Introducing Nine New Professors on Campus in the Biological and Physical Sciences

By L & S Staff

March 21, 2001

The Division of Biological Sciences and the Division of Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science are pleased to introduce nine new faculty members who are working on campus. These professors are interested in an wide array of fascinating research, from rainforest ecology to high-energy astrophysics.

The Division of Biological Sciences is strengthened by one appointment in Integrative Biology and two in Molecular and Cell Biology.

The Department of Integrative Biology welcomes Craig Moritz, Professor and Virginia G. and Robert E. Gill Chair in Natural History; Director, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Dr. Moritz received the Ph.D. in 1984 from the Australian National University. He came to Berkeley from the University of Queensland, Australia, where he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Zoology and Entomology. Moritz is trained as a geneticist and molecular evolutionist. He was one of the founding members of the Cooperative Research Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and his research earned him the reputation of one of the leading evolutionary biologists in the world today. His work has covered a range of areas from the evolution of parthenogenesis and maintenance of sex to the effects of historical changes in current distributions and diversity in faunas, and his researches have included a wide range of animal species. He is a coauthor of a text in Molecular Systematics that is considered the standard in the field and he won the Whitley Award from the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for his second book on conservation biology.

The Department of Molecular & Cell Biology welcomes Richard Kramer who joins the Berkeley faculty from the University of Miami where he was an Associate Professor. Professor Kramer, who earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1985, is a cellular neurobiologist whose research focuses on intracellular signaling mechanisms in neurons. Using a state-of-the-art combination of biochemical and molecular biological techniques, imaging methods and electrophysiological recording, he studies cyclic nucleotide-gated (CNG) channels which play a central role in converting environmental signals into electrical signals in sensory receptors. For example, when an odorant binds to a receptor on an olfactory neuron in the nose, it causes a coupled G-protein to be activated. This, in turn, can activate an enzyme, adenylate cyclase, which increases the intracellular concentration of cyclic AMP. CNG channels sense this increase and open, allowing sodium and calcium ions to flow into the cell, changing the cell's membrane potential. That potential change is the electrical signal that initiates the sense of smell. Kramer's research explores how CNG channels, receptors and signaling enzymes work together in neurons to mediate information transfer and memory.

We are delighted to welcome Professor Mu-ming Poo to the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology where he is appointed the Class of 1933 Professor of Neurobiology. He also holds an appointment in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. Professor Poo was born in China and earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University in 1974. He has a distinguished record of research focusing on how the growth cone of a developing nerve steers itself towards its target neurons, what factors govern the establishment of synapses at points of contact and what factors subsequently lead to the strengthening or weakening of those synapses. This latter process, known as synaptic plasticity, is believed to be the cellular basis of learning and memory. Recently Professor Poo has been studying the computational capabilities of small networks of developing neurons, grown in culture. This work has enormous implications for how neural networks can generate high-order function and serves as an exciting new bridge between cellular and systems neurobiology. Professor Poo also serves as the current Director of China's National Institute for Neuroscience in Shanghai which he was instrumental in founding.

The Division of Physcial Sciences benefits from six new faculty members: one in Earth and Planetary Science, a mathematician and four physicists.

Michael Manga joined the Department of Earth and Planetary Science in January, 2001 as Associate Professor. He received his B.S. in 1990 from McGill University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from Harvard. He has published research in fluid mechanics, geodynamics, mineral physics, volcanology, and hydrology. In planetary geodynamics, he has modeled plumes and diapirs, the major upwellings of hot rock within the Earth and terrestrial planets. He developed a theoretical analysis of experimental results in order to clarify the nature of specific mechanisms for plumes within the Earth's mantle bringing significant amounts of heat from the deep interior to the surface. He also has made significant contributions to the understanding of the mixing of heterogeneities. In the area of bubble dynamics, the topic of his Ph.D. thesis, Manga performed an elegant set of experiments on the dynamics of bubbles in a creeping fluid, which has applications in modeling the effects in subsurface flow as well as in magmas and lavas. In volcanology, Manga's work is characterized by field observation, laboratory simulation, and theoretical analysis, shedding light on problems of the development of bubbles in lava flows, bubble distribution in frozen lavas, and explaining the means for gases to emerge from magmas at depth.

The Department of Mathematics has hired Ming Gu, who received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993, as Associate Professor. Professor Gu's area of expertise is in scientific computing, numerical linear algebra, and numerical optimization. Gu's contributions in numerical linear algebra are important across a vast range of applications in computational science, especially those involving massively parallel computation. He developed novel, fast algorithms for computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors of symmetric tridiagonal matrices, which are now the standard in the LAPACK package, used very widely in science and engineering. His newer work on linear control also is expected to have considerable impact.

Steven Boggs, who received his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1998, joined the Physics faculty in January, 2001. He is an experimental astrophysicist whose research focus is in gamma ray spectroscopy. Dr. Boggs has applied this technique to study solar flares and to measure gamma ray from supernovae. He is playing a major role in three distinct gamma ray mission proposals. Professor Boggs is considered an outstanding experimentalist and holds great promise as a future leader in high-energy astrophysics.

 

Physics department member Yury Kolomensky received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Massachusetts. His fields of expertise are high energy particle physics; electroweak theory and QCD; heavy flavor physics, and Standard Model. For his thesis research, Kolomensky studied neutron spin using the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). He was responsible for the design and installation of two magnetic spectrometers and wrote codes for the experiment and the subsequent data analysis. He has published seven papers in the top journals in his field on the results, plus five additional reports and preprints.

 

Adrian Lee, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1993, is an experimental astrophysicist. Since coming to Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in 1994, he has been working on the MAXIMA project. The goal of this project is to launch a balloon containing equipment to measure the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation over a wide range of angular scales. It involves the collaboration of investigators from several American and foreign universities. His contributions to astrophysics thus far have been twofold: instrument development and cosmology. Lee has published forty papers either in archival journals or conference proceedings.

Dan Stamper-Kurn was appointed in the Physics Department as Assistant Professor on January 1, 2001, after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT in 2000. He is an experimental atomic physicist who works in the field of Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) of atoms. His publication list totals twenty-three papers in archival journals, twenty of which are on the subject of BEC and three in energy conservation of buildings. He has already made important contributions to the discovery and study of BEC of atoms.

To read about additional new faculty see other news article, "12 New Faculty on Campus in the Division of Social Sciences" or 12 New Faculty in the Arts and Humanities.

Photo of Craig Moritz courtesy of the University of Queensland; photos of Richard Kramer and Mu-ming Poo by Genevieve Shiffrar, photo of Michael Manga courtesy of Michael Manga; photo of Ming Gu courtesy of George Bergman, photos of Steven Boggs, Yury Kolomensky, Adrian Lee courtesy of UC Berkeley Public Affairs.