EPA Funds Research to Detect Drinking Water Contaminants
UCR scientists have received a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a fast and effective means of detecting disease-causing viruses in drinking water supplies.

The work holds global interest because it addresses the issue of finding and treating viral contaminants and other disease-causing, waterborne viruses in water systems.

The research project is being spearheaded by Wilfred Chen, Ashok Mulchandani and Nosang Myung from the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering; and Marylynn V. Yates of the Department of Environmental Sciences.

The grant is part of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research and is funded through its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program.


Commencement Ceremonies Move, Get a Makeover
UC Riverside’s commencement ceremonies are getting a major makeover this year – a new location, additional ceremonies and tickets for guest seating.

The six ceremonies will take place June 15 through 18 on the Pierce Lawn east of the bell tower. The new plan also includes limiting the number of seats available to the families and friends of graduates.

“We are planning to give up to 12 tickets per student,” said Kyle Hoffman, assistant vice chancellor for alumni and constituent relations. “But we also know that all students won’t request 12 so some students may get more. What I think we achieve with this new format is we’ve brought back the intimate setting and as a consequence our graduates will have a more personal experience and a much lovelier setting.”

Find out more at www.commencement.ucr.edu.


Twenty-One UCR Faculty Receive AAAS Fellowships
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has named 21 UC Riverside faculty members, including the chancellor and the dean of the College of Engineering, as 2006 AAAS fellows.

This represents the largest single-year contingent from the campus and the largest from within the UC system. The selection of this year’s fellows brings the number of UCR faculty who have received this distinction to 150.

The AAAS has awarded the fellow distinction to 449 of its members this year. They are being recognized for their efforts in advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

The 2007 AAAS fellows are:
Bourns College of Engineering: Reza Abbaschian, dean and professor of mechanical engineering; Wilfred Chen, professor of chemical and environmental engineering; Marc Deshusses, professor and chair in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering; Tao Jiang, professor of computer science and engineering; Dimitrios Morikis, professor of bioengineering; Victor G.J. Rodgers, professor of bioengineering; Charles Wyman, professor of chemical and environmental engineering.

College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences: Christine Ward Gailey, professor of anthropology and women’s studies.

College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences: Guy Bertrand, Distinguished Professor of chemistry; Katherine A. Borkovich, professor of plant pathology; France A. Córdova, chancellor and professor of astrophysics; Shou-Wei Ding, professor of plant pathology; Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology and chair in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences; Bai-Lian Li, professor of ecology, botany and plant sciences; Umar Mohideen, associate professor of physics; Joseph G. Morse, professor of entomology; P. Kirk Visscher, associate professor of entomology; Shizhong Xu, professor of plant genetics; Jory A. Yarmoff, professor of physics; Marylynn V. Yates, chair in the Department of Environmental Sciences and professor of environmental microbiology.

Graduate School of Education: Jan Blacher, faculty chair and professor of education.

UCR Proceeds with Plans for Medical School
UCR has begun a national search for a founding dean for its proposed School of Medicine and will also hire initial faculty and staff, develop curriculum that focuses on improved health care in both primary and specialty care, and seek private support.

These moves come after a November vote by the University of California regents to allow UCR to proceed with planning for the school.

Mark Rubin, a longtime Riverside area commercial and residential property developer, and his wife, Pam Rubin, have designated that some of the proceeds from a real estate gift they made to the university be used to endow a chair for the medical school’s founding dean. Campus officials estimate that this will mean at least $3.5 million for the chair when the property is sold – the largest chair endowment in campus history.

Projected to open in fall 2012, UCR’s School of Medicine would serve the medically underserved in Inland Southern California and would be the first new public medical school west of the Mississippi since 1971.

UCR plans to submit a final proposal and refined business plan to UC officials by the end of 2007. Both will go through review by the UC Academic Senate, the California Postsecondary Education Commission, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and the regents.

More information is available at www.medschool.ucr.edu


National Research Group Awards Low-Emissions Vehicle Research
The Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Research Council, has given UCR’s College of Engineering-Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT) its Pyke Johnson Award.

The award, which recognizes excellent research in transportation systems, planning and administration, acknowledges the impact of a 2005 paper titled Measuring and Modeling Emissions from Extremely Low Emitting Vehicles, which was authored by CE-CERT Director Matthew Barth; researchers John Collins, George Scora and Nicole Davis; and Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering Joe Norbeck.

The CE-CERT researchers developed an emission measurement program for a new class of vehicles that are 98 percent cleaner than catalyst-equipped vehicles of the 1980s. They also developed emissions models from those measurements. Then they applied those models to future emission inventories in regional air quality models.


UCR Researchers Named Fulbright Scholars
Two UCR researchers will take their research on the road after being named Fulbright Scholars. The Fulbright Scholars Program is one of the most prestigious international education programs in the United States.

