New Horizons in Science

Arlene Ash is a biostatistician at Boston University. Her studies have ranged across such topics as health care delivery, costs, and outcomes; patient safety; and racial and gender differences in disease outcomes. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a past chair of ASA's Subcommittee on Electoral Integrity. She has testified on statistical issues in elections before the state legislature of Massachusetts and in a court case in Florida in 2000.

Anthony Barnhart, a magician since the age of 7, is known for his unique blend of theater, psychology and magic. He has won four national competitions and placed third among magicians from around the world in a 1999 competition. At Arizona State University, he studies the processes involved in handwritten word recognition in humans and the psychological foundations of stage magic.
 

Ken Bost grew up near Concord, NC, and received his undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1979. He left the state to pursue a doctoral degree in immunology from Ole Miss Medical School. After rising through the academic ranks at UTMB-Galveston, then UAB Medical Center, and finally Tulane Medical Center, where he was a professor of microbiology and immunology, he returned to N.C. in 1998 as the Belk Distinguished Professor of Biology at UNC-Charlotte. In 2005 Ken Bost and Kenneth Piller co-founded SoyMeds, Inc. as a UNC-Charlotte startup company. This small business uses transgenic soybean seeds as a platform technology for expressing recombinant proteins that have pharmaceutical and diagnostic applications.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist whose interests include dark matter, dark energy, the arrow of time, inflation, extra dimensions, gravity and, it seems, just about everything. Much of what he studies is being re-examined in the face of a new discoveries and a flood of data. “We live in a preposterous universe,” he says, “and it’s our job to make sense of it.”
 

Clegg received her Ph.D. in nutrition from the University of Georgia. Before coming to Dallas, she was in the psychiatry department at the University of Cincinnati.

Joe DeSimone is a prolific and creative inventor, entrepreneur and scientific collaborator. Among his inventions are: an environmentally friendly manufacturing process that relies on supercritical carbon dioxide for the creation of fluoropolymers and high-performance plastics; a bioabsorbable, drug-eluting stent; and a roll-to-roll particle-fabrication technology that borrows photolithographic techniques from semiconductor manufacturing to deliver high-performance, cost-effective vaccines and medicines. The new fabrication technology is the foundation of Liquidia Technologies, which DeSimone launched in 2004. Liquidia now employs roughly 50 people in Research Triangle Park. Trained in chemistry, DeSimone is a member of the National Academies of Engineering and Sciences.

Twitter: @Joseph_DeSimone

Jeffrey Foster is a wildlife biologist specializing in infectious diseases. His studies of bats were preceded by work on work on brucellosis (it’s not bison that are infecting cattle; it’s elk) and on avian malaria in Hawaiian honeycreepers.
 

Maribeth Gandy is a computer scientist who works in the field of human-computer interaction, where she develops novel and scientifically validated games for purposes such as training, rehabilitation and cognitive training. She is currently collaborating with Anne McLaughlin and colleagues at NC State on an NSF-funded project to develop cognitive games for older adults. The goal is to both isolate what components are necessary in an activity for it to have general cognitive benefits and to craft a custom game that is accessible and compelling for an older player. For seven years she worked in the fields of disability and accessibility as a project director in the Wireless RERC (through the Shepard Center in Atlanta and Georgia Tech) and generated guidelines for the universal design and user-centered design process with disabled individuals. In her consulting work she has built commercial games, designed a home medical device for older adults, enhanced live rock concerts, and worked with startup companies to develop augmented reality business models and products.

Andrea Gore serves on the faculty of the Division of Pharmacology & Toxicology at the University of Texas College of Pharmacy. She is one of a small group of researchers studying the links between the brain and reproduction. The work suggests that new therapies for infertility might depend on a better understanding of this link. (Among her collaborators is Michael Skinner of Washington State University, who spoke at New Horizons at Carnegie Mellon in 2005.)

Fred Gould began studying how insects adapt to plant defenses and insecticides after completing his PhD at SUNY Stony Brook in 1977. This work took him to North Carolina, where he began to focus on how transgenic crops can be deployed to suppress the evolution of pest resistance. He now focuses on how insects and other pests might be engineered to protect endangered species, reduce crop losses, restore island ecosystems and suppress diseases such as malaria. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and now leads an effort to cross-train graduate students in genomics, ecology, molecular biology, ethics and policy to better inform the use of genetically modified organisms in pest management.

