Grad students help undergrads get most out of UCLA

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Dec 102011

Three days before classes started, a small group of international undergrads wheeling suitcases appeared at the walk-up window of the College Academic Counseling office in Murphy Hall.

They were fresh from LAX, feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where to begin. Staffing the window was a grad student, a specially trained mentor, who started with the basics and gave them a campus map.
That map is an apt symbol of what UCLA’s graduate student College Academic Mentors (CAMs) do: They give undergrads the guidance and resources to solve problems.
“We’re like a hub of campus information where you can find all the resources you need to get help or make an educated decision,” said Mekeila Cook, a sixth-year public health grad student who has mentored undergrads for four years.
The 21 mentors have the answers to questions ranging from whether a class will fulfill a GE and when to drop a class without incurring a penalty, to the bigger issues of how to deal with stress and what to major in. Count on mentors to know every corner of the university as they point students to the Career Center, the Office for Students with Disabilities and the study-abroad office.
Mentor Mekeila Cook with one of her PEERS students, fourth-year biology major Vanessa Rangel.

The mentoring program, funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education, is especially needed this year as UCLA welcomes its largest freshman class ever. The CAMs, who earn tuition remission and work alongside full-time counselors, offer a unique perspective since they were in the undergrads’ shoes so recently.

The mentors are nominated for the job by their home departments, giving the counseling office connections across campus, said Penny Hein-Unruh, the assistant vice provost of academic advising. “We support one another,” Hein-Unruh said. “And many of our mentors work part-time in their own department, so they’re very knowledgeable.”
The mentors even keep the counselors up-to-date on recent changes.
“These grad students are amazing,” said Bill Gordon, the College Academic Mentor program coordinator. Gordon, a full-time counselor, trains all the mentors and guides them throughout the year. They sometimes help upperclassmen make post-graduation plans, but mostly, they meet with first- and second-year students.
“The mentors help the undergrads find their way,” he said. “At a large research university, it’s easy to get lost in the scramble. We want students to know about all their opportunities and to help them integrate into the big university.”
Mentor Diana Ichpekova counsels an undergrad.

Many students come in feeling stuck because they’ve planned to become doctors or lawyers, but decide in college that it’s not right for them, Gordon said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of pressure from home to be a doctor,” but partly because students and their families don’t know enough about other promising career paths, he said. “We’re able to show them all the options to decide for themselves, and give them the information to advocate at home for a different direction.”

The CAMs work with students through one-on-one appointments, group workshops, email, online counseling and the walk-up window. “Anything can happen at the window,” a couple of them joked.
At workshops, the mentors instruct students on the do’s and don’ts of talking to professors and TAs; how to get course credit or a paycheck for internships; and the merits of master’s versus Ph.D. programs. But a big part of the job is cluing students in to options they don’t know about, Cook said.
“I’ll ask, ‘Have you thought about study abroad?’ and they’ll say, ‘I think it would be really great, but I don’t have time.’ So I’ll explain they can clear some of their GEs with classes abroad,” Cook said. Other students have ruled out internships for time reasons, not realizing that some carry academic credit, she noted.
The program also offers benefits to the mentors, who find that it’s good training if they want to become professors, added Hein-Unruh. “Former CAMs have found that having the extensive mentoring experience gave them the edge in applying for competitive academic jobs,” she said. “Many institutions now require faculty to do academic counseling.”
“We like to think we’re creating better faculty,” Gordon said. “The mentors are getting to know the students in a holistic way.” And because mentors are looking at each mentee as a whole person, they uncover problems that undergrads might not take to their professors.
A struggling student might disclose to a mentor rather than a faculty member or TA that they have to work 40 hours a week, Gordon said. “Once you know what they’re up against, you can recommend university resources that will help them. We’re not just here to say, ‘You’ve got to do better and study more.’ We’re here to help them figure out how.”
In one mentoring program, the Program for Excellence in Education and Research in the Sciences (PEERS), first-year students come in as a cohort that stays together for two years with a single mentor. The program seeks to encourage students who are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences to study a south-campus discipline. Many are first-generation or low-income college students who look to the mentors to demystify the college experience and guide them through a tangle of class assignments, university paperwork and pesky problems such as where to find a grocery store.
Although technically PEERS covers only freshman and sophomore year, mentor Cook has been the mainstay for some of her mentees for their entire college career.
One of Cook’s original PEERS students, Deborah Akinsilo, now a fourth-year, recalled how nervous she was when she came as a freshman. “She’s (Cook) the one I always turn to when I’m freaking out about my classes, or whether or not I’ll be able to graduate on time,” said Akinsilo.
One of her first hurdles was getting credit for classes from community college onto her UCLA transcript. “It was confusing to figure out where to start,” Akinsilo recalled. “She explained how to do it, exactly where to go and helped me with the petitioning process.” Now Akinsilo, a history major with a load of science classes under her belt, is talking about medical school with Cook.
Cook’s challenge, as always, is finding the best approach for every student. “There’s so much variety,” she said. “It keeps you on your toes.”
Posted by admin at 4:12 am

