PERLMAN INSTALLED AS CHANCELLOR

Chancellor Harvey Perlman addresses the audience after being installed as UNL's 19th chancellor on Aug. 23 at the Lied Center.

Dermot Coyne retired this year as the George Holmes distinguished university professor of agronomy and horticulture. His work on the genetics of disease resistance in dry edible beans has been recognized around the world. Photo - Brett Hampton.

Coyne's Career Helped Feed the Hungry

IANR Professor Retires After 40 Years

By Vicki Miller, IANR News

For Dermot Coyne, discovery is exciting, but seeing those discoveries benefit humanity is the ultimate reward.

As a University of Nebraska plant breeder and geneticist for more than 40 years, Coyne has had many opportunities to see how his research and his graduate students help Nebraska farmers and poor people in developing countries.

"Some people who are very good scientists are motivated by a desire to discover per se. I'm motivated by discovery that will improve people's welfare," Coyne said.

The longtime Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources scientist officially retired as George Holmes distinguished university professor of agronomy and horticulture June 30, but he's working part time through year's end.

Coyne is internationally recognized for his work on the genetics of disease resistance in dry edible beans. His improved varieties and germplasm have been used worldwide. He identified genes for resistance, especially for bacterial diseases, bred the first great northern and pinto varieties with multiple disease resistance and recently identified molecular markers for resistance. His disease-resistant germplasm is incorporated into major U.S. great northern and pinto bean varieties and is the major source of common bacterial blight resistance worldwide.

International collaborations have been important for Coyne, who advocates curbing world hunger through land-grant university research, education and extension programs.

In the Dominican Republic, for example, he and NU Plant Pathologist Jim Steadman helped avert food shortages. Working with Dominican scientists, they found ways to control a virus that devastated the country's dry beans, a staple for the poor. Thanks to their non-chemical controls for disease management and new, high-yielding bean varieties, the country is self-sufficient in bean production. Findings from this effort have been adapted in other developing nations.

While he has earned many scientific, academic, industry and international awards and honors, Coyne counts his 40 graduate students among his greatest contributions and rewards. Many of his foreign graduate students returned home to improve their country's food production.

"There's a great multiplier effect with graduate students and great pleasure in seeing them develop, mature and accomplish great things in their work," he said.

Coyne's commitment to fighting hunger is unflagging. He believes horticulturists can help reduce hunger and malnutrition by developing better food crops well-suited to local conditions and customs.

"The problems haunt our souls and challenge our intellect for solutions," he said of hunger, poverty and malnutrition in a speech while president of the American Society for Horticultural Science in 1985.

He's also a realist.

"As a plant breeder, you can help, but there are other factors such as politics and money that determine who has food and who doesn't," he said. "That's why people sometimes go hungry in the midst of abundance."

Coyne's interest in plants, his concern about hunger, his empathy for the underdog and his passion for fairness and social justice all are rooted in a tough Irish childhood.

"We're all shaped by our experiences of our upbringing," he said. "I grew up in a controversial environment with the struggles of religion and politics in Ireland."

Coyne's mother died at Christmastime when he was 9.

"Those were very difficult times after that," he said. Coyne was moved around a lot and wound up as the youngest boy at a boarding school.

Summers with a foster family in Northern Ireland were happier. The woman of the house, an excellent gardener, took a special interest in Coyne and they worked together in her garden.

She filled a great void in Coyne's life and planted a seed of interest in what would become his life's work.

"That sparked my interest tremendously," he said. "I almost knew that I would always want to work with plants from then on."

When his father remarried, Coyne, then a teen, grew vegetables to help feed his new family during food shortages of World War II. He read about vegetable production, visited with the neighborhood's best gardeners and applied what he learned in his garden.

Coyne didn't aspire to be a scientist. He dreamed of heading a botanic garden. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in horticulture in Dublin, but didn't get hooked on the science of plant genetics and breeding until his doctoral studies at Cornell University.

