Key Departmental News

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Scientist Honored. Mina J. Bissell, Ph.D., Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), will be conferred the honor of "Doctor Honoris Causa" by the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris, France. The title will be bestowed at a ceremony that will take place in the Salon of the Chancellery of Paris at the Sorbonne, on Wednesday, January 24, 2001. Dr. Bissell's honorary doctorate is in recognition of her contributions in establishing the central role that extracellular matrix and microenvironment play in differentiation, programmed cell death, and cancer. Dr. Bissell's many honors include, election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, recipient of the G. H. A. Clowes Memorial Award of the American Association for Cancer Research supported by Eli Lilly and Company, the Mellon Award of the University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award. In addition, she was the president of the American Society of Cell Biology.
Contact: Marvin E. Frazier, SC-72, 3-5468

Brookhaven Chemist Dr. Joanna Fowler - Recipient of the 2000 Alfred P. Wolf Award. The first Alfred P. Wolf Award was presented to Dr. Joanna Fowler by the Society of Nuclear Imaging and Drug Development (SNIDD) at the society meeting held on October 23-25, 2000, at the National Institutes of Health Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The award honors Dr. Fowler's contributions in imaging for drug discovery and development. Her contributions recognized by the SNIDD community range from developing new routes for radiochemical synthesis, new radiotracers, tracers that work via novel mechanisms, to applications of positron emission tomography to a variety of disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, drug addiction, and Parkinson's disease, as well as to drug research and development.
Contact: Prem Srivastava, SC-73, 3-4071

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program (ARM) Portable CO₂ Flux Tower Readied for Implementation. The goal of carbon cycle research is to reduce the significant uncertainty for predictions of future concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂). Significant net uptake of fossil-fuel CO₂ by terrestrial ecosystems has been postulated to account for the observed imbalance between annual increments in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation and estimated uptake by the oceans, the so-called "missing carbon." The eddy correlation method using stationary CO₂ flux towers is the standard approach for quantifying the magnitude and rate of net carbon exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems and investigating the mechanisms of ecosystem carbon cycling.

The portable tower provides a cost effective complement to these towers. The new design provides a measurement system that is independent of external power and structural infrastructure. It is highly portable and can be set up, taken down, and transported by 1-2 people. Cross-calibration tests with existing flux towers showed excellent agreement--less than 3% difference. The tower met all design and performance goals.
Contact: Wanda R. Ferrell, SC-74, 3-0043

The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory's (EMSL's) Collaboratory Selected as one of ChemWeb's "Picks of the Week." The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory's (EMSL's) Collaboratory website was selected as one of the "Picks of the Week" for the week of October 16, 2000, by ChemWeb's "Alchemist" Webmagazine. The selection came after James Myers of the EMSL presented a paper entitled "The Environmental Molecular Sciences Collaboratory: A National User Facility that Fits on your Desk," during the September 23-26 meeting of ChemInt 2000: Chemistry and the Internet, in Washington, DC. The website for the EMSL Collaboratory (http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/collab/) both describes and is a key part of the facility. The EMSL Collaboratory is a "center without walls," where scientists can work together accessing instrumentation or computational resources and sharing data, regardless of geographical location. Even though the EMSL Collaboratory is still in the pilot phase, 25% of the users of the EMSL's NMR spectrometers now conduct their experiments remotely, via the Virtual NMR Facility. EMSL's collaboratory staff incorporated the cross-platform Collaborative Research Environment (CORE2000) software suite, along with the Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) into the EMSL Collaboratory. CORE2000 permits real-time group interaction via videoconferencing facilities, remote camera control, online chat and an electronic whiteboard for uploading and manipulating images. The ELN includes automatic data manipulation, querying, and integration of rich media types. ChemWeb is a chemistry community website and hosts the Chemistry Preprint Server.
Contact: Paul Bayer, SC-74, 3-5324

Brookhaven Lab Scientist Dr. Nora Volkow Elected to the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Nora Volkow, Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Volkow is one of 70 members elected to the institute this year and the first member from Brookhaven Lab to be elected in the institute's 30-year history. Members are elected by the current membership on the basis of professional achievement and of demonstrated interest, concern and involvement with problems and critical issues that affect public health. Currently, the Institute of Medicine has about 1,380 members. The new members will be formally welcomed to the Institute at next year's annual meeting. A board-certified psychiatrist and a world-leader in research on addiction, Dr. Volkow uses a medical imaging technique known as positron emission tomography, or PET, to view how addictive drugs affect the brain. She is credited with being one of the first researchers to report that cocaine is toxic to the human brain. She has also used PET in pioneering studies of the biochemical changes in the brain associated with alcoholism and aging. Her studies are focused on finding an effective pharmacological treatment of addiction and could aid in finding avenues for delaying and counteracting the deleterious effects of aging. After receiving her MD in 1980 from the National University of Mexico, Volkow did her residency at New York University's Department of Psychiatry, from 1981-84, and, during this time, she used the Brookhaven PET facility for research on schizophrenia. At the University of Texas Medical School from 1984-87, Dr. Volkow performed groundbreaking research on the toxic effects of cocaine on the brain. In 1987, she joined Brookhaven where she currently serves as the Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences.
Contact: Prem Srivastava, SC-73, 3-4071