Recognition & Honors
Ashley Askew (NSM Director of Special Programs and Data Specialist) led two NSM Excel Workshops (Beginners to Intermediate) for faculty and staff in October and November. Workshop topics included anatomy of an Excel sheet, entering and formatting data, formulas, XLOOKUP, and pivot tables.
Eric Bittner (Physics) and Physics Ph.D. student Bhavay Tyagi (first author) published a paper in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters that was featured on the journal cover. Work for the paper, Noise-Induced Quantum Synchronization and Entanglement in a Quantum Analogue of Huygens’ Clock, was done in collaboration with Los Alamos National Lab and the Institut Cortois at the Universite de Montreal. The paper presents a “quantum analog” of Huygens’ famous observation of spontaneous synchronization of pendulum clocks in the 17th century whereby coupling to a shared correlated noisy environment, quantum spins can become phase-locked and entangled. The theory presented in the paper can be used to explain the quantum efficiency photosynthesis and be used to develop error-tolerant quantum computers by exploiting environmental correlations.
Zhigang Deng (Computer Science) and Computer Science Ph.D. student Meng-Chen Lee (first author) presented a full technical paper at the 26th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. The paper received the Best Paper Runner Up Award. When humans participate in three-party conversations, we use non-verbal behaviors (such as gaze, gesture, etc.) to manage turn-taking and conversational flow among participants. The authors developed a multi-modal computational framework that accurately predicts “when the exact end-of-turn will happen during three-party conversations.” The “end-of-turn” includes three cases: normal turn-taking, interruption, and overlapping. Their computational model can accurately predict the three cases (with accuracy over 75%). The method is based on multi-modal signals of the three participants in a conversation, including their gazes, speech features, gaze target information, and their back-channeling information (such as head nodding/head shaking). The work is the first ever reported research that can accurately predict “interruption” and “overlapping” in multiparty conversations, besides the “turn-taking” case. The method can run in real-time and quickly make predictions every 100 milliseconds on continuous incoming data.
Karla Adelina Garza (teachHOUSTON Postdoctoral Research Fellow) received the John Laska Dissertation Award for Teaching at the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum’s Annual Meeting, held in Denver on October 4. Garza’s dissertation, titled Migrant Students Following the Crops, Teachers Following Their Students: A Narrative Inquiry into Two Migrant Children Who Became Teachers, was nominated for the award by Cheryl Craig, professor and the Houston Endowment Endowed Chair of Urban Education in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M University.
Ioannis Kakadiaris (Computer Science) received the IEEE Biometrics Council Meritorious Service Award at the IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics. The award honors outstanding service in the field of biometrics. Kakadiaris received a plaque and $1,000 honorarium.
Rich Meisel (Biology & Biochemistry) corresponding author, former UH undergraduate Patrick Foy (first author), and Biology graduate student Sara Loetzerich published in Journal of Heredity with collaborators from 10 universities. The house fly has an extremely variable system for determining if an embryo will develop into a female or male. Across natural populations of house fly from throughout the world, different chromosomes contain genes that initiate sexual development. This paper reports the results of a collaboration, organized by the USDA, in which the frequencies of these sex determining chromosomes were measured in populations across the U.S. Data were collected by Foy, now in graduate school at Indiana University. Analysis of these data revealed that frequencies of these chromosomes are correlated with the differences in daily temperatures, suggesting a role for ecological factors in maintaining this curious polymorphism.
Meisel, former postdoctoral scholar Pablo J. Delclos (corresponding author, now on the faculty at UHD), and numerous student co-authors published in eLife. Y chromosomes are passed from fathers to sons, and as a result of this male-limited inheritance, they are predicted to accumulate mutations that increase male reproductive success. While there is evidence for Y chromosome genes that allow males to make sperm, examples of Y chromosome genes affecting male-specific behaviors are lacking. In this paper, multiple UH undergraduates, a Ph.D. student, and Delclos identified a gene on a house fly Y chromosome that affects male mating behavior allowing them to mate faster and outcompete other males for female mates. This provides a demonstration of how a Y chromosome gene can improve a male-specific behavior.
Rich Meisel (Biology & Biochemistry), Danial Asgari (first author), and Alex Stewart, former UH faculty now at University of St. Andrews in Scotland, published in G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics. Immune systems can respond to infections by turning on genes that kill pathogens, or they can maintain constant activity regardless of infection status. Each of these strategies has costs and benefits, including the rate of response to infection and the cost of production of defensive molecules. In this paper, Asgari developed a mathematical model to catalogue these costs and benefits in order to determine when the different strategies are expected to evolve in response to bacterial infections. The model showed that the benefits of the strategies depend on the density of infectious bacteria and their proliferation rates, which also affect the use of different negative feedback loops in preventing overstimulation of the immune response.
Ioannis Pavlidis (Computer Science) and Computer Science Ph.D. graduate Vitalii Zhukov published in Communications Psychology with colleagues from three other universities. They investigated what makes a research paper impactful, how often other researchers cite a paper as a measure of impact. They found the stronger predictor of impact is the appeal of the paper’s research across disciplines. They demonstrated such appeal comes more often from monodisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary papers. This flies in the face of prevailing wisdom that considers multidisciplinary research – known as science convergence – to be a prerequisite of broader impact. The authors cite as an example the case of AI papers, which though computer science artifacts, transformed methods and practices across all disciplines. By analyzing over half a million publications, they documented the same phenomenon accounts for the rise and dominance of affectivism over cognitivism in behavioral sciences literature. Affectivism, rooted in psychology, emphasizes the role of emotions in explaining human behavior. Cognitivism, rooted in a multidisciplinary amalgamation known as brain science, emphasizes the role of thoughts in explaining human behavior. Successful affectivism papers tend to exert impact across a wide spectrum of disciplines. For example, findings from papers on anxiety are used not only in psychology, but also smartwatch sensing, migraine etiology, and economic productivity. By contrast, successful cognitivism papers tend to exert impact only within the confines of brain science. Their work brings to the fore the mechanism through which contemporary intellectual trends dominate science and shape our world.
Charles Puelz (Mathematics) published “Simulating cardiac fluid dynamics in the human heart” in PNAS Nexus. Predictive mathematical models of the heart’s blood flow can simulate cardiac physiology, pathophysiology, and dysfunction along with responses to interventions. However, existing models are limited in their abilities to predict valve performance, use realistic descriptions of tissue biomechanics, or predict the response of the heart to changes in loading conditions. The computer model of the human heart introduced in this paper addresses these limitations. It generates pressure-volume loops, valvular pressure-flow relationships, and vortex formation times that are in excellent agreement with clinical and experimental data. The model also captures realistic changes in cardiac output in response to changing loading conditions.
Xin Shi (Physics/TcSUH) received the 2024 Steven Weinberg Research Award for excellence in research from the Texas Section of the American Physical Society. Shi was selected as the 2024 recipient for his outstanding achievements in thermoelectrics. The only criterion is excellence, including potential impact in the relevant scientific community. Recipients must have been a graduate student when the research was performed. Shi received a plaque and $1,000. Xin is currently a postdoctoral fellow working with Zhifeng Ren.
Yingcai Zheng (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) presented “Quest for Fracture Permeability Using Seismic Data” at the University of Utah & University of Houston Joint Technical Conference on Energy Geosciences and the Energy Transition.