Awareness of ethnicity-based stigma found to start as early as second grade

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Sep 022011
Students are stigmatized for any number of reasons, from the clothes they wear to what model cell phone they clench in their hands.
Now, in a new report, researchers from UCLA show that youths from a range of ethnic-minority backgrounds have an added burden to contend with: ethnicity-based stigmatization. Even elementary school–aged children are aware of such stigmatization and, like older youths, they feel more anxious about school as a result.
In the current online edition of the journal Child Development, senior author Andrew J. Fuligni, a UCLA professor of psychiatry, first author Cari Gillen-O’Neel, a graduate student working with Fuligni, and colleagues report that while children who are stigmatized are more likely to have less interest in school overall, ethnic-minority children, despite this hurdle, reported high interest in school. And for some of these students, feeling close to other students or school staff helps them maintain higher levels of interest in academics, despite the potentially negative effects of stigmatization.
The study included 451 second and fourth graders from New York City schools who belonged to one of the following ethnic groups: African American, Chinese, Dominican, Russian or European American. They ranged in age from 7 to 11 years old. European American students were not considered to be ethnic minorities.
For the study, each student participated in three individual interview sessions lasting approximately 40 minutes each, which took place in a private room on the school’s campus during school hours. Each interview was conducted by a female researcher who had the same racial or ethnic background as the student. Students were asked questions about their awareness of stigma, their anxiety about school, their interest in academics and their feelings of belonging in school.
“We found that differences in the young children’s awareness of stigma were similar to differences among adults, with ethnic-minority children generally reporting more awareness than ethnic-majority children,” Fuligni said. “There were few differences by grade, suggesting that even second graders are sensitive to ethnic attitudes in society.”
Ethnic-minority children also reported higher academic anxiety, he said, which the researchers attributed to their greater awareness of stigma.
But the study also found that some ethnic-minority students reported significantly higher interest in school than their ethnic-majority peers, despite past research by others that showed that awareness of stigmatization is associated with lower interest in school.
For Dominican children in particular, this seemingly paradoxical finding was explained, in part, by their feelings about belonging: For these youngsters, feeling close connections to people at school accounted for their high levels of interest in school, despite their awareness of stigma.
The study has implications for intervention efforts, Fuligni said. “Programs aimed at decreasing students’ perceptions of group stigma, such as providing community role models, could help keep students’ academic anxiety in check,” he said. “And school-based interventions that foster close connections among individuals at school may help students stay interested in learning.”
The other author on the study was Diane N. Ruble of New York University. The study was funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Science Foundation. The authors report no conflict of interest.
The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences is the home within the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for faculty who are experts in the origins and treatment of disorders of complex human behavior. The department is part of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a world-leading interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders
Posted by admin at 9:09 am

Life scientists use novel technique to produce genetic map for African AmericansLife scientists use novel technique to produce genetic map for African Americans

