An influential Institute of Medicine advisory panel co-chaired by Dr. Sheldon Greenfield, the Donald Bren Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine, has issued a report urging the U.S. government to fund studies comparing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit disorder and other conditions to determine which strategies work best. The recommendations were included in a list of 100 priorities developed by the panel, which was charged with advising the government on how to spend money allocated by Congress for “comparative effectiveness” research. “This report lays the foundation for an ongoing enterprise to provide the evidence that healthcare providers need to make better decisions and achieve better results,” Greenfield said.   More »

Wendell Brase, UC Irvine business & administrative services vice chancellor, will receive a "Campus Leader Who Cares" award Monday, July 13, from the Campus Safety, Health and Environmental Management Association. This major national award recognizes senior administrators who show strong support for environmental stewardship, health, and safety issues at their institutions. "It takes commitment from senior administrators to sustain a culture of safety and environmental stewardship in all aspects of their employees’ and students’ lives," said Madelyn Miller, CSHEMA president. Brase will accept the award at a ceremony in New Orleans, La.   More »

Julia Lupton, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Fellow and English professor, and her twin sister, graphic designer Ellen Lupton, recently published Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things. The book takes a fresh, funny look at toilet paper, rolling luggage, stuffed animals and potted plants, as well as housekeeping, entertaining, parenthood and time management. “Our lives belong to our families, routines and jobs,” says Lupton, a mother of four. “We wrote this book to help people feel a sense of control over their daily lives.”   More »

Variations in how people perceive colors and how those same colors appear on TV, computers and other media have confounded broadcasters, Web designers and printers trying to reproduce lifelike hues. A. Kimball Romney, UC Irvine social sciences research professor, has found a solution – a mathematical model that determines how the human eye sees color and allows it to be replicated in other formats. His model yields a 99.4 percent match, based on International Commission on Illumination standards.The study, published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was co-authored by Chuan-Chin Chiao of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.   More »

The UC Irvine Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia has a new name -- UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, or UCI MIND. The change makes the institute's name more user-friendly and better describes its role in researching brain disorders beyond Alzheimer's disease, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington's disease, inclusion body myositis, and Lou Gehrig's disease, director Frank LaFerla said. More than 60,000 Orange County residents suffer from Alzheimer’s, the leading cause of dementia among the elderly. In the U.S., 5.3 million people have the disease. Every 71 seconds, an American develops Alzheimer's, and by 2030, someone will develop it every 30 seconds. Other disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, also are expected to double in the next few decades.   More »

About 20 local science teachers are at UC Irvine this week and next to learn about atmospheric chemistry as part of the AirUCI Summer Teacher Workshop. UCI researchers share their knowledge about air quality, climate change, car emissions and other topics with the participants, who in turn take the information back to their 7th- through 12th-grade classrooms. Goals are to connect with the local teaching community and increase student interest in science. Researchers with AirUCI study topics ranging from indoor air purifiers to the effects of sea salt on urban smog formation.   More »

UC Irvine has been awarded up to $300,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy for nuclear energy research. Mikael Nilsson, chemical engineering & materials science assistant professor, initiated the effort along with Russell Detwiler (pictured), civil & environmental engineering assistant professor, and George Miller, chemistry senior lecturer and director of UCI's nuclear reactor facility. With the grant money, the scientists will purchase new equipment and strengthen UCI's nuclear science and engineering research program.   More »

Women exposed to air pollution from freeways and congested roads are much more likely to give birth to premature babies and suffer from preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced hypertension), according to a University of California study led by UC Irvine public health assistant professor Jun Wu. The findings, based on pregnant women in the Long Beach/Orange County region, add to the growing evidence that car and truck exhaust can jeopardize the health of babies while they are in the womb. Reviewing the birth records of more than 81,000 infants, researchers found that the risk of having a baby born before 30 weeks of gestation increased 128 percent for women who live near the worst traffic-generated air pollution. The study appears online in Environmental Health Perspectives.   More »

Dr. Zeev Kain, anesthesiology & perioperative care professor and chair at UC Irvine, has found that treating children with the hormone melatonin before they undergo surgery significantly reduces emergence delirium, a distressing incidence of acute behavioral changes experienced when waking up from anesthesia. Affecting up to 20 percent of children who undergo surgery, emergence delirium in the post-anesthesia care unit can include crying, thrashing and need for restraint. This also can lead to behavioral changes outside the recovery suite, with the onset of nightmares, bed-wetting and separation anxiety, according to Kain. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates sleep and moods. The study, which involved 148 subjects between the ages of 2 and 8 undergoing outpatient surgery, appears in Anesthesiology.   More »

UC Irvine neuroscientist James McGaugh has been selected to receive the American Philosophical Society's 2009 Karl Spencer Lashley Award. Established in 1957 by Lashley, a society member and distinguished neuroscientist and neuropsychologist, the award recognizes outstanding research on the integrative neuroscience of behavior. McGaugh is founding chair of the department of neurobiology & behavior, and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UCI.   More »

