Congratulations to Claire Tran from the Irene Chen lab on receiving the Connie Frank Fellowship Award. This one-time award, which has been made possible by a generous donation, consists of $10,000 in fellowship support for Summer 2016.
A multidisciplinary team of scientists — including two UC Santa Barbara faculty members — is poised to undertake a major biomedical research initiative focused on the escalating problem of sepsis, the body’s abnormal response to severe infections.
Providing structural support and protection against such conditions as blistering, cataracts and dementia, intermediate filament proteins (IFs) reside in every cell in the human body. In insects, however, IFs are nowhere to be found.
Scientists have posited that in these creatures another kind of protein is responsible for key IF functions; but exactly what kind — or even where to start looking — has been a mystery.
Compared to other mammals, humans have the largest cerebral cortex. A sheet of brain cells that folds in on itself multiple times in order to fit inside the skull, the cortex is the seat of higher functions. It is what enables us to process everything we see and hear and think.
The expansion of the cerebral cortex sets humans apart from the rest of their fellow primates. Yet scientists have long wondered what mechanisms are responsible for this evolutionary development.
UC Santa Barbara announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations grant winner; CGE is an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. David Low, a professor in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled “Strategy for development of enteric pathogen-specific T2 bacteriophage targeting the essential outer membrane protein BamA.”