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Jul 242011
UCLA life scientists and colleagues have produced one of the first high-resolution genetic maps for African American populations. A genetic map reveals the precise locations across the genome where DNA from a person’s father and mother have been stitched together through a biological process called “recombination.” This process results in new genetic combinations that are then passed on to the person’s children.
The new map will help disease geneticists working to map genetic diseases in African Americans because it provides a more accurate understanding of recombination rates among that population, said the senior author of the research, John Novembre, a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of bioinformatics. The map could help scientists learn the roots of these diseases and discover genes that play a key role in them.
The study was published July 20 in the online version of the journal Nature Genetics and will be published in the print edition at a later date.
“Research aimed at finding disease variants will be improved by this tool, which could lead to better medications to help ameliorate the effects of those disease variants,” Novembre said. “Health researchers can use a recombination map to refine where a disease gene might be.”
Prior to this research, which was conducted by scientists from seven institutions, recombination had mainly been studied in European populations.
“Now we have a map for African Americans that researchers can use as a tool, instead of using a European map or an African map,” said Novembre, a member of UCLA’s Interdepartmental Program in Bioinformatics.
A second, independent study, led by David Reich at Harvard University and Simon Myers at Oxford University, used a similar approach to infer an African American recombination map. That research was published this week in Nature.
“While recombination rates between populations are very similar when you look at the broadest scales of the genome, we start to see variation in recombination between populations when we zoom in,” said Daniel Wegmann, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in Novembre’s laboratory and the lead author of the study. “There are clear differences in recombination between Africans and Europeans, and African Americans tend to have a map that is a mixture between the African and European map, reflecting the mixture that took place between these two groups.
“If the position of a mutation is unknown and you want to pinpoint a gene linked to a disease, then recombination is important to help reveal in what region the gene lies,” Wegmann said.
The mixture of African and European ancestry typical in the DNA of African Americans is reflected in recombination rates, Novembre said.
“No high-resolution recombination map has been inferred before for populations where the individuals have ancestry from different parts of the globe,” Novembre said. “African Americans represent a unique combination of African and European ancestry. We found that if you know an African recombination rate for one region of the genome and you know the European rate, the African American rate sits about 80 percent of the way between the two. That is interesting, because the ancestry of African American DNA, on average, is 80 percent from African ancestral sources and 20 percent from European ancestral sources. The recombination rate reflects the ancestry.”
The life scientists used an innovative method involving population genetic models in which they scanned the individual genomes of 2,565 African Americans, as well as 299 African Caribbeans, to study where in the genome each had African ancestry, where they had European ancestry, and where the “switch points” were that mark the location where the ancestry of a DNA segment changes.
Novembre and colleagues studied the ancestry of DNA segments to reconstruct where recombinations have occurred.
“The key is to uncover the ancestry of each segment of the genome,” Novembre said. “Switch points enable us to identify recombination ‘hot spots,’ where recombination rates are high.”
Explaining recombination, Novembre said, “When we pass on DNA to our children, we stitch together the DNA we received from our mother and father. The resulting DNA alternates between DNA from your mother and from your father, and the recombination points are the boundaries. Those points could be chosen uniformly across the whole chromosome, but studies have found that recombinations occur in some locations in the chromosome more than in others. Locations in the chromosome have particular recombination rates — the rate at which break points occur in that location.
“It is difficult to identify, by studying chromosomes directly, where the stitch points are between maternal and paternal DNA,” he said. “In individuals of mixed ancestry, however, such as African Americans and African Caribbeans, we can identify switch points between African ancestry and European ancestry. These switch points mark locations where recombinations have occurred at some point in the past.”
“There are regions of our map that differ from what we would expect,” Wegmann said. “We see locations where there are deficiencies in recombination, and they line up with the locations of mutations that rearrange the genome and flip a piece of DNA to invert it. When you have a normal copy of the DNA and an inverted copy of the DNA, one from your mother and one from your father, this inversion suppresses recombination.”
Of some 3 billion base pairs in a person’s genome, the scientists were able to resolve recombination rates down to 50,000 base pairs of the DNA — an impressive figure.
Comparing this African American recombination map with that of other populations enables researchers to locate recombination hot spots, which have highly elevated rates of recombination.
In addition to the applications for disease mapping, the research provides broad insights into the fundamental biological process of recombination.
“We want to learn how recombination rates vary across the genome,” Novembre said.
Nelson Freimer, director of the UCLA Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics and a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, is a principal investigator on the research, along with Novembre and Wegmann, and helped to organize the collaborative effort to bring together the large sample used in the study.
The effort was made possible by the cooperation of investigators from five large consortia: the Genetic Study of Atheroscleoris Risk (GeneSTAR) consortium; the Genetic Network of Arteriopathy (GENOA) consortium; the Chicago Asthma Genetics (CAG) and the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Asthma (CSGA) consortia; the Genetic Research on Asthma in the Africa Diaspora (GRAAD) consortium; and the Severe Asthma Research Program (SAARP).
The consortia were funded by the STAMPEED (SNP Typing for Association with Multiple Phenotypes from Existing Epidemiological Data) program run by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. Novembre’s research was also funded by the Searle Foundation.
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of more than 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 328 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Posted by admin at 3:08 pm

Chemistry never sounded this good!

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Jun 112011
By now, the word is out at UCLA that undergraduates in Neil Garg’s organic chemistry course produce clever, creative music videos as an extra-credit assignment. The bigger secret may be just how much chemistry they learn by doing so, as none of them are chemistry majors and most admit they didn’t like chemistry when the class started.
 
It’s a little too soon to say which music video will be this year’s sensation. A strong candidate is “We’re Yours” by the Gargonauts — Rachel Stafford-Lewis, Myan Pham, Ali Lanewala and Jordan Halfman — which achieves the desired trifecta of excellent chemistry in a video that sounds and looks great. But unlike last year, when one video, “Chemistry Jock” — which has become the gold standard of the genre, with 38,000 YouTube views and many fans — ran away from the competition, this year’s field is much deeper.
 
This quarter, 250 students produced 87 videos. Among the most notable are “Let It Be” by John Boles and Edgar Gonzalez; “Forget That” by Alex Jaksha, Sean Nguyen, Kevin Nishida and Nakia Sarad; and “O-Chem Toolbox,” sung with stellar vocals by Michelle Azurin, joined by Daniel Brenners, Frank Choe and Mike Dai. Yannick Goeb and Kimberly Bui, who starred with Justin Banaga in “Chemistry Jock,” are fans of “O-Chem Toolbox.”
 
“When I am doing the problem sets or taking a test, I find myself singing the various chemistry songs that people wrote and it helps me remember all the details,” said Rachel, a sophomore majoring in microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. Rewriting lyrics helped her to learn the chemistry, she added.
 
“I catch myself randomly singing the lyrics while I’m walking through the halls and just kind of laugh,” said Edgar, a sophomore physiological science major. “It’s crazy, because up until this point, I had hated chem. I remember when I first signed up for the class I was afraid, but I soon realized I had a great professor. I can honestly say that Professor Neil Garg has not only made it a fun class, but he made me care about learning chemistry. You can tell how much he cares about his students by the time and effort he puts into his lectures. He always had a dozen or so pieces of computer paper on which he wrote his lecture notes.
 
“Making the music video was really fun, and a great way to get out of my comfort zone and at the same time learn some chemistry. I would recommend this course as long as Professor Neil Garg is teaching it.”
 
