Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

This Major Thematic Grant will fund research over three years to identify the immunological explanation for the impaired defense against infection of HEU babies. To achieve this goal the team of researchers from UBC and the Health Sciences Faculty and Tygerberg Hospital, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa will study 100 HIV-exposed babies and 100 babies born to women who are not HIV infected. Blood samples will be obtained, frozen and evaluated at the CFI Centre for Understanding and Preventing Infections in Children, BC Children’s Hospital. The team will study the innate (present from birth) and the adaptive (learned) immune system of all babies at several time points from 2 weeks of age to 24 months. Investigation of nutrition, infant development and maternal depression will also be performed. These studies will be guided by the results of a small pilot study conducted in 2009 and 2010 in which 60 babies were investigated. With information gained from these studies, and future major studies arising from them, it should be possible to suggest interventions to protect these very vulnerable children during the first year of life, when most of the fatal infections occur.

This project builds on the momentum generated by a highly successful Wall Exploratory Workshop, "Exploring Development of a Birth Cohort to Understand and Prevent Disease of Children in the Developing World," held at the Peter Wall Institute which helped to identify and refine the themes of this project.

The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, associated with this project, is a partner of the Peter Wall Institute and in 2009 co-hosted a Peter Wall Colloquium Abroad on the topic of HEU infants: http://www.heu.pwias.ubc.ca

It has three major objectives: (i) To control chemical reactions within and between ultra-cold molecules using both ultra-fast laser pulses and stationary electric and magnetic fields. This integration will lay the foundations of the new research field of "ultracold coherent chemistry." (ii) To create and study a new phase of condensed matter consisting of ordered ensembles of ultra-cold molecules, called molecular "optical lattices." Among other applications, such lattices would aid in the development of "quantum computers." (iii) To explore an entirely new chemical regime of molecular gases confined by laser fields to one and two dimensions, and obtain insights into the cooperative effects exhibited by ensembles of ultra-cold molecules in confined geometries with extremely large wave-lengths. These three directions constitute a completely new paradigm in the fields of chemical dynamics and Atomic, Molecular and Optical (AMO) physics.

Human sensorimotor systems normally perform so flawlessly that it is easy to overlook the extraordinary sophistication behind ordinary actions such as looking at an object with our eyes and picking it up with our hand. Indeed, these actions appear simple to us precisely because our brains and bodies have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to perform complex sensorimotor tasks without much conscious thought. The sophistication only becomes apparent when we try to reproduce these "ordinary" skills in robots, or when we observe the development of these skills in childhood and their loss in the elderly.

The scientific goal of this project is to model the complex computations, sensing, and motor actions that are required to control our eyes and hand when we look at or reach out for an object of interest. Specifically, we will construct computational models of how the eyes and head are moved to direct gaze to objects of interest in the environment, and how the hand manipulates objects. These models will be firmly based on neurobiological measurements of how humans actually perform these tasks. The results will have important implications for applied clinical research and therefore for human health in the long term.

Psychoacousticians study hearing by determining how listeners respond to artificially simple stimuli in which specific physical dimensions are manipulated independently; indeed many stimuli used in these experiments do not occur naturally in the world. In contrast, Gestalt psychologists study how listeners responded to intact examples of natural sounds. The latter approach has greater ecological validity, but to date it had not yielded quantitative models. It was thought by the Acoustic Ecology researchers that a more productive intermediate approach in the study of speech perception was the analysis-by-synthesis approach in which complex natural sounds have been modified or synthesized to determine which aspects of the sound pattern cue particular responses. Just as post-war electronics enabled analysis-by-synthesis research, in the late 1990s, computer speed and memory were by then sufficient to enable us to adopt an analysis-by-synthesis type approach to study how listeners respond to the complex array of cues that are present in real acoustical environments. The same computational tools that enable us to record and systematically manipulate dimensions of complex stimuli (virtual reality) also enable us to create computational models that are closer approximations of biological systems (neural networks). The new approach developed in this study re-focussed research from "hearing" to "listening." This re-focusing reflected the more general shift in cognitive science from modular to integrated views of the brain and behavior. Whereas ears were once viewed as passive biological microphones that picked up sound and sent messages to the brain, the ears were now viewed as active sound grabbers. Over the last several decades auditory physiologists had learned how top-down control from the brain 'tunes' the auditory system even down to the level of the most peripheral sensory cells. 'Listening' captures the interplay of hearing and thinking that must be featured in future models. Foundational research conducted under the Acoustic Ecology grant was critical to the awarding of two Canadian Foundation for Innovation project grants for which Acoustic Ecology members were project leaders and core investigators: "Hearing, Accessibility, Assistive Technology, and Acoustic Design" ($2.4 million), and the Institute of Computinng Information and Cognitive Systems ($22.1 million).

From 2002, William McKellin, Anthropology (2002-2003) continued the work started by Kathleen Pichora-Fuller.

By extending it further to bring in more health professionals and community participants, the new team undertook a more ambitious programme of research dealing with both individual narratives in various forms and the larger cultural narratives of which they are a part. By "narrative" is meant the structuring of experience that gives it meaning. Researchers examined the ways in which health and disease, disability, and trauma, are constructed and represented, in comparative crosscultural and transhistorical perspectives. UBC has considerable relevant expertise in this area, and the strong presence in Vancouver of alternative, Asian and aboriginal medical practices, alongside conventional Western ones, made UBC a particularly appropriate site for such a project. The culmination of this project was a highly-successful international conference, "Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma," held at the Institute in May 2002, the publication of an edited collection of research papers, Valerie Raoul et al, eds., Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), and one of the first Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grants awarded to a humanities project, for "Studies in Autobiography, Gender and Age" (SAGA). The SAGA centre continued and expanded a number of initiatives launched under the Narratives project.

The measurements were made using an existing multichannel electron momentum spectrometer plus two new very high performance state-of-the-art instruments. This advanced technique, which has the unique ability to image the electron density in individual atomic and molecular orbitals in molecules or bands in solids, has been successfully developed at UBC into a state-of-the-art multichannel tool that is now suitable for the study of relative large chemical systems of practical interest in modern life and for which quantum mechanical theory needs to be developed, tested and refined with a view to improved computer aided molecular design and modeling of reactivity and function. Gas-phase model systems selected for study included small and intermediate size biomolecules, transition metal complexes, free radicals, metastable species and ions. The condensed matter targets included crystalline solids, ultrasmooth surfaces, nanostructures and adsorbed molecules, which were investigated using an ultra high vacuum reflection geometry hybrid EELS / EMS instrument that was designed and constructed under this grant. Additional information on surfaces and adsorbed molecules were obtained using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) and various other surface science techniques such as LEED crystallography. The highly excited electronic states of many of these targets were also studied using high resolution EELS. This research endeavour was achieved by combining the interdisciplinary skills of a talented, experienced and well-equipped team of UBC researchers representing professional expertise in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Surface Physics, Atomic Physics, Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Materials Sciences (AMPEL) together with the extensive design and fabrication facilities of the Mechanical and Electronic Engineering Workshops located in UBC Chemistry Department. The projects were further aided by the participation of leading national and international scientists working in related fields. The results of these fundamental studies found applications in significant areas of science, medicine and technology, including computer aided molecular design, molecular modeling, the screening and design of drugs, catalysis, theories of chemical reactivity, new materials, atmospheric and space sciences and plasmas.

It may be recurrence of a disease such as tuberculosis posing a major new threat, groundwater pollution reaching a level where it threatens our water supply, the collapse of fisheries due to a sudden drop in populations, an avalanche, earthquake or an economic crisis such as the collapse of a currency or a market. Crises or critical points may also be associated with the formation of social order, a new technology or pattern of commerce, the formation of an embryo, herd, flock or school. The critical points at which such phenomena emerge are the "crisis points" were the focus of this study. One of the many substantial results of this, the first of the Peter Wall  Institute Major Thematic Grant awards, is the monograph by one of the co-investigators, Lawrence M. Ward, Dynamic Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2002). An introduction to the application of dynamical systems science to the cognitive sciences, Ward's study demonstrated that human behaviour is an "unfolding in time" whose study should be augmented by the applicatiojn of time-sensitive tools from the disciplines such as physics, mmathematics, and economics, where change over time is of critical importance.