- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Research.com just released its 2023 rankings, based on a researcher's D-index (Discipline H-index) metric, which includes only papers and citation values for an examined discipline. For chemistry, the organization singled out leading scientists with a D-index of at least 40 for academic publications.
Gee achieved a D-index of 56, 8,287 citations, and 202 publications.
“We already knew she's one of the nation's best chemists; we're so proud of her,” said Hammock, a UC Davis distinguished professor who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Her statistics are “better than most of the chemists in the UC Davis Department of Chemistry,” Hammock added.
“This is a pleasant surprise and I am honored,” Gee said. “But, it would not have been possible without Bruce's mentorship and all the hard work of the many graduate students and postdocs that have come through our lab. Their eagerness and creativity and the ready availability of both lab and campus wide collaborators, as well as the multidisciplinary nature of the lab let them bring many new ideas to fruition. So my deepest gratitude goes to all of them. I just tagged along for the ride!”
“In addition to her scientific leadership Shirley became the personal focus of the field with her personal encouragement and attachment for scientists internationally,” Hammock related. “She made Davis the place to come to get the latest in technology and made international introductions and fostered collaborations that continue to be productive today.”
The UC Davis toxicologist was among the first staff research associates at UC Davis to be given principal investigator status on grants. "On her own, she developed a computer-based chemical and equipment inventory system in the laboratory which could be used throughout the university," Hammock said.
Gee's work has been recognized repeatedly with achievement awards and publications in peer-reviewed journals. Her area of expertise is the development of "ELISA" (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays) for pesticides and other environmental pollutants and their metabolites. She has trained students from around the world.
Gee was a toxicologist at SRI International in Menlo Park for three years before joining the Hammock lab in 1985. In the Hammock lab, she managed a team of researchers for more than three decades that annually included some 40 scientists: graduate students, technicians, post graduates and visiting professors from all over the world. From 2007 to 2016, she served as the director of research and founding member/manager of Synthia LLC, Davis.
“I have long been interested in human and environmental exposure to toxicants and utilizing screening methods to evaluate the presence of the toxicant as well as the potential for effects,” Gee writes in her biosketch. “Immunoassays have been used clinically for more than 50 years to detect the presence of drugs, hormones and microorganisms for human medical diagnostics.”
Hammock, a pioneer in the field that applies immunoassay and biosensor technology to environmental toxicants, noted that “Shirley led a project that extended the technology to measurement of a variety of environmental toxicants including pesticides, industrial byproducts, bioterror agents and flame retardants. It also included the application of new concepts to improve the robustness, sensitivity and high throughput that is required for environmental analysis and for the analysis of low-level exposure to toxicants in humans and animals in large scale studies.”
Gee has collaborated with investigators from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Uruguay, Mexico, and Sweden using the assays for dioxins. She participated in a farmworker exposure study on the herbicide paraquat in Costa Rica and a farmer/consumer study in Thailand on exposure to pyrethroid insecticides. She is also noted for exploring novel immunoassay technologies, such as the use of nanobodies and to transfer this technology to end users throughout the world.
Four-Fold Contributions
Her major contributions to science are four-fold:
1. Her dissertation work focused on the comparative metabolism of xenobiotics in vivo and in vitro. She worked with a variety of organisms including rats, mice, monkeys, insects, and marine invertebrates. This provided a foundation for later work on the development of novel primary hepatocyte cell cultures as high throughput screening methods to assess xenobiotic toxicity and to explore mechanism of toxicity. Her colorimetric assay for monitoring cytochrome P450 assays is the basis of assays used now to monitor these enzymes in projects ranging from drug metabolism to environmental health.
2. Working with Hammock who pioneered the development of immunoassays for pesticides, Gee developed the first immunoassays for pesticides found as ground and surface waters contaminants by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Some of these assays were transferred to their analytical laboratory where in the early 1980s they helped end fish kills and drinking water contamination from rice herbicides. Shortly thereafter she co-authored a user's manual on assay development and use as a cooperative project with the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The basic assay development and validation continues today and has found application to many environmental contaminants and includes the development of commercially available test kits.
3. Her interest in metabolism led her back to extending assay development from parent compounds to their metabolites. “Metabolites excreted in urine are useful biomarkers of exposure and the immunoassays developed have been used in several exposure studies,” Gee explained. “The studies have provided guidance to help reduce pesticide exposure by examining pesticide exposure patterns based on urine tests, then relaying educational information to the population.”
4. Since 1975 the gold standard of antibody reagents has been monoclonal antibodies. Touted as a better defined and continuously available reagent for immunoassays, monoclonal antibodies have applications both in analytical chemistry, including such things as home pregnancy kits and therapeutics where many new drugs are monoclonal antibodies. However, they are limited because their size does not allow penetration of the cell membrane and ‘humanizing' them for therapeutics is difficult. At 1/10th the size, single domain antibodies derived from camelids (VHH) will penetrate cell membranes, are easy to clone, express and genetically modify. Leading a team of researchers Gee explored the utility of these novel antibodies for the detection environmental contaminants and other small molecules.
In 2011, Gee received the UC Davis Staff Assembly's Citation for Excellence, presented by the chancellor. “Shirley seeks ways to help the lab and the department be successful,” the nominators wrote. “She is extremely efficient and effective” and a “can-do person skilled at anticipating and solving problems in a friendly, courteous and timely manner.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Researchers at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan China, used the drug developed at UC Davis to show that the neurofibrillary pathology of an Alzheimer's disease-related protein could be dramatically reduced. Their work was published in December in the Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
“They further demonstrated the mechanism of action of the UC Davis drug in blocking the oxidative stress-driven phosphorylation events associated with Alzheimer's disease,” Hammock said. The UC Davis drug stabilizes natural anti-inflammatory mediators by inhibiting an enzyme called soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) discovered at UC Davis and recently spotlighted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health's PubMed.
