- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
They are pollinator ecologist/associate professor Neal Williams and Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen.
Williams, co-director of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis, will deliver the research luncheon talk on Wednesday, Nov. 20. His topic is “Honey Bees and Pollination: New Things We Now Know.”
Mussen will discuss “The Most Interesting Time in Beekeeping” on Thursday afternoon, Nov. 21. Mussen has served as the Extension apiculturist since 1976 and will be retiring in June 2014. He wears several hats on the CSBA board: apiculturist, parliamentarian and a delegate to the American Beekeeping Federation.
Other topics will include scientific updates, bee laws, almond pollination, sustainability, and “A Bug for Every Bug,” the latter by Steve Godin and the California Citrus Research Board.
Among the other speakers is Robert Curtis, associate manager for agricultural affairs, Almond Board of California. He just received the "Friend" award from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at its 25th annual College Celebration.
President of the association is John Miller of Newcastle. The mission of CSBA is to educate the public about the beneficial aspects of honey bees, advance research beneficial to beekeeping practices, provide a forum for cooperation among beekeepers, and to support the economic and political viability of the beekeeping industry.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Hammock was named the recipient of the 2013 William E. M. Lands Lectureship Award in Nutritional Biochemistry at the Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor. He lectured Oct. 8 on “Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Inhibitors of the Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase Block Angiogenesis, Tumor Metastasis and Tumor Growth.”
Hammock and postdoctoral researcher Guodong Zhang and their team made national news when they discovered a key mechanism by which dietary omega-3 fatty acids (fish oils) could reduce the tumor growth and spread of cancer, a disease that kills some 580,000 Americans a year.
“Bill Lands has long been one of my heroes in science,” Hammock said, “because he carried out excellent fundamental biochemistry and then applied this work to having a dramatic effect on diet and health worldwide.
Lands, a world-renowned nutritional biochemist, discovered the beneficial effects of balancing the effects of excess omega-6 fatty acids with dietary omega-3 fatty acids. One of the world's foremost authorities on fish oils and the author of the book, "Fish, Omega-3 and Human Health,” Lands is best known for his seminal studies demonstrating the benefit of reducing omega-6 and increasing dietary omega-3 lipids. He is a 1951 graduate of the University of Michigan and served on the faculty from 1955-1980.
Some of the top nutritionists in the country have lectured on the biochemical of essential nutrients at the Lands Lectureship, but this year was particularly relevant. Hammock was selected because his laboratory has shown one of the biochemical mechanisms by which omega–3 lipids reduce blood pressure, inflammation and pain.
The work was also timely in that Hammock’s laboratory, in collaboration with Kathy Ferrara at UC Davis and Dipak Panigrahy at Harvard recently demonstrated a biochemical pathway by which omega-3 fatty acids can reduce the growth and metastasis of breast and lung cancers. The work was recently published (April 3) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Hammock lab researcher Guodong Zhang, now an assistant professor in the Department of Food Science, University of Massachusetts.
The UC Davis researchers demonstrated that the omega-3 fatty acid is converted into bioactive metabolites that reduce hypertension, inflammation and pain.
While at the University of Michigan, Hammock also delivered a keynote address at the Fall Symposium on Lipid Mediators, a one-day scientific conference highlighting biomedical research involving lipid mediators. Hammock described how an omega-3 rich diet coupled with a drug candidate developed at UC Davis with researchers Bora Inceoglu and Karen Wagner can control chronic neuropathic pain such as that associated with diabetes.
“Now that the fundamental work can be translated, Alonso Guedes of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is well underway in trials of a drug to relieve pain and inflammation in horses, cats and now dogs,” Hammock said.
The omega-3 lipid project is part of the effort carried out by the UC Davis Foods For Health Institute, directed by Bruce German. The work has been in progress for a number of years in the Hammock laboratory. John Newman, former postdoctoral researcher in the Hammock lab and now an adjunct professor in nutrition, received the John Kinsella award for his Ph.D. work developing a mass spectrometry method for regulatory lipids. More recently Angela Zivokvic, former postdoctoral researcher in the Hammock lab and now associate director of scientific development and translation, has led a team using a later version of this mass spectrometry method to predict patients most likely to benefit from an increase in omega-3 dietary lipids.
“As Professor Bill Lands often says, ‘Nix the 6 (Omega-6) and eat the 3 (Omega-3,’ Hammock quipped.
Hammock directs the campuswide Superfund Research Program, National Institutes of Health Biotechnology Training Program, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Combined Analytical Laboratory. He is a fellow of the Entomological Society of America, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and the recipient of the 2001 UC Davis Faculty Research Lecture Award and the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Reiner, a RAPIDD (Research and Policy in Infectious Disease Dynamics) postdoctoral fellow, studies with UC Davis Professor Thomas Scott, a worldwide expert on the epidemiology and prevention of dengue. Scott chairs the mosquito-borne disease modelling group in the RAPIDD program of the Science and Technology Directory, Department of Homeland Security, Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health.
“Dengue takes an enormous toll on human health worldwide, with as many as 4 billion people at risk," said Scott.
Reiner noted that “Mathematical models for the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases often rely on very simple assumptions about the population dynamics of the mosquito vectors. Linking transmission models to real-world data on mosquito abundance requires a method that smooths over the discontinuous mosquito abundance data to yield complete time series, simultaneously accounting for the effects of covariates that also vary in space or time.”
