Research

As scientists at UC Irvine, Susan Bryant, dean of biological sciences, and her husband, research biologist David Gardiner, are used to conducting experiments. This fall, however, they've been involved in an experiment of a different kind: They've altered their work and home life to make room for a former student displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Their arrangement is one of the many innovative ways the UCI community has helped those affected by the unprecedented disaster -- and those in need closer to home.

I worked on a story about Michael Milken many years ago, not long after the infamous junk-bond tycoon's release from prison. During the reporting phase, I observed him fulfilling his court-ordered community service by teaching a math clinic at a middle school in a low-income Los Angeles neighborhood. The clinic was not at all what I had expected. Milken, accompanied by his usual entourage, approached the job with the fervor of a motivational speaker. He knew the kids by name and took them through a series of math games, during which they used techniques they'd been taught to multiply and divide multiple-digit numbers quickly in their heads.

Academic test scores in Newport-Mesa Unified increased nine points to 830 of the 1,000-point scale in 2011, but nearly half of the district's elementary schools had declines, state data released Wednesday show. Assistant Supt. of Secondary Education Charles Hinman said it's important to look at Academic Performance Index (API) scores from a long-term perspective and not be concerned about a one-year change. "If you look at our API score districtwide, longitudinally, we have eight straight years of growth," he said.

A Newport Coast teen is set to donate 200 teddy bears with medical ID bracelets around their necks to Children's Hospital of Orange County next week. Devon Cohen, who has been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, has raised almost $30,000 for diabetes research. The 13-year-old will speak in front of almost 250 people at his bar mitzvah Saturday in Costa Mesa and will read excerpts from an edition of the Torah that survived the Holocaust. The bears and bracelets project was part of his mitzvah project, a social endeavor that Jewish children undertake.

The operative word is ambitious. The result has been nothing less than extraordinary. Launched in the spring of 2010, Children's Hospital of Orange County created a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $125 million to fund the remodel and restoration of Orange County's premiere pediatric health facility. Last Saturday evening in Newport Beach, close to 500 guests converged upon the Island Hotel for the fifth annual CHOC Cherishes Children gala, raising some $900,000 toward the ultimate campaign goal.

UC Irvine's drama department will soon realize a 40-year-old dream, when its inaugural season of "Shakespeare Under the Stars" opens next month at an open-air theater, which production staff and technical theater students built by hand. The festival will feature contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Merchant of Venice" presented in the New Swan Theatre, a mini-Elizabethan theater in the round that can be dismantled and moved. Drama professor and department chair Eli Simon, is leading the effort on behalf of UCI's Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

A UC Irvine stem cell researcher won a $4.8-million grant to fund research toward a treatment for multiple sclerosis. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine awarded immunologist Thomas Lane, of the campus' Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, an Early Transitional Award last week to create a new line of neural stem cells to treat multiple sclerosis, according to a UCI press release. "I am delighted that [the California Institute] has chosen to support our efforts to advance a novel stem cell-based therapy for multiple sclerosis," Peter Donovan, director of the research center, said in the release.

When motorcycle builder and Hog Pen bike shop owner Steve Smith recently lost his father to cancer, it made him think about how things could possibly be worse. “It’s tough,” Smith said, who flew to back and forth to Michigan to visit his father during his father’s battle with the disease. “I asked myself ‘what could be worse,’ and having a kid with cancer would be rough.” The Costa Mesa-based Hog Pen hosted a motorcycle rally to benefit the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation Saturday that featured music, food and raffle prizes.

UC Irvine researchers announced this week that they have had a breakthrough in melanoma research, discovering why the deadly skin cancer is largely resistant to chemotherapy and other existing therapies. UCI dermatologist Dr. Anand Ganesan and a team have been researching melanoma, which kills 10,000 people in the United States yearly, since 2007. They dissected melanoma cells and performed a genome-wide scan, finding that two genes, RhoJ and Pak1, prevent cells from "sensing" when they are damaged and therefore build up a tolerance to cancer-killing drugs.

Marisa O'Neil A cancer researcher may have misspent more than $2 million in grant funds to pay for software development rather than cancer research, according to a university audit released this week. In January, auditors started investigating how Division of Epidemiology chief Hoda Anton-Culver was using federal and state grants for research. Their preliminary report from the college's Internal Audit Services, released Tuesday, found that about $2.3 million went to fund a software program similar to one the state started using this month.