bridges vol. 9, April 2006 / News from the Network

Alexandra Lerch-Gaggl, molecular biologist and confocal imaging specialist
will assume the position of assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in the Department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology, and Anatomy. After completing her studies at the Paris-Lodron University in Salzburg, she came to the Medical College as a postdoctoral fellow in 2000 to continue her work in developmental biology.

Dr. Lerch-Gaggl studies the role of factors involved in ribosome biogenesis and nucleologenesis during early development. Recently she has also been appointed director of the Bryant Imaging Core Facility at the Medical College, which offers state-of-the-art imaging techniques, using confocal microscopy, to all faculty and staff of the institution.

Department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Anatomy at the Medical College of Wisconsin: http://www.mcw.edu/cellbio/

Thomas Teo, psychologist
has been associate professor in the History and Theory of Psychology Program at York University (Toronto, Canada) since 2000. His research interests in theoretical psychology are broad and are based on critical-hermeneutic analyses. Specifically, he has been reconstructing the critique of psychology, the history of philosophical psychology in the 19th century, and the theory of race and racism in the human sciences.
His most recent book, The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to Postcolonial Theory, was published in 2005 by Springer. He is chair-elect of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association and he is organizer for the next International Society of Theoretical Psychology conference in 2007 at York.
To learn more about Teo's research program, please visit:
http://www.yorku.ca/tteo

Barbara Franz, political scientist
has been professor of political science at Rider University since 2004. She recently published her first book, Uprooted and Unwanted: Bosnian Refugees in Austria and the United States (Texas A&M University Press, 2005).

The book can be ordered at
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/158544412X/ref=pd_ts_6/302-8589563-7008031

Guenter Bischof, historian
is professor of history and director of the Center for Austrian Culture and Commerce at the University of New Orleans (UNO). After teaching courses in diplomatic history at UNO since 1989, Guenter Bischof took over as chair of the History Department in January 2006, after a national search for a new chair had to be canceled following Hurricane Katrina. Post-Katrina duties as chair are highly unusual, as he has to deal with issues such as housing for five of the department's 13 faculty members, as well as one graduate assistant and a staff member whose houses or apartments were lost or damaged in the storm.

Read more about the recent donation of $1 million by the ERP Fund in Vienna to the UNO and New Orleans for the reconstruction of the devastated city and university in Guenter Bischof's article .

Visit Guenter Bischof's Web site:
http://www.centeraustria.org/bischof/index.html

Gerhard Eschelbeck, computer scientist
and renowned network security expert, has been appointed to the position of chief technology officer and senior vice president of engineering at Webroot Software, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, where he is responsible for developing and driving the company's overall product strategy. Prior to joining Webroot Software, Eschelbeck served as CTO and vice president of engineering of Qualys, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand vulnerability management, where he was pioneering the company's Software as a Service based vulnerability management platform.
Webroot Software, Inc.: http://www.webroot.com/

Christian Poellabauer, computer scientist
an assistant professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame, received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation for his work on consequence-aware distributed resource management. The award is endowed with $400,000 over five years, starting March 1, 2006.

Read more: http://www.cse.nd.edu/news/news.php?id=881
For more information on the Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award visit:
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5262

Kurt Stockinger, computer scientist
at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, works on algorithms to quickly search extremely large amounts of data. The Scientific Data Management Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was one of the research groups analyzing the data (more than 500,000 e-mails sent by 151 Enron employees) made public as part of an investigation into Enron's business dealings in California. Stockinger is the lead author of the group's report "Analyzing Enron Data: Bitmap Indexing Outperforms MySQL Queries by Several Orders of Magnitude," published in January 2006.

Read more: http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=10420
Full report: http://www-library.lbl.gov/docs/LBNL/594/37/PDF/LBNL-59437.pdf

Henning F. Harmuth, physicist
recently published his fifteenth scientific book, Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics: Dogma of the Continuum and the Calculus of Finite Differences in Quantum Physics (London: Elsevier, 2005), together with Beate Meffert from the Humboldt University in Berlin.

His book can be ordered at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0120147718/002-9834239-9122447?v=glance&n=283155
or at:
http://elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/702364/description#description

Robert H. Schiestl, biologist
is professor of pathology, environmental health and radiation oncology at the UCLA schools of Medicine and Public Health. He received the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Helene Brown Award for 2006. This award is given by the cancer center each year, to a member who has made significant contributions in the area of cancer prevention and control research. The award includes an unrestricted fund in the amount of $10,000.

Robert Schiestl's UCLA Web site:
http://www.uclaaccess.ucla.edu/UCLAACCESS/web/Faculty.aspx?ri=1045

Arne Rietsch, microbiologist
a former post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. John J. Mekalanos, was appointed assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University where he started in January of this year.

Currently, his research is focused on understanding the syringe-like secretion machinery, called the type III secretion system, which the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa uses to directly inject protein toxins into targeted host cells.

Visit Arne Rietsch's Web site at the Department of Molecular Biology & Microbiology at Case Western Reserve University: http://www.case.edu//med/microbio/rietsch.htm

Gerwin Schalk, research scientist
has been with the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health since 1999. He was recently promoted to Research Scientist IV (02/2005) and subsequently received a tenured appointment with New York State (10/2005). Since then, he has submitted a proposal for a $1.8 million, five-year research project to the NIH and received a very favorable review (top 2.6 percent), which practically guarantees funding. Promotion to Research Scientist V is currently pending.

Thomas Loerting, chemist
was awarded the 2005 Novartis Prize in Chemistry for his research on the topic "amorphous ice," in particular for the discovery and characterization of VHDA, as well as for the results of his latest research in atmospheric chemistry. The latter addressed ozone reduction in the polar stratosphere and sour rain in the troposphere. The Novartis Prize was awarded for the thirty-fifth time in the fields of medicine, biology and chemistry in the Novartis Research Center, Vienna, in January 2006.

Thomas Loerting's Web site at the Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Innsbruck: http://www-c724.uibk.ac.at/staff/loerting/

Johannes Schwank, chemical engineer
has been full professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor since 1980. He was appointed director of the Transportation Energy Center (TEC), which has been recently established by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to find solutions to the problem of energy production and utilization. Schwank's main research interests are heterogeneous catalysis with special emphasis on advanced transportation energy concepts, fuel processing for fuel cells, automotive emission control catalysis, and microelectronic thin film gas sensors.

Visit the Transportation Energy Center's Web site: http://www.engin.umich.edu/research/tec/

Christoph Lengauer, geneticist
has been associate professor of oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. After eleven years with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, he joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, MA, in June 2005, assuming the position of Head (Executive Director) of Drug Discovery Oncology Research.

The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research:
http://www.nibr.novartis.com/

Norbert Neumeister, physicist
Is a professor of experimental particle physics at Purdue University. He has been awarded an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award for FY 2006 by the Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics. The award-winning proposals in experimental and theoretical high energy physics and in accelerator physics were selected on the basis of their scientific and technical merit from among the 54 submitted to the program this year.

The 2006 Outstanding Junior Investigator Awards in High Energy Physics announcement:
http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/OJI2006Winners.shtm

Norbert Neumeister's website at Purdue University:
http://tesla.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/neumeister.shtml