March 29, 2007

News Briefs

Ameer honored by American Heart Association

Guillermo Ameer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association (AHA).

The award supports mid-term investigators with unusual promise and an established record of accomplishments.

Ameer’s research integrates the principles of biomaterials tissue engineering and biotechnology in order to investigate and develop novel approaches to assess, replace and regenerate tissue function.

His AHA project, “Biomaterial and cell therapies for improved vascular tissue engineering,” has been funded at $100,000 a year for five years. Ameer will develop and validate new biomaterial and cell-based strategies to improve vascular grafts and the outcome of bypass surgeries. Ameer hopes to improve the functionality of grafts and even create a new class of tissue-engineered grafts by using novel materials he developed based on citric acid.

Ameer, who joined the Northwestern faculty in 2001, is a member of Northwestern’s Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine.

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Booth named Dolle Associate Professor

James Booth has been named the JoAnn G. and Peter F. Dolle Associate Professor of Learning Disabilities in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the School of Communication.

Booth’s research examines brain activation in typical children and in children with dyslexia when engaged in language and reading tasks as well as brain activation in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during executive functioning tasks.

His research has provided fundamental knowledge about brain differences between those with and without disorders. In his studies he has shown that individuals labeled with a disability do not comprise a homogeneous group even though most research has treated them as such.

Currently Booth is examining whether or not unique neural “signatures” exist in children with well-defined subtypes of reading disorders or ADHD.

Booth, recognized for his innovative application of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology to the study of learning and learning disabilities, has earned him research grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

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Kleinhans to receive Cinema and Media Studies teaching award

Chuck Kleinhans, associate professor of radio/television/film, received the inaugural Society for Cinema and Media Studies Award for Teaching at the group’s annual conference in Chicago. The SCMS award for teaching excellence will be given yearly thereafter.

Kleinhans, who joined Northwestern’s faculty 30 years ago, has chaired more than 40 dissertation committees. Many of his students today are major scholars in the field of media studies. He has taught undergraduate courses in microcomputer graphics, film and video making, media literacy, popular culture and graduate courses in film and television theory, digital culture and cross-cultural media.

His research and teaching interests include the history and aesthetics of experimental and documentary work; mass culture; sexual representation in visual communication from high art to kitsch and from advertising to pornography; and aesthetic, ethical and political issues in cross cultural media analysis.

Kleinhans has created courses that serve both majors and non-majors. His course in Hong Kong cinema, for example, enrolled junior and senior radio/television/film students as well as seniors from Asian American Studies or of Asian heritage. The radio/television/film students brought an understanding of film to the class while the non-majors brought a strong cultural knowledge of themes presented in the films.

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Lubet named Williams Professor

Steven Lubet, professor of law, has been named the Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor.

As director of the Fred Bartlit Center for Trial Strategy, Lubet oversees the law school’s award-winning litigation program, which includes courses on legal ethics, trial advocacy, pretrial litigation, narrative persuasion and litigation strategy.

Lubet’s most recent books are “Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players” and “Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp,” both of which have been widely reviewed and praised. 

He is also author of “Modern Trial Advocacy,” which has been adopted by more than 90 U.S. and Canadian law schools, and has been translated for use in Israel, Brazil, the Peoples Republic of China, and the Republic of China (Taiwan). He is coauthor of “Judicial Conduct and Ethics,” which has been called the nation’s leading reference on judicial ethics. In addition, Lubet is the author of many other books and over 100 scholarly articles on aspects of law practice. 

Lubet’s humorous commentaries have been heard on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” and he writes an award-winning column for The American Lawyer Magazine.

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Morimoto named to Argonne Board

Richard Morimoto, the Bill and Gayle Cook Professor in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been named to the Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory.

UChicago Argonne LLC manages Argonne for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science; its board members help oversee and guide Argonne research, operations and management. Members of the board are chosen from faculty, administrators and trustees of The University of Chicago, from other universities, from national and international organizations and from industry.

Morimoto is director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research and is the University’s liaison to the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, a collaboration of Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is widely recognized for his research on the regulation of the heat shock stress response and the function of molecular chaperones. Morimoto’s current research studies provide a molecular basis to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS and Alzheimer’s disease.