Illustration by Michael Klein

Issue: Winter 2005

What’s New - Shelf Life - People Watch

News & Notes on All Things Trojan

A Capital Idea Takes Shape in D.C.

USC’s new Office of Federal Relations funnels topical research to the government while promoting education at the national level.

With the opening of USC’s Office of Federal Relations in the nation’s capital, word is spreading: This university is ready for prime time.

Led by experienced Washington insider Jennifer Grodsky ’97, the federal relations office is charged with promoting the advancement of education and research at the national level. Employing such tools as national advertising, direct mail, online surveys and a lot of networking, it aims to heighten USC’s national visibility, provide policymakers with access to research and faculty expertise, and promote the university’s research in a bid to attract federal funding.

In its first year, the office has launched three major initiatives: an online survey for alumni and friends of USC in Washington; a prototype guide for policymakers that offers a snapshot of USC faculty expertise and programs of interest to lawmakers and lobbyists; and a major media campaign targeted at Capitol Hill that showcases USC’s involvement in four key areas: education, research, health care and community service.

“This office will play a vital role in communicating the breadth and depth of USC’s research activities to the federal government and others in Washington,” says Martha Harris, senior vice president for university relations, who oversees Grodsky’s operation.

One of the ads created to promote USC research programs in the DC area.

The federal relations office dovetails with USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias’s goal of strengthening the university’s presence in Washington.

“We are entering a phase of ‘scientific squeeze’ in terms of funding from federal government agencies,” he says. “It is essential that we allocate resources to help faculty win research grants and contracts. We must remain extremely competitive to secure funding from federal government agencies, corporations and foundations.”

To that end, Grodsky’s office is working with the newly formed USC Office of Research Advancement, under the leadership of Randolph Hall, vice provost for research advancement. The two units will join forces to bridge gaps between basic and applied research, substantially increase USC’s share of federal and foundation research support, and develop partnerships with major research universities around the world.

In addition to being a resource for policymakers, the federal relations office serves as USC’s eyes and ears on Washington policymakers whose decisions affect the university’s research and education mission.

“Congress often considers legislation that can greatly impact universities,” says Grodsky, who joined the university after a four-year stint as legislative director for U.S. Rep. Hilda L. Solis; she previously was a staffer for the late Rep. Julian Dixon.

“Working with national associations such as the Association of American Universities or the Association of American Medical Colleges, we can advocate for policy changes that will benefit the university and our students.”

Congress is currently considering several issues of importance to USC, including legislation on stem cell research.

“We are part of a coalition of scientific organizations and academic institutions advocating for legislation allowing federal funding for stem cell research,” Grodsky says.

The federal office is also spearheading a campaign to connect with alumni living and working in Washington. In October, ads ran in the Washington Post and Roll Call showcasing USC’s achievements and announcing the creation of the Washington office. Brochures highlighting the ads were also mailed to more than 4,000 alumni and friends of USC in the capital.

Networking is essential inside the Beltway. Grodsky has hooked up with the Washington, D.C., chapter of the USC Alumni Association, called the USC Club of the Nation’s Capital. The alumni club and the Washington office piggyback on events and publicity, but the key advantage of having both in the capital is that it helps in expanding the Trojan Family – the club introduces key people to the Washington office and vice versa.

Grodsky says the Washington club leverages its location and has had tremendous success in attracting high-level speakers to both attend events and help spread the Trojan spirit.

“They have been very helpful in connecting us with people here,” she adds. “They are very plugged into the area. It helps to have friends in high places.”

– Karen Newell Young

Tradition & Innovation

Robert and Lois Erburu, with Sample and Aoun Photo by Philip Channing

USC College Embarks on a New Quest

In September, USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences formally launched “Tradition & Innovation,” a new fundraising initiative designed to raise $400 million by 2010 in its quest to become one of America’s best liberal arts colleges within a private research university.