He planned to return to Ireland after graduating. That was before he met and married Ann Gaffey, an undergraduate student from Boston, who was also studying at Cornell. Ann later became a professor of social work at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

After working briefly in England as a researcher for Campbell's Soup Co., Coyne took a temporary job at Nebraska studying the Platte Valley's potential for vegetable production.

The first day on the job, Joe Young, then horticulture department head, stopped by to remind him he only had money for a year and had better start looking for work.

When a permanent position opened later than year, Coyne applied, "and here I am 40 years later."

Throughout those 40 years, Coyne has been a strong advocate for academic freedom and citizenship, and received the UNL faculty senate's James Lake Academic Freedom Award. He sometimes found himself on the unpopular side of issues or in the midst of controversies.

"Generally, I don't seek trouble or problems but I've often found myself being asked to get involved," he said. "I don't particularly enjoy it. I find it disruptive to my work, but it's part of being a responsible citizen."

University research and public plant breeding are facing enormous change, Coyne said. As public and federal funds dwindle, scientists increasingly must compete for larger grants for basic research.

"I think we need to maintain a better balance between fundamental science and the type of (applied) research that seeks to enhance rural communities and is compatible with good management of our natural resources," he said.

In the future, Coyne predicts research success will be measured almost exclusively by grants and publications.

"There's much more to being a land-grant scientist than that."

Researchers Model 4 Kinds of 1D Ice

By Tom Simons, University Communications

In the nanoscale world, a tiny little bit can mean a lot.

Working with large-scale computer simulations, a team of scientists that included Xiao Cheng Zeng, UNL professor of chemistry, has modeled four new kinds of crystalline ice, all by adjusting the diameter of a carbon nanotube by less than one-quarter of a nanometer (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter).

A carbon nanotube can be viewed as a graphite sheet that has been rolled up to create a tube that can be as small as one-half a nanometer in diameter, Zeng said.

Zeng and his team studied the formation of quasi-one-dimensional ice crystals in carbon nanotubes in the range of 1.0 to 1.4 nanometers in diameter. Zeng's team included three other scientists, Kenichiro Koga of the Fukuoka University of Education in Japan, G.T. Gao of the U.S. Naval Academy (both of whom had been postdoctoral scholars for three years in his Nebraska laboratory) and Hideki Tanaka of Okayama University in Japan.

In results published in the Aug. 23 edition of Nature, the international weekly journal of science, the scientists found that ice crystals formed a square structure in a 1.108-nanometer tube. As they increased the size of the tube's diameter, they found structural changes in the ice crystals at roughly .07-nanometer intervals to pentagonal, hexagonal and heptagonal crystals.

Zeng said the ice crystals in the tubes are "quasi-one-dimensional" because they are almost but not quite mathematically one-dimensional (that is, a line with no width). The four new ice crystals that his team modeled follow the two-dimensional "Nebraska" ice that he, Koga and Tanaka modeled in 1997.

"If our study is confirmed experimentally, it would extend the crystalline ice family," Zeng said. "Right now, there are 13 types of (three-dimensional) ice that have been discovered in nature. We earlier reported the two-dimensional 'Nebraska' ice and this time we found four members in one-D. They all satisfy the 'ice rule' that every water molecule (except on the surface) forms four hydrogen bonds with its nearest neighbor water molecules."

If confirmed, Zeng said the discovery announced in this week's Nature could contribute to the study of molecular biological science.

"It is known that water provides the 'glue' for the binding of protein molecules via the hydrophobic (water-repellent) attraction force," he said. "Our study of water in hydrophobic micropores is of fundamental importance to this because it will help us to gain deeper insights into the interactions between proteins."

Zeng said his team's investigation also indicated some new knowledge in the area of physics. In phase transitions from ice to liquid to vapor or vice versa in the 13 known types of three-dimensional water, scientists have never found a point beyond which there is no difference in structure between the liquid and solid states. He said there might be such a point at the one-dimensional level.

"We found some evidence from our simulation that maybe in quasi-one-D that beyond the critical point, there is no difference between liquid and solid," he said.

