Namkee Choi, professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, is using technology in an innovative way to curb depression among homebound adults. Photo: Marsha Miller.

Choi, a professor in the Center for Social Work Research in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, was not only in a position to recognize depression in the clients. She could do something about it.

Her idea: Use the Internet to connect homebound clients and psychotherapists.

This story first appeared on the university’s Know website.

Nationally, depression affects more than 6.5 million of the 35 million people aged 65 years or older, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Rates are higher among those who are homebound or ill.

Those affected desperately want treatment, Choi said.

“When you are in that situation — a terrible, terrible depressed mood — you want help. You really look for help,” she said. “They are very honest in admitting their depression.

“When they’re depressed, they don’t have energy,” Choi said. “Their house is cluttered, and they can’t take care of their business (paying bills and the like).” Other problems clients reported included physical limitations, other mental health problems, family conflict and social isolation.

Choi, whose research has focused on aging issues, won a $450,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health and received supplemental grants from the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Foundation and the St. David’s Foundation, both based in Austin, and set up a pilot study to test her idea.

Choi worked with Meals on Wheels and More in Austin to recruit participants for the study. Choi has been a Meals on Wheels and More volunteer and is currently an advisory board member.

During periodic in-home visits and assessments with Meals on Wheels and More clients, case managers identified prospective participants by administering a widely used depression screening scale, said Linda Perez, the agency’s assistant vice president of client services.

For clients whose score indicated at least a moderate level of depression, the case managers provided a description of Choi’s project and asked them if they would be willing to participate. Those who consented were put in touch with Choi.

In the pilot study that began in late 2009, Choi has provided Dell laptop computers to 54 homebound older adults. The computers were loaded with Skype, a free videoconferencing program, and equipped with a cellular network card to provide an Internet connection.

Therapists Leslie Sirrianni and Mary Lynn Marinucci chat via Skype. Photo: Marsha Miller

PST has been found effective in dealing with depression for all age groups. The therapy was provided in six weekly sessions followed by six monthly telephone booster sessions.

A few minutes before a Skype therapy session, the social worker gave the client a reminder call. All the client had to do was press the computer’s “on” button to bring up Skype.

Then for the next hour the client and the therapist engaged in a tele-PST session.

In the project, another group of 43 homebound older adults received one-on-one, in-person PST from the same social workers-therapists in their homes. A third group of 34 homebound older adults received six weekly telephone support calls from two social workers who were not trained in PST. The in-person PST group and telephone support group served as controls to the tele-PST group.

Following six weeks of PST or telephone support, follow-up interviews were done with each participant at two, 12 and 24 weeks.

The depression outcomes for the tele-PST group and the in-person PST group were not significantly different from each other, but the participants in both groups scored significantly lower on depressive symptoms than those who received telephone support calls, Choi said.

The sample size for the study was not big enough to draw definitive conclusions, Choi said, “but we really can see tele-PST’s potential as an effective depression treatment approach among depressed homebound older adults.”

Choi also said that the participants accepted the technology. Some were enthusiastic about it. Even technical glitches didn’t seem to bother them, Choi said. When a computer screen would freeze or a connection would drop during tele-PST sessions, the clients took it in stride. However, some participants were annoyed when an advertisement popped up on the screen.

Perez said Meals on Wheels and More clients who participated in the therapy love it. “They really see improvement, and we see it really has helped them.”

She said some clients have been able to discontinue Meals on Wheels and More services after the therapy.

“That’s a good thing,” Perez said. “They were receiving meals because they were unable to prepare their own meals and get out and do things for themselves due to depression and/or disability.”

After the therapy, she said, some of the clients went out to senior centers and other places they had shied away from.

Perez said that Meals on Wheels and More staffers were surprised that the clients responded so well to using technology.

“Let’s say they didn’t have a good day and they just didn’t want to have somebody come into their home because they didn’t get to clean up,” she said. “This is a way to still be able to work through their issues because they’re able to engage in a therapy session via videoconferencing.”

Choi is pursuing a bigger test of the concept with a research project that would run in Austin and New York City. She is applying for a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Choi continues to investigate technology for the project. Game devices, iPads and other tablets, and smartphones could be used. Devices that connect to a television would provide a bigger image.

Who knows? When it comes to treating depression, Choi might have an app for that.

