UT Dallas Magazine - Winter 2012 - (Page 8)

WHOOSH! Dr. Anne Van Kleeck, professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, won the International Reading Association’s 2011 Dina Feitelson Research Award for a study she co-authored about book sharing between parents and preschool children. UT Dallas graduates Shweta Arya BS’10 (economics) and Ryan Cheung BS’11 (neuroscience) showcased their projects on personal credit and neural motor plasticity during Texas Undergraduate Research Day at the State Capitol. The Callier Center for Communication Disorders received more than $200,000 from the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas to provide pediatric hearing aid services and speech and language treatment for children with cochlear implants. Electrical engineering graduate student Joey Sankman won a $120,000 National Science Foundation fellowship to develop technology that could enable many future electronics to harvest power from their environment. Stimulation Improves Potential to Learn New Skills Brain Sciences report that brain stimulation accelerated learning in laboratory experiments that may eventually lead to improved treatments for strokes, tinnitus, chronic pain and more. In addition, rats in the study performed tasks they had learned under stimulation even after their brain responses returned to their pre-stimulation state. The findings were published in the April 14 edition of Neuron. The scientists used stimulation to release neurotransmitters that caused the brain to increase its response to a set of tones. This enhanced response allowed rats to learn a task using these tones more quickly than animals that did not receive stimulation. The results provided direct evidence that a larger brain response can aid learning and skill development. “We think that this process of expanding the brain responses during learning, and then contracting them back down after learning is complete, may help animals and people to be able to perform many different tasks with a high level of skill,” said Dr. Amanda Reed, who wrote the article with colleagues from BBS. “For example, this may explain why people can learn a new skill like painting or playing the piano without sacrificing their ability to tie their shoes or type on a computer.” -Emily Martinez Nancy S. Jacobsen R Undergrad’s Award Funds Nanotech Discovery esearchers in the School of Behavioral and in the journal Carbon with the help of funding from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Undergraduate Research Program. The research helped develop an improved procedure for evaluating the purity of carbon nanotubes, which have the potential to revolutionize various applications ranging from electronics and fuel cells to super-strong materials used for body armor. “Carbon nanotube samples are analytically challenging because all the current manufacturing processes introduce carbonaceous impurities, which are difficult to quantify in the presence of the carbon nanotubes,” said Dr. Paul Pantano, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and senior author of the paper. Regardless of applications, the builders of this technology need to know the levels of carbon nanotubes in the base material and the amount of impurities. “It’s like baking a cake using a cup of flour and not knowing if a quarter of the cup contained salt,” said Jacobsen, lead author of the paper. “Like bakers, nanotechnologists need assurance that their cup of CNTs contains no unwanted components.” NSM’s Undergraduate Research Program is in its seventh year and has awarded a total of $315,000 for undergraduate research work. -Katherine Morales A s a UT Dallas undergraduate student, Nancy S. Jacobsen BS’10 published an article 8 utdallas.edu http://www.utdallas.edu

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of UT Dallas Magazine - Winter 2012

UT Dallas Magazine - Winter 2012
Contents
On Campus
From the Lab
Arts and Culture
Courtside Success
Athletics
Research Is Teaching
Town and Gown
In Your Footsteps: An Alumni Perspective
Alumni Notes
In Memoriam
Hindsight

UT Dallas Magazine - Winter 2012