As an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, Virgil Griffith was sued for demonstrating the security flaws in multi-use campus ID cards. He moved to Indiana University, where he was hired to teach computer security before being admitted as an undergraduate. He developed Wikiscanner, a tool for identifying organizations that have edited Wikipedia entries, and has worked on Polyworld, a computer-generated example of artificial evolution. He has been a guest at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and is a regular visitor to the Santa Fe Institute.

Jo Handelsman's work on organisms in the soil and in the guts of humans and even insects has led to findings that are proving important in human disease and in pest control. It’s a case, she says, of basic research once again surprising us with unexpected and important practical implications.

Hans Hofmann is a biologist and a fellow at UT’s Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. He was one of the first researchers to use cichlid fish to study how the social environment regulates brain and behavior. And he is a pioneer in the use of genomics and systems biology to analyze and understand these processes. He received his PhD in biology from the University of Leipzig.

Andy Howell leads the supernova group at Las Cumbres. He’s also an adjunct professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara and was a host of the third season of the National Geographic Channel series Known Universe. He’s been a member of three teams that have found and followed thousands of explosive and transient events in the universe, providing our best measurement of the mysterious dark energy. Earlier he worked with the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by 2011 Nobelist Saul Perlmutter. Howell also does popular science writing and reviews movies under the name Copernicus at Ain't It Cool News. He's been known to get into boxing matches with NASA conspiracy theorists.

Twitter: @d_a_howell

Neil Johnson heads a new interdisciplinary research group on complexity dealing with such seemingly unrelated phenomena as quantum entanglement in nanostructures and the evolution of human disease.

Linda Kah has been pursuing her love of science since kindergarten, when she announced her intention to become a geologist. She received concurrent BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1990, followed by a PhD from Harvard in 1997. In her research, Kah combines her knowledge of geology, isotope geochemistry and biology to decipher how ecosystems arise on planets, and how biological processes fundamentally interact with, and even change, geological systems. Her research has taken her to some of the most remote places on Earth, including the Canadian Arctic, Saharan West Africa, and the high Andes of Argentina; and continues to take her to even more remote localities, as she begins exploration of Gale Crater on the surface of Mars with NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. “I was brought into the mission seven years ago for the express reason that I knew almost nothing about Mars,” she recalls.

John Kappelman grew up on a family farm in southwestern Idaho. He holds a joint PhD in anthropology and earth and planetary sciences from Harvard and a BS in geology and geophysics from Yale. The primary focus of his research is hominoid evolution and human origins and evolution, with particular emphasis in paleoecology and functional morphology, and stratigraphy and paleomagnetism. He has carried out field work in many parts of African and Asian and currently conducts field projects in Ethiopia and Turkey. He is also active in CT imaging of fossils and in 2008 headed the team that completed the first high-resolution imaging of the fossil Lucy.

He is also active in producing digital educational materials that include www.eSkeletons.org, www.eLucy.org, and www.eFossils.org.

The Child Study Center's autism program, which Ami Klin directs, draws on the expertise of researchers in clinical psychology, neuroimaging, child psychiatry, social work and genetics.

Mark Kruse is an associate professor specializing in experimental high-energy physics at Duke University, where he holds the Fuchsberg-Levine Family Chair for excellence in teaching and research. Kruse led the CDF Higgs discovery group at Fermilab from January 2007 to January 2009 and continues to play an active role in searches for the Higgs boson. In addition, he has developed a global analysis to search for new physics using events containing a high-energy electron and muon. Kruse is also interested in silicon detector design for high-energy particle physics experiments and is part of a group developing the next generation of silicon detectors for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.