Use of meth dropped significantly in 2007 and 2008 after laws limiting the availability of pseudoephedrine went into effect made it much harder to obtain key ingredients.

Jane Maxwell, a senior research scientist in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, is concerned that programs to help people addicted to methamphetamines continues.

Jane Maxwell, a senior research scientist in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, and Mary Lynn Brecht, a researcher in the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported their findings in the journal Addictive Behaviors in December 2011.

Meth purveyors are getting around restrictions on pseudoephedrine by turning to a manufacturing method that uses different chemicals, according to Maxwell.

The recent increase in use as seen in the indicators is not as high as use mid-decade, but Maxwell said she’s worried that the stage is set for a repeat. That concern is reflected in the title of the paper “Methamphetamine: Here We Go Again?”

For example, there were more than 18,000 meth lab accidents in 2003, according to the National Clandestine Laboratory Database and National Laboratory Information System. Accidents dropped to about 6,000 in 2007 and rose to more than 10,000 in 2010.

Maxwell said she’s fearful that policymakers, looking at the mid-decade decrease, will curtail funding for people in recovery from meth abuse.

“I’m concerned there’s going to be a de-emphasis on treatment for meth users,” she said.

She said there is still a need for treatment programs. In another study, Maxwell has found that many meth users are mentally and physically impaired.

“We need to keep focused on methamphetamine as a drug that demands and needs serious treatment,” she said.

It’s not surprising that meth use is rebounding, Maxwell said. That’s the pattern during the decades that meth has been used.

“It really is a cyclical pattern of use is up, we put in barriers to producing it or to prevent it from being obtained and that takes it down for a little while,” she said. “But then it goes back up again.”

The recent down cycle occurred after sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine were severely restricted.

The up cycle began as makers of the drug in Mexico reverted to another method called P2P for the principal chemicals involved.

The P2P process is harder and more time consuming, but manufacturers have sharpened their skills.

“It’s a much more difficult process to produce meth using it, but these guys appear to be very good chemists, and the potency and purity is continuing to go up,” she said.

Purity has increased to 90 percent even as the price per gram has dropped to about $89, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Agency database and reported in the study.

Maxwell and Brecht conclude that meth has joined heroin and cocaine as a drug of chronic abuse in some communities no matter what steps are taken to curtail its supply and use.

Economics Professor Dan Hamermesh.

To examine how people respond to a permanent cut in work hours, Hamermesh and his colleagues examined data from national time-use diaries in Japan and Korea, two countries that imposed sharp decreases in standard workweek hours. The data were collected before and after the changes went into effect.

This post comes from Jessica Sinn in the College of Liberal Arts.

The researchers broke up time allocations into four categories: Market work (studying, working, commuting to and from the office), household production (childcare, shopping, chores), tertiary activities (sleeping, grooming, eating, sex, medical treatment), and leisure (watching TV, socializing, attending sports events and many others).

Of all the activities, the researchers found channel surfing, snoozing and self-care were the main activities undertaken in the freed-up time.

Analyzing time-use data in Japan from 1976 to 2006, the economists found a significant increase in leisurely activities, particularly watching TV. In Korea, the data culled from 1999 to 2009 show a sharp increase in personal care, particularly grooming, among both men and women.

In both countries, the researchers found no increase in household production activities. Thanks to improvements in household appliances, Hamermesh said people are spending less time in the kitchen and more time enjoying life.

So what does this mean for workers in the United States, a nation known for its population of workaholics? Hamermesh suggests these findings lend insight into how people want to spend their precious free time – and how a shorter workweek can vastly improve the quality of life.

Studies have shown Americans work more hours than most European nations. Even on the weekends, they’re putting the axe to the grindstone instead of enjoying their downtime with friends and family. In addition to working more hours per week than those in other developed countries, Americans retire later and take much shorter vacations.

“Whether other countries would experience similar effects is not clear,” Hamermesh said. “But I like to think the same would occur in the United States — that we would use permanent cuts in work time to enjoy ourselves and take more care of ourselves. Regrettably in the workaholism champion of the Western world, these cuts don’t seem likely any time soon.”

The study, conducted together with Jungmin Lee, a University of Texas at Austin alumnus (Ph.D. Economics, ‘03) and associate professor of economics at Sogang University, Korea; and Daiji Kawaguchi, associate professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University, Japan, will be published in the May issue of the American Economic Review.

As busy as those researchers were, the semester also brought discoveries in green energy, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, concealed handguns and the relationship between children’s happiness and their parents.

Here’s a look at the significant discoveries researchers at The University of Texas at Austin made in fall 2011.

NASA, Texas Astronomers Find a Goldilocks Planet and Others

An artist's conception of Kepler 22b, a planet in its star's habitable zone.

Observations by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Paul Robertson and research scientist Michael Endl eliminated other possible causes of the transit signal using the Harlan J. Smith Telescope. Later, other astronomers found that the planet, called Kepler-22b, is just 2.4 times the size of Earth and may be as much as 20 times Earth’s mass.

Pair of Black Holes ‘Weigh In’ at 10 Billion Suns, the Most Massive Yet

Artist's conception of stars moving in the central regions of a giant elliptical galaxy that harbors a supermassive black hole. (Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook).

The team measured the black holes’ masses by combining observations of the fast-moving stars at their hearts made with the giant Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii with observations of their diffuse outer regions (called the “dark halo”) using the George and Cynthia Mitchell Spectrograph on the 2.7-meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory.

Astronomers Find Unusual Multi-planet Solar System

A team of researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin used the Kepler space telescope to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other.

Evidence for “Great Lake” – potential place for life — found on Europa

A cross-section of what the subsurface lake on Europa might look like, with Saturn on the horizon.

Many more such lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa’s shell, lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, writes in the journal Nature.

Further increasing the potential for life, the newly discovered lake is covered by floating ice shelves that seem to be collapsing, providing a mechanism for transferring nutrients and energy between the surface and a vast ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell.

Discovery of a ‘dark state’ could mean a brighter future for solar energy

The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion from chemists at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Parkinsonian” worms might be key to drugs for Parkinson’s disease

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have devised a simple test, using dopamine-deficient worms, for identifying drugs that may help people with Parkinson’s disease.

Memory-enhancing drug might improve exposure therapy for PTSD patients

A memory-enhancing drug may improve the speed and effectiveness of prolonged exposure therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients, according to a new pilot study by psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin and other institutions.

Researchers Develop Optimal Algorithm for Determining Focus Error in Eyes and Cameras

University of Texas at Austin researchers have discovered how to extract and use information in an individual image to determine how far objects are from the focus distance, a feat only accomplished by human and animal visual systems until now.

Like a camera, the human eye has an auto-focusing system, but human auto-focusing rarely makes mistakes. And unlike a camera, humans do not require trial and error to focus an object.

Johannes Burge, a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Liberal Arts’ Center for Perceptual Systems and co-author of the study, says it is significant that a statistical algorithm can now determine focus error, which indicates how much a lens needs to be refocused to make the image sharp, from a single image without trial and error.

Appalachian tiger swallowtail butterfly is a hybrid species

The Appalachian tiger swallowtail butterfly evolved through the hybridization of Eastern and Canadian swallowtails.

“How new species form is one of the central questions in evolutionary biology,” says Krushnamegh Kunte, a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard who began his research as a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. “Hybrid speciation is more common in plants, but there are very few cases in animals. This study may create the fullest picture we have to date of hybrid speciation occurring in an animal.”

Why Texas women have concealed handguns licenses

Texas women who hold concealed handgun licenses are motivated to do so by feelings of empowerment and a need for self-defense, according to research by University of Texas at Austin researchers.

Middle-aged parents only as happy as their least happy grown child

Despite the fact that middle-aged parents are no longer responsible for their grown children, the parents’ emotional well-being and life satisfaction remain linked to those children’s successes and problems — particularly their least-happy offspring, research from The University of Texas at Austin shows.

Choi, a professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, grew up in a South Korean village in the years after the Korean War combat ended.

Namkee Choi, professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin.

Her grandmother’s benevolence made a mark on Choi.

“I look back and still marvel about how she did this,” she says. “At the time I didn’t know what that was. It was social work, right?”

Choi’s rapport with her grandmother instilled a deep appreciation for her elders.

In the Getting Started series, Further Findings highlights the paths some researchers at The University of Texas at Austin took to the laboratory, the library, the field—wherever they do their work.

Choi teaches aging population in Social Work and social work practice with older adults. Her research focuses on the lives of older adults.

When she lived in Portland. Ore., she found a refuge in the company of older adults, even when she took the bus.

The job she moved to Portland for was not what she thought it would be. Her son had just left home. And she didn’t know anyone there.

But when she got on the bus, things changed.

“I automatically went to sit with the older adults,” she said. “We always talked and we were laughing and laughing. Even the transit police would come and listen to our conversations.”

The reason behind her career direction is not uncommon among social work students who want to work with older adults.

When she teaches an aging-related course, Choi asks the students why they want to work with older adults.

“They always say the same thing,” she says, ” ‘I had a great relationship with my grandparents.’ ”

State Sen. Kirk Waton, Alexa Stuifbergen, dean of the School of Nursing, and Earl Maxwell, chief executive of the St. David's Foundation, marked the foundation's endowment of a health-care research center.

The researchers used this money – about $600,000 altogether – to undertake small pilot projects in the community to determine whether a subject is worth pursing on a larger scale.

To a large degree, the researchers were successful.

They not only developed larger research projects that received $14.1 million in grants, they also developed ways to improve health care.

Now that work will continue.

St. David’s Foundation has made a $3 million gift to the School of Nursing to permanently fund the center. It will be known at St. David’s CHPR.

The center had been funded for 10 years by the National Institute of Nursing Research, a part of the National Institutes of Health\.

The missions of the center and the foundation mesh, said Earl Maxwell, the chief executive of St. David’s Foundation.

“We were particularly attracted to this research center because it aims to optimize health outcomes for the populations that we serve: vulnerable, low-income, uninsured and otherwise underserved patients,” Maxwell said.

Patricia Carter, an associate professor in the School of Nursing, used a CHPR grant for a study about people who care for loved ones were are seriously ill. These caregivers suffer from chronic sleep loss.

Carter checked proposed methods for recruiting subjects, methods, procedures and tested the proposed treatment on a small group.

“This gave me the data to show the National Institute for Mental Health that the project was feasible and worth doing,” she said.

Other projects conducted by center researchers include:

Researchers have published their results in journals and presented them at conferences.

Alexa Stuifbergen, dean of the College of Nursing, said the work of the center and of St. David’s Foundation is needed more than ever.

“As we move forward – in a world where health disparities are more pronounced, where individual patients deal with multiple debilitating and serious conditions, and where the landscape of providing care to them is changing more rapidly than ever, we are grateful that St. David’s Foundation has seen the need and is answering the call,” she said.

Graduate student researchers at the Population Research Center (PRC) are working toward understanding these health disparities that continue to persist and grow in the United States, and to help extend our most precious resource: human life.

To help them succeed, Mark Hayward, Robert Hummer, and Debra Umberson, professors in the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center, created research lab meetings, scientific forums allow graduate students to present their research and brainstorm ideas with their colleagues. Every two weeks the students and professors come together to vet new ideas, critique research projects, and discuss papers in progress.

This post was written by Jessica Sinn and it appeared on the College of Liberal Arts website.

Since the lab meetings were created in 2005, Hayward says he has seen many of the participating students publish papers in top sociology, demography and health science journals, win prestigious fellowships, and go on to academic positions at top tier research universities.

“These lab meetings are a tremendous vehicle for professional socialization and mentoring,” says Hayward, director of the PRC. “The end result has been a stream of outstanding scientific publications, usually led by the students with faculty support, outstanding placements in postdoctoral programs and universities and – perhaps most of all – a very fun learning environment.”

The following stories profile just a few students and recent alumni who have benefited from the research lab meetings and are on their way to advancing the field of population health.

Finding the Link between Early Childhood Environments and Adult Longevity

Jennifer Montez

“I was attracted to UT because its Population Research Center has some of the world’s best scholars in population health disparities,” Montez says.

Impressed by the PRC’s international reputation for producing top scholars in the field of sociology, Montez called Bob Hummer, who was the department chair of sociology at the time, to get more information about the program.

“He spent over an hour with me talking about the pros and cons and sent me all kinds of information about the research opportunities I could have if I came here,” Montez says. “Knowing that the department head was willing to talk to a potential grad student for over an hour was the deciding factor. Immediately after I hung up the phone, I turned in my acceptance letter.”

While at The University of Texas at Austin, Montez has published several papers in top demography and population health journals. She says many of her studies took shape in the research lab meetings.

“The research meetings keep us together as a community – and the faculty treat us like colleagues rather than students,” she says. “It’s also a great way to showcase how faculty and students collaborate when candidates come to campus.”

A specialist in social demography and adult mortality, Montez is currently researching a phenomenon known by sociologists as the “gender paradox.”

“Although women tend to live longer than men in the United States, they have more chronic health problems, such as arthritis, later in life,” she says. “This is one of the biggest puzzles in our field. What is it about women’s lives that disadvantages their health? We’ve been studying this puzzle for decades but we still cannot fully explain the male-female health gap.”

To understand why more women than men suffer from chronic ailments during adulthood, Montez is exploring the possibility that conditions early in life – as early as in utero – cause poor health outcomes for women in particular.

“We are increasingly recognizing how critical early life is for later life health,” she says. “You just can’t undervalue the importance of experiences such as proper nutrition and a supportive home environment for children. We might think that we’re more resilient than we are and that we’ll make up for it later down the road as adults, but early life is such a critical period. Early experiences seem to ‘get under the skin’ in ways that permanently shape our physiology, for better and for worse.”

After completing her doctorate in sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in spring 2011, Montez is continuing her research at Harvard University as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health & Society Scholar. The fellowship is the most prestigious postdoctoral award in the field of population health.

Bridging the Black-White Mortality Gap

Ryan Masters

One of his studies examined the puzzling finding that African Americans have lower death rates in Vital Statistics data than whites after age 85. Researchers have questioned whether this is a result of poor data quality or whether it stems from a highly robust group of older blacks.

In a forthcoming paper in Demography, a leading academic journal, Masters shows how the crossover is largely an outcome of “differential selective survival” (a sociological term that explains skewed mortality data) for blacks and whites.

According to his research, African Americans experienced substantially higher death rates than whites throughout adulthood, which resulted an unusually robust group of blacks who survived to old age.

Masters was also awarded the RWJF Health & Society Postdoctoral Fellowship and is continuing his research at Columbia University. Masters and Montez were two of 12 RWJF fellows chosen nationwide in 2011, an extraordinary accomplishment given the hundreds of high quality applicants.

Masters attributes much of his success to his fellow researchers and mentors, Hayward and Hummer, who helped him flesh out his projects in the research lab meetings.

“The lab meetings give us the space to actually research and discuss the most pressing questions in our field,” he says. “All they ask in return is for us to meet them halfway with a solid work ethic. It is a remarkable setup for academic work, and I have benefited tremendously from it.”

At Columbia University, Masters is broadening his work into the area of health policy. He also is investigating the key historical advances in public health and nutrition between 1910 and 1940 that led to the remarkable declines in mortality rates in the United States.

Investigating a Puzzling Paradox

Connor Sheehan

According to the Centers for Disease Control, Hispanics currently have a life expectancy of 80 years. That compares to about 78 years for whites and just under 73 years for blacks. Hispanics are less likely to have health insurance, yet they are less likely than whites to die from heart disease, cancer and strokes – the leading causes of death in the United States.
Connor Sheehan, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and the PRC, aims to find some reasons underlying the paradox.

With a focus on U.S. health disparities between whites and racial and ethnic minorities, Sheehan is developing a multi-methodological approach to his research. Although it may take years of research, he hopes his findings will help eliminate disparities in mortality.

By working with some of the nation’s leading sociologists at the PRC and participating in the lab meetings, he says he is on his way to accomplishing his goals.

“The UT sociology department continues to be highly regarded,” says Sheehan, who joined The University of Texas at Austin in fall 2011 after completing his master’s degree in geography at the University of Colorado. “They have an impressive number of faculty who are conducting research at the forefront of their respective fields, and the graduate program has an outstanding placement record.”

Eliminating Barriers to Good Health

Phil Cantu

To understand how community and space affect health outcomes, Phil Cantu, a new graduate student in the Department of Sociology and PRC, is studying health disparities among poor minority populations, specifically Hispanics.