Three UC Irvine scientists have been awarded nearly $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to buy research instruments. Suzanne Sandmeyer, biological chemistry professor, will receive about $500,000 to purchase a next-generation DNA sequencer; Tom Poulos, molecular biology & biochemistry professor, will get about $477,000 for an X-ray diffraction instrument; and Greg Weiss (pictured), chemistry associate professor, will receive about $500,000 for a mass spectrometer, which helps determine molecule mass and examines proteins in great detail.   More »

Chemistry professor James Nowick has been awarded more than $98,000 for a project that seeks to understand and control peptides and proteins that are involved in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. This work is supported by the National Institute of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences through the Recovery Act. Nowick's research interests include organic and bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology and biomolecular nanotechnology.   More »

Dr. Steven George has been named founding director of The Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology at UC Irvine. George, the William J. Link Professor and Chair of Biomedical Engineering, will lead the center’s initiatives in cardiovascular research and training. The center’s multidisciplinary effort focuses on heart and vascular diseases and advanced cardiovascular device technology, with strong collaboration among students, faculty and cardiovascular experts. Although programs will be directed by the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the center will integrate many disciplines, such as tissue engineering, materials science, computer science, and advanced imaging and microfabrication, all of which may play a role in creating devices that can help treat cardiovascular diseases.   More »

UC Irvine researchers are leading the effort to see how - or if - natural compounds in tomatoes, kava and other “superfoods” work in the human body to prevent or treat cancer. Since joining the UCI urology department in 2002, Xiaolin Zi has made key discoveries showing that kava compounds called flavokawains stop bladder tumor growth in cell cultures and animal studies, and he believes they hold hope for staving off bladder cancer in humans. And in recent work, he’s finding that lycopene – an antioxidant compound in tomatoes – is proving to be a promising supplement for prostate cancer chemotherapy. “Although there are not yet a lot of studies showing the cancer-fighting effectiveness of natural treatments, many cancer patients are using them,” he says. “There is a lot of exciting potential is this area of research.”   More »

Just three years after the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine awarded its first round of research grants, the funding has resulted in the 300th research paper logged by grantees -- and it's by UC Irvine scientists Hans Keirstead and Tom Lane (pictured). The paper found that transplanted cells derived from human embryonic stem cells were able to repair some damage in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. In people with MS, the immune system attacks the insulation -- called myelin -- that covers and protects neurons of the brain and spinal cord. Transplantation helped re-form the myelin coating on damaged cells. The study was published late May in the Journal of Neuroimmunology.   More »

Ivan Soltesz, UC Irvine professor and chair of anatomy & neurobiology, has been named recipient of the 2009 Michael Prize, one of the most highly regarded international awards for biomedical research on epilepsy. Soltesz’s work focuses on the factors causing epileptic seizures resulting from head trauma in adults and early febrile seizures in infants. The award includes a 20,000 euro prize and will be presented at the International Epilepsy Congress Sunday, June 28, in Budapest. In 2005, Soltesz also received the Senator Jacob Javits Award in the Neurosciences, the U.S.’s top prize for cutting-edge research into brain disorders, and was recently elected chair of the basic science committee of the American Epilepsy Society.   More »

Dinosaurs appeared on Earth about 230 million years ago, when atmospheric oxygen levels were close to half what they are today. Scientists wonder how they survived - for 165 million years - under these varying conditions. UC Irvine biologist James Hicks is finding answers in the alligator, a modern relative of the dinosaur. In a recent study, Hicks and UCI postdoctoral researcher Tomasz Owerkowicz found that alligators incubated and raised in an environment with just 12 percent oxygen (compared to today's 21 percent) had larger hearts and lungs and improved cardiopulmonary function. "In a similar vein, the success of dinosaurs probably depended on the effectiveness of their lungs and hearts in obtaining oxygen from air and distributing it throughout the body," Hicks says. "Our results provide indirect evidence that dinosaurs must have had superior oxygen delivery systems." The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Biology.   More »

UC Irvine Healthcare’s Dr. Kenneth J. Chang (left) and Dr. Raman Muthusamy are among the physicians whose study has verified an effective treatment for Barrett’s esophagus, a precancerous condition in the lining of the esophagus. There are no specific causes Barrett's esophagus, but it is commonly found in people with acid reflux disease or chronic heartburn. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine May 28, found that radiofrequency ablation – heating the cells to destroy them – treats the condition and has a low complication rate compared to a traditional esophagectomy. Earlier this year, Dr. Chang and a patient appeared on the syndicated program "The Doctors" to discuss the successful use of the procedure. See the video here: www.healthcare.uci.edu/   More »

In a tradition that goes back more than a century, the first graduating class of UC Irvine’s nursing science program will participate in a pinning ceremony Sunday, June 14, in the Student Center’s Pacific Ballroom. Dressed in their white coats, the 36 graduates will be called individually to the stage to be awarded a specially designed UCI pin from program director Ellen Olshansky and associate director Ellen Lewis as a symbolic welcoming into the nursing profession. “The pinning ceremony is a rite of passage that each nurse takes on a long journey toward a rewarding career,” says Olshansky. “Because we’re honoring UCI’s inaugural class of nursing graduates, this event is even more special.”   More »