Daily Archives: May 3, 2022

Eleven UCLA faculty members were elected today to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nations most prestigious honorary societies. A total of 261 artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors were elected, including honorary members from 16 countries.

UCLA had the second most honorees among colleges and universities, preceded only by Harvard. Stanford was third, UC Berkeley fourth, and MIT and Yale tied for fifth.

In February,UCLA was No. 1 in the number ofprofessors selected for2022 Sloan Research Fellowships, an honor widely seen as evidence of the quality of an institutions science, math and economics faculty.

UCLAs 2022 American Academy of Arts and Sciences honorees are:

John AgnewDistinguished professor of geographyAgnews research focuses on political geography, international political economy, European urbanization and modern Italy. Among his many awards is the2019Vautrin Lud Prize, one of the highest honors in the field of geography. In 2017, Agnew was selected to deliver UCLAs Faculty Research Lecture.

Walter AllenDistinguished professor ofeducation, sociology and African American studiesAllen, UCLAs Allan Murray Cartter Professor of Higher Education, is the director of UCLAs Capacity Building Center and the UCLA Choices Project.His expertise includesthe comparative study of race, ethnicity and inequality; diversity in higher education; family studies; and thestatus of Black males in American society.

Patricia GandaraResearch professor of educationGandara is co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA and chair of the working group on education for the UCMexico Initiative. Her publications include the 2021 books Schools Under Siege:Immigration Enforcement and Educational Equity and The Students We Share: Preparing U.S. and Mexican Teachers for Our Transnational Future.

Wilfrid Gangbo Professor of mathematicsGangbos expertise includes the calculus of variations, nonlinear analysis, partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. He is the founder of EcoAfrica, an association of scientists involved in projects in support of African countries, and is one of the UC and Stanford University faculty members who launched the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute.

Haruzo HidaDistinguished research professor of mathematicsHida is an expert onnumber theory and modular forms. A highly honored mathematician, he has spoken about his research at numerous international conferences and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991 and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research from the American Mathematical Society in 2019.

Leonid KruglyakDistinguished professor of human genetics and biological chemistryDavid Geffen School of Medicine at UCLAKruglyak is UCLAs Diller-von Furstenberg Professor of Human Genetics, chair of the department of human genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He studies the complex genetic basis of heritable traits, which involves many genes that interact with one another and the environment, and his laboratory conducts experiments using computational analysis and model organisms.He has been the recipient ofmany awards, includingthe Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics, the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Geneticsand the Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America.

Peter NarinsDistinguished research professor of integrative biology and physiology, and ofecology and evolutionary biologyNarins research focuses on how animals extract relevant sounds from the often noisy environments in which they live. His numerous honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, theAcoustical Society of Americas2021 silver medal in animal bioacoustics and election to four scientific societies: the Acoustical Society of America, the Animal Behavior Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Society for Neuroethology.

Bradley ShafferDistinguished professor of ecology and evolutionarybiologyShaffer, the director of theUCLA La Kretz CenterforCalifornia ConservationScience, is an expert onevolutionary biology, ecology and the conservation biology of amphibians and reptiles. His recent work has focused on conservation genomics of endangered and ecologically important plants and animals of California, global conservation of freshwater turtles and tortoises, and the application of genomics to the protection of endangered California amphibians and reptiles.

Blaire Van ValkenburghDistinguished research professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biologyVan Valkenburgh, UCLAs Donald R. Dickey Professor of Vertebrate Biology, focuses on the biology and paleontology of carnivorous mammals such as hyenas, wolves, lions and sabertooth cats. She is a leading expert on the evolutionary biology of large carnivores, past and present, and analyzes the fossil record of carnivores from both ecological and evolutionary perspectives.