“We are launching the Tradition & Innovation initiative at a time when the role of a successful college within a research university is rapidly evolving,” said USC College dean Joseph Aoun who, along with USC President Steven B. Sample and campaign chair Patrick C. Haden ’75, announced the initiative at a black-tie kickoff celebration held in a tented area outside the newly dedicated Molecular and Computational Biology Building. “The initiative will elevate USC College – the core of USC – so that it can attain the highest level of accomplishment.”

Inaugural USC College Dean’s Medallions were awarded to alumni Lois and Robert Erburu, MaryLou and George Boone and Dana and David Dornsife, recognizing their leadership and support.

”The College has been vital to the success of the entire university since USC opened its doors in 1880,” Sample said. “In order for USC to continue to enhance its stature as one of the nation’s leading private research universities, we must continue to advance the quality and reputation of the College.

“Those who support USC College are investing in the creativity and imagination of our students and faculty. When you invest in the College, you’re saying you believe that we can, and should, do our best to improve the quality of life for people in our community and around the world.”

College With a Conscience

The gospel of college placement counselors, The Princeton Review, recently declared USC a “college with a conscience.” Chosen from 900 institutions, USC got the nod in a book profiling “81 great schools with outstanding community involvement.”

Credit for this honor falls largely to USC College’s Joint Educational Project. Among the oldest service-learning programs in the country, JEP gives 2,000 students a year the chance to mix coursework with community experiences. Also mentioned were USC’s civic and community relations office, its Civic Engagement Initiative and its experiential learning office.

Trojans quoted in College With a Conscience noted that it’s “definitely the ‘cool’ thing to be engaged on campus.”

Health News

Howard Hodis Photo by Laura Crosta

Heartening News

A landmark study examines whether estrogen can slow the progression of atherosclerosis in women past menopause.

Can estrogen protect against heart disease? Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC believe it can, and they have begun a landmark study to put their beliefs to the test.

Cardiologist Howard N. Hodis leads the five-year, $9.8 million Early versus Late Intervention Trial with Estradiol (ELITE), funded by the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Hodis believes estrogen may slow the progression of atherosclerosis, the accumulation of cholesterol-containing plaques in the arteries leading to heart attack and stroke. Of the yearly 750,000 deaths attributed to atherosclerosis-related disease, about a third occur in postmenopausal women. Yet before the change of life – when estrogen is still abundant – women rarely exhibit atherosclerosis.

To test the theory, Hodis is enrolling 504 women in ELITE: half will take 17beta-estradiol (a form of estrogen identical to women’s own estrogen) daily for three years; the rest will take a placebo.

To monitor the progress of atherosclerosis, Hodis’ team will measure the thickness of participants’ carotid artery wall. Other tests will measure estrogen therapy’s effects on thinking and memory.

ELITE has its origins in Hodis’ earlier work. In 2001, he and his colleagues followed more than 200 healthy women for a few years after menopause. Atherosclerosis progression, they found, slowed or seemed to halt in the women on 17beta-estradiol.

At the time, some 6 million American women were using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to combat the menopausal discomforts that hit women at about age 51.

Then, in July 2002, the National Institutes of Health halted part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a large, ongoing trial of HRT.

Early data indicated increased risk of breast cancer, heart attack, strokes and blood clots with HRT use. But when scientists analyzed the study’s final data – rather than incomplete data – the results differed significantly from the early findings. They actually found HRT had no effect on coronary heart disease in general – and among women who had only recently passed through menopause, it seemed to help the heart.

“The public did not hear about these final results,” Hodis says.

“The data remain conflicted and controversial, and even certain WHI investigators now concede in a recent publication that with all the data considered, the benefits of hormone therapy outweigh the risks,” Hodis says. “Women have a right to know if there is something out there that may help their health and quality of life.”

Axel Schonthal Photo by Philip Channing

Arthritis Drug as Chemotherapy?

Study shows a version of the drug Celebrex halts cancer-cell growth.

After the tempest over unreported cardiovascular risks associated with COX-2 inhibitors, here’s a ray of sunshine: the controversial arthritis drug appears to be a powerful anticancer agent.

In exciting new research, an interdisciplinary team of USC scientists has shown that a close structural relative of the COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib (Celebrex) can wipe out tumor cells.