Myan, a second-year pre-med history major, agreed, saying, “Making this video motivated me to do better in the class. This is my favorite chemistry course by far. It’s a lot of thinking and solving problems; I’ve learned a lot. Sometimes we forget that learning should be a fun experience.”
 
Myan added that she’s “never been superbly great in chemistry” and “it’s always been a little hard” for her, although you’d never suspect that watching her sing “We’re Yours.”
 
The lyrics to “We’re Yours” include”
 
Well, I got this chem equation and it’s getting pretty hazy
Palladium on carbon and ethanol, that’s crazy
With hydrogen molecules, I don’t know what to do
But then Garg showed me cat. hydrogenation
Breaking alkenes, what a sensation
Syn addition of hydrogens, it’s reduction …
 
I’ve been spendin’ way too long on this one chem equation
Ozone and DMS, I’m filled with frustration
Alkenes and double bonded O’s, please get rid of my woes
I looked at Garg’s answer and it all made sense somehow
You split the alkene and add oxygen to each now
You’ve got two molecules, with carbonyls, wow!
 
 
John and Edgar turned for inspiration to the Beatles, whose “Let It Be” was, of course, a huge hit long before they were born. One of their verses is:
 
SN2 electrophiles: primary carbon not tertiary
Lone pairs show nucleophilicity
Use polar aprotic solvent
Tosylates and halides, they will leave
Inversion of stereochemistry
 
 
John, a life sciences major, like many of Garg’s students, said, “I looked forward to class with Professor Garg. He turned a class of potential hours of memorization and confusion into a series of intricate logic games with organic molecules. I had a great time with my buddy Edgar making the movie. As I studied for the final, at least twice in my head I’ve sung a part of our song or a part of another song from last year. Putting the exceptions and rules of thumb to music helps me remember concepts like solvation and which solvent causes which reaction.”
 
Jordan, a second-year psychobiology major, called the course “an awesome experience” and said, “I’ve never had a professor so qualified in all aspects to teach a class.” He added, “After spending so much time learning so many different reactions, a chance to use that knowledge creatively was a very welcome break.”
 
The students uniformly agreed that making the videos was great fun.
 
“We had a great time shooting our video,” Rachel said, adding that she and her creative partners knew early on that “we were going for a different feel” from the rap music videos that dominated Garg’s class last year.
 
“Organic chemistry is as difficult as you make it,” she said, noting that Garg “does help to make it more interesting and entertaining than I ever thought possible.”
 
“I loved taking Chem 14D with Professor Garg,” said Michelle, a neuroscience major who just finished her third year. “It’s not one of my best subjects, but he definitely taught us that chemistry doesn’t have to be intimidating. We were encouraged to be innovative with the information we learned, and I think that is the thing that I appreciated most about this class.
 
“My friends and I had a great time making the video. We were looking for ways to create both an entertaining and educational video, and we are happy that we could share that, and most importantly, that other people enjoyed watching it as much as we enjoyed producing it. I learned that there are definitely outlets for creativity in all subjects, including chemistry.”
 
Most of the students who take this course “come in with little or no interest in organic chemistry,” Garg admitted. They don’t end the course that way, though. Last year, only 5 percent started the course with a high interest in organic chemistry, but by the end of the 10 weeks, most of the students said they had a high interest.
 
Why does Garg offer students this optional extra-credit assignment?
 
“The majority of the Chem 14D students are hooked on technology, such as the Internet and YouTube,” Garg said. “Rather than fighting this, I designed the assignment to take advantage of the students’ strengths and interests. I didn’t realize at the outset that so many students would create spectacular videos. When you consider the clever lyrics about organic chemistry and the high quality of the video editing and the audio, the TA’s and I were extremely impressed by how amazingly creative UCLA’s south campus students are.
 
“Don’t believe anyone who says creativity is mostly in the humanities and arts; the evidence otherwise is right in these videos. And for all the time the students put into creating these videos, we give them some extra credit, but not much.”
 
If your musical taste runs more to Lady Gaga, you might enjoy “Bond This Way,” starring Natalie Green, Storm Hagen, Megan Johnson and Kylie Wilson and directed by Brian Tan.
 
Garg’s course website has all these music videos, and more. Garg called this year’s class “Chem 14D Jedi,” and many of the videos picked up this “Star Wars” theme, in which the students strive to become “Chemistry Jedis.”
 
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of more than 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 328 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize
Posted by admin at 4:59 am

Paraplegic man stands, steps with assistance and moves his legs voluntarily

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May 222011
A team of scientists at the University of Louisville, UCLA and the California Institute of Technology has achieved a significant breakthrough in its initial work with a paralyzed male volunteer at Louisville’s Frazier Rehab Institute — the result of 30 years of research to find potential clinical therapies for paralysis.
 
The study is published today in the British medical journal The Lancet.
 
The man, Rob Summers, 25, was completely paralyzed below the chest after being struck by a vehicle in a hit-and-run accident in July 2006. Today, he is able to reach a standing position, supplying the muscular push himself. He can remain standing, and bearing weight, for up to four minutes at a time (up to an hour with periodic assistance when he weakens). Aided by a harness support and some therapist assistance, he can make repeated stepping motions on a treadmill. He can also voluntarily move his toes, ankles, knees and hips on command.
 
