Archive for academia
The Brooklyn College Cancer Center gets $2.6 million grant
My sister, Professor Jenny Basil (in red), is the Associate Director of Community Outreach for this terrific and growing initiative.
The Brooklyn College Cancer Center, BCCC-CURE, will be training, building, and supporting its network for the next generation of diverse cancer researchers thanks to a $2.6 million grant from the American Cancer Society.
Specifically, the Diversity in Cancer Research Institutional Development Grant (DICR IDG) titled “Supporting Cancer Research at Brooklyn College Cancer Center, a Highly Diverse Institution,” will support early career cancer researchers through $2.6 million over four years. The funding will go toward four areas: pilot grants for faculty who are in the early years of their tenure track; support for clinical scientists’ research and training; and offerings of two postdoctoral fellowships and six master’s scholarships over the length of the grant program.
Other funding earmarked for the center itself will support the mentoring of junior faculty, clinician scientists, and other early career scientists, travel to conferences for BCCC-CURE researchers, plus trainings and seminars on different areas of cancer research. It will also support the launch of the BCCC-CURE Molecular Modeling Laboratory for Cancer Therapeutics lead by Dr. Emilio Gallicchio, professor of chemistry at Brooklyn College and Dr. Shaneen Singh, professor of biology at the college.
“This grant constitutes a unique opportunity for Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn College Cancer Center to support cancer research activities, most specifically for early career scientists in a moment when we are hiring assistant professors,” said Maria Contel, director and research area leader of BCCC-CURE. “The money will support principal investigators and their research groups and allow us to train new experts in the field of cancer research. The support included in this grant for clinician scientists is key, as we will be able to recruit and collaborate with clinician scientists in research areas like cancer disparities, clinical translation of drugs, or cancer immunology.”
It’s a sweet gig!
Applications for two full-time regular faculty positions in my department – Applied Communications – are being accepted until February 10. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply. This is the link to the job posting. Kwantlen Polytechnic University is a fine place to work.
Grandsons and brothers
With my partner I’ve endowed a student scholarship at my workplace, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, “The Luke Melvin Basil and Colby Joseph Basil Health Sciences Student Award,” to honour my miracle genius grandsons, their parents (both in the health sciences), and their great-grandparents who were so generous to those seeking postsecondary education. The $1,000 student award will be presented each year to a student in KPU’s Health Sciences (Honours) Program whose project thesis is audacious and advanced. This is the third endowed award I’ve supported at Kwantlen.
Workers Vanguard
My favourite Trotskyists are back with a new issue of The Spartacist. I was afraid that the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), which publishes that periodical as well as the newspaper Workers Vanguard, had ceased operations. No doubt its leadership is getting old; indeed, this issue of The Spartacist has three obituaries of former leading members.
I value these publications for their erudite, brilliantly written propaganda (their word), which has come in handy for me any number of times. I met a couple of their editors back at Stanford University in the mid-nineties, and featured an issue from their Women and Revolution series in my “Writing and the Bill of Rights” classes there.
I hope a younger generation of true Marxist-Leninists takes up the banner. I will miss this voice terribly otherwise.
The evolution of intelligence
My sister Jenny Basil, a brilliant biologist headquartered at the City University of New York (Brooklyn College), makes a spirited appearance in this piece in bioGraphic (by Kate Evans, with photographs and video by Dave Abbott and others):
What would be lost, if we lost the nautilus? Not just beauty, but brains, too. In the past, some marine biologists have dismissed nautiluses as “dumb snails,” the least intelligent of the cephalopods. The suggestion greatly offends Basil, who has studied chambered nautiluses in her Brooklyn lab for more than 25 years. Her hair is a color her students call “nautilus auburn,” and she has nothing but enthusiasm for her subjects. She and her doctoral students call them “the kids,” and Basil says looking after them is like parenting a gang of troublesome 12-year-olds: “‘I’m gonna go out the outlet pipe. I’m gonna fight for some shrimp even though I have some.’ They’re always trying to injure themselves.”
Basil studies animal brains and behavior—hamsters, jays, chickadees, lobsters—but she finds nautiluses particularly compelling because they can help answer questions about the evolution of intelligence. As a group, cephalopods have the most grey matter of any invertebrate on Earth, Basil says—“big, fat, sassy brains” that evolved hundreds of millions of years before the vertebrate brain. But while octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid live fast and die young after laying a thousand eggs, nautiluses don’t mate until they are at least 10 years old, then lay a handful of eggs that take a year to hatch. “They are solving problems in a different way with a different brain.”
Basil’s early studies showed that nautiluses have superior powers of smell—they are able to detect very low concentrations of odors at distances of more than 10 meters, and move toward the source with great accuracy by comparing minute differences in the intensity of the odor reaching the receptors on each side of their body. In other words, they smell in stereo—an adaptation requiring complex sensory processing, and a surprise in such an ancient animal.
Their eyesight isn’t bad, either. In another experiment, Basil and doctoral student Robyn Crook strapped each nautilus into a harness—dubbed the “nautilus car seat”—and exposed them to a flash of blue light, giving the animals some food immediately afterward. Just like Pavlov’s dog, the nautiluses learned to respond and continued to do so hours later, proving they have both short-term and long-term memory.
The whole piece is utterly engrossing.
basil.CA 