George VargheseProfessor of computer scienceUCLA Samueli School of EngineeringVarghese, UCLAs Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Networking,devotedthefirst part of his career tomaking the internet fastera field he calls network algorithmics for which he was elected to theNational Academy of Engineeringin 2017, theNational Academy of Inventorsin 2020 and theInternet Hall of Fame in 2021. He is now working to jump-start an area he calls network design automation to provide a set of tools for operating and debugging networks.

Min ZhouDistinguished professor of sociology and Asian American studiesZhou, UCLAs Walter and Shirley Wang Professor of U.S.China Relations and Communications, is director of UCLAs Asia Pacific Center.Her research interests include migration and development,Chinese diasporas,race and ethnicity, and urban sociology.

These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future, David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, said of this years honorees.

Membership is an honor, and also an opportunity toshape ideas and influence policy in areas as diverse as the arts, democracy, education, global affairs and science, said Nancy C. Andrews, chair of the academys board of directors.

The American Academy of Arts and Scienceswas founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals. Previous fellows have included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and UCLA astrophysicistAndrea Ghez.

The academy also serves as an independent policy research center engaged in studies of complex and emerging problems. Its current membership represents some of todays most innovative thinkers across a variety of fields and professions and includes more than 250 Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners.

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11 UCLA faculty members elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences | UCLA - UCLA Newsroom

Three exceptional scholars at the University of Connecticut have been selected for the highest honor the university bestows on its faculty, the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor.

Each year, the Office of the Provost seeks nominations from across UConn for the newest cohort of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors. Candidates must excel in all three areas of research, teaching, and public engagement. A committee of faculty is charged by the Provosts Office to review and select each years honorees from among a competitive pool of nominees.

Honorees retain the title of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor throughout their career at UConn and receive a $2,500 one-year stipend to be used by each recipient to further their professional activities. The number of available professorships each year is determined by the University by-laws. The Board of Trustees approved the latest cohort of honorees at its April 27 meeting.

The recipients for 2022-23 are as follows, with more detailed biographical information below.

The selection of each new class of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors highlights how exceptional our faculty are at UConn. These are outstanding scholars who have made significant advancements in their fields, as well as in scientific discovery and community impact within and far beyond our university campuses. I am pleased to honor them with this recognition and congratulate them on this distinction, said Carl Lejuez, provost at UConn.

Laurinda Jaffe

In her research, Jaffe has repeatedly made discoveries that have been key to moving forward our understanding of the physiological mechanisms that produce a fertilization-competent egg and initiate embryonic development upon fertilization. Another major focus in her lab has been how membrane receptors and cyclic nucleotides function in the signaling pathways by which the cells that surround the oocyte in the mammalian ovarian follicle control meiosis. These discoveries have contributed greatly to our understanding of fertility mechanisms. They also provide important paradigms for understanding how cyclic nucleotides can coordinate intercellular communication in multicellular systems.

Over her career, Jaffe has published over 100 scientific papers and book chapters, including five single author or senior author original research papers in Nature and Science. In 2021, she was elected a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 2021, one of only three members at UConn.

Jaffe has actively participated in formal and informal teaching of graduate, medical and dental students at UConn Health as well as in the mentoring and laboratory teaching of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. She came to UConn Health in 1981 and has served UConn and the community for over 40 years. Early in her career, she developed and directed the medical and dental school curriculum in Tissue Biology, which was recognized by the 1988 Loeser Award for Outstanding Teaching. She has also contributed to the summer program for incoming medical students with disadvantaged backgrounds, a program designed to improve diversity in education at UConn Health. In 2018, she was honored with the Excellence in Research Mentoring award given by the UConn School of Medicine. Jaffe also serves on the Graduate Women in Medicine and Science steering committee and has led an initiative to advocate for an increase in endowed chairs for female faculty. For the past 14 years, she has chaired the organizing committee for the annual Richard D. Berlin Lectureship, a campus wide event that brings together many departments. In 2015, she helped to organize an event that brought author Rebecca Skloot and the family of Henrietta Lacks to the Storrs campus.