These unprecedented results were achieved through continual direct “epidural electrical stimulation” of the subject’s lower spinal cord, mimicking signals the brain normally transmits to initiate movement. Once that signal is given, the research shows, the spinal cord’s own neural network, combined with the sensory input derived from the legs to the spinal cord, is able to direct the muscle and joint movements required to stand and step with assistance on a treadmill.
 
The other crucial component of the research was an extensive regime of locomotor training while the spinal cord was being stimulated and the man suspended over the treadmill. Assisted by rehabilitation specialists, the man’s spinal cord neural networks were retrained to produce the muscle movements necessary to stand and to take assisted steps.
 
Leading researchers on the 11-member team are two prominent neuroscientists: Susan Harkema, of the University of Louisville’s Department of Neurosurgery, Kentucky Spinal Cord Research Center and Frazier Rehab Institute, a service of Jewish Hospital and St. Mary’s HealthCare in Louisville; and V. Reggie Edgerton, of UCLA’s Division of Life Sciences and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
 
Joel W. Burdick, a professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering at Caltech, developed new electromechanical technologies and computer algorithms to aid in locomotion recovery in spinal cord injury patients.
 
The research was funded by the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Harkema is director of the Reeve Foundation’s NeuroRecovery Network, which translates scientific advances into activity-based rehabilitation treatments. Edgerton is a member of the Reeve Foundation’s Science Advisory Council and its International Research Consortium on Spinal Cord Injury.
 
Harkema, Edgerton and their colleagues envision a day when at least some individuals with complete spinal cord injuries will be able to use a portable stimulation unit and, with the assistance of a walker, stand independently, maintain balance and execute some effective stepping.
 
Relief from secondary complications of complete spinal cord injury — including impairment or loss of bladder control, sphincter control and sexual response — could prove to be even more significant.
 
“The spinal cord is smart,” said Edgerton, distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology at UCLA. “The neural networks in the lumbosacral spinal cord are capable of initiating full weight-bearing and relatively coordinated stepping without any input from the brain. This is possible, in part, due to information that is sent back from the legs directly to the spinal cord.”
 
This sensory feedback from the feet and legs to the spinal cord facilitates the individual’s potential to balance and step over a range of speeds, directions and levels of weight-bearing. The spinal cord can independently interpret these data and send movement instructions back to the legs — all without cortical involvement.
 
Harkema, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of Louisville, oversees the human research program there. She began her career as a postgraduate student in Edgerton’s UCLA laboratory, where Edgerton pioneered the field of locomotion with extensive animal studies. The two have been close collaborators ever since.
 
“This is a breakthrough. It opens up a huge opportunity to improve the daily functioning of these individuals,” said Harkema, lead author of today’s Lancet article. “But we have a long road ahead.”
 
“While these results are obviously encouraging,” Edgerton concurred, “we need to be cautious. There is much work to be done.”
 
To begin with, only one subject has been studied, and he was an athlete in extraordinary physical condition before his injury. (Five human subjects have been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to be enrolled in the study.)
 
Additionally, the first subject, while completely paralyzed below the chest (C7/T1 vertebra spinal section), was rated “B” on the American Spinal Injury Association’s classification system, since he did retain some feeling below the level of injury. It is not known how these interventions will work with “A”-level patients (no cognition of sensation below the injury). Another issue is the stimulation equipment itself. To date, researchers have had access to only standard off-the-shelf stimulation units designed for pain relief.
 
In earlier published animal studies, drug interventions further heightened the sensitivity and functioning of the spinal cord’s neural network. The compounds used in animals, however, are not approved for human use; it is likely that a large investment in further pharmacological research will be required to bring such compounds to market.
 
More than 5 million Americans live with some form of paralysis, defined as a central nervous system disorder resulting in difficulty or inability to move the upper or lower extremities. Roughly 1.3 million are spinal cord injured, and of those, many are completely paralyzed in the lower extremities.
 
Epidural stimulation, in the context of paralysis of the lower extremities, is the application of continuous electrical current, at varying frequencies and intensities, to specific locations on the lumbosacral spinal cord corresponding to the dense neural bundles that largely control movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes. The electrodes required for this stimulation were implanted at University of Louisville Hospital by Dr. Jonathan Hodes, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the University of Louisville.
 
“Today’s announcement clearly demonstrates proof-of-concept,” said Susan Howley, executive vice president for research at the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which, in addition to supporting this particular work, has underwritten basic research in the field for some three decades. “It’s an exciting development. Where it leads to from here is fundamentally a matter of time and money.”
 
“This procedure has completely changed my life,” said Rob Summers, the research volunteer. ”For someone who for four years was unable to even move a toe, to have the freedom and ability to stand on my own is the most amazing feeling. To be able to pick up my foot and step down again was unbelievable, but beyond all of that, my sense of well-being has changed. My physique and muscle tone has improved greatly, so much that most people don’t even believe I am paralyzed. I believe that epidural stimulation will get me out of this chair.”
 