Phyllis Leppert started out as a nurse-midwife in the 1960s, then took a turn toward medical school, earning an MD in 1973 and then a biology PhD in 1986. She developed a research interest in the biology of the uterine cervix, and specifically its elastin fiber network. After a stint as chief of the Reproductive Services Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, she joined Duke University’s obstetrics and gynecology faculty in 2006. There she focuses on issues in reproductive health and primary and preventive reproductive medicine for women. She has written for women’s magazines and today focuses on uterine fibroids, a health scourge that affects 7 of 10 U.S. women of childbearing age.

As a Stanford mechanical engineering graduate student, Elizabeth Loboa worked with a craniofacial surgeon on challenges such as repairing cleft palates and separating conjoined twins. She continues to be motivated by the chance to help repair severely wounded bodies. After completing her PhD in mechanical engineering in 2002 and doing a postdoc, she headed to North Carolina, where the breadth of her understanding of mechanics, modeling, materials and regenerative biology has landed Loboa adjunct appointments in physiology, textiles and orthopedics. “Engineers do things differently from biologists,” she says. “If it’s not solving the problem, then as an an engineer, it’s not important to me. I want to do the most clinically relevant thing. I want to solve the big problems.”

Steven Lohrenz has studied carbon dioxide distribution in coastal waters, methods for detecting algal blooms and other biogeochemical properties of coastal waters.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, now husband and wife, were both postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate David Hubel at Harvard, where they trained as visual neuroscientists. They are the founders of the exciting new discipline of NeuroMagic—and also members of the Magic Castle, Magic Circle, International Brotherhood of Magicians, and the Society of American Magicians. Macknik studies the neurobiology of perception, cognition and neural diseases, with a special interest in the neural underpinnings of visual awareness, with an aim toward understanding the minimal set of physical conditions necessary to make an object visible—the beginning of visual perception.
 

Jane Marks is an expert on freshwater ecosystems and how they respond to environmental disruptions.
 

Helen S. Mayberg used neuroimaging to study mood regulation and neural networks for 20 years, leading to her pioneering development of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for severe depression.

Cindy Meston, PhD, is a professor of clinical pathology at the University of Texas at Austin, and co-author, with David Buss, of Why Women Have Sex. Meston’s research is concerned primarily with understanding female sexual arousal and female sexual desire, with an eye toward developing treatments for sexually dysfunctional women. She is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health.

“People are curious about how lives unfold,” says Terrie Moffitt, describing the public interest that has created a worldwide audience for her research. Moffitt studies how genetic and environmental risks work together to shape the developmental course of abnormal human behaviors and psychiatric disorders. She is associate director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1,000 people born in 1972-73 in a New Zealand town, and also directs the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which follows 1,100 British families with twins born in 1994-95. Moffitt is an internationally renowned clinical psychologist who completed her hospital training in 1984 at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Topping her long publication list is a 1972 feature film about stock car racing legend Richard Petty, where young Temi Moffitt had a small part. Moffitt and her collaborator and husband Avshalom Caspi joined the Duke faculty in 2007 and also hold faculty positions at the Institute of Psychiatry in England.

Gary Paul Nabhan is the author of more than 20 books and co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, which collects and saves seeds. He counts Thoreau among his influences.

Miguel Nicolelis is a neurophysiologist and physician best known for his work using brain-machine interfaces and “neuroprosthetics” to restore motor function to paraplegics, amputees and others who have lost function to disease or injury. In addition to this work, which has been widely honored and reported in US and international media, his research aims to develop an integrative approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders. He remembers that he was led to science by long childhood afternoons of backyard exploration with his grandmother in his native Brazil, where “I discovered the joy of probing the unknown on voyages that only our imagination can plan and track.” Author of the book Beyond Boundaries, Nicolelis holds both an MD and a PhD from the University of Sao Paulo and is co-founder and scientific director of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal.

Twitter: @MiguelNicolelis

Steven Pinker has won numerous prizes for research and teaching and for his eight books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. He  is currently chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic and other publications. His is married to the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
 

In addition to work on drug safety and genetic causis of illness, Psaty, who holds an MD and PhD, has published extensively on conflict of interest in medicine and the design and conduct of clinical trials.