Led by immunologist Axel H. Schonthal of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the researchers have been studying the effects of an analog of celecoxib called 2,5-dimethyl-celecoxib, or DMC. This analog does not have its cousin’s celebrated ability to block the activity of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), an enzyme integral to the inflammatory process.

It does, however, halt tumor growth in drug-resistant lines of multiple myeloma cells. (Multiple myeloma is an incurable cancer of the plasma cell.)

Celecoxib has received a lot of negative attention recently with the withdrawal of two other COX-2 inhibitors – Vioxx and Bextra – after data linked them to an increased risk of stroke. (Celebrex remains on the market but now carries a “black box” warning about the potential for cardiovascular side effects.)

Over the past couple of years, however, researchers have begun to recognize that COX-2 can sometimes play a role in cancer. For instance, they have found that the enzyme is overexpressed by multiple myeloma cells, and that this is a predictor of a poor outcome for the patient.

Some researchers wondered: Might administering a COX-2 inhibitor to patients turn things around? It did.

In several laboratory studies, celecoxib showed an ability to target several tumor-growth pathways. Further studies, including some performed by Schonthal and colleagues, showed that celecoxib’s anticancer activity appears to be independent from its COX-2 inhibition.

Schonthal’s team then went on to show that DMC retains the ability to stop cancer growth despite the fact that it doesn’t inhibit the activity of COX-2.

“Amazingly,” the researchers noted in an article in the journal Blood, “these growth-inhibitory effects take place even in cells that otherwise are highly resistant to the inhibitory effects of various anticancer drugs … commonly used in the clinic for the treatment of cancer patients.”

The fact that DMC is as potent as celecoxib – or even more potent at lower doses – is important. “Bearing in mind that substantially increased daily dosages of these drugs are considered – and probably necessary – for cancer prevention or cancer therapy, the increased risk of cardiovascular failure is of considerable concern,” they wrote. But the unwanted cardiovascular side effects of celecoxib are connected to its ability to inhibit COX-2. Lacking that ability, DMC might not cause similar problems.

Schonthal’s research points to celecoxib in particular as unique in its ability to slow or stop tumor growth. All the COX-2 inhibitors are able to block the activity of the cyclooxygenase-2 enzyme, he says, but only celecoxib and its analogs seem to be able to arrest growth and induce cellular suicide (apoptosis).

What does this mean for the treatment of multiple myeloma?

“Curing laboratory mice of multiple myeloma isn’t good enough,” Schonthal says.

“But proof of principle has been established with this work, so our next goal will be to evaluate DMC in myeloma patients, perhaps in combination with other drugs.”

– Lori Oliwenstein

Cancer Watch

Surgeon Dennis Holmes holds the special gold-tipped wand used to administer radiation during breast-cancer surgery, thus avoiding the need for additional radiation therapy after surgery. Photo by Philip Channing

A Wand to Ward off Mastectomy

If USC cancer specialists have their way, certain women with early-stage invasive breast cancer will be able to receive their entire course of radiation therapy in a single treatment – while still under anesthesia after surgery.

USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center is participating in an international, multi-center clinical trial of intraoperative radiotherapy, a technique aimed at women who undergo lumpectomy – a minimally invasive, breast-conserving surgery. Initial European studies indicate intraoperative therapy has similar side effects and effectiveness as external-beam radiation.

USC breast surgeon Dennis R. Holmes calls the new technique “a tremendous advancement” both in terms of improved breast-cancer treatment and reduced disruption to patients’ lives.

Ordinarily, when physicians find invasive breast cancer early – and women have a single, small tumor and no sign of cancer spread to the lymph nodes – there’s no need for a mastectomy. The cancer may be effectively treated by lumpectomy with follow-up radiation therapy.

But traditional radiation therapy requires that patients visit a medical center five days a week for six to seven weeks. Some women find this so disruptive to their lives that they opt for the more invasive mastectomy rather than undergo weeks of radiation.

