Dimensions_of_Discovery

Summer2012

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Distinguished Professor Elected to National Engineering Academy Supriyo Datta, the Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineer- ing, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Datta was among 66 new members and 10 foreign associates elected to the NAE, one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Members are elected by their peers for distinguished service in business and academic management, in technical positions, as university faculty and as leaders in government and private engineering organizations. Datta was chosen for membership because of his work in quantum transport modeling in nanoscale electronic devices. Keck Foundation Awards Grant for Epigenetics Study Four Purdue faculty members have received a $1 million grant from the W. Keck Foundation to pursue transformative research in epigenetics. Joseph Irudayaraj, professor of agricultural and biological engineering, Sophie Lelièvre, associate professor of basic medical science, Ann Kirchmaier, associate professor of bio- chemistry, all from Purdue, as well as Feng Zhou, professor of anatomy, cell biology and neurobiology from IUPUI, are the investigators for the grant, the first awarded to Purdue by the Keck Foundation in 20 years. The Keck Foundation's Medical Research Program seeks to advance the fron- Supriyo Datta Continental Ecology Focus of New NSF Grant tiers of the life sciences by supporting high-risk basic research. In this particular study, Irudayaraj and his co-investigators will seek to understand how epigenetic marks — chemical additions to the genetic sequence that lead to chronic illness — can govern gene expression at the single cell level. By studying them in a neural stem cell differentiation model and a 3D breast epithelial tissue culture system, the researchers hope to devise ways of resetting key events during neural differentiation or tumor formation in individual cells. The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to Gabe Bowen (PI), associate professor of earth and atmo- spheric sciences, Chris Miller, assistant professor of library sciences, and Eric Riggs, adjunct associate professor of geoscience, education and geology, to support their project, Collaborative Re- search: Integrated Training for Continen- tal Ecology (ITCE): Bridging Scales and Systems with Isotopes. Ann Kirchmaier Sophie Lelièvre Joseph Irudayaraj Feng Zhou The $2,155,000 award in combina- tion with a $2,187,000 award to collab- orators at the University of Utah, will provide training and network building opportunities to more than 150 gradu- ate students and postdocs over five years, preparing future generations of ecologists to use existing and new isotopic data streams from regional to continental scale ecology programs. Data and model synthesis efforts will increase the accessibility of existing large scale isotopic datasets and data analysis tools within and beyond the ecological research community to further help develop the discipline of macrosystem biology. Summer 2012 3

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