Steve Brickner and Michael Barbachyn, the co-inventors of Zyvox™, which was introduced in 2000 in U.S. clinics to treat infections from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a superbug that still kills about 20,000 people a year in the United States alone. Another notable presenter is Karen Bush from Johnson&Johnson who is spearheading the introduction of Ceftobiprole in the United States. Ceftobiprole, a broad-spectrum antibiotic that also can treat MRSA, was approved this year for treatment of complicated skin infections.

Faculty members in the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry as well as Biology will be chairing the sessions. The conference is led by Shahriar Mobashery, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Navari Family Chair in Life Sciences, who investigates mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in MRSA, among other bacteria, and studies strategies in development of new classes of antibiotics. He says that the importance of this event is underscored by the difficulties that clinicians are having in dealing with highly resistant bacteria. Some of these infective agents can only be treated with a single available antibiotic or cannot be treated with anything that is available.
The entire conference schedule is available at .

_ Contact: Shahriar Mobashery, Navari Family Chair in Life Sciences, 574-631-2933 or_ " mobashery@nd.edu ":mailto:mobashery@nd.edu _
_

TopicID: 28448

Ann Weber, executive director of medicinal chemistry at Merck Research Laboratories, will deliver a lecture titledDesign and Synthesis of Selective DPP-4 Inhibitors: Discovery of Januvia™,a New Treatment for Type 2 Diabetesat 11 a.m. Thursday (April 10) in room 123 of the University of Notre Dames Nieuwland Science Hall. Webers lecture is part of the Organic Seminar series sponsored by the Department of Chemistry and is free and open to the public.

Weber led a cross-functional team of chemists and biologists that created the diabetes pill Januvia™, a leading drug that was the first in its class to come to market. The drug, which was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2006, helps diabetics control their blood-sugar levels by enhancing the body’s ability to produce its own insulin.

Weber is co-inventor on 23 US patents, the author or co-author of more than 55 publications and has 14 patents pending. Her research team won the 2007 Prix Galien USA award for their work on Januvia™. In 2007, she received the Merck Directors Award as well as the 2007 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award. She was named a MerckMost Amazing Womanin 2006.

Webers research interests include the design and synthesis of ligands for G-protein coupled receptors, ion channels and enzymes. In addition to her work on diabetes, she has worked in the area of obesity research where her group identified a ß3-adrenergic receptor agonist that was used for key proof of concept studies in the clinic, demonstrating that stimulation of this target did not induce weight loss in humans.

Weber was graduated from Notre Dame with a bachelors degree in chemistry in 1982. She earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard in 1987 and accepted a senior research position at Merck Research Laboratories that same year.

TopicID: 27309