Eight University faculty members were recently awarded the newly created Homeland Security Grants offered by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, in conjunction with the University of Arizona Foundation.

These newly initiated awards of up to $5,000 were made on a competitive basis semi-annually for projects involving research or other creative scholarly activity.

Assistant Vice President for Research Tom Hixon says the small grants are intended as seed money for researchers at the UA to help attract major homeland security initiative grants from such federal agencies as the

National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

“One of the things we want to do is jumpstart any initiative on homeland security,” Hixon says, “We want to put these people in a position to go after Office of Homeland Security Grants.”Homeland Security Grants program was created in response to the national events of Sept. 11. The new program seeks applications relevant to a broad spectrum of homeland security, including disease prevention and control, water supply protection, food supply protection, spatial imaging, computer security, personal security and various other physical, social, and behavioral concerns of relevance. The grants are intended to provide short-term worthwhile projects and result in data or work that can be used in developing major proposals for submission to external funding agencies or private contributors. Homeland Security Grants awardees and their proposed projects are:

John Allen, associate professor of psychology, “Is Brain ‘Fingerprinting’ Ready for Prime Time?”

Charles Gerba, professor of soil, water & environmental science, and Christopher Choi, associate professor of agricultural & biosystems engineering, “Environmental Dispersion of Biological Agents in Water Supply Systems.”

Pierre Lucas, assistant professor, of materials science and engineering, “IR Glass Fibers for Biochemical Sensors Using Evanescent Wave Spectroscopy.”

Dominic McGrath, associate professor of chemistry, “Synthesis of Dendritic Phthalocyanines for Optical Limiting Applications.”

Petra Miketova, assistant research scientist in nursing, “Identification of GCMS Microbial Fingerprints by Using Pattern Recognition Evaluation.”

J. Glenn Songer, professor of veterinary science and microbiology, “Economics of Animal Agroterrorism in the Sonoran Region.”

Ben Sternberg, professor of mining and geological engineering, and Steven Dvorak, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, “Imaging through Walls.”

Miklos Szilagyi, professor of electrical and computer engineering, “Software Development for Information and Human Influence Propagation Studies.”

The Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology (IBSB) at the University of Arizona in Tucson has named two prominent scientists as associate directors.

Vicki Chandler, an expert on crop genetics and professor of plant sciences at the UA, and Dr. Fernando Martinez, director of the Arizona Respiratory Center and professor of pediatrics at the Arizona Health Sciences Center, were named to the newly created positions.

Chandler teaches in the department of plant sciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and is internationally recognized for her genetics research, which focuses on regulation of gene expression.

Martinez is director of the Arizona Respiratory Center (ARC) and professor of pediatrics at the Arizona Health Sciences Center. He is known worldwide for his leadership in the area of risk factors for childhood asthma and the genetic basis for this disease. ARC is an interdisciplinary Center of Excellence in the College of Medicine that is dedicated to research, clinical care and teaching in adult and pediatric pulmonary disease.

Both Chandler and Martinez are engaged in research that is interdisciplinary and dependant on high technology equipment and techniques – a perfect fit for the IBSB, which is a collaboration involving five UA colleges, including Medicine and Agriculture and Life Sciences. Baldwin believes bringing scientists from different disciplines together with cutting-edge technology will create the environment conducive to major conceptual advances.

The Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology is dedicated to creating a climate that facilitates the advancement of high technology molecular life sciences research and education to improve human health and well being and to stimulate biology-based industrial development in Arizona.

It will provide a facility to house the technical support for genetics research. It will enable physician-scientists to find new ways to detect and treat disease, and will encourage development of better foods and biology-based products.

Astronomers using adaptive optics technology on the Gemini North Telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have observed a brown dwarf orbiting a low-mass star at just three times the distance between Earth and the sun. This is the closest distance between a star and its companion in this type of binary system ever found by direct imaging.

The record-breaking find is just one of a dozen lightweight binary systems observed in the study, led by Laird Close, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The survey suggests that stellar systems and smaller bodies, including large planets, may form differently than previously thought.

A “brown dwarf” is an object too massive and hot to be classified as a planet, but too small and cool to burn like a star. These so-called “failed stars” are best viewed in the infrared because they release surface heat as they slowly contract.

“By using Gemini’s advanced imaging capabilities, we were able to clearly resolve this binary pair where the distance between the brown dwarf and its parent star is only about twice the distance of Mars from the sun,” said team member Melanie Freed, a graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The newly identified brown dwarf is estimated to be between 38 and 69 times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits a star called LHS 2397a, which is 46 light-years from Earth.

Finding a brown dwarf companion within 3 Astronomical Units of its parent star is an important step toward imaging massive planets around other stars.

An Astronomical Unit (AU), the distance between the Earth and sun, is 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles. The previous record image for the closest distance between a brown dwarf and its parent star, which is a much brighter, sun-like star, was almost five times greater at 14 AU.

Close and his team used the Gemini North Telescope to detect eleven other low mass companions. That many low-mass pairs is striking. It suggests that these binary pairs may be common. It contradicts the idea that most very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are solo objects that have been wandering though space alone after being ejected from their stellar nurseries during star formation.

Aided by skilled southern Arizona birders reporting over the Internet, University of Arizona ecologist Will Turner is getting unique new information on urban bird ecology in a fast-growing metropolis.

This spring, Turner described striking patterns in Tucson urban bird populations revealed by the first Tucson Bird Count, a cooperative project initiated last spring by UA Science, area conservation and birding communities. Data about the bird count can be found at www.tucsonbirds.org.

Tucson is probably one of the best-studied cities in the world when it comes to bird life, Turner says. But the Tucson Bird Count is rare in that it produces information on how birds are distributed across the city, how species are responding to changing land use, and how populations fare at different spatial scales over the long term.

“We can actually visualize the distribution of bird species across Tucson because of the way this count is organized. We want to learn what intriguing trends there are in Tucson bird populations as the city has developed,” he says.

If you wonder why anyone should care about urban bird ecology, there’s a hefty body of research that says nature is important to enhancing the quality of human life. More than half of humanity will be living in urban areas by the end of the decade, he says.