The research was funded by $800,000 in grants over the last six years from the National Science Foundation's Division of Electrical Communications Systems and the Office of Naval Research Physical Science and Technology Division, with matching funds from the Center for Materials and Analysis at NU. Zeng also credited one of his former Ph.D. students, Ruben D. Parra, an assistant professor of chemistry at De Paul University in Chicago, for important contributions through his quantum-mechanical calculations of the finite-size ice tubes.

This week's Nature paper was the second in less than a year for Zeng and his team, following the Nov. 30 publication of a paper on the formation of ice glass.

"We feel very fortunate and very rewarded," Zeng said. "My professional career started in 1980 and it took 20 years to see one Nature article, and this is the second one in one year. It's almost like I can compare this to the Husker players when they win a championship game. The joy is as good as that for us."

Chancellor Names 4 University Professors

Four UNL scholars have been selected by a universitywide committee as University Professors, the campus' highest possible distinction for a faculty member.

The four are political scientist John Hibbing, biologist/psychologist Alan Kamil, chemist Lawrence Parkhurst and physicist Anthony Starace.

Selection of University Professor is decided by a committee consisting of university professors. The selection of Hibbing, Kamil, Parkhurst and Starace brings to 25 the number of University Professors in a faculty of nearly 1,500.

"I would wish those who doubt the quality of this university could read the files submitted on behalf of these individuals," Chancellor Harvey Perlman said in announcing the selections at his Aug. 24 State of the University address. "Each contains letters from leading scholars around the country attesting to their accomplishments and national stature."

Hibbing, who will have the title of Foundation University Professor of Political Science, is nationally recognized as one of the leading students of the U.S. Congress. His book, Congress as Public Enemy, won the prestigious Fenno Prize in 1996 for the best book on legislative politics. He earned his bachelor's degree at Dana College (1976) and his master's (1978) and doctoral (1980) degrees at the University of Iowa. He has been a member of the Nebraska faculty since 1981.

Kamil, who will be George Holmes University Professor of Biological Sciences and Psychology, is an expert in animal behavior. He has been funded virtually continuously for 30 years by the National Science Foundation and is regarded as a pioneer in the study of learning and memory of animals. Kamil, who also serves as director of the Cedar Point Biological Research Station near Ogallala, earned his bachelor's degree (1963) at Hofstra University and his master's (1966) and doctoral (1967) degrees at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He joined the Nebraska faculty in 1991.

Parkhurst, who will become the Hewett University Professor of Chemistry, has the longest record of continuing National Institutes of Health funding at the university. His research has involved hemoglobin functional studies and more recently DNA bending. Parkhurst, who has been a member of the Nebraska faculty since 1969, earned his bachelor's (1959), master's (1960) and doctoral (1965) degrees at Yale University.

Starace, a theoretical atomic physicist who will have the title of George Holmes University Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been funded continuously by two agencies, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. He is one of the world's leading researchers on the theory of atomic photoionization, the ionization of a molecule or atom caused by absorption of radiant energy. Starace earned his bachelor's degree (1966) at Columbia University in New York City and his master's (1967) and doctoral (1971) degrees at the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the Nebraska faculty since 1973.

The endowed stipend from the NU Foundation for University Professors is $15,000.

Researchers at UNL's Midwest Roadside Safety Facility are, from left, John Rohde, John Reid and Dean Sicking.

UNL Smash-car Work Helps NASCAR

By Kelly Bartling University Communications

A small auto-testing track in Nebraska may seem far removed from Daytona Speedway, but industry experts at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and their roadside safety facility were at the center of NASCAR news.

Analysis and expertise at UNL's Midwest Roadside Safety Facility made international headlines in the wake of the Feb. 18 death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Safety facility Director Dean Sicking, professor of civil engineering, participated in a news conference Aug. 21 in Atlanta where three NASCAR-hired teams presented findings from exhaustive research into the crash. Sicking's 70-page report was a result of months of computer analysis, investigation and accident simulation at UNL's facility.

The facility and its experts design, test and ultimately make safer the many roadside "hardware" fixtures such as guardrails, posts and signs that flank roadways.