For a more in-depth discussion of the research behind the breakthrough, watch this interview with Edgerton.
Posted by admin at 12:33 pm

‘I’m a tumor and I’m over here!’ Nanovaults used to prod immune system to fight cancer

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May 042011

UCLA scientists have discovered a way to “wake up” the immune system to fight cancer by delivering an immune system–stimulating protein in a nanoscale container called a vault directly into lung cancer tumors. The new method harnesses the body’s natural defenses to fight disease growth.

The vaults, barrel-shaped nanoscale capsules found in the cytoplasm of all mammalian cells, were engineered to slowly release a protein — the chemokine CCL21 — into tumors. Pre-clinical studies in mice with lung cancer showed that the protein stimulated the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells, potently inhibiting cancer growth, according to the study’s co-senior author Leonard Rome, a researcher at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.

“Researchers have been working for many years to develop effective immune therapies to treat cancer, with limited success,” said Rome, who has been studying vaults for decades. “In lung tumors, the immune system is down-regulated, and what we wanted to do was wake it up, find a way to have the cancer say to the immune system, ‘Hey, I’m a tumor and I’m over here. Come get me.’ ”

The study appears in the May 3 issue of PLoS One, a peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science.

Waking up the immune system

The new vault delivery system, which Rome characterized as “just a dream” three years ago, is based on a 10-year, ongoing research effort focused on using a patient’s white blood cells to create dendritic cells, which are immune system cells that process antigen material and present it on their surface to other immune cells known as T cells, stimulating a response.

As part of that effort, Dr. Steven Dubinett, director of the Jonsson Cancer Center’s lung cancer program, led a Phase I study in which these dendritic cells were infected with a replication-deficient adenovirus engineered to carry a gene that prompts them to over-secrete CCL21. The engineered cells were then injected, 10 million at a time, directly into patients’ lung cancer tumors to stimulate an immune response — the first time the chemokine has been administered to humans.

The early-phase study has shown the dendritic cell method is safe, has no side effects and seems to boost the immune response; Dubinett and his team found T lymphocytes circulating in the blood stream with specific cytokine signatures, indicating that the lymphocytes were recognizing the cancer as a foreign invader.

However, the process of generating dendritic cells from white blood cells and engineering them to over-secrete CCL21 is cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming. It also requires a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) suite, a specialized laboratory that is critical for the safe growth and manipulation of cells, which many research institutions do not have.

“It gets complicated,” said Dubinett, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, a member of the CNSI and a co-senior author of the current paper. “You have to have a confluence of things happen: The patient has to be clinically eligible for the study and healthy enough to participate, and we have to be able to grow the cells and then genetically modify them and give them back.”

There also was the challenge of patient-to-patient variability, said co-senior author Sherven Sharma, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine and a researcher at the Jonsson Cancer Center and CNSI. It was easier to isolate and grow the dendritic cells in some patients than in others, so results were not consistent.

“We wanted to create a simpler way to develop an environment that would stimulate the immune system,” Sharma said.

How nanovaults could be more effective, less expensive

In the Phase I study, it takes more than a week to differentiate the white blood cells into dendritic cells and let them grow into the millions required for the therapy. The dendritic cells are infected with the adenovirus and then injected into the patient’s tumor using guided imaging.

“We thought if we could replace the dendritic cells with a nanovehicle to deliver the CCL21, we would have an easier and less expensive treatment that also could be used at institutions that don’t have GMP,” Dubinett said.

If successful, the vault delivery method would add a desperately needed weapon to the arsenal in the fight against lung cancer, which accounts for nearly one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States and kills 1 million people worldwide every year.

“It’s crucial that we find new and more effective therapies to fight this deadly disease,” Dubinett said. “Right now we don’t have adequate options for therapies for advanced lung cancer.”

The vault nanoparticles containing the CCL21 have been engineered to slowly release the protein into the tumor over time, producing an enduring immune response. Although the vaults protect the packed CCL21, they act like a time-release capsule, Rome said.

Rome, Dubinett and Sharma plan to test the vault delivery method in human studies within the next three years and hope the promising results they have found in pre-clinical animal tumor models will be replicated. If such a study is approved, it would be the first time a vault nanoparticle is used in humans for a cancer immunotherapy.

The vault nanoparticle would require only a single injection into the tumor because of the slow-release design, and it eventually could be designed to be patient-specific by adding the individual’s tumor antigens into the vault, Dubinett said.

The vaults may also be targeted by adding antibodies to their surface that recognize receptors on the tumor. The injection could then be delivered into the blood stream and the vault would navigate to the tumor, a less invasive process that would be easier on the patients. The vault could also seek out and target tumors and metastases too small to be detected with imaging.

Rome cautioned that the vault work is at a much earlier stage than Dubinett’s dendritic cell research, but he is encouraged by the early results. The goal is to develop an “off-the-shelf” therapy using vaults.

“In animals, the vault nanoparticles have proven to be as effective, if not more effective, than the dendritic cell approach,” he said. “Now we need to get the vault therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in humans.”

Because a vault is a naturally occurring particle, it causes no harm to the body and is potentially an ideal vehicle for use in the delivery of personalized therapies, Rome said.

The study was funded by a University of California Discovery Grant; a Jonsson Cancer Center fellowship grant; the National Institutes of Health; the UCLA Lung Cancer Program; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Research Funds; and the University of California’s Tobacco-related Disease Program Award.

UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has more than 240 researchers and clinicians engaged in disease research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation’s largest comprehensive cancer centers, the Jonsson Center is dedicated to promoting research and translating basic science into leading-edge clinical studies. In July 2010, the center was named among the top 10 cancer centers nationwide by U.S. News & World Report, a ranking it has held for 10 of the last 11 years.

The California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA is an integrated research facility located at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its mission is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations in nanoscience and nanotechnology; to train a new generation of scientists, educators and technology leaders; to generate partnerships with industry; and to contribute to the economic development and the social well-being of California, the United States and the world. The CNSI was established in 2000 with $100 million from the state of California. An additional $850 million of support has come from federal research grants and industry funding. CNSI members are drawn from UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School of Dentistry, the School of Public Health and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. They are engaged in measuring, modifying and manipulating atoms and molecules — the building blocks of our world. Their work is carried out in an integrated laboratory environment. This dynamic research setting has enhanced understanding of phenomena at the nanoscale and promises to produce important discoveries in health, energy, the environment and information technology.

Posted by admin at 1:46 pm

UCLA News|Week: Radioactive Fallout and Lab Safety

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Apr 082011

Posted by admin at 4:38 am

USD Model United Nations aims for success

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Mar 222011

The students of Model United Nations are gearing up for a challenging set of spring conferences at UC Riverside and UCLA, culminating in New York at the 2011 National Model United Nations.

The UC Riverside conference will be held March 4 to 6, and will give students an opportunity to practice their critical thinking, public speaking and negotiating skills. “Riverside is more like a teaching and learning conference,” said Sara Johnson, senior and Fundraising Chair for the club. “This one is better for newer members who have only been to one or two conferences in the past.”

One month later, April 7 to 10, the MUN-ers will travel to UCLA for the All-Crisis Conference. UCLA hosts what are termed “historical conferences,” meaning the themes are based upon past diplomatic conflicts. The conferences are made up of committees that are assigned specific scenarios to negotiate: NATO versus the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, and Wikileaks scandal as managed by the U.S. State Department.

“UCLA will be a partially historical and partially pop-culture conference, which makes it more fun to attend,” Johnson said.

The MUN-ers believe that the three conferences they attended last semester in Orange County, Santa Barbara and Georgetown have prepared them well for their upcoming competitions. “The Georgetown conference in particular put us in an environment where we were competing with people from all over the country,” said Mahad Ghani, a sophomore MUN@USD member. “It definitely generated a spirit of cooperation and was exciting because we could meet and network with people who will be working in the same line of work.”

Georgetown was a unique experience for the group because it was the first time MUN@USD participated in an East Coast conference, and it allowed the students to tour the sights of Washington D.C.

In addition to the MUN@USD club meetings, political science professor Mary McKenzie teaches a MUN class that can be taken for three credits. Requirements include attendance at one conference and completion of a position paper (to be presented at a conference). The position paper helps students to understand the diplomatic details of a country before acting as a representative at a conference.

“MUN@USD is very exciting this year, and the program is growing by leaps and bounds,” McKenzie said. “I’m so proud because our students are great MUN-ers and great representatives of USD.”

Two members in particular were honored for their participation last semester. Sophomore Dylan Heyden won an honorable mention at the Orange County conference, and sophomore Sophia Carrillo won an outstanding delegate award at Santa Barbara.

“In today’s world,” Carrillo said, “security, multilateral relations and peacekeeping have reached such a catalytic flashpoint that it’s necessary to educate yourself on world affairs and positions of global hegemony. I think my MUN experience has really given me the opportunity to achieve that.”

Funding for MUN@USD’s conferences has come largely from an anonymous grant of $100,000, received last spring. The club is authorized to spend $10,000 of the grant annually to cover travel and registration fees.

“We are so fortunate to have the grant to fund MUN,” Johnson said. “We do, however, want to expand our program and bring more students to conferences, so this semester will be our first attempt at active fundraising. Previously, it was all word of mouth. This was also our first semester having a table at the Alcala Bazaar.”

As they prepare for nationals in New York, the MUN-ers are excited to compete with major collegiate Model UN clubs from around the country. Students interested in joining MUN@USD can contact Mary McKenzie during office hours at

Posted by admin at 6:55 am

UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures announces events for spring 2011

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Mar 132011
The UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC) is offering a variety of events for the public’s enjoyment this spring. The department’s emphasis is threefold: cross-cultural research, dance and community outreach. Events include student and faculty performances, lectures, and symposia and feature an eclectic range of exciting artists and scholars from around the world.        
 