After earning his undergraduate degree in sociology from Southwestern University in 2008, Cantu worked with several local nonprofit groups addressing economic and social justice issues in underserved communities. While conducting a health survey in East Austin, he found that his project was stultified by substandard research design.

“The research design for our project was really poor,” Cantu says. “I decided the best way to pursue that line of inquiry was to go to grad school and use these tools and methods that have been proven over time.”

After attending one of the research lab meetings during a recruitment event, he knew the Department of Sociology and PRC at The University of Texas at Austin was the best fit for his academic interests.

“The co-authorship between the students and professors here at UT is astounding,” he says. “They help prepare students for getting those really good post-doc positions. The focus on ideas is what really excited me about this program. I think that’s the most important thing professors can give their graduate students, and it’s the most important thing they can get out of graduate students.”

Cantu says he was also enticed by the new Liberal Arts building, which will house the PRC in 2013.

“I’m very excited about the new building, which will provide us more space for new collaborations and exchanging ideas,” Cantu says. “The fact that the college is making this building a priority speaks volumes about the importance of the Population Research Center.”

After earning his master’s degree, Cantu plans to work toward a doctoral degree at The University of Texas at Austin and later pursue a career in demography.

“UT has a history of producing really strong scholars in the field of sociology,” Cantu says. “And I would like to continue that tradition.”

Adela Ben-Yakar, an engineering professor, and Jon Pierce-Shimomura, a neurobiology professor, have teamed up to develop technology to test drugs for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Researchers bring different skills, expertise and perspectives that can illuminate hard problems.

But just bringing different disciplines together can be a hard problem in itself, despite work being done by universities to break down the siloes that contain them.

So we wondered how Adela Ben-Yakar, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Jon Pierce-Shimomura, an assistant professor in the Section of Neurobiology, came to collaborate.

They have received a $3 million grant from National Institutes of Health to develop technology that could drastically cut the time and cost to test drugs for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

What Ben-Yakar brings to this collaboration is expertise in designing tools for delicate work at the cellular level. What Pierce-Shimomura brings is expertise in developing a special breed of C. elegans worm on which to use the tools.

All Ben-Yakar and Pierce-Shimomura had to do is attend a conference for researchers who work with C. elegans held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. It helped that they happened to sit at the same table for a lunch.

That fall Pierce-Shimomura would be a new faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin.

“I was just about to move to UT and was excited to learn that she was already here,” Pierce-Shimomura said. “I had experiments in the back of my mind that would clearly benefit from her expertise in microfluidics, lasers and optics.

“Likewise, I think she was happy to have us move to UT as the first lab with extensive experience in C. elegans neuroscience and molecular biology.”

Pierce-Shimomura’s arrival in Austin was indeed timely for Ben-Yakar and her lab.

“Before arrival of Jon, my group had developed several novel techniques for studying C. elegans, including precise laser surgery and microfluidic trapping methods for studying nerve regeneration,” Ben-Yakar said. “It was clear to both of us that together we can create a powerful synergy for revealing new insights in neurodegenerative diseases.”

But even after they realized that they could work together, there was more work to do before they could.

Pierce-Shimomura’s lab had developed a worm that develops Alzheimer’s disease. Just as in humans, a subset of the worm’s brain degenerates in the worm’s “middle age,” when its about five-days-old. The dying neurons can be seen through the worm’s transparent body.

“When Jon showed me his new Alzheimer’s model last year, I kept thinking what kind of new tools I need to develop to take advantage of this important disease model for rapid screening of drugs,” Ben-Yakar said.

Ben-Yakar went to her lab and soon after she came up with new ideas for ultrafast optical and microfluidic methods.

“This new tool box, combining new optical, microfluidics, and genetic methods, could only be invented by the combined expertise of our team,” Ben-Yakar said. “It has the potential to be very powerful in enabling new paradigms for research and discovery.”

What they plan to do with Ben-Yakar’s tools and Pierce-Shimomura’s worms is to search for new drugs that may delay or prevent neurodegeneration and aging in humans.

Moms are tops in muriquis monkey society. Photo by Carla B. Possamai; provided by K. B. Strier.

In a study of wild primates, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Karen B. Strier and her colleagues, including University of Texas at Austin associate professor of anthropology Anthony Di Fiore, describe patterns of paternity in a monkey society where equality and tolerance rule and where sexually mature males, still living at home, seem to get helpful access to mates by the mere presence of their mothers and other maternal kin.

