March 31, 2011
Dear Board Member,
This month we introduce you to one of ASU’s Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Lee Hartwell, a renowned cancer researcher now pursuing goals in both sustainable health and sustainability education for K-8 students. Our video interview with Dr. Hartwell follows a brief review of recent ASU sustainability news and activities, below.
Highlights of ASU sustainability activities
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Resilience 2011, an international science and policy conference sponsored by the Resilience Alliance and ASU, brought a wide-ranging group of participants from government, business, NGOs, and academia to the Tempe campus to share their work and diverse perspectives on the complexities of global change. Speakers such as Carlo Jaeger of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Pamela Matson of Stanford, and John Finnigan of CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science addressed conference themes including adaptation, thresholds, innovation, governance, resilient development, and transformation in social-ecological systems.
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ASU is partnering with Taiwan’s Chang Gung University to establish an international Biosignatures Center co-directed by Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Lee Hartwell. The long-distance collaboration will focus on developing new diagnostic tests for the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer and other diseases. It is part of an ASU initiative to develop a global network of centers that will identify and incubate panels of diagnostic markers in the nonprofit sector before commercialization.
Read more »
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An invitation to guest lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned into an unexpected opportunity for ASU professor Tom Moore to co-invent a sustainable energy production system with MIT collaborators. The joint invention, which pairs an MIT-developed catalyst for producing hydrogen with an ASU-created solar cell that powers the reaction, has subsequently been licensed to Sun Catalytix, a renewable energy startup. Moore is a Senior Sustainability Scientist and a professor in ASU’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.
Read more »
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The Regional Tree and Shade Summit organized by ASU’s Sustainable Cities Network drew more than 200 participants from Arizona cities to learn about the importance of trees and shade in creating a healthy, livable, and sustainable urban landscape. The goal was to help cities plan and expand their shade coverage by planting trees. The summit was a partnership with the cities of Phoenix, Mesa, and Glendale, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Arizona State Forestry Division.
Read more »
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The Global Institute launched a new sustainability series, Case Critical, to provide authoritative analysis about time-sensitive sustainability threats for the benefit of a local audience and also for communities worldwide via webcast. The most recent event, “Fallout from the Disasters in Japan,” featured four ASU experts on earthquakes, nuclear engineering, and radiation who examined the impacts of Japan’s recent series of disasters and answered audience questions. The event was covered and picked up by numerous print, web, and broadcast media.
Read more »
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Focus Phoenix, a community service component of the “Sustainable Communities” course offered by the School of Community Resources and Development (College of Public Programs), provides students an opportunity to apply their knowledge to current urban challenges in local communities. Student teams must work together with community members to find solutions to issues of local concern, such as pollution from engine idling and the need for local foods. Senior Sustainability Scientist Rhonda Phillips teaches the course.
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Please feel free to email or call us with any questions or comments about this briefing.
Best regards,
cc: Jim Buizer
Q&A With Dr. Lee Hartwell
applying science to improve healthcare and education
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Dr. Lee Hartwell is a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability, Virginia G. Piper Chair of Personalized Medicine and chief scientist in the Center for Sustainable Health at the Biodesign Institute, professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2001 for his discoveries of a specific class of genes that control the cell cycle – research that provided important clues to cancer.
In this two-part video interview, Dr. Hartwell describes the issues and goals for his two most important sustainability-related projects in healthcare and K-8 education. He also discusses how he came to embrace sustainability research and teaching at ASU and his concerns about world social inequities.
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Dr. Lee Hartwell
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Watch interview/read transcript
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