“I was thrilled to see this paper on tau phosphorylation from Huazhong University shows that our drug could block a key event and a key enzyme called GSK-3 beta thought critical in the development of Alzheimer's disease,” said Hammock, who holds a joint appointment in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“We were planning to do this study, but having another laboratory do it with our compound was even better,” he said. “Since our publication last year in PNAS that showed UC Davis soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors both prevented and reversed depression, we have been excited about trying to block the development of Alzheimer's disease.”
The PNAS paper, “Gene Deficiency and Pharmacological Inhibition of Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase Confers Resilience to Repeated Social Defeat Stress,” was co-authored by a 13-member research team led by Hammock and Kenji Hashimoto of Chiba University Center's Division of Clinical Neuroscience, Japan. They found that sEH plays a key role in the pathophysiology of depression, and that epoxy fatty acids, their mimics, as well as sEH inhibitors could be potential therapeutic or prophylactic drugs for depression and several other disorders of the central nervous system. Co-authors of the paper included Hammock lab researchers Christophe Morisseau, Jun Yang and Karen Wagner.
Hammock credited several UC Davis colleagues for their work leading to the publications. Research from the labs of Liang Zhang and Qing Li at the University of Hawaii--Qing is a former UC Davis doctoral student--pointed out some of the mechanisms involved in cognitive decline which associate professor Aldrin Gomes of the UC Davis Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior and Fawaz Haj of the UC Davis Department of Nutrition “have shown to be blocked by the natural metabolites stabilized by the UC Davis drugs,” Hammock said.
One of the Hammock lab drugs is moving toward human clinical trials for neuropathic pain through a Davis-based company, EicOsis, LLC, and the financial support of the Blueprint Program through NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Hammock founded the company to develop inhibitors to the soluble epoxide hydrolase, a key regulatory enzyme involved in the metabolism of fatty acids, to treat unmet medical needs in human and animals.
“The clinical back-up candidate at EicOsis penetrates the blood brain barrier and should be a perfect compound to test if this class of chemistry can prevent cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease,” Hammock said.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, funded the research.
Highly honored by his peers, Hammock is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, which honors academic invention and encourages translations of inventions to benefit society. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Entomological Society of America, and the recipient of the Bernard B. Brodie Award in Drug Metabolism, sponsored by the America Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. He 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.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The 12th annual Bruce Hammock Lab Water Balloon Battle will take place at 3 p.m., Thursday, July 24 on the north side of the Briggs Hall lawn.
Christophe Morisseau, associate research scientist, said the lab has 2000 water balloons to fill; anyone who wants to be a water warrior must participate in the filling, which starts at 1 p.m. by the Briggs loading dock.
All are invited. “Whoever wants to get wet,” Morisseau said. “Children and spouses are always welcome.”
In the past, the water warriors, led by Bruce Hammock and Morisseau, have included professors, researchers, visiting scientistis, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students.
In addition to the water balloons, some favor squirt guns and toy pressurized water blasters. Others hoist half-filled buckets of water for sneak attacks.
So proficient are the water warriors that the “15 minutes of fame” often turns into “10 minutes of aim.”
Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology who holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, launched the water balloon fest in 2003 as a way to build camaraderie and gain relief from the heat.
The Hammock lab works hard and plays hard. Hammock, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Entomological Society of America, 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.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Newmark, a colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, will be hosted by researcher Bora Inceoglu of the Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. The lecture is part of the UC Davis CounterACT Center Seminars for Excellence, Pharmacology Training Grant and Department of Pharmacology (website and list of speakers pending).
According to an entry in Wikipedia:
"Sarin, or GB, is an organophosphorus compound with the formula [(CH3)2CHO]CH3P(O)F. It is a colorless, odorless liquid, used as a chemical weapon owing to its extreme potency as a nerve agent. It has been classified as a weapon of mass destruction in UN Resolution 687. Production and stockpiling of sarin was outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, and it is classified as a Schedule 1 substance."
"Sarin can be lethal even at very low concentrations, with death following within one minute after direct ingestion due to suffocation from lung muscle paralysis, unless some antidotes, typically atropine or Biperiden and pralidoxime, are quickly administered to a person.People who absorb a non-lethal dose, but do not receive immediate medical treatment, may suffer permanent neurological damage."
Newmark’s credentials include:
- Colonel, Medical Corps, U.S. Army
- Deputy Joint Program Executive Officer, Medical Systems
- Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical/Biological Defense, U.S. Department of Defense
- Consultant to the U.S. Army Surgeon General for Chemical Casualty Care
- Adjunct full professor of neurology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
- Staff neurologist at Fort Belvoir (Va.) Community Hospital
Newmark received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He completed a residency in neurology at the Boston City Hospital and fellowships in neurochemistry at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; in occupational neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital; and in neuromuscular disease at the University of Pennsylvania.
More information is available from host Bora Inceoglu at abinceoglu@ucdavis.edu or by telephoning (530) 591-0697.
Contact:
Tracey Pirrung
Program Grant Analyst
VM: Molecular Biosciences
University of California, Davis
(530) 754-8157 phone
tapirrung@ucdavis.edu