“With intraoperative radiotherapy, radiation is administered during the surgical procedure, avoiding the need to return for additional radiotherapy later,” says Holmes, a clinical surgeon in the Keck School of Medicine of USC and principal investigator in the intraoperative radio-therapy trial at USC/Norris. “It only takes 20 to 35 minutes to administer, after the tumor has been removed.”

The new technique involves a special gold-tipped wand attached to the arm of a machine called Intrabeam. While the patient is still under anesthesia, physicians maneuver and manipulate this wand inside the cavity left by the removed tumor. The device accelerates electrons and shoots them through the gold tip, emitting X-rays exactly where they are needed: in the tissues immediately surrounding the tumor, where the risk of cancer recurrence is greatest.

Surgeons then close the incision, and pathologists check the tumor’s margins to ensure its full removal.

At USC, trial participants are currently being recruited. They are randomly assigned either to receive lumpectomy and the new intraoperative radiotherapy, or lumpectomy and standard post-operative external-beam radiation. Women may be eligible to participate if they are age 40 or older, have a single invasive tumor 3 cm wide or smaller and have no positive lymph nodes.

For information about the trial, call (323) 865-3933 or visit www.targittrial.com.

– Alicia Di Rado

Faculty Books & recordings

Photo by Philip Channing

Inside the Film Biz

In his new book, savvy Hollywood veteran Lawrence Turman recounts the ups and downs of being a producer.

So You Want to Be a Producer
By Lawrence Turman
Three Rivers Press/Random House, $14

We all watch movies. Many of us also read the list of credits. We see the names of producers in huge type on the screen and occasionally wonder: What do they actually do?

USC film professor Lawrence Turman answers that question – and plenty of others – in his book So You Want to Be a Producer. And he should know. Before joining the USC School of Cinema-Television as head of its Peter Stark Producing Program, Turman produced more than 40 films, including The Graduate, The River Wild and American History X.

Part memoir, part insider’s guide, the book contains advice from a number of colleagues whom Turman interviewed, including above-the-title figures like Brian Grazer, Curtis Hanson and David Wolper. It’s also a nuts-and-bolts resource for anyone entering the profession that Turman chose five decades ago.

“A producer is a generalist, acting as an ‘editor’ to everyone else on the film,” Turman says. “But primarily, we’re entrepreneurs: starting each and every film from scratch, deciding what to try to make into a movie. We start the ball rolling, then – like a sheepdog – keep it and everyone on the film on the rolling path that the producer had in mind from the get-go.”

Chapters cover such critical components as raising money and securing permissions, finding a story and developing a script, choosing a director, hiring cast and crew and distributing the product.

For Turman, the choice of which film to make has always come from the heart. “When I come across a story that makes my blood race, I can’t sleep until I get my hands on it. For The Graduate, I even put up my own money for the option, a cardinal producing sin.”

While filming is under way, a producer often has the least to do, Turman says – “if he or she has done their planning and pre-production well,” that is. “Then it’s a matter of crisis management when things go wrong – as for sure they will.”

If you want a low-stress career, producing probably isn’t for you. “I worry a lot,” Turman admits. “Are we getting from each scene, from each actor, from the creative technical crew all we had hoped and expected? As we watch the rushes [daily takes], are the scenes clear, entertaining, engaging? Most importantly, are they adding up to a compelling, dramatic or funny whole? The problem is, you rarely get that answer until you are finished shooting and see the rough cut.”

After filming, the producer gives collaborative input on the music, editing and, just as critically, the marketing, ad campaign and distribution. “A good producer is working on the marketing during shooting because it is so vital,” Turman says.

Why share all this insider’s knowledge?

Turman got a cold call from a literary agent who had read a New York Times story about the Peter Stark Program’s graduates.

“I was so flattered I said ‘yes’ with alacrity, forgetting that I had to actually write the darn thing,” Turman says. “Incidentally, that lit agent did what I try to teach my students to do: be enterprising.”

Turman was interviewed about his book on national programs such as public radio's “Marketplace” and TV’s “The Late Late Show.” The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer wrote, “Turman’s book isn’t the definitive guide to such things – for such a book, he rightly notes, is an impossibility given all the variables. It all starts with wanting greatness, living with disappointment, working without rest and enduring – and in such matters So You Want to Be a Producer offers a wealth of invaluable lessons.”