“Generalized additive models (GAMs) offer a flexible way to disentangle the relative roles of seasonality, inter-annual variation, control, temperature, and land cover as predictors of mosquito abundance," Reiner said in an abstract of his talk. "Case studies on the abundance of vectors of different pathogens in two different locations are considered: dengue virus and Aedes aegypti in Iquitos, Peru and West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever virus and Culex tarsalis, the Culex pipiens complex, and Aedes melanimon in California.”
“Using over 150,000 entomological surveys conducted at the household level within Iquitos, Peru as well as spatio-temporally explicit control efforts of varying intensity, we identify locations within the city that systematically over or under produce Aedes aegypti as well as quantitatively assess the impact of various levels of control. Within California, using a spatially explicit surveillance data set (2003-2009, 102,188 trap-nights of 4,882,911 mosquitoes), we parse the relative contributions of seasonality, temperature and land-type on mosquito abundance, identifying significant interactions between seasonality and land-type. In both cases, GAMs produce simple, yet flexible products that can link real world vector abundance data to transmission models, increasing accuracy and utility to models used to inform both epidemiology and public policy.”
Reiner received his doctorate in statistics in 2010 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He began his academic studies in California, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in 2002 from UC Berkeley. He went on to obtain his master’s degree in applied mathematics from California State University, Northrdige, in 2005; and his master’s in statistics from the University of Michigan in 2009.
Plans are to record the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
Related Links:
Dengue Higher Than Previously Estimated (Thomas Scott lab)
List of Upcoming Seminars Sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The outstanding awards, presented Oct. 11 in Freeborn Hall, went to:
College leaders:
Neal Van Alfen, former dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES)
James D. MacDonald, former executive associate dean, CA&ES
Alumni:
Willison T. Crites, retired from the agricultural chemical industry. He is a double graduate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1958 and his master's degree in 1961
Glenda Humiston, California director of the USDA's Rural Development Program. She received her master's degree in international agricultural development at UC Davis before obtaining her doctorate at UC Berkeley.
Friend:
Robert Curtis, associate manager for agricultural affairs, Almond Board of California
Staff:
Janet Brown-Simmons, chief administrative officer for five academic departments, including the Department of Entomology and Nematology, and Plant Pathology
Faculty:
Kathryn Dewey, distinguished professor in the Department of Nutrition
CA&ES Interim Dean Mary Delany served as the emcee, welcoming the crowd and offering congratulations to the recipients. UC Davis Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph Hexter praised the work of CA&ES, which ranks No. 1 in the world for agricultural teaching and research (QS World University Rankings).
A reception and farmers' market followed.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Professor and ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab, UC Davis Health System, will explore that topic when he discusses “Vision from Trilobites to Trichogammatids: How the Arthropods See” at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar on Wednesday, Oct. 23 in 122 Briggs Hall, UC Davis campus.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, will be the host.
“The first eye is known from a trilobite of approximately 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian explosion,” Schwab said. “Trilobites are long extinct arthropods but the phylum Arthropoda includes four other branches that are alive and well. All branches have at least some animals with eyes, and these eyes are sensory masterpieces for their respective niche requirements. From the trilobites to the fairy wasps, we can tell the story of how fantastic evolutionary development has forged the sensory visual elements necessary for survival.”
Schwab directs the Cornea and External Disease Service and serves as the medical advisor of the eye bank, as well as professor of ophthalmology in the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Science.
A former director on the American Board of Ophthalmology, he now serves on several editorial boards for ophthalmology journals, Cornea (associate editor), Ophthalmology, British Journal of Ophthalmology, and the PanAmerican Journal of Ophthalmology.
Schwab is active in the American Academy of Ophthalmology, chairing committees on education and alternative medications. His publications of more than 240 peer-reviewed papers, 35 chapters, many white papers, and abstracts include work on bioengineered tissues and ocular surface rehabilitation as well as infectious ocular diseases.
The UC Davis ophalmologist writes a blog, Evolution’s Eyewitness. “Life first emerged approximately 3.75 billion years ago from the swirling broth of the prebiotic soup,” he wrote, in prefacing and explaining his blog. “The process leading to its appearance is only partially understood, but has several possibilities. The harsh conditions on earth at the time would have permitted only an organism capable of withstanding such bleak surroundings. It would have been very different from any alive today. Survival of any life form in that environment would have required analysis and interaction with its birthplace habitat, skills that would require sensory abilities. Such sensory understanding would have been essential for, and crucial to, life’s evolution.”
“Sight is but one member of a family of sensory abilities, yet for most creatures it is a dominant and pivotal one,” Schwab wrote on his blog. “But sight is probably not the first sense acquired by those early cells, nor were the necessary components of vision secured for the purpose of sight. As often occurs, evolution co-opted various molecules that were assembled for other purposes. These changes and biochemical redirection leave traces suggesting the path of early photoreception."
Schwab, in his blog about jumping spiders and their "magnificent eyes," described them as "positively charming creatures, and you will know that to be true if you have ever watched one closely. These are common spiders and range from approximately 3 to 17 mm in length and will watch you closely as you approach them. They have four pairs of eyes, with the large anterior median (AM) set the most obvious/ These circular eyes provide an ‘attentive child’ appearance because they are fixed and are relatively large based on body size, but are tiny on an absolute scale. These placid eyes belie the organized complexity and evolutionary genius that lies beneath the carapace.”
Schwab received his medical degree from West Virginia University School of Medicine, Morgantown, in 1973. He completed his internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, San Jose, in 1974 and his residency at the California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, in 1980.
(Editor's Note; See list of upcoming seminars hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. All are held Wednesday noon in 122 Briggs Hall.)