New Faculty
Science Journal, Fall 1997 -- Vol 15, No. 1
Philip C. Bevilacqua is interested in the folding, structure, and catalysis of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and its interactions with proteins. RNA-protein complexes have structural and functional roles central in carrying out and regulating many biological processes. Many of these processes involve dynamic changes in the structure of the RNA molecule. Bevilacqua's work focuses on biologically important systems, including viral replication and the human response to viruses. His goal is to understand the mechanisms of these biological systems.
Bevilacqua earned his bachelor of science degree, summa cum laude, in chemistry with a minor in physics at the John Carroll University in 1987. He earned his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Rochester in 1993. He was a Jane Coffin Childs Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado from 1993 until the fall of 1997, when he joined the Penn State faculty.
W. Nielsen Brandt, assistant professor
of
astronomy and astrophysics
W. Nielsen Brandt uses X rays to study the giant black holes that reside in the centers of active galaxies. Gas swirling around these black holes emits X rays, and Brandt's spectral and variability studies of this X ray emission help to reveal the physical conditions near black holes. Brandt is trying to determine the precise mechanisms by which the X rays are emitted, and he hopes to measure the rates at which supermassive black holes are swallowing matter. He also works to discover new active galaxies using X ray data. Brandt says he uses the X ray emissions from the central black hole as a "flashlight" to "X-ray" matter in the host galaxy of the black hole. Brandt primarily uses data from the ASCA and ROSAT satellites, and he soon hopes to use the new AXAF satellite, which was designed and built with contributions from Penn State's Gordon Garmire, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and his research team (see story on page ).
Brandt earned his bachelor's degree in physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and his doctoral degree at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University (UK) in 1996. He was a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1992 until 1997, when he joined the faculty at Penn State.
Craig E. Cameron, assistant professor
of
biochemistry and molecular biology
Craig E. Cameron studies the Hepatitis C virus (HCV), the primary cause of post-transfusion hepatitis. Chronic infection by HCV progresses from acute hepatitis to cirrhosis of the liver, and often terminates in liver cancer. Complicating the development of an antiviral vaccine is the discovery of at least 21 HCV genetic variants. The objective of CameronÕs studies is to define the molecular mechanism of HCV genome replication through the discovery and characterization of viral and cellular factors required for this process. "The factors required for HCV genome replication represent attractive targets for the design of antiviral agents," he says. Cameron has developed a model for HCV genome replication and plans to use biochemical, kinetic, genetic, and structural approaches to test and refine it.
Cameron earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics, magna cum laude, at Howard University in 1987. He earned his doctoral degree in biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University in 1993. He was a National Institutes of Health Predoctoral Fellow from 1988 to 1992 and in 1993 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Case Western Reserve University. He arrived at Penn State in 1994 as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and became an assistant professor in biochemistry and microbiology in 1997.
Shyamoli Chaudhuri has broad interests in theoretical high-energy physics and quantum gravity. Her area of research is String Theory, a subject that addresses questions on the forefront of fundamental physics and provides clues to discovering a precise and unified short-distance description of the fundamental interactions and of spacetime. Her research is currently focused on string duality?a radical new dynamical-symmetry principle relating physical phenomena at the shortest and longest distance scales. Recent developments in this area have produced a novel picture of quantum black-hole physics, providing new insights and mathematical tools for the understanding of strong coupling in quantum field theories and in string theory.
Chaudhuri earned her bachelor's degree in physics with honors at the University of Delhi in India and her master's degree in physics in 1986 and her doctoral degree in physics in 1989 from Cornell University. From 1989 to 1992, she was a research associate in theoretical physics at Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) in Illinois and from 1992 to 1993 she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Theory Group of the University of Texas at Austin. From 1993 to 1996, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She served as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder until 1997, when she joined the faculty of Penn State.
Stéphane Coutu is interested in experimental high-energy particle astrophysics, which he describes as a study of the universe "at the point where the mind-bogglingly vast meets the infinitesimally tiny." His research concerns high-energy cosmic rays?particles that rain down on Earth from the depths of space. He also is searching for particles that could be the elusive dark matter that appears to pervade the universe but is detectable, at present, only through its gravitational influence. Coutu is involved in the NASA-supported High-Energy Antimatter Telescope (HEAT) program, a series of high-altitude balloon-borne experiments to study antimatter in the primary cosmic radiation, and the Monopole Astrophysics Cosmic Ray Observatory (MACRO) project, an experiment buried deep under a mountain in Italy designed to search for magnetic monopoles and to study a number of astrophysical phenomena, such as the detection of neutrinos emitted by supernovae in our galaxy. In addition, he recently joined the Auger Project to study the highest-energy particles in the universe, whose existence still cannot satisfactorily be explained.
Coutu earned his bachelor's degree with first-class honors in physics in 1987 at McGill University in Canada. He earned his master's degree in 1989 in physics and his doctoral degree in physics in 1993 at the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan until he joined the faculty of Penn State in the fall of 1997.
Vincent H. Crespi's research, which aims to develop a broad framework of knowledge in condensed-matter physics, currently focuses on electron transport and superconductivity. A critical aspect of his research strategy is close collaboration with experimentalists. Among the applications he is interested in are novel carbon-tubule-based nanodevices, 10-9 meters in size. He is studying their synthesis and electronic structures, in addition to novel characteristics of their bond-rotation defects, which have a powerful effect on the size of the semiconductor gap. "Should controlled synthesis be possible, one can speculate on long-term applications in detectors and signal processing," Crespi says. Other areas of his research include giant magnetoresistive manganite materials and novel electron-phonon mechanisms in high-temperature superconductors.
Crespi earned his bachelor's degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 and his doctoral degree in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. In 1994 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley and then became a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 1996 to 1997, when he joined the faculty of Penn State.
John R. Desjarlais is interested in the fundamental relationship between the amino-acid sequence of a protein and its three-dimensional structure. His research involves the design of proteins?especially the construction of amino-acid sequences that encode information for the folding of a protein into a uniquely defined structure?and the determination of the factors within certain amino-acid sequences that control a protein's ability to undergo specific changes in structure. Using a combination of computational and experimental techniques, he is analyzing the qualities of amino-acid sequences that determine a natural protein's specific structure in an effort to ultimately be able to synthesize proteins with desired structures. "We are attempting to find the sequence differences that distinguish proteins and their different abilities to change form," he says. "Ultimately, one can imagine designing proteins that can be used as catalysts, therapeutics, or biological tools."
Desjarlais earned his bachelor's degree, in physics, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts in 1987 and his doctoral degree in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1993. From 1993 to 1994 he held a postdoctoral position at the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company. In 1994 he continued his postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley until the fall of 1997, when he arrived at Penn State.
Timothy E. Glass is studying various aspects of bioorganic chemistry, with an emphasis on mechanisms of molecular recognition and catalysis. His approach is to design and make small molecule targets that simulate the functions of natural macromolecules. These artificial systems provide insight into the natural systems they mimic. One major focus of his research is the study of allosteric, or cooperative effects, which are often encountered in enzymatic systems as control mechanisms. The mechanism of the response of the substances acted upon, (the substrate), can be applied to the production of a new class of biosensors. A second major focus of Glass' research is the preparation of enzyme mimics. These structures will be used to study binding and catalysis of biologically relevant substances in water. "This knowledge can be used to perform recognition and catalysis, which will then lead to new materials and reactions," he says.
Glass earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry, magna cum laude, at Franklin and Marshall College in 1989, and earned his doctoral degree as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 1995. Glass joined Columbia University as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow in 1995 until the fall of 1997, when he arrived at Penn State.
Jenny Xiaoe Li has two major areas of research interest: the mathematical modeling of market uncertainty and the study of monetary economics by mathematical analysis and numerical simulations. Her work on the mathematical modeling of market uncertainty focuses on the economic effects of such factors as prices, employment, and the inflation rate. She says "I believe that numerical analysis will provide a new and powerful approach to understanding the effect of market uncertainty, which obviously is a subject of great social importance." Li also has developed rigorous mathematical and numerical tools that can be applied successfully to a large class of economic models, especially to monetary models. These tools, which are used for predicting future economic trends, are considered to be an improvement over previous approaches that relied on trial-and-error methods.
Li earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1982 at the Yunnan University in China, and a master's degree in mathematics in 1988 then a doctoral degree in mathematical economics in 1993 from Cornell University. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State from 1993 to 1995 and, after working as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1995, she became an assistant professor at Penn State in 1997.
Ken Ono's primary field of interest is number theory. His research concerns the theory of partitions, which is the study of how whole numbers are expressed as sums of other numbers. His recent work on partitions has lead to surprising new perspectives on the deeper structure of connections between partitions and complicated abstract objects in other areas of mathematics. In many cases, Ono has made these complicated theoretical constructions more explicit by using partitions. For example, he used his work on partitions to devise a new method for studying points on elliptic curves, one of the main objects in the recently celebrated proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which for decades was the world's most famous unsolved mathematical problem.
Ono earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1989 and a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1993. He has held faculty positions at the University of Georgia and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and recently was named a National Security Agency Young Investigator. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1995 to 1997, when he joined the faculty of Penn State.
Joseph Reese, assistant professor
of
biochemistry and molecular biology
Joseph Reese uses a combination of biochemical, molecular, and genetic approaches to investigate the coordination of gene-transcription regulation and cell-cycle control in the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. An important step in understanding this process requires the identification of gene products that link transcription and the cell cycle together. He has created yeast strains containing genetic mutations in order to analyze how the transcriptional machinery and the cell-cycle control system communicate. Some of the yeast genes he studies have counterparts known to be implicated in the formation of certain kinds of cancers. "The human gene product may function in cell-cycle regulation and its alteration in cell-cycle functions may lead to leukemia and other cancers," Reese says.
He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, with a minor in chemistry, at Boston University in 1988, then his master's degree in molecular physiology in 1990 and his doctoral degree in molecular physiology in 1992 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois in 1992 and from 1993 to 1997 he was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He joined the faculty of Penn State in the fall of 1997.
Billie J. Swalla's research encompasses broad areas in evolutionary, developmental, and molecular biology. She uses the sea squirt, a primitive animal in the chordata phylum, to study the control of gene activation during embryonic development and the influence of developmental genes on the structure and function of the ascidian tadpole larva. Her experiments use two very closely related sea squirts that live side by side in one small coastal area. One of these species develops into a regular tadpole larva with a head and a tail, while the other one does not make any larval structures, but sperm and eggs can hybridize and make an intermediate larva. "These species offer a unique opportunity to examine specific molecular changes underlying the chordate body structure and species formation," she says.
Swalla earned a bachelor of science degree with honors in zoology and a minor in botany in 1980, a master of science degree in zoology in 1983, and a doctoral degree in biology in 1988 from the University of Iowa. She was a National Institutes of Health cellular and molecular biology trainee from 1984 to 1986 at the University of Iowa. From 1988 to 1989 she was an American Association of University Women Sarah Berliner Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Austin. She was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Davis from 1989 to 1992 and also an assistant research developmental biologist from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 1997 she was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, then joined Penn State in the fall of 1997.