– Elaine Lapriore

Photo by Mark Tanner

Paved Oasis

Urban scholars reconstruct a many-faceted history of how Los Angeles went from paradise to parking lot.

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise
University of Pittsburgh Press, $35

In the 19th century, the Los Angeles Star called the City of Angels a paradisiacal garden.

With its Mediterranean climate, beaches, dunes, wetlands, mountains and rivers, this Shangri-La “awaited only the shaping hands of human action and labor,” opined authors of the time.

How times have changed.

Now famously mocked as “60 suburbs in search of a city,” Greater Los Angeles is over-stuffed. Further sprawl would require hurdling across entire mountain ranges. The region joins the San Joaquin Valley and Houston as America’s worst smog pits.

In their new collection of essays, Land of Sunshine, USC professors William Deverell and Greg Hise explain why the goose stopped laying golden eggs.

The editors hope the book, which chronicles the environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles, incites citizen activism in local planning and land-use policy.

“The more the general public knows, the more they can contribute to the dialogue,” says Deverell, a history professor in USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. “The only real change in Los Angeles will be initiated by citizens. The book validates citizen-initiated change and, in a sense, calls for it.”

In recent years, a groundswell of citizen participation has emerged on the local level, says co-editor Hise, an urban historian in USC’s School for Policy, Planning, and Development. Land of Sunshine enhances that effort.

“This book is less of a toolkit, and more a history of people making change,” says Hise, who has joint appointments in USC College’s history and geography departments.

It also dispels myths about Los Angeles.

“People call Los Angeles a paradise gone wrong or a museum of failed urbanism,” Hise says. “But neither of these descriptions captures the dynamics of the region.”

The reality is much more complex. Rather, residents are living with the results of regional “success.” Since the turn of the 20th century and the birth of the automobile, planners deliberately recast American cities as metropolitan regions. The Southland, where 18 million people live within nearly 34,000 square miles, has become the poster child for sprawl.

Deverell and Hise, who edited the book’s 19 essays, enlisted input from many disciplines. Experts in geography, geology, landscape architecture, ecology, biology, economics, anthropology, public policy, literary non-fiction and various branches of history contribute to the scholarly discussion.

Land of Sunshine is, in effect, a sequel to Hise and Deverell’s Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000). The earlier book had resurrected a little-known master plan. Had it been implemented, that blueprint would have led the region down a drastically different environmental path: one situating each household within a half-mile of a grassy park.

L.A.’s Chamber of Commerce killed the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew report before citizens had a chance to fight for it. This episode underscores the need for citizen input, argue Deverell and Hise.

In a review, H-Urban, an online forum for multi-disciplinary discussions, called Land of Sunshine “a thoughtful, nuanced consideration of the relationship between people and the natural environment in Los Angeles as it has evolved over time.”

– Pamela J. Johnson

Books and Music

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda MIT Press, $39.95 Japan’s enthusiastic engagement with mobile technology has become – along with anime, manga and sushi – part of its popular culture. Here, USC communications researcher Mizuko Ito and her co-authors put together the first book-length English-language treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, covering the transformation of keitai (the Japanese term for mobile phone, roughly translated: “something you carry with you”) from business tool to personal device for communication and play. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Thornton Omnibus by USC Thornton School of Music Flora Records, $10.95 Bringing together top performances by student soloists and ensembles, this collection reflects the diversity of expression available at the USC Thornton School of Music. It showcases everything from early Baroque to Afro-Cuban percussion, including works by composers Bach, Haydn and USC’s own Thomas Osborne. Available through the Trojan Bookstores (www.uscbookstore.com). Photo by S. Peter Lopez

The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles by David E. James University of California Press, $29.95 This panoramic history of film production outside the commercial studio system reconfigures Los Angeles as the real center of American avant-garde cinema. Cinema scholar David E. James retraces the Southland’s place at the aesthetic and social core of all cinematic periods – the early Socialist cinemas, psychic self-investigations in the 1940s, countercultural utopias of the 1960s, the minority-focused cinemas of the 1970s – right up to the 1990s and beyond. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Technology News

Priya Vashishta Photo by John Livzey

Let’s Get Visual

USC’s Center for Data Visualization and Collaboration brings world-class supercomputing into sharp focus.

It’s not what is usually meant by library “treasure,” but to researchers who yearn to be at the bleeding edge of teleconferencing, collaboration and complex, high-resolution information sharing, the new USC Center for Data Visualization and Collaboration (DVC) is just that: a treasure. Housed in the Science & Engineering Library, the DVC center boasts an AccessGrid, a tiled display wall and an ImmersaDesk.

“No other university in the world has all three of these technologies together in one space,” says Priya Vashishta, who chairs the faculty advisory council to USC’s Center for High Performance Computing and Communications.

The AT&T Tile Wall, named in recognition of that company’s support, provides researchers with an economic and scalable means of displaying wall-size images or computer simulations with very high resolution. Moving or still images are sliced up into a dozen smaller images by a bank of computer processors and then projected by a dozen state-of-the-art digital projectors onto a 14-by-8-foot acrylic screen. The rear-projected composite image, comprised of roughly 9.5 million pixels, has remarkable clarity both overall and when viewed close up. In fact, the resolution of USC’s tile wall is slightly higher than the new screen-resolution standard set by the film industry in 2004.

The AccessGrid allows users to videoconference and collaborate interactively by way of the Internet. Three projectors, suspended from the ceiling, project onto a wall-sized screen whatever collaborators wish to share, be it a computer simulation, film, live television feed, PowerPoint presentation or Web site.

Participants at various locations – from university classrooms and labs to hotel lobbies and government offices – can come together virtually for meetings, collaborative work sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials and training.

Last but not least, the ImmersaDesk lets users experience simulations in three dimensions. On its 7-by-5-foot single screen, the ImmersaDesk creates a semi-immersive and interactive virtual environment that places users – who wear goggles and manipulate a wand – “inside” the projected image. Thanks to head-tracking devices in the goggles, users can move around and have the sensation of walking through the projection. If the image were a million-atom simulation of a ceramic material upon impact from a bullet, for example, a user of the ImmersaDesk could study fracture patterns and note where the material had held together. Gaining such an intuitive feel for simulation data could lead to advances in protective armor.

The new center’s video, audio and networking equipment provides high-speed access to distributed data and computers and may be linked to support group-to-group interactions across USC’s network and the Internet. The potential for linking the three technologies is currently limited by the speed of computer processors and available bandwidth. But in coming years such linkages will be the norm. In the meantime, USC faculty and students have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with these individual technologies and learn how to apply them to their own research interests.

“One of the biggest things faculty must overcome when using new technology is fear of the unknown,” says Vashishta, a professor of materials science, computer science, physics and astronomy. “Once they have used these technologies and crossed over the threshold of discomfort, they can customize them to suit their own needs.”

– Kevin Durkin

So Haptic Together

Stroke Rehab with a Cyber Touch

Bringing together neurology, communications, engineering and physical therapy, USC researchers are challenging stroke patients to grasp, pinch, squeeze, throw and push their way to recovery with the aid of haptics systems. Adding the sense of touch to virtual environments, such systems are now in development at USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), with input from researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Armed with a $1.8 million National Institutes of Health grant, neurologist Thomas McNeill of the Keck School of Medicine of USC has recruited experts in IMSC’s Haptics and Virtual Environments Lab to develop tools applying haptics to the rehabilitation of upper limbs. With cute names like “space tube” and “mutual touch,” these gadgets target specific eye-motor coordination skills. For “pincher,” the patient wears stereoscopic goggles and robotic “thimbles” on forefinger and thumb; the goal is to lift and squeeze a virtual cube to fit through a narrow hole in the computer screen. Haptics interfaces give physical therapists precise control over a patient’s exercise program. “We can tailor rehabilitative tasks – like pouring milk out of a glass – to each patient, depending on what level of impairment they have sustained,” explains Margaret McLaughlin, an IMSC investigator and communications professor at the USC Annenberg School. Real stroke survivors are now trying out these prototypes in pilot studies on the Health Sciences campus. That effort is led by Carolee Winstein, professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy and co-principal investigator on the NIH grant.

– Diane Ainsworth and Lori Oliwenstein

Illustration by Michael Klein

Found in Translation

A ground-breaking, two-way machine voice computer system translates for English-speaking doctors and Persian-speaking patients.

After three years of tireless questing, engineer/computer scientist/linguist Shrikanth Narayanan has found his holy grail. The interdisciplinary team he leads recently debuted the Transonics Spoken Dialog Translator – a rudimentary, two-way voice computer system that automatically turns a doctor’s spoken English questions into spoken Persian. It also translates patients’ spoken Persian replies into spoken English.

“Fluent two-way machine voice translation is one of the holy grails of engineering,” says Narayanan, who is director of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab at USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center.

“We are years away from perfecting it,” he cautions, “but we think the choices we have made about how to go about creating such a system are working. We hope to have something that will be useful in emergency rooms or ambulances within two years or so.”

The current system, funded by $3.8 million in grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a product of research in information technology, supplemented by observation of patient-doctor dynamics in staged bilingual sessions.

To use the Transonics interface, doctor and patient both must wear headphones with microphones attached. A small keypad connected to a laptop computer speeds and simplifies certain routine commands – switching from doctor to patient mode, for example.

When the doctor asks a question, the speech-recognition software captures and displays, in English text, what it thinks the doctor said. The doctor selects the most appropriate choice, and Transonics obligingly speaks the Persian question into the patient’s earphone. The process then takes place in reverse as the patient responds.

Narayanan’s interdisciplinary team is indebted to groups of USC medical students, Iranian-heritage USC students and Los Angeles residents who assembled a database of some 300 English-speaking doctor/ Persian-speaking patient dialogues: “Rather than imagining what people might say, we analyzed what people did say.” Recordings of the encounters were then used to train and fine-tune the system.

More information on the Transonics system, including demonstration videos, can be viewed at http://sail.usc. edu/transonics.

– Eric Mankin

Supercomputing Superstar

It’s official: USC is home to the nation’s fourth-fastest academic supercomputer, according to TOP500 Supercomputer Sites, an online publication that ranks the world’s 500 most powerful systems.

Among all supercomputers internationally, including non-academic ones, USC’s Center for High Performance Computing and Communications is ranked 37th – despite stiff competition from computers in Asia and Europe. The rank of USC’s cluster rose in April after achieving a benchmark 7.291 teraflops, or 7.291 trillion calculations per second. Six months earlier, it had clocked in at a mere 5.5 teraflops. (An upgrade increased the cluster’s total number of compute nodes from 1,364 to 1,716.)

Launched in 2000, the USC supercomputer cluster is an interdisciplinary partnership supported by numerous schools and departments across campus. It supports more than 120 research groups in disciplines ranging from genomics and geophysics to materials science and language translation.

People Watch

Movers & Shakers

Illustration by Tim Bower

Urology’s Unsung Hero

Donald Skinner built a fledgling urology program into an international center pioneering ways to maintain patient dignity.

The USC/Norris was still a mass of steel beams, barrels of concrete and blueprints when Donald Skinner arrived in 1980. Federal research dollars for the nascent urology program: nil. Its faculty: one (Skinner himself). Its surgical facilities: under construction.

Today, Skinner is chair of urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and chief of surgery at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. The department boasts 16 specialist physicians and six lab researchers investigating the science behind urology’s medical challenges. Its genitourinary surgeons alone log some 700 major operations a year. Not bad for 25 years of hard work.

The program is now known for its expertise in erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, urologic prostheses and nerve-sparing surgery for prostate cancer.

“We treat the most difficult problems and develop solutions for them,” says Skinner.

A good example is bladder cancer. When first diagnosed with the disease, 20 to 30 percent of patients require cystectomy, or removal of the bladder. The life-saving procedure – which bypasses the ureter to allow urine to drain continuously into an external bag – unfortunately takes a heavy physical, emotional and social toll on patients.