Rachel ONeill

ONeills work centers on how genomes function and evolve. She uses cutting-edge genomic, computational and imaging approaches to gain fundamental insights into chromosome biology and genome evolution in a wide variety of organisms. Her studies on the structure and function of chromosome centromeres, essential for proper chromosome segregation during cell division, have shaped the field of centromere biology. She is highly sought-after as a collaborator on large-scale national and international projects that require a high-level expertise in genome assembly curation.

ONeills work on repetitive DNA, which makes up about 50% of the human genome but is frequently dismissed as junk DNA, has had far-reaching impact, including on normal fetal and placental development, the discovery of novel retroelements, evolutionary breakpoints and chromosome evolution, and continuing challenges to the centromere paradox. She is part of the team that released the first complete human genome sequence, published in a series of papers in Science. Her 2010 publication titled Chromosomes, Conflict, and Epigenetics: Chromosomal Speciation Revisited, remains one of the most cited reviews from the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. Collectively, ONeill has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and led or contributed to projects that have brought over $23 million in extramural funding to UConn.

ONeill is also the director of the Institute for Systems Genomics (ISG). As Director of the ISG, she has developed multiple new degree programs, initiated core facilities and programs (including the SARS-COV2 Surveillance Program) and established the iGEM and Genome Ambassadors outreach programs. Most recently, ONeill organized and hosted Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna for the ISG Distinguished Lecture series, an event that attracted about 1,800 attendees for the live virtual presentation.

ONeill also is part of the team that spearheaded the COVID-19 testing efforts at UConn that have helped UConn remain safe, efforts that were widely praised throughout the country including by White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator (2020-2021), Dr. Deborah Birx.

ONeill has been recognized with several honors for her teaching, research and service, including a UConn Excellence in Teaching award, a Connecticut Women of Innovation Academic Leadership Award, and is an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Richard Pomp

Pomp has dedicated his career to promoting fair, efficient, and progressive taxation. States, cities, and countries have valued his guidance on building ethical and sound tax regimes. He is sought after both nationally and globally as a visiting scholar, advisor, and expert witness, counseling cities, states, Indian tribes, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Treasury, the White House, the Department of Justice, the IRS, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and numerous foreign countries, including Zambia, Indonesia, Gambia, Mexico, the Philippines, India, the Peoples Republic of China, Vietnam, and the Republic of China.

He served as the hearing officer for the Multistate Tax Commission, revising the existing rules on state corporate income taxation and drafting alternative solutions. He helped design or draft the Navajo tax code, the Connecticut income tax, the Alaska personal income tax (adoption pending), and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. He was Director of the NY Tax Study Commission, and was described by the then-governor as the father of fundamental tax reform in NY. He was the only non-resident appointed to the California Commission on the 21st Century Economy. He participates in various capacities in Supreme Court litigation.

Pomp is a remarkably prolific author with 13 books and monographs and more than 140 publications in total. Pomps interdisciplinary work has been relied on by judges to justify their decisions in high-profile cases. His casebook, now in its ninth edition, has been translated in part into seven languages. His work has been described as challenging orthodoxy, exposing fallacies and myths, connecting seemingly disparate concepts, and fundamentally changing the professions views of classical problems.

He has won two awards for his teaching. His classes have been consistently described as transformative, inspirational, innovative, and creative, the reason for coming to UConn Law School.

His views are regularly sought by the media, including CNN, NPR, Bloomberg Radio, Sirius Radio, KCBS, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The International Herald Tribune, and the Hill.

Pomp has received every major award in his field, including NYUs Outstanding Achievement in State and Local Taxation, the Bureau of National Affairs Lifetime Achievement Award, Tax Analysts State Tax Lawyer and Academic of the Year, the Council on State Taxations Excellence in State Taxation Award, and the Connecticut Law Tribunes Professional Excellence Award.

