Science Market Update

One of the ways to measure how well a program or department at a university is doing is to look at their graduate programs. To be able to offer the PhD in a specialized area, you need qualified faculty willing and able to take on teaching and mentoring responsibilities; a strong reputation for excellence in the area; research opportunities (and RA funding) for those doctoral students; and equipment and laboratory facilities, to name just a few factors. So when you see an institution win a major grant to launch a PhD program, you know that's a hot area for research and facilities expansion as well.

In a recent round of new funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), two UC Irvine stem cell research labs and their collaborators at other California universities and private labs have been awarded some $37M, of which approximately $12M will go directly to UCI. The two funded projects involve translational research to develop eventual clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease, in the one study, and retinitis pigmentosa in the other. The new awards bring Irvine's total CIRM funding over the years to $96.25 million, most carried out at the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center (right) which opened its cutting-edge facility on campus 2 years ago.

Did you know you can be considered a "pot-head" without ever touching, let alone smoking, marijuana? When early neuroscientists went looking for the mental hardware that allowed the body to respond to the active ingredient in the cannabis sativa plant (called THC), they found much more than they were bargaining for. They did in fact identify a perfectly-shaped receptor in the brain. Puzzled at why it would exist (surely the human body was not designed with cannabis-intake in mind?), they went on to discover that the body itself makes a cannabis-like substance, called an endocannabinoid, and that it is part of a complex system regulating appetite, pain, pleasure, and immunity. So, technically, your brain is already wired for pot, and your body produces it all by itself.

Imagine how much more territory you could explore if so much of your budget didn't have to go for gas. That's the thinking behind both the Better Buildings Challenge issued by the DOE and the University of California Irvine's new and retrofitted Smart Labs, which are getting a lot of attention nationwide for their success at cutting building inefficiencies and expenses by upwards of 50%.  So what makes a Smart Lab so smart? What did building system engineers find when they put their bio research facilities and equipment under the microscope?

You've heard about green labs and green buildings, with solar panels, roof gardens, and underground parking.  UC Irvine's Smart Labs have more to do with the internal systems, though buildings like UCI's Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center building, at right, that are built from the ground up (as opposed to retrofits) also qualify for high LEED ranking and are both green in the broader sense and smart.

In 2010, the vendor show on campus at UC Irvine attracted researchers from multiple departments around campus.  The most active attendee participation included researchers from the following departments:

The University of California, Irvine and French scientists have discovered the switch that causes healthy brain cells to become epileptic.  This breakthrough may help treat and prevent the most common form of epilepsy, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). 

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder that is characterized by seizures.  Temporal lobe epilepsy is a type of epilepsy where the seizures arise from one or both of the temporal lobes of the brain.  It affects one to two percent of the population and is currently resistant to treatment 30% of the time.

The University of California, Irvine runs a world-class academic Medical Center in Orange County, and it's getting even better with these recent research and facilities developments: