Andres Torres gets the mast ready to lift the cameras above the traffic van while Bryan Guy watches. The students worked in the van this summer on an Interstate 80 traffic study. The van is operated by the University of Nebraska's Peter Kiewit Institute and is used to study traffic and analyze data in a variety of locations instantly.   Photo by Kelly Bartling
	Jay Ling, a junior civil engineering major from Omaha, watches Interstate 80 traffic on monitors in the I-3 mobile traffic van. The van was used this summer to check traffic data equipment on I-80. Ling said the hands-on experience on the equipment is extraordinary for an undergraduate. Photo by Kelly Bartling
	The "I-Cubed" mobile traffic monitoring van from the University of Nebraska's Peter Kiewit Institute Intelligent Transportation System Information and Infrastructure Lab is a colorful but high-tech mobile lab. The cameras, monitors and data-gathering and analysis equipment on board allow it to study traffic and collect data and analyze it on the fly.   Photo courtesy of the Peter Kiewit Institute

Have van, will travel

'I-Cubed' van monitors traffic as it develops

By Kelly Bartling, University Communications

Omaha-area motorists may have already noticed the bright van emblazoned with cool, colorful traffic-emblem graphics and the rooftop cameras. And motorists all over Nebraska will eventually see it as it travels about, filled with researchers studying problem traffic.

It's the "I-Cubed" mobile traffic monitoring van from the University of Nebraska's Peter Kiewit Institute Intelligent Transportation System Information and Infrastructure Lab. It looks high-tech, and it is. With data-gathering and analysis equipment on board, it's a mobile traffic engineering lab.

"The van allows us to go out and do detailed traffic studies in a wide variety of locations and be able to collect the data in a pretty sophisticated way while analyzing it on the fly," said Elizabeth G. "Libby" Jones, assistant professor of civil engineering at the UNL College of Engineering and Technology.

Jones and students at the Peter Kiewit Institute use the mobile traffic monitoring van to collect detailed traffic data such as how many vehicles are passing a particular spot, when they pass by and how fast they are traveling; measurements of traffic flow; and determination of how many vehicles are clustered in a given space. With either of two cameras atop a 42-foot mast, they can bring visual data into the van's VCRs, monitors and computers to observe and collect video and data.

"We can get information about what the traffic signals are doing in the same data stream as the traffic so we know exactly what was going on and we can reconstruct what was happening," Jones said. "With the video, we can actually watch cars as they go through an area, and do a better job of understanding how people change lanes, and do things like study red-light running and what's causing it."

Being mobile has its advantage, Jones said. It allows the researchers to do detailed studies with one piece of equipment instead of having people scattered with radar guns, cameras and traffic-counters.

"The real advantage to this van is it makes collecting data a lot easier," she said. "It's actually dangerous to be down on the interstate, and we can be up on an overpass above the traffic. Besides that, we're able to do two studies at once with the two cameras so we can get both directions of I-80 or two directions of traffic at an intersection. And we're also able to process all that data here in the van. This is a much more efficient way to collect data than what we've done in the past."

Traffic analysis vans are becoming more common in government and industry. But Jones said what's uncommon about the "I-Cubed" van is it being operated by undergraduate students.

"We're very lucky to have what we have here because most universities don't have this type of equipment available for students to actually use," she said. "In the way we structured the van, I really tried to get students in charge of the van, instead of me. Plus, it gives them great hands-on experience with this new traffic equipment that's coming out. When they get out working as traffic engineers, they will be using this equipment on a daily basis or at least having to understand how it works in transportation systems."

The van, which arrived in May, has created excitement among the university's engineering students. Jones said interest in traffic engineering is way up and students are eagerly awaiting their hands-on time in the traffic van.

"I'm not only learning the basics of traffic studies and traffic engineering, but I get to work with this high-tech equipment that will get me a head start on my career in traffic engineering," said Bryan Guy, a junior civil engineering major from Hartington who worked in the van this summer.

"This equipment you wouldn't normally get in a regular engineering curriculum. There are a lot of different fields you can do traffic engineering and use this type of equipment," he said.

The first projects students worked on involved testing some Department of Roads equipment on Interstate 80 near Omaha's 96th Street overpass, doing traffic counts for the Omaha transportation system near a trail and a proposed pedestrian bridge.

Jones said senior students in computer electronics engineering are designing a wireless local area network for the van, which will allow transmission of data over a 20-mile distance, thus expanding the van's capabilities.

"That will allow the van to connect back to either our lab at the Institute or some other location for monitoring incidents or managing traffic in difficult situations," she said. If a bridge goes out, an accident occurs or a snowstorm closes down part of a highway, the mobile lab technology could help the roads department or State Patrol divert traffic before a pileup occurs.

"Husker football games are a good example of a difficult situation," Jones said. "The games create one of the heaviest traffic volumes of the year for Interstate 80, and at places like the Waverly exit, that becomes a difficult location. In the future, if we could have a van there and transmit the data and video back to probably a State Patrol headquarters or a Department of Roads location, that would help them in managing the traffic during these special events."

But, as in all traffic engineering research, safety is still the key goal.

"What this does for Nebraska primarily is that it can help us reach our goals: of saving lives, time and money," she said.

Jones also sees the van itself as a revenue source and a recruitment tool.

"It has allowed me to bring in more research dollars that I wasn't able to before that has made me more competitive in national research funding. This lab and the equipment we have actually is a good reason why we've gotten a couple of grants. We also have private consultants interested in renting the van for traffic studies so hopefully that revenue will pay for most of the operating expenses of the van and the lab."

Michael Fromm shown at right. Photo by Erik Stenbakken/Stenbakken.com

Grant to create plant genome center

By Kim Hachiya, University Communications

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is the lead recipient of a $6 million, four-year National Science Foundation grant to establish a plant genome research center.

Michael Fromm, director of UNL's Center for Biotechnology and a member of the UNL Plant Science Initiative, is the principal investigator on the team composed of scientists from UNL, the Univer-sity of Califor-nia-Davis, the Univer-sity of Arizona, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Florida and the University of Missouri.

"This grant is a tremendous example of the strength we have built in plant science and a realization of our goals to establish research centers and collaborations with other institutions," said Prem Paul, UNL vice chancellor for research.

The genome center will study protein kinases of plants, focusing mainly on rice. Rice is the first cereal crop for which scientists have sequenced all of the DNA in its genome. This makes rice an important model for other important cereal crops, such as corn, Fromm said.

Protein kinases are enzymes that modulate protein behavior, affecting the way plants perceive and react to their environments. Manipulating kinases could be a way to regulate plant tolerance of disease and environmental stresses, such as drought and cold, Fromm said.

Rice has about 2,600 protein kinases, which can be grouped into about 300 subfamilies. The team will look at those 300 as representative of the whole.

"This would cut a wide swath in terms of new knowledge about protein kinases," Fromm said.

"The main questions we are trying to answer are what are the kinases' role in the rice plant, how they are involved in signaling and how kinases interact with each other and with what they interact," he said. "We hope that through rice protein kinases, we can create a blueprint for other cereals."

The process is complex and will take some time to completely understand, he said. "Cereals are important for a number of reasons, but the research is just so far behind in this area."

Fromm is one of several UNL researchers associated with UNL's Plant Science Initiative. The initiative was established to conduct interdisciplinary research in the basic plant sciences. Faculty research emphases include plant-microbe interactions, plant signaling and organellar biology, abiotic and biotic stress responses, and genomics/proteomics. Among collaborative projects conducted by PSI scientists are those devoted to plant-breeding programs focusing on crop improvement; ecology and evolution studies that look at plant function in the natural environment; and an array of faculty investigating the food safety, environmental impact and economic implications of agricultural biotechnology.

The university's investments in plant sciences through the state-funded Nebraska Research Initiative have encouraged development of large-scale, multi-investigator projects by funding faculty recruitment, equipment acquisition, matching grants and other needs for a research enterprise.

A key factor in winning the grant is UNL's strong track record in using mass spectrometry in the study of proteomics. The word proteome refers to all the proteins expressed by a genome; proteomics involves the identification of proteins in the subject under study and the determination of their role in physiological and pathophysiological functions. While a genome remains unchanged to a large extent during a subject's lifetime, the proteins in any particular cell change dramatically as genes are turned on and off in response to its environment.

Ron Cerny, director of mass spectrometry services at UNL, is one of three UNL scientists involved in the grant. Also associated is Gautam Sarath, research associate professor, Protein Core Facility, Biochemistry.

Mass spectrometry is used to analyze the proteins once they have been isolated. UNL has a high-quality mass spectrometry center, Cerny said; its seven instruments make it one of the best academic mass spectrometry centers in the nation.

Fromm, who joined UNL in July 2001, has been working with the weedy mustard plant known as Arabidopsis. Its genome has been sequenced, and it's commonly used by plant geneticists for a variety of research purposes. Fromm is working to understand how the plant perceives and reacts to drought stress. If that process could be understood, it might be feasible to engineer crop plants to become more drought tolerant.

