Department News
CIRM Awards Three Awards to UCSD Researchers in Support of Innovative Technologies
January 28, 2011The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded three grants totaling nearly $5.8 million to researchers at the University of California, San Diego for development of innovative technologies designed to advance translational stem cell research. The grants are part of $32 million in Tools and Technology Awards II awarded to 19 projects at 10 California institutions that were announced by CIRM today. The grants were awarded to Lawrence Goldstein, Karl Willert, and Shu Chien.
Professors Phil Bourne and Bernard Palsson elected as AAAS Fellows
January 11, 2011Eight professors at the University of California, San Diego have been named new Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Philip E. Bourne, Xiang-Dong Fu, Kun-Liang Guan, Yishi Jin, Peter J. Novick, Bernhard Palsson and Kang Zhang were among 503 AAAS members selected by colleagues in their disciplines to be honored this year for “efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.”
UC San Diego Receives Two Major Biomedical Informatics Grants
October 22, 2010Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, led by Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the Department of Medicine, have received two federal grants totaling more than $25 million to develop new ways to gather, analyze, use and share vast, ever-increasing amounts of biomedical information.
UC San Diego Receives $15.4 Million to Establish New Center for Systems Biology
September 21, 2010The National Institute of General Medical Sciences has awarded $15.4 million to the University of California, San Diego, to establish a center for the study of systems biology, a relatively new branch of science that maps interactions between regulatory molecules in order to understand how complex biological systems work.
The UC San Diego Center for Systems Biology will focus on interactions involved in cells’ responses to stress, said director Alexander Hoffmann, professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the Division of Physical Sciences.
Researchers at the new center will analyze interactions among all of the genes and proteins within a cell in response to potentially harmful changes in the environment, then test the functions of specific genetic “circuits” involved in the response by recreating them in isolation using synthesized genes.
Philip E. Bourne Wins Microsoft's 2010 Jim Gray eScience Award
September 18, 2010Philip E. Bourne, a computational biologist and professor with the University of California, San Diego, is this year’s recipient of Microsoft’s Jim Gray eScience Award, for his contributions to data-intensive computing. “Phil's contributions to open access in bioinformatics and computational biology are legion, and are exactly the sort of groundbreaking accomplishments in data-intensive science that we celebrate with the Jim Gray Award,” said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, in a corporate blog this week following the announcement. “In particular, Phil's role as the founding editor-in-chief of the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology has significantly advanced open access in mathematical and computational biology.”
Shankar Subramaniam Named Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center
June 7, 2010Shankar Subramaniam has been named a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), to assist the Organized Research Unit of the University of California, San Diego, in identifying new opportunities and solutions in the area of bioinformatics.
Dr. Amy Kiger recipient of 2010 Hellman Faculty Fellowship
May 27, 2010A total of $375,000 has been awarded to the 2010-2011 Hellman Faculty Fellows at the University of California, San Diego. The funds awarded will support 30 faculty members in their scholarly work as they strive for tenure with the university, including Dr. Amy Kiger in cell and developmental biology.
Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado named new editor of JAMIA, prestigious informatics journal
May 17, 2010Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, FACMI and founding chief of the division of biomedical informatics at the University of California, San Diego has been named editor of the American Medical Informatics Association’s journal, JAMIA.
Dr. Susan Taylor elected to the National Academy of Sciences Governing Council
May 17, 2010Two scientists from UC San Diego have been elected to the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s preeminent organization of scientists, which advises Congress and the U.S. government on matters of science and technology. They are former UC San Diego Chancellor and University of California President Robert C. Dynes, now a professor of physics at UCSD, and Susan S. Taylor, a professor in UCSD’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Department of Pharmacology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
NSF Graduate Research Fellowships awarded to Stephanie Huelga, Phillip Samayoa, and Max Shokhirev
April 6, 2010The National Science Foundation has awarded Graduate Research Fellowships to Ph.D. students Stephanie Huelga, Phillip Samayoa, and Max Shokhirev in the Bioinformatics Graduate Program.