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At the MIT Convocation held on May 6, 2008, Professor Sylvia T. Ceyer was honored with The Arthur C. Smith Award. The Award was established in 1996 on the occasion of Dean Smith’s retirement from the position of Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs. The award honors his service and is presented to a member of the MIT faculty for meaningful contributions and devotion to undergraduate student life and learning at MIT. |
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Christian Schubert, Graduate Student in the Kemp Lab was presented with the 2008 Goodwin Medal at the MIT Convocation held on May 6, 2008. The Goodwin award is given annually to a graduate student whose performance of teaching duties is “conspicuously effective over and above ordinary excellence.” It is an honor bestowed by MIT to a very small number of gifted and committed teachers. This award was established in memory of Henry Manley Goodwin, the first Dean of the Graduate School of MIT. |
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The Board of Directors of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation has awarded the Camille Dreyfus-Teacher Scholar Award to Professor Mohammad Movassaghi. The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program is focused primarily on individual research accomplishments and promise, but evidence of excellence in teaching is also expected. Professor Movassaghi is the third professor in the Department to receive this prestigious award in the past five years. Professor Jianshu Cao received it in 2003 and Professor Alice Y. Ting in 2006. |
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Professor Christopher C. Cummins has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers, announced on April 28, 2008 the election of a new class of members. “The Academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields, and to the world,” said Academy President Emilio Bizzi.Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected as members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.
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Professor Daniel G. Nocera will direct the Solar Revolution Project (SRP). The SRP, funded by a $10 million gift from the Chesonis Family Foundation, will explore new materials and systems that could dramatically accelerate the availability of solar energy. The SRP will complement and interact closely with other large solar projects at MIT, creating one of the largest solar energy clusters at any research university.
Go to MIT News Office for full story
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Annelise Beck ‘09 has been awarded a 2008 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. Congress established the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who served his country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years of service in the U.S. Senate. The purpose of the Goldwater Foundation is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to outstanding undergraduate college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields. |
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The Field Lab
The S1 state of acetylene presents the possibility of low-barrier isomerization from its trans geometry minimum to a local energy minimum at a cis geometry. This process has been the focus of many theoretical studies, but it has been difficult to study experimentally because, though the trans minimum has been exhaustively characterized, the transition from the ground electronic state to the cis geometry is electronically forbidden and no transitions to this geometry have previously been observed. In the course of characterizing the S1 surface, several levels were observed which could not be ascribed to S1 trans or other electronic states. S1 cis seems a likely candidate for explaining these “interloper” levels, which were, surprisingly, observed below the calculated barrier to trans–cis isomerization, and must therefore owe their intensity to mixing via tunneling with trans geometry localized states.As part of our investigation of the cis well states, we undertook a discrete variable representation (DVR) calculation to try to obtain information on the delocalized wavefunctions of S1. Based on the input from levels of ab initio electronic structure calculations that reasonably reproduce the known characteristics of the trans isomer, our reduced dimension DVR was designed to capture the planar isomerization dynamics due to modes n3 and n6. The results appear to corroborate our assignments of the interloper levels to the cis well, as well as revealing very intriguing and as yet uninterpreted insights into the molecular dynamics close to and above the isomerization barrier energy.
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Professor Steven R. Tannenbaum, Professor of Chemistry and Underwood-Prescott Professor of Toxicology, Biological Engineering Division, is the recipient of the Second AACR-CICR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research. The award was established in 2007 by the AACR’s Chemistry in Cancer Research Working Group, through the support of GlaxoSmithKline, and honors novel and significant chemistry research that has led to important contributions to the field of cancer research. Tannenbaum’s study of chemistry as related to cancer has advanced our knowledge of chemical carcinogenesis, the molecular epidemiology of cancer, and more recently, anti-cancer drug development and evaluation. Professor Tannenbaum will be recognized by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) at its 2008 Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. |
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Professor Mohammad Movassaghi has been selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow for 2008. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. |
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The National Academy of Sciences has chosen Professor JoAnne Stubbe, Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biology to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences. The prize and medal is given for innovative research in the chemical sciences that, in the broadest sense, contributes to the better understanding of the natural sciences and to the benefit of humanity. It will be presented to Professor Stubbe "for landmark work on the mechanisms and regulation of ribonucleotide reductases, a compelling demonstration of the power of chemical investigations to solve problems in biology." The award, supported by the Merck Company Foundation, has been presented since 1979. |
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The Ting lab is interested in developing new site-specific reactions for protein labeling, using enzymes that recognize an acceptor sequence with exquisite specificity but that can utilize unnatural probes with useful bioorthogonal functional groups for labeling, such as azides and alkynes. We cloned, expressed, and purified biotin ligases from nine different species, and screened them for the ability to ligate unnatural analogues of biotin onto a specific lysine residue of the human p67 biotin acceptor protein. Unique among our panel, the biotin ligases of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) and Pyrococcus horikoshii accept alkyne and azide derivatives of biotin, respectively. These new ligation reactions demonstrate the differential substrate specificities of biotin ligases from different organisms and could be useful for new protein labeling applications.
Journal of the American Chemical Society 2008, 130, 1160-1162.
S. A. Slavoff, I. Chen, Y.-A. Choi, and A. Y. Ting. |
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These images show macrophages infected with anthrax. The fluorescent green areas indicate the presence of nitric oxide (NO). In the top two panels, the anthrax can produce NO. At top left, an image taken two hours after infection shows that NO is present. These cells die. At 18 hours, top right, more NO is present, produced by the macrophages. In the bottom two panels, the anthrax infecting the macrophages is unable to produce NO. At bottom left, after two hours, almost no NO is present, but it is present (produced by the macrophages) at 18 hours, bottom right. These cells are viable.
Konstantin Shatalin*, Ivan Gusarov*, Ekaterina Avetissova*, Yelena Shatalina*, Lindsey E. McQuade†, Stephen J. Lippard† and Evgeny Nudler*
*Department of Biochemistry, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016;
†Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
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New Mechanism for Energy Flow in Polyatomic Molecules
Professor Robert W. Field and his group, along with collaborators at the University of Amsterdam, have observed quantum interference effects in the spectrum of acetylene that reveal a new mechanism for Inter-System Crossing (ISC) in polyatomic molecules. Most chemically stable molecules have a triplet state as their first excited electronic state. As a result, the low-lying vibrational levels of an electronically excited singlet electronic state, S1, are embedded in an ergodic manifold of highly excited vibrational levels of the lower-lying triplet state, T1. Spin-orbit S1~T1 mixing induces energy flow from the ‘optically bright’ singlet state into the dense bath of ‘optically dark’ triplet vibrational states in a process known as Inter-System Crossing (ISC). The traditional model for ISC in polyatomic molecules is a statistical decay mechanism, where there is no explicit causality in the flow of energy from one electronic state to the next. The Field group and collaborators have obtained evidence in support of a new, deterministic model called the ‘doorway mechanism’ of ISC. In the ‘single doorway’ mechanism, rather than a pure statistical decay, ISC is promoted by a special doorway state that can uniquely facilitate coupling of an S1 state into the bath of indistinguishable T1 vibrational states. The ‘double doorway’ mechanism involves two doorway-mediated paths between the bright state (S1) and dark bath (T1). These two paths can interfere with each other, giving rise to quantum interference effects that are observable in the molecular spectrum. State-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (U of Amsterdam) and Surface Electron Ejection by Laser-Excited Metastables (SEELEM) spectroscopy (MIT) were employed to observe the quantum interference effects and confirm the energy flow mechanism as double doorway. The above figure presents the simultaneously recorded SEELEM and ultraviolet laser-induced fluorescence (UV-LIF) spectra in the region of the V03K01 sub-band of the acetylene Ã1Au –  1Sg+ electronic transition. Analysis of the spectral patterns reveals the double doorway mechanism for ISC in acetylene. The double doorway mechanism and observation of quantum interference effects offers possibilities for external manipulation and control over molecular excited state dynamics and non-radiative energy flow in polyatomic molecules. |
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