In show business, it’s all about who you know. But for UCLA Mathematics Professor and IDRE-related faculty Joseph Teran, it’s all about snow. His research into the mechanics of ice crystals that fall from the atmosphere aided the Walt Disney Company in the creation of animated snow sequences in its Oscar-winning film “Frozen.” Teran has…
Dr. Anastassia Alexandrova is living in a materials world; she is concerned with the study of new chemical materials through the use of computational design and multi-scale modeling. To Alexandrova, associate professor at UCLA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the most interesting questions in science are related to the electronic structure and chemical bonding of…
Getting inside a person’s head is no longer just the stuff of telekinetic comic book characters—the recently announced National Science Foundation’s Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex) awards help to fund real scientists and their research into the interworkings of the brain. Through NSF funding, one of nine NeuroNex Technology Hubs will be established at…
Creating a realistic rendering of the human body is hard enough. It would be modest to say Dr. Hong Zhou has turned this challenging task into one that is macroscopically more difficult: the creation of 3D structural studies of biological complexes as small as microbes. To put that in perspective, the human body is made…
You might think of Professor Kendall Houk as the Shonda Rhimes of Organic Chemistry. Like Rhimes, the writer/producer known for her steady stream of hit television shows including “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” Houk is also known for his prolificness but in publication; he averages around 20 papers a year. Houk, who began teaching at UCLA…
As for the phrase “as far as the eye can see,” it turns out to be actually not that much. This was proven during the 17th century by Robert Hooke, an English physicist, architect and polymath who used a hand-crafted microscope to detail his accounts of plants, insects, and objects. His microscope was so precise…
While her grade-school classmates were learning the alphabet and how to count to five, Andrea Bertozzi remembers studying negative numbers and modular arithmetic. Math often gets a bad rap as an uncreative left-brain oriented activity, but Bertozzi said she was fascinated with it as a child because of its creative potential. “Teachers have trouble teaching…
You probably don’t want a doctor who is a general practitioner to perform your open heart surgery. While both a general practitioner and a cardiothoracic surgeon have extensive medical training, each doctor has specific skill sets. To choose the former is just not the most efficient use of resources. A similar line of thinking exists…
Each June, thousands of UCLA students graduate and find themselves thrust out of the familiar university environment. Some have secured full-time jobs, others acceptance to graduate schools, and for many the path ahead is simply unknown. In the world of genetics, though, much of what’s ahead can be scientifically-speculated directly out of the womb. And…
Imagine stepping into your lab to find that you have captured your very own star on which to conduct research. It’s a nice thought, but housing what amounts to an exploding ball of gas that can reach 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit isn’t what most scientists would call practical. Enter Jaime Marian, a professor in UCLA’s School…