UC Irvine

A $5 million gift from an anonymous donor is earmarked for the Department of Pediatrics, representing the largest gift in the department’s history.

Dr. Feizal Waffarn, chair of the Department of Pediatrics, said in a statement he would like to establish endowed chairs for new programs to attract research talent and improve care for Orange County’s children. The Department of Pediatrics has earned national recognition in neonatology, genetics and child neurology.

Under Waffarn’s tenure as chair, federal and other research grants have more than doubled over the past six years to $17.7 million. In 2005, the Department of Pediatrics, together with community partners from Orange County, received $14.6 million to establish one of seven Vanguard Centers in the nation to conduct the National Children’s Study. This comprehensive study will track 100,000 children nationwide to determine the impact of environmental, medical and social factors on development and health from birth to age 21.

Larry Overman, who is known as the “maestro of molecules” for his skill in manipulating the tiny particles, has been named this year’s winner of Japan’s prestigious Nagoya Medal in organic chemistry.

The prize, whose previous recipients include Nobel laureate Robert Grubbs, is being awarded to Overman for his pioneering work in synthesizing chemicals, some of which might be useful in fighting cancer.

The announcement drew praise from UCI chemist and Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, who has worked with Overman since 1971. “It’s a distinguished honor; the competition for the medal is all the organic chemists in the world.”

The soft-spoken Overman said that he’s very honored to receive the medal, which will be bestowed at a ceremony in Japan in November.

Overman is known as the “maestro of molecules” because of his gift for building unique molecules and perfectly duplicating existing ones. The chief goal: new chemical means to help the pharmaceutical industry discover and produce drugs, especially those that fight cancer.

Overman also is well-known for cultivating talented young researchers, such as Curtis Campbell, who helped Chevron develop the fuel additive Techron. Overman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. He also received the 2003 Arthur C. Cope Award, the highest honor the American Chemical Society bestows in organic chemistry.

– Gary Robbins, Orange County Register

The world’s largest society for the study of the brain and nervous system will soon be led by Tom Carew, a UCI biologist widely known among colleagues for his insights about short- and long-term memory.

Carew was recently elected president of the Society for Neuroscience, whose previous presidents have included Nobel Prize winners Eric Kandel, Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel, and Bruce McEwen, who is famous for his studies of how stress affects the brain.

In research largely done on sea slugs, Carew has helped figure out what’s going on at the cellular and molecular level as short-term memories become long-term memories. His work led to his appoint as chair of psychology at Yale University. UCI recruited him from Yale in 1999, appointing him to an endowed chair in the School of Biological Sciences. He has since been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Scientists, the 227-year-old honor society. AAAS members have included Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.

Carew will formally become president of the Society of Neuroscience in November.

– Gary Robbins, Orange County Register

UCI, which is already home to such well-known climate scientists as Nobel laureate Sherry Rowland and former Bush administration adviser Michael Prather, has hired three assistant professors who specialize in abrupt climate change.

“This group … was hired as part of a ‘cluster of excellence,'” says Susan Trumbore, chair of the Department of Earth System Science, where the new scholars will hold their appointments.

The department began as a program under Ralph Cicerone, the current president of the National Academy of Sciences. ESS’ full and joint faculty include Rowland, Prather, Trumbore (a leading figure on carbon), and Charles Zender, who recently published a paper in Science that says that up to one-third of warming the Arctic could be caused by “dirty snow,” or snow tinged with soot and other pollutants.

The three new climate experts are Claudia Pasquero, Kathleen Johnson and Todd Dupont. Trumbore provided the following mini-bios:

•Pasquero is an oceanographer who studies how the oceans act to influence the distribution of energy and therefore climate at the global scale. The mechanism she studies include tropical cyclones (i.e. hurricanes and typhoons), and the deep overturning circulation, including how these might be altered by and participate in climate change.

Dr. Pasquero’s research combines data analysis, theoretical models, and numerical models of the ocean-atmosphere system. Dr. Pasquero’s PhD is from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and she has did research at the Weitzman Institute, UCLA and Caltech prior to joining UCI.

•Johnson is a geologist who studies abrupt changes in past climates as recorded in cave (speleothem) deposits. Her current research uses cave deposits from China to study abrupt changes in the Asian Monsoon. Prof. Johnson’s PhD is from UC Berkeley and she comes to us from Oxford, where she was a Lecturer in Earth Science.

•Dupont studies the behavior of ice streams and ice shelves, in particular how fast large ice sheets like those in Greenland will respond to climate warming, and the consequences for future sea level rise. His PhD is from Penn State University.

– Gary Robbins, Orange County Register