In the 1970s Swedish surgeon Nils Kock had envisioned an artificial bladder – an internal reservoir that could be emptied through a catheter several times a day. Skinner and his team refined the idea and popularized the concept of continent cutaneous urinary diversion in the United States. Hearing of this innovation – which Skinner dubbed the Kock pouch – patients flocked to the USC/Norris.

Before long, surgeons were successfully connecting this artificial bladder to the urethra, where urine ordinarily drains and leaves the body. Through practice, men could learn to void conventionally. By 1992, the procedure was also available to women.

The pouch itself was further refined. A new T-pouch reduced the risk of restricted urine flow or obstruction, which had put patients at risk for kidney damage. Skinner’s team pushed advances in other procedures as well – such as removal of the uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, vagina, bladder, rectum and part of the colon due to sarcomas or advanced colon or bladder cancer.

Today, by using the T-pouch and other techniques, “we can reconstruct the pelvis and restore urine and bowel function with no ostomy and no bags,” Skinner says.

– Alicia Di Rado

World Healer

Photo by Philip Channing

Doctor Do-A-Lot

At 28, newly minted physician Chris Gruber has seen more suffering than some doctors encounter in a lifetime. He spent 2001 in Nicaragua setting up programs for orphaned and abandoned children, many with substance-abuse problems. “That’s absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever done – being a parent to 60 kids. That was much harder than medical school,” says the 2005 Keck School graduate. His Nicaraguan experiences were a template for programs he later developed in Haiti. Between terms at med school, Gruber was a public health worker in Mexico, Costa Rica and the Caribbean. Last spring, he did a five-week rotation at a hospital in Tanzania, seeing as many as 35 patients a day at the height of the malaria season. “In the 30 years I’ve worked here,” says Keck School administrator Althea Alexander, “he is the most well-rounded medical student I’ve had the opportunity to work with. He really is one of those people who belongs to the world.”

– Jon Nalick

Musical Material

Fiddling With Fibers

When Jennifer Tsakoumakis and Billy Kaplan consulted a luthier about making a violin out of carbon-composite fiber, the skilled artisan said it couldn’t be done. The USC students proved otherwise. Tsakoumakis and Kaplan, who graduated from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering last spring, fashioned a playable instrument from the material, rigorously testing it on a variety of criteria – timbre, rate of decay, tone quality – against conventional wooden instruments. Not only did their prototype fool a panel of listeners; it also won them a $500 prize in USC’s Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work. “We wanted to take our knowledge of working with composite materials and apply it in a new way,” explains Kaplan, an amateur fiddler and now an aerospace engineer with Boeing in Seattle. “A violin seemed like a fun challenge.” The students found published dimensions of a Stradivarius, put these coordinates in a 3-D computer modeling program, and sent the data to a milling machine, which cuts precise shapes out of blocks. Into these molds they layered strips of carbon-fiber cloth, hardened with epoxy, to construct the top, bottom and sides of their violin. They topped it off with a conventional neck salvaged from a broken instrument. Interesting, but why bother? Because such composite violins could be manufactured not only faster and cheaper than traditional wooden ones, but with greater acoustical reliability. In her spare time, Tsakoumakis – who now works for Northrup Grumman in El Segundo, Calif. – has taken up the instrument she helped design. “It’s probably a biased opinion, but we like it better than the wooden one,” she recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education. (To listen to a sound file, go to http://viterbi.usc.edu/links/?10)

Fanning the Trojan Flame

A business student moonlights as Pete Carroll’s chronicler.

At a time when Trojan football is hotter than the proverbial hotcakes, a USC business student has stepped up to fill a gaping need.

Meet Simon Tikhman, co-creator of www.petecarroll.com. This interactive Web site serves as a virtual fan club, offering opportunities to meet USC’s football coach. “Our fans have really made a difference in bringing the excitement back to Trojan football,” says Carroll. “It’s important to keep them a part of our team and involve them in everything we do, from the game to my favorite charities. That’s why I’m launching this