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Three Faculty Selected for Board of Trustees Distinguished Professorship - UConn Today - UConn

The Roma people have long held a special fascination for population geneticists who study the frequencies of genetic diseases. The largest minority in Europe, the Roma number 10 to 12 million and live in scattered groups, mostly in central and southeastern Europe. A recent Comment in Nature, from a team at the University of Freiburg, explores how Europes Roma people are vulnerable to poor practice in genetics.A tragic history

TheRoma, once called gypsies, likely originated in the Punjab region of northwest India about 1,500 years ago. They traveled to Persia (Iran), then through Armenia to the Balkan peninsula, and reached the Iberian peninsula by the 15th century. Their genomes diversified as people joined along the way. After their arrival in Portugal and Spain, persecution began. It was the beginning of extreme discrimination and isolation that would unfold over the years.

The Roma and the Jews became the targets of the Nazi goal of racial hygiene. In1936, investigators at The Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Centre drew pedigrees of these groups to form the rationale of a scientific basis for the final solution. German geneticists studied the Roma. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, nominated for a Nobel, submitted a grant proposal to conduct genetic and medical research in Auschwitz, which the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft funded. Hundreds of thousands of Roma died in experiments.

The ending of enslavement of the Roma across eastern Europe beginning in the mid nineteenth century and economic and political changes in eastern Europe in the twentieth century also left their marks on gene frequencies.

Discrimination continued. In the 1970s, the Slovakian government began sending Roma children to schools for those with mild mental disabilities due to genetically determined disorders from inbreeding, according to government documents. Not until 2020 did investigation begin. Said one geneticist,

The slip from genetics to eugenics can happen quite easily.

Today in some nations in eastern Europe the Roma still live in ghettos, with low incomes and little access to quality health care and education. Some do not even have electricity or fresh water to drink.

Thetwisted history of the Roma has left marks on their genomes. In the parlance of DNA science, the Roma experienced a series of Founder effects as they migrated west, while their numbers winnowed through population bottlenecks fueled by discrimination. Even with others joining, reproduction stayed mostly among the descendants of those from India.

Over time, due to continual social isolation, the Roma genome came to include sections that were identical in DNA sequence on both chromosomes of a pair. This is a telltale sign, called runs of homozygosity, that shout endogamy relatives having children together, often without knowing it. Roma genomes today are about 80 percent European and 20 percent Indian.

The complex undulations of Roma movements across Europe and ostracism led to variations of single-gene conditions that are more prevalent, or even unique, among them. Nine disorders are caused by novel private Roma mutations, including forms of glaucoma, polycystic kidney disease, limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, and a few neuropathies.

The frequency of one disease in particular across Europe, galactokinase deficiency, recapitulates the journey of the Roma. I have a figure of it in my human genetics textbook to illustrate the effects of migration on a gene pool.

Galactokinase deficiency is very rare and causes serious symptoms among people in most of Europe, but a mild form in the Roma causes only cataracts in infants. It affects 1 in 1,600 to 2,500 of the Vlax Roma in Bulgaria, where 5% are carriers. But among all Roma people in Bulgaria, which includes several groups, the incidence is 1 in 52,000. Farther west in Austria, 1 in 153,000 people have it, and in Switzerland, even farther west, it is 1 in more than 2 million.

Carrier rates in some Roma groups for various conditions range from 5% to 15%. Thats high enough to justify newborn screening programs linked to early treatment, or education and carrier testing for conditions with no treatments, so people can lower their risks of having an affected child using prenatal diagnosis or other strategies. But that hasnt happened. By comparison, 4% of northern Europeans carry cystic fibrosis, for which newborn screening is routine.

The Roma have been ignored, marginalized.

A few geneticists have long recognized the plight of the Roma.

