A new Dean and the end of summer. August, the last month in which to meet compliance requirements. Go to the Website and get it out of the way. Another deadline to be thinking about is October 1st. As reported, grants submitted then may fall into the last of the good funding budgets for some time to come. As always, I am sure David Konkel is poised to be of help to both Department and SCMS members who would like some editing advice.

Also, a reminder that the deadline for nominations for the SCMS sponsored Scholars in Residence Program is almost here. This can be great opportunity to facilitate your research program. If you have any questions about the program, do not hesitate to ask me. The Scholars in Residence is but one of the new initiatives planned as joint ventures between SCMS and HBC&G being put into place this fall. Three other events will be the new course on molecular aspects of disease that Wayne Bolen, John Papaconstantinou and Claudio Soto have organized and a new set of workshops with a translational theme being developed for SCMS by Alan Brasier and Krishna Rajarathnam. A fourth is a new series of SCMS sponsored monthly seminars to be given by UTMB faculty from the different Departments and Centers. Tom Wood is in charge of that event. All together these are efforts to bring various activities in line with the new translational goals of the University as outlined at the last Research Retreat and the NIH Roadmap.

Early in the next academic year I would like to have input from the faculty as to the development of an optional in house grant review process. I would not like this to become an obstacle or a delaying process and would like it to be useful for those who would like to avail themselves of the advice. As a model I have been thinking of the mechanism used at the Shriner’s, where several months prior to submission short presentations are made in an informal seminar setting of proposed Specific Aims and Preliminary Data. The way I envision these is to have typically anywhere from 20-30 minutes of a PowerPoint presentation with some critique by the selected audience. Because of the lead time they would be useful in that there would be time for the presenter to carry out a key experiment based on the advice preferred. They could also serve another purpose in that they might stimulate new collaborations among our faculty. These would not necessarily be announced to the general public but would be “in house site visit” exercises. If they are to be successful they would have to be very informal and would require participation by faculty referees. While it is too late for these to be put into place for the October deadline, we might just be able to organize some of use for the February/ March deadline. Think about this new aid to grant submission and let me know your thoughts. I think it would serve better than having finished grants pre-reviewed as these are usually not ready until shortly prior to submission and at that stage only cosmetic changes are possible. However, if there is interest in that approach let me know.

Also, do mark your calendars for the October 27th Daniel W. Kempner sponsored talk to be given by Dr. Stan Prusiner, the 2004 Daniel W. Kempner Visiting Professor. The 9am talk will be at the new Galveston Island Convention Center as part of a one day event devoted to aspects of aging ranging from a morning of talks around the topics of prions and protein mis-folding to an afternoon of more clinical, social and community issues relevant to the problems of the aging population. There will also be a reception and banquet to end the day. Dr. James Lee is a member of the Committee that helped organize and design the morning scientific sessions. A more detailed announcement will be made in early September.

The coming new academic year will present many new opportunities and challenges to all of us. As we all know research space is very tight throughout the University. An overall review of space assignments is likely to take place in the near future. As you may know in the past the Dean expected each department to generate $160 per square foot in external funding. At a recent presentation to the Executive Committee of the Medical School a new figure of $250 per square foot was announced. While these numbers apply to departmental entities and not individual faculty members, we have to take them into account as we make plans that will include faculty growth when a new Chair of HBCG is in place. As the Dean takes charge and a new Chair and Director respectively are chosen for HBCG and SCMS, I am sure that there will be changes that will affect all of us. To that end be sure to attend seminars given by the applicants to the position, which will be going on into the middle of August and let Louise Prakash and Wayne Bolen know your opinions. This is important.

Finally, sometime in the next few months or so the Departmental Office, now in the sixth floor of BSB, inclusive of conference room there, will be moving to the first floor of BSB. Details to follow later. Because of the ever present need for meeting and teaching rooms, we will be converting the lunch room in the seventh floor Blocker MRB to a conference room with projection facilities and teleconferencing capabilities. It will still be used as a lunchroom but will be equipped to also serve as a meeting and teaching room. It should be available for use by November. We will share use with the Department of Otolaryngology.

Enjoy the dog days of summer.

regino

Dr. J. Regino Perez-Polo
- March 19-22, 2004 , Chicago , IL to attend the symposium and participate as a Member of the Executive Council grant review.

