Former physics majors Keith Cheveralls ’09 and Daniel Beller ’10 and current physics major Netta Engelhardt ’11 have been awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in the US who have demonstrated exceptional promise in science research. Keith is currently a first year graduate student at UC Berkeley; while at Brandeis he did his senior thesis with Professor Jane Kondev and was a co-author on a paper that appeared last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dan, a first year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, completed his senior thesis at Brandeis with Professor Zvonimir Dogic and Professor Robert Meyer. Currently, Dan is conducting research on liquid crystals in the group of Professor Randall Kamien at UPenn. Netta is currently doing her senior thesis with Professor Matthew Headrick, and is planning to attend graduate school in physics next year.
Keith Cheveralls ’09, Daniel Beller ’10, and Netta Engelhardt ’11 awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
Detecting Mutations the Easy Way
Recent Brandeis Ph.D graduate, Tracey Seier (Molecular and Cell Biology Program), Professor Sue Lovett, Research Assistant Vincent Sutera, together with former Brandeis undergraduates Noor Toha, Dana Padgett and Gal Zilberberg have developed a set of bacterial strains that can be used as “mutational reporters”. Students in the Fall 2009 BIOL155a, Project Laboratory in Genetics and Genomics, course also assisted in the development of this resource. This work has recently been published in the journal Genetics.
These Escherichia coli strains carry mutations in the lacZ (β-galactosidase) gene that regain the ability to metabolize lactose by one, and only one, specific type of mutation. This set allows environmental compounds to be screened for effects on a broad set of potential mutations, establishing mutagen status and the mutational specificity in one easy step.
This strain set is improved over previous ones in the inclusion of reporters that are specific for certain types of mutations associated with mutational hotspots in gene. Mutations at these sites occur much more frequently than average and involve DNA strand misalignments at repeated DNA sequences rather than DNA polymerase errors. Such mutations are associated with human diseases, including cancer progression, and have been under-investigated because of the lack of specific assays. Using this strain set, Seier et al. also identified a mutagen, hydroxyurea, used in the treatment of leukemia and sickle cell disease, which affects only the “hotspot” class of mutations. This strain set, which will be deposited in the E. coli Genetic Stock Center, will facilitate the screening of potential mutagens, environmental conditions or genetic loci for effects on a wide spectrum of mutational events.
Left: E. coli colonies showing lacZ mutant revertants (blue pimples) arising on a white colony on growth medium containing the beta-galactosidase indicator dye, X-gal
NEUCS-2011
Brandeis is one of the co-organizers of the third annual New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium which will be held on Saturday April 9th at Tufts University. This symposium is designed to build community among undergraduate Computer Science majors in New England and also to increase the diversity of our undergraduate majors by actively reaching out to under-represented groups and encouraging them to participate. Students register online at https://sites.google.com/site/neucs11/ by completing a simple form describing the project they plan to demo or present as a poster. We expect to have 60-80 students projects and around 150 students and faculty attending the symposium. If you are an undergrad that has written an interesting mobile app, or completed a creative project in one of your classes, or are working in a research lab on an exciting problem involving computation, please visit the site and register to present your project and/or demo your code.
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(EL)2 2011
(EL)2 2011. the Experiential Learning, Engaged Learners Symposium held each Spring at Brandeis, will take place on the afternoon of Thursday, March 24th, in the Levin Ballroom and International Lounge. Brandeis President Frederick M. Lawrence will be the keynote speaker. Student presenters include undergraduates from Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Physics, Psychology, as well as a wide range of other disciplines across the university, will present results from research, internships, and other learning experiences.
For more information, see the symposium website or download the symposium program (PDF).
Older Adults are Better at Spotting Fake Smiles
Studies of aging and the ability to recognize others’ emotional states tend to show that older adults are worse than younger adults at recognizing facial expressions of emotion, a pattern that parallels findings on non-social types of perception. Most of the previous research focused on the recognition of negative emotions such as anger and fear. In a study “Recognition of Posed and Spontaneous Dynamic Smiles in Young and Older Adults” recently published in Psychology and Aging, Derek Isaacowitz’s Emotion Laboratory set out to investigate possible aging effects in recognizing positive emotions; specifically, the ability to discriminate between posed or “fake” smiles and genuine smiles. They video-recorded different types of smiles (posed and genuine) from younger adults (mean age = 22) and older adults (mean age = 70). Then we showed those smiles to participants who judged whether the smiles were posed or genuine.
Across two studies, older adults were actually better at discriminating between posed and genuine smiles compared to younger adults. This is one of the only findings in the social perception literature suggesting an age difference favoring older individuals. One plausible reason why older adults may be better at distinguishing posed and spontaneous smiles is due to their greater experience in making these nuanced social judgments across the life span; this may then be a case where life experience can offset the effects of negative age-related change in cognition and perception.
This was the first known study to present younger and older adult videotaped smiles to both younger and older adult participants; using dynamic stimuli provides a more ecologically valid method of assessing social perception than using static pictures of faces. The findings are exciting because they suggest that while older adults may lose some ability to recognize the negative emotions of others, their ability to discriminate posed and genuine positive emotions may remain intact, or even improve.
The Emotion Laboratory is located in the Volen Center at Brandeis. First author Dr. Nora Murphy (now Assistant Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University) conducted the research as a postdoctoral research fellow, under the supervision of Dr. Isaacowitz, and second author Jonathan Lehrfeld (Brandeis class of 2008) completed his Psychology senior honors thesis as part of the project. The research was funded by the National Institute of Aging.
Fostering leaders into a new scientific generation
Brandeis SACNAS Chapter Symposium
Saturday, March 26, 2011
10:00 am-3:00 pm
Shapiro Science Campus lobby
On March 26th the Brandeis SACNAS chapter will be holding their 2nd Brandeis SACNAS Chapter Symposium 2011: Fostering leaders into a new scientific generation. This year, we hope to expand our circle of influence even farther as we look forward to hosting students and mentors from Brandeis and other institutions in the greater Boston Region. We want to create a forum for students to network and learn about the different pathways that the sciences have to offer.
This year we will have Dr. Daniel Colon-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University, talk about his journey from early undergraduate to PhD. Dr. Jim Morris from Brandeis will discuss his track towards earning his MD/PhD at Harvard Medical School. Lastly, we will also hear from our own chapter President Kerwin Vega, fourth year undergraduate, as he speaks of his first steps towards pursuing a career in science and his networking experiences thus far. We will also host a Career Development Panel where professionals from various scientific backgrounds will briefly speak of their personal professional anecdotes as well as answer any questions. There will also be a poster session for students to present their work.
- Register for the event on the SACNAS chapter website
- For information about the event or if interested in presenting a poster, email us at brandeis.sacnas@gmail.com
