Being an actor is hard. It is fraught with rejection, failure, insecurity and envy. Just ask John Lithgow. “It is a profession that is very hard on your ego,” he told a small group of UC San Diego master of fine arts in acting students during a visit to the campus last week. Even worse, he said with comic theatricalism, is the “humiliation of being rejected by people you have contempt for,” a well-rehearsed line that garnered laughs from the students. Still, he admitted, “I fret all the time.” It seems like an odd confession from an actor whose career has spanned decades and been marked by numerous accolades and awards, including his recent Emmy for his role as Winston Churchill in the Netflix series “The Crown.”
A few weeks ago, Stefan Savage, a UC San Diego computer science professor started receiving calls on a daily basis—sometimes more than once a day—from a phone number with a Chicago area code. The caller didn’t leave a voicemail. Savage never answers calls from a number he doesn’t recognize. He is a security researcher and at least one of his collaborators has been targeted by cybercriminals. So he looked up the phone number. To his relief, it tracked back to the MacArthur Foundation’s headquarters in Chicago.
Modeling the interplay between neurons and astrocytes derived from children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues in Brazil, say innate inflammation in the latter appears to contribute to neuronal dysfunction in at least some forms of the disease.
A noted scholar and a world-leader in microbiome research, Rob Knight, Ph.D. will take guests inside the human body and share the dirt on the microbiome, the focus of his new book, published in June 2017. On Tuesday, October 24, Knight will discuss Dirt Is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System, from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. in Geisel Library’s Seuss Room. The UC San Diego Library talk is free to attend and open to the public. A reception and a book signing with Dr. Knight will follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event from the UC San Diego Bookstore.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announcement in early 2016 that scientists for the first time detected gravitational waves in the universe as hypothesized by Albert Einstein in 1915 has led to additional landmark discoveries with the assistance of advanced supercomputers, including Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.
The University of California San Diego’s history of outstanding chemists dates back to Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey, who joined the university in 1958. That tradition of excellence continues today, as exemplified by The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry’s J. Andrew McCammon. The distinguished professor, who also holds the Joseph E. Mayer Chair of Theoretical Chemistry, will deliver the Russ Pitzer Lecture Nov. 13 at Ohio State University, which named McCammon the winner of the 2017 Russell M. Pitzer Award. McCammon’s talk will address “Thermodynamics of Molecular Recognition.”