David Rothschild is a founding member of Microsoft Research's new New York City lab, having joined after a postdoc stint as an economist at Yahoo! Research. He has written extensively, in both the academic and popular press, on polling, prediction markets, and predictions of upcoming events; most of his popular work has focused on predicting elections and an economist take on public policy. Various projects, including Yahoo!’s The Signal, act as online laboratories dedicated to prediction, interest and sentiment models, polling and prediction games. David jumped into politics while working on degrees in civil engineering and history at Brown, spending a summer interning at the White House. He earned his PhD in applied economics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, studying under Justin Wolfers, who gave a briefing on prediction markets at New Horizons in Science in 2006. Rothschild is also a fellow of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia.

Twitter: @DavMicRot

Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor at Stanford University, holding joint appointments in several departments, including Biological Sciences, Neurology & Neurological Sciences, and Neurosurgery. A neuroendocrinologist, he has focused his research on issues of stress and neuronal degeneration, as well as on the possibilities of gene therapy strategies for protecting susceptible neurons from disease. Currently he is working on gene transfer techniques to strengthen neurons against the disabling effects of glucocorticoids. Sapolsky also spends time annually in Kenya studying a population of wild baboons in order to identify the sources of stress in their environment, and the relationship between personality and patterns of stress-related disease in these animals. More specifically, Sapolsky studies the cortisol levels between the Alpha male and female and the subordinates to determine stress level. He is the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping (1994), which explores the effects of prolonged stress and its contribution to damaging physical and mental afflictions. His other books include The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997), Junk Food Monkeys (1997), A Primate’s Memoir (2002) and Monkeyluv and Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (2005).

David A. Spiegel is using new kinds of chemical synthesis to develop molecules that could help illuminate the mechanisms that underlie human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and diabetes, in addition to his work with antibody recruiters.

Darlene Taylor jumped off the pre-med track as a student when she discovered her gift for chemistry. She earned a PhD in polymer physical chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and stayed at UNC for postdoctoral work on the design and characterization of polymer materials for novel applications, collaborating with fellow New Horizons speakers Joe DeSimone and Tom Meyer. In 2005 she joined the faculty at North Carolina Central. Her work focusing on structure-property relationships in oligomers and polymers has brought her back to medicine, where some of her innovations in chemistry hold potential as smart materials for drug delivery.

Kristina Thayer’s office conducts evaluations of environmental chemicals and mixtures to determine whether they cause adverse health effects—and provides opinions on whether these substances are of concern, given what’s known about humans’ exposure to them. Before joining NIEHS, Thayer was a senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and then at the Environmental Working Group.
 

Miguel Vasquez is married to a Mayan woman from Guatemala who had to leave Guatemala because her political activism made it too difficult for her to stay. “For a long time, I’ve had a global perspective on things,” he says. He is a distant relative of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a conquistador who led the major expedition of conquest in the Southwest.
 

Heidi Wayment is a social psychologist interested in self and identity, and how individuals react to threat and loss. Before receiving her PhD in social psychology at UCLA in 1992, she played professional basketball for several top European teams, was on the U.S. and German national teams and played in the first professional women’s league in the U.S.—for the WBL New Orleans’ Pride. She is the editor, along with Jack S. Bauer, of Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego.

Epidemiologist Steve Wing conducts research on occupational and environmental health. His recent work has focused on environmental justice, the health effects of ionizing radiation, community impacts of industrial swine production and the built environment. He has collaborated on health and exposure studies with communities and workers affected by the nuclear industry, industrial animal production, and other environmental and occupational threats.

“I grew up loving nature,” Greg Wray recalls, “and it’s still what gets me up in the morning.” Once up, Wray spends his days immersed in large-scale data analysis, studying biological diversity 21st century-style. He has focused on the evolution of gene regulation partly by studying sea urchins, an organism whose gene regulatory networks are well understood, providing an intuitive understanding of how regulation works. But the major focus of the Wray Lab is the primates: understanding how changes in gene expression might have driven many of the phenotypic traits that make us human. Wray joined the faculty at Duke—where he earned his zoology PhD—in 1997.

Julie Zimmerman is acting director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University. In addition to green chemistry, her research interests include the development of public policies to encourage sustainability, water-treatment technology for developing countries, and programs to encourage corporate environmental responsibility.