- May 11-14, 2004 , Avignon , France to attend the International Society for Neurochemistry Advanced School meeting.

- April 06-08, 2004 , Leipzig , Germany to meet with a collaborator at Leipzip University.

- April 12-14, 2004 , Avignon , France to meet with the International Society for Neurochemistry Advance School to coordinate the upcoming annual meeting.

- April 25-26, San Juan, Puerto Rico to attend the Specialized Neuroscience Research Program meeting of the Puerto Rico National Institutes of Health External Advisory Committee.

Dr. Sankar Mitra
-May 25-30, 2004, Banff, Canada, to attend Radiation Damage 2004 Conference as an invited speaker.

-June 3-9, 2004, Oahu, Hawaii, to attend 2nd US-Japan DNA Repair Meeting as an invited speaker.

Dr. Louise Prakash
-May , 2004, Los Angeles, CA to give a seminar at UCLA.

Wiederhold, L., Leppard, J. B., Kedar, P., Karimi-Busheri, F., Rasouli-Nia, A., Weinfeld, M., Tomkinson, A. E., Izumi, T., Prasad, R., Wilson, S. H., Mitra, S., and Hazra, T. K. AP Endonuclease-independent DNA Base Excision Repair in Human Cells. Molecular Cell, In press, 2004.

Bhakat, K. B., Hazra, T. K. and Mitra, S. Acetylation of the Human DNA Glycosylase NEIL2 and Inhibition of Its Activity. Nucleic Acids Research, 32, 3033-3039, 2004.

Nair, D. T., R. E. Johnson, S. Prakash, L. Prakash, and A. K. Aggarwal (2004) Replication by human DNA polymerase- i occurs by Hoogsteen base-pairing. Nature 430:377-380.

Wooden, S.H., Bassett, H.M., Wood, T.G. and McCullough, A.K. Identification of critical residues required for the mutation avoidance function of human MutY (hMYH) and implications in colorectal cancer. Cancer Lett., 205: 89-95, 2004.

Cobb, S., Wood, T., Ceci, J., Varro, A., Velasco, M. and Singh, P. Intestinal expression of mutant and wild-type progastrin significantly increases colon carcinogenesis in response to azoxymethane in transgenic mice. J. Am. Cancer Society, 100: 1311-1323, 2004.

Dasu, RKM, D.N. Herndon, M. Spies & J.R. Perez-Polo. Genomic analysis of IGF-I gene transfer in thermally injured rats. Wound Repair and Regeneration: Vol 12:217-224, 2004.

Izumi, T., Schein, C.H., Oezguen, N., Feng, Y. and Braun, W. “Effects of backbone contacts 3' to the abasic site on the cleavage and the product binding by human apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease (APE1)”. Biochemistry 43(3):684-689, 2004.

William H. Boylston, Arpad Gerstner, James H. DeFord, Mark A. Madsen, Kevin Flurkey, David E. Harrison and John Papaconstantinou. Altered Cholesterologenic and Lipogenic Transcriptional Profile in Livers of Aging Snell dwarf (Pit1 dw/dwj) Mice. Aging Cell (In Press), 2004.

Mark A. Madsen, Ching-Chyuan Hsieh, William H. Boylston, Kevin Flurkey, David E. Harrison and John Papaconstantinou . Altered Oxidative Stress Response of the Long Lived Snell Dwarf Mouse. Biochem Biophys Res Comm., (In Press), 2004.

Lipniacki, T., Paszek, P., Brasier, A., Luxon, B.A. and Kimmel, M., “Mathematical Model of NF-kappaB Regulatory Module.” J Theor Biol., 228, 2, 195-215 (2004).

Ferreon, J.C. and V.J. Hilser. (2004) Thermodynamics of Binding to SH3 Domains: The Energetic Impact of Polyproline II (PII) Helix Formation. Biochemistry. In Press.

Babu, C.R., Hilser, V.J. and A. J. Wand (2004) Direct Access to the Cooperative Substructures of Proteins and the Protein Ensemble via Cold Denaturation. Nat. Struct. Mol. Bio. 11, 352-357.

NONE