The NSF grant represents what Fromm calls the second wave of biotechnology. In the first wave, scientists were inserting non-plant genes into plants to give plants new traits. A well-known example is the Bt gene in corn, which gave corn greater insect resistance. The second wave, he said, involves trying to understand and improve the complex properties that control how plants behave and work. This wave is "knowledge intensive," Fromm said, and involves gathering large data sets and analyzing them for patterns and information.

The National Science Foundation is funding larger multi-institutional and multi-investigator projects like this one in part because the amount of information gathered is larger than one individual researcher or laboratory can handle, Fromm said.

Fromm and his partners at the other institutions have been working on similar projects and often confer at meetings and seminars. It was at a recent meeting that the group decided to combine forces to apply for a plant genome center grant, Fromm said.

A unique aspect of this grant is that it contains $200,000, parceled out in $50,000 increments over four years, to encourage minority students to pursue scientific careers. Promising students will take a graduate-level summer course that will teach aspects and techniques of research and will have opportunities to work in laboratories. Fromm said this approach is unusual because the course augments the more typical laboratory-only experience. It's envisioned that the course will better equip students to do more advanced research rather than spending lab time learning to do the projects.

UNL Plant Genome Center facts and figures UNL is the lead institution for the Plant Genome Center, established with a grant from the National Science Foundation. The $6 million grant provides support for a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional center to study proteins that play an important role in how plants respond to environmental stress. UNL provides the expertise in plant genomics research and the advanced facilities for studying protein structures needed to lead the research, which brings together researchers from six universities. The new center grows in part from the research capabilities of UNL's Plant Science Initiative, which uses genomics technologies to gain new understanding of how plants work and how they can be improved for value-added agricultural applications. Title of UNL Grant: "A Protein Interaction Database for Rice Protein Kinases" Award: $6.05 million over 4 years Center partners: University of California at Davis, University of California at San Diego, University of Arizona-Tucson, University of Florida-Gainesville and University of Missouri-Columbia Research focus: The center's goal is to discover how plants respond to environmental stresses, particularly drought and disease. The research projects will focus on the class of proteins, called protein kinases, that control the plant's response to the environment. Rice is being used as a model crop for this work because sequencing of its genome is nearly complete and, as a cereal crop, rice is highly representative of the other major cereal crops - corn, sorghum and wheat - critical to Nebraska agriculture. An important part of this project is UNL's Nebraska Center for Mass Spectrometry, which provides advanced capabilities in proteomics. Applying the technology of mass spectrometry to the study of proteomics is relatively new and allows identification of peptides within the protein chains. Educational Outreach: The grant funds a program that brings students to UNL for research experiences, with an emphasis on students from underrepresented groups. In addition to lab experiences, the students will attend a formal course in research skills and techniques to better prepare them for graduate school and careers as research scientists. Departments participating: agronomy and horticulture, biochemistry, Center for Biotechnology, and chemistry Center Director: Michael Fromm, Plant Science Initiative and Department of Agronomy UNL Faculty Participating: Michael Fromm, Ron Cerny (director of Mass Spectrometry Services and research associate professor of chemistry) and Gautam Sarath (research associate professor of biochemistry and director of Biochemistry's Proteomics/Protein Core Facility) UNL and Collaborative Student Participation: Grant provides support for eight postdoctoral associates and two graduate students.

'Good doctor' Farmer delivers next Thompson Forum lecture

Paul Farmer, who was called the "good doctor" in a profile in The New Yorker, will deliver the next lecture in the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.

Farmer's free lecture, "Infectious Diseases and Poverty: A View from Haiti," will begin at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 11 in the Lied Center for Performing Arts.

Farmer is a medical anthropologist whose work draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on diseases disproportionately afflicting the poor. Farmer's research and writings result largely from his work in Haiti and Peru and from clinical and teaching activities. Currently professor of medical anthropology in the department of social medicine at the Harvard Medical School and founding director of Partners In Health, a non-profit organization active in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the United States, Farmer also trains medical students, residents and fellows at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Among his numerous awards are the Duke University Humanitarian Award and the Margaret Mead Award. In 1993, Farmer received the MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in recognition of his exceptional creativity, dedication and potential.

Farmer's lecture will be broadcast live online at www.unl.edu, on Lincoln cable channel 21, KRNU radio station at 90.3 FM, UNL campus TV, the NebSat satellite system, and at satellite sites in Grand Island, Norfolk, North Platte and Scottsbluff.