This story was written by Molly Wahlberg. It appeared on the College of Liberal Arts website.

The new study, which combines Strier’s long-term behavioral studies of wild muriquis with new genetic assays obtained from their scat, is important because relatively little is know about patterns of male reproductive success in wild primates, much less ones with the muriqui’s unique egalitarian social system.

“The idea of looking at genetic paternity in the muriquis grew out of conversations I had with my Brazilian colleagues more than a decade ago, but it wasn’t until we teamed up with [Di Fiore] that the study could be realized,” Strier says.

Anthony De Fiore, associate professor of anthropology.

“We believe this is the first piece of research to look at the distribution of paternities across males in any primate species where male social relationships are egalitarian,” Di Fiore notes, meaning that researchers cannot detect any sort of dominance hierarchy or dominance relationships among the males.

The northern muriqui is a large, long-lived, socially complex and critically endangered New World primate. There are at most 1,000 animals left in patches of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the only place the species is found.

“The kind of society that northern muriquis live in is very rare among primates. Lots of different males mate with females, and our results show that the number of kids that a male sires isn’t age or dominance related, as is true for many other primates such as baboons or chimpanzees,” Di Fiore says. “That’s a very unique situation.”

But the study’s big surprise was evidence that could extend the ‘grandmother hypothesis,’ the notion that human females evolved to live well past their reproductive years because of the advantages that post-menopausal women might confer on their offspring’s own reproduction, to other long-lived primates.

“The new data show who’s pulling the strings in muriqui society,” Strier says. “It’s the mothers.”

Genetic data from 67 monkeys – infants, mothers and possible sires – were analyzed, and the genetic results validate previous behavioral observations, and provide a new window into muriqui society.

“It would be really interesting now to look at paternity in other muriqui populations and in other species where mothers and sons stay together for life, to see if there are similar maternal effects,” Strier says.

Intriguingly, no infants were the result of mating between males and a close maternal relative. “The finding that no inbreeding is occurring is important,” Strier says. “Mating may be less random than we think because of the influence of mothers and other maternal kin. There must be some mechanism of recognition or avoidance.”

This is an important discovery that may also help with muriqui conservation, says Strier, given that the 300 or so muriquis in her study population are found in a protected reserve, where they are isolated from other muriquis and, potentially, at risk from inbreeding depression. The data suggest that this muriqui population, despite its isolation, may be large enough for its members to avoid close inbreeding, at least over the short term, as conservationists work to preserve and expand habitats for other existing groups.

Julia Mickenberg

CSPAN is the cable television enterprise that covers the U.S. Congress and offers other public affairs programming. It turns CSPAN-2 over to interviews with non-fiction authors on weekends.

This weekend (Nov. 19-21, 2011) BookTV will feature interviews with three UT Austin professors, following two that appeared last weekend. More will follow in coming weeks.

The Texas interviews are part of a BookTV university series that’s included George Mason University, the University of Chicago and George Washington University.

The CSPAN crew had been in Austin for the Texas Book Festival on Oct 22-23. It stayed over a day to interview the professors.

It set up a mini-studio in the Lee Jamail Academic Room in the Main Building (Room 212). There were two chairs, two cameras, bright lights and production board.

The results can be seen on BookTV (and on the BookTv.org website after they are aired). Here are the times of the telecasts for this weekend:

Steven Weinberg

Lewis Gould, Eugene C. Barker Centennial Professor Emeritus in American History, ” “My Dearest Nellie: The Letters of William Howard Taft to Helen Herron Taft, 1909-1912.” 10:30 a.m. Sunday and 12:30 a.m. Monday.

Robert Auerbach, professor, Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, “Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.” 10:40 a.m. Sunday and 12:40 a.m. Monday.

Three other professors were on the previous weekend and their interviews can be found at BookTV.org. They are:

Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, “Constitutional Faith.”

Julia Mickenberg, associate professor, Department of American Studies, “Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature.”

Yet to appear are:

Martha Menchaca, professor, Department of Anthropology, “Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants.”

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations in the LBJ School, “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.”

Jeremi Suri

Ami Pedahzur, professor, Department of Government and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism.”

Neil Foley, professor, Department of History, “Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity.”