As a result of traditionally low socio-economic status and limited access of the Roma to health care, their unique genetic heritage has long escaped the attention of European medicine and is now being randomly discovered,

wrote Luba Kalaydjieva, professor of molecular genetics at the Western Australian Institute of Medical Research, and colleagues in a 2001 paper,Genetic Studies of the Roma (Gypsies): A Review. She is a Roma guru with an MD and PhD with nearly 200 publications. Medical genetics has an important role to play in improving the health of this underprivileged and forgotten people of Europe, she and her co-authors write. Genetic studies should consider cultural anthropology and social organization against the backdrop of population substructure and demographic history of the Roma to develop public health programs.

In BioEssays in2005, Kalaydjieva calls the Roma the invisible minority. Yet their DNA is valuable. Researchers have sampled it since the 1990s, often not informing the people of the purpose.

In many cases, particularly in the late twentieth century, data and samples were collected from people, including prisoners, without adequate consent or record of consent, and then given to research groups or placed in public databases,

said Veronika Lipphardt, from the University of Freiburg.

In 2022, Lipphardt and colleagues analyzed hundreds of published reports of research that used DNA from Roma people. They also probed five public DNA databases. Bioethical breaches were rampant:

DNA samples were collected without adequate or any consent, and the DNA sequence and other personal information deposited in public databases or shared with other researchers.

Some researchers told the people theyd get feedback on whether they were carriers for certain genetic diseases. That didnt happen.

Published papers persisted in using the term gypsies.

Some studies sampled only the most isolated people or the sickest, skewing conclusions about the general health of the Roma people.

Privacy was compromised. It was easy to cross-reference DNA information in public databases with disease-based databases to identify patients.

Roma people are overrepresented in forensic databases. More than half of entries in a Bulgarian database used to hunt criminals are from Roma, yet they are only 5% of the population.

No projects aimed to help the Roma people who gave DNA.

But change is coming.

Journals are retracting papers that used DNA from vulnerable people without consent. Vulnerable populations include Indigenous peoples, migrants, displaced people, and groups that are considered foreign in their home countries, such as the Kurds in Turkey and Uyghurs in China.

Projects using DNA information from vulnerable groups now have international oversight boards that include bioethicists, social scientists, forensic specialists, and most importantly, community members. They consider consent; DNA collection, analysis, and interpretation; sharing findings; benefits or harms to donors; and ability to opt-out.

Several other vulnerable peoples participate in projects that use their DNA.

TheNative BioData Consortium, founded in 2018, is composed of the nations leading Indigenous geneticists, including tribal experts in precision health, technology, law, policy, business, ethics, and cultural matters. DNA sequencer manufacturerIllumina helps build datasets that encompass all aspects of health; not just genes, but social determinants of health too.

The San, one of the oldest Indigenous groups, live in southern Africa. In 2017 they published a detailedcode of ethicssummarized inScience. They ask that respectful researchers engage with us in advance of carrying out research. There should be no assumption that San will automatically approve of any research projects that are brought to us. We have encountered lack of respect in many instances in the past. For example, researchers photographed young children and breastfeeding mothers, without consent.

The San also ask for clear communication of study results. We require an open and clear exchange between the researchers and our leaders. The language must be clear, not academic. Complex issues must be carefully and correctly described, not simply assuming the San cannot understand.

Transparency, of risks and benefits, is key. In the past, researchers have changed the course or goals of an investigation, didnt show the San papers before publication, and the work yielded no benefits to them, they write.

TheAustralia National Centre for Indigenous Genomicssums up their situation, which is universal. Their goal is harnessing the science of DNA to improve the health and well-being of Australias First Peoples.Our DNA. Our people. Our stories. Our way.

Thanks to Diana Fredriksson for the suggestion to write this article.

Ricki Lewis, PH.D is a writer for PLOS and author of the book The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It. Check out Rickiswebsiteand follow Ricki on Twitter@rickilewis

A version of this article was originally posted atPLOSand is reposted here with permission. Find PLOS on Twitter@PLOS

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Roma 'gypsy' people of Europe have long held a fascination for geneticists. Here's why - Genetic Literacy Project