Debadarshi D. Bhattacharya, an associate research physicist at UCR’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, will travel to Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to lecture on and research curriculum development and gamma-ray imaging collaboration. Mohsen Elhafsi, associate professor at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, will conduct research on managing inventory and capacity in contract manufacturing at the Central School of Lille in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France.


UCR Alumnus Will Lead Efforts in New Orleans
Edward J. Blakely (’60), namesake for UCR’s Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development, has been appointed executive director for recovery management in New Orleans.

Blakely will act as the primary recovery interface to all regional state and federal agencies for the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts and will serve as Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s designee on other recovery related issues.

Blakely, who is the chair of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney, is nationally and internationally recognized for his extensive experience in the design of recovery strategies for cities across the country.


UC Riverside Officials Inaugurate Altix 4700 Supercomputer
As speakers extolled the virtues of UCR’s latest acquisition to a room full of professors, students, administrators and the press at the Bourns College of Engineering on Feb. 2, the guest of honor whirred away in a mostly empty, bone-chilling room several doors away.

The cause of the enthusiasm was the Altix 4700 supercomputer, which is designed to boost high-end computing and data analysis in engineering, bioinformatics and computer science by up to 1,000 times.

Laxmi Bhuyan, a professor of computer science and engineering and one of the principle investigators, obtained a $330,000 National Science Foundation grant that helped obtain the refrigerator-size Altix 4700.

The system, the largest single Altix 4700 in the University of California system, is powered by 64 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and features 128 GB of system memory. It can also be expanded to 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and up to six terabytes on a single Linux operating system.

In bioinformatics and proteomics – the technology that made TV shows like “CSI” hits – new investigations in Altix technology shows promise in cutting the time it takes to get results from a sample of unknown origin down from three days to less than an hour, said Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI, the Silicon Valley company that sold the supercomputer to UCR.


AGSM Gets Kudos in Princeton Review Survey
The A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at UC Riverside has been named an outstanding business school by The Princeton Review’s “Best 282 Business Schools: 2007 Edition.”

The Princeton Review compiled the ranking lists based on a survey of 18,000 students at 282 business schools. Schools were chosen based on high regard for their academic programs and offerings, institutional data collected from the schools and the candid opinions of students who rate and report on their campus experiences at the schools, said Robert Franek, Princeton Review vice president-publishing.

The review says that students involved in the AGSM program seemed most excited about the wide variety of electives, which are all seminar size and designed to encourage participative learning.


Insulin Heals Wounds
Insulin is a hormone known primarily for regulating sugar levels in the blood, yet researchers at UC Riverside have discovered that applying insulin directly to skin wounds significantly enhances the healing process.

Skin wounds in rats treated topically with insulin healed faster. Surface cells in the epidermis covered the wound more quickly and cells in the dermis, the deeper part of the skin, were faster in rebuilding blood vessels.

In follow-up studies of human skin cells in culture, Professor Manuela Martins-Green and her colleagues explored the molecular impact of applying insulin on keratinocytes, the cells that regenerate the epidermis after wounding, and on microvascular endothelial cells, the cells that restore blood flow.

Chronic or nonhealing wounds take an immense toll on American health and on health care systems. It particularly affects millions of patients with impaired mobility and those with diabetes. Because diabetes is a disease caused by impaired production or utilization of insulin, this work may help explain the connection between diabetes and poor healing.

Martins-Green worked with Y. Liu, who is on leave from the burn department of a university medical center in Shanghai, China; and M. Yao, who is now at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.


Native Nations Research Materials Donated to UC Riverside Libraries
The papers and photographs of Ralph C. Michelsen and Roger Owen, scholars of the Cahuilla, Cocopah, Kiliwa and Kumeyaay nations, and papers discussing the Pechanga, Rincon and Soboba nations of the Luiseno group of Indians have been donated to UC Riverside Libraries.

The collection, donated by anthropologist Susan Lobo from the University of Arizona, covers work between the 1950s and the 1980s related to the PaiPai and Kiliwa of Baja California; various Luiseno groups in Southern California; the Mohave and Cocopah; the Seri of Mexico; and other groups in Mexico and Guatemala.

The papers will be housed at the Rupert Costo Library of the American Indian in the Rivera Library. The collection includes more than 7,000 books and thousands of documents, artifacts and baskets collected over a period of 50 years.


Three UCR Engineering Professors Named IEEE Fellows
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elected Jie Chen and Ilya Dumer, from the Department of Electrical Engineering; and Walid Najjar, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as 2007 IEEE fellows. The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology.

Chen was cited for his contributions to fundamental design limitations of feedback control in electrical and electronics systems. Dumer was cited for his contributions to error-correcting codes. Najjar’s citation focuses on his contributions to data flow and reconfigurable computing architectures.