"Our research area is dealing with vehicles that leave the travel way. Whenever a vehicle leaves the road, our goal is to make sure they come to a safe stop or are safely controlled and don't hit something that causes injury or death," said John Rohde, associate professor of civil engineering. "We save thousands of lives a year with our designs and testing."

UNL's roadside safety facility has existed since the late 1980s and has emerged as an industry leader. As much as $1.7 million in grants is spent and 31 people work on the project in UNL's College of Engineering and Technology, an office on Y Street, and the 34-acre crash-test facility near Lincoln Airport.

"Part of our job as researchers is defining the criteria that should be met by a device put out on the highway," Rohde said. Facility experts have a hand in writing legislation and standards, designing improved hardware, training and educating states about roadside hardware, as well as simulating crashes and testing hardware designs.

The Midwest Roadside Safety Facility does the majority of design work across the nation, and its experts are often called on in accident reconstruction and simulation. The project for NASCAR evolved from an ongoing project for Indy Racing League to test a cushion wall design for auto racing.

"They had some soft-wall concepts and they wanted us to test them," Rohde said. "We determined it could be improved. We went through many stages of design, we have a design that is getting built right now, and we've been testing those barriers with both NASCARs and Indy cars because they share many of the same tracks."

That testing included crashing Indy and NASCAR stock cars.

Earnhardt's spectacular crash that day at Daytona may seem far removed from the work Rohde and Sicking do on regular vehicles on everyday highways, but the analysis can offer safety clues that can carry over to normal highway driving.

"We don't often have the opportunity to really know what happened in an accident on the highway. We can look at skid marks, marks in the grass, how the vehicle hit a barrier," Rohde said. "But with this Earnhardt accident, we have six or eight cameras on this car. We can figure the impact conditions very accurately. We know the properties of the vehicle. We can determine precisely what types of things happened in the impact. There are always things to be learned in any fatal or serious injury accident."

Over the years, because of research by the UNL facility and others, roadways and vehicles have become safer. Rohde said that while some guardrail terminals had fatality rates of 15 percent, the UNL engineered guardrail terminals now have fatality rates as low as 3 percent.

"We've come up with clever engineering designs and economical solutions, and we've developed things that have very significantly reduced the cost of installation for those devices," he said. "A combination of performance and economy will save a lot of lives because then states can afford to make more safety improvements on their highways."

Scientists: Research Yields Safer Race Cars, Tracks

By Kelly Bartling University Communications

Dean Sicking and John Reid see a safer future for NASCAR and other race car drivers.

Drivers' seats and belts will be designed and mounted differently. An energy-absorbing wall may appear.

Sicking, who presented details of Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash at a NASCAR news conference, is confident work by UNL's Midwest Roadside Safety Facility will result in positive changes. Engineers Sicking, Reid and John Rohde said their test results and recommendations were taken seriously by NASCAR officials.

"Our computer simulation model is going to be the basis for the improvements to the vehicle and the barrier, and ultimately be used significantly as part of the occupant restraint systems," Sicking said.

The facility's analysis of the crash helped pinpoint what went wrong and ultimately caused Earnhardt's death. Sicking said he can't speculate on what NASCAR could have done to prevent the driver's death because multiple factors were involved.

"This particular accident was the culmination of a lot of bad things happening all at the same time," he said. "You have a serious, critical-angle hit at the wall, which put a high impact load into the vehicle. You have the seatbelt breaking. You have the pre-impact associated with the No. 36 car that moved Mr. Earnhardt around in his seat and put him out of position. It's quite possible that any one of those things is eliminated, and he might have lived."

In addition to gaining new information from their months of research for NASCAR, the facility and its staff were spotlighted by the national press, with the news conference presented live on ESPN and cnnsi.com, and in stories in USA Today, The New York Times, and other newspapers and news programs around the world. In addition to grueling hours practicing and delivering his presentation, Sicking said another difficult moment came when he explained his outcomes to Earnhardt's family.

"It was emotional for them. But they appreciated the work that had gone on expressing the hope that some positive changes could come out of this."