For events at Glorya Kaufman Hall, including those at the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater and the Glorya Kaufman Garden Theater, all-day parking ($10) and short-term parking (payable at pay stations) are available in Lot 4 (enter the campus at Sunset Boulevard and Westwood Plaza). For ticketed events, contact the UCLA Central Ticket Office at 310-825-2101 or www.tickets.ucla.edu, unless otherwise noted. Programs are subject to change. For further information, call 310-825-3951 or visit www.wac.ucla.edu.       
 
EVENTS        
 
April 2–17
Allison Wyper: ‘Witness’
Glorya Kaufman Hall
Free 
 
Performed by M.F.A. dance candidate Allison Wyper for one audience member at a time, “Witness” is an intimate ritual for victims of wrongful incarceration and torture. Together testifying to crimes perpetrated in their name, both performer and witness acknowledge their complicity in actions beyond their control and understanding and confront their responsibility for each other. Performances by reservation only. Visit www.wac.ucla.edu to reserve a seat.
 
 
Friday, April 29
8 p.m.
MFA Upstarts Concert Series: ‘Off The Grid’ by Elizabeth Terschuur
Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (Room 200)
Tickets $15; $8 students 
 
M.F.A. candidate Elizabeth Terschuur concludes her graduate studies with an evening of dance, theater and film exploring the ideas of self, empathy and the connection between memories and identity.
 
 
Friday–Saturday, May 13–14
8 p.m.
Senior Projects Showcase
Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (Room 200)
Tickets: $6
 
The UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures class of 2011 presents fresh choreography, documentaries, scholarship and interdisciplinary works that represent the culmination of their studies.
 
 
Tuesday, May 24
6 p.m.    
‘Pau Hana’
Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (Room 200)
Free 
 
Literally “end of work” in Hawaiian, “Pau Hana” is an opportunity to see and show what has been happening in UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures classes each quarter.
 
 
Friday–Saturday, June 3–4
8 p.m.
UCLA Dance Faculty ‘Works in Progress’ Presentation
Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (Room 200)
Tickets $15; $10 students
 
An informal sharing of new works-in-development from some of the nation’s leading choreographers, including UCLA faculty Rennie Harris, Victoria Marks, Lionel Popkin, David Rousseve and Cheng-Chieh Yu. This provocative collection of early-stage choreographic ideas weaves dance, humor, spoken word and gestural movement to interrogate, challenge and affirm
Posted by admin at 10:50 am

UCLA Loneliness Scale measures how lonely people are

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Feb 092011

With 20 quick and simple questions, UCLA-affiliated researchers can assess the extent of a person’s loneliness.

Known as the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the brief survey was developed in the late 1970s to fill a void in psychological research.

“It was an important psychological phenomenon that we didn’t know much about and it piqued my curiosity,” said Letitia Anne Peplau, psychology professor and an author of the study.

Since then, the scale has been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish and Japanese, and used for college surveys, such as a recent poll of Iowa State University freshmen as well as telephone questionnaires.

With her then-graduate students Daniel Russell and Carolyn Cutrona, Peplau created a set of questions to quantitatively measure a person’s loneliness. After reading statements like “I lack companionship,” or “I am unhappy being so withdrawn,” patients would rate how often they felt that way, said Russell, now a professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University.

When the study was first completed in the early 1980s, Peplau’s team found that students who were lonely reported less involvement with friends and social activities. Furthermore, students who were involved in casual dating or serious relationships had much lower scores of loneliness.

Age also played a factor. While younger students looked for friendships in their early years of college, older students placed a greater emphasis on romantic relationships.

The researchers then compared the results within the test group and came to a conclusion.

“Loneliness isn’t hard to measure,” Peplau said. “If people are feeling that their relationships are inadequate, they know they’re lonely. They’ll tell researchers about it.”

But not all people who spend time alone are lonely. This distinction relates to the difference between loneliness and social isolation.

While loneliness implies a feeling of dissatisfaction with the quality of current relationships or lack thereof, social isolation simply describes a person who is alone, Peplau said. People may choose to be alone, and Peplau said there is no evidence that people who are alone in living situations are more lonely than people who live in more communal environments. Similarly, people can be lonely while surrounded by others.

At UCLA, the process of meeting new people may be difficult, especially at the beginning of college. For Joseph Truong, a second-year biology student, the transition into college was a little lonely. He didn’t join clubs his first quarter to focus on academics, and with a dormitory floor full of second years, it was difficult to make friends, he added.

“I think if I had first years (on the floor), it would have been different,” he said.

While loneliness is tied to emotions, it is also related to biological factors.

“There’s growing evidence of a human need to be attached to a person,” Peplau said. “We’re social animals.”

This social impulse could relate to circuitry and structures in the brain. Some hormones are geared toward social interaction, such as oxytocin, which has the potential to affect the development of relationships, said Steve Lee, assistant professor of clinical psychology.

Another part of the brain, the fusiform gyrus, is a socioemotional center of the brain that is geared toward accurately reading people’s expressions, Lee said.

In Truong’s case, he was able to make friends in his small discussion section for his GE cluster. These friends also crossed over into his other classes, and this year, his floor is much more social.

But along with the changing social atmosphere, Truong said he has also changed.

“I think I’ve become more outgoing,” he said

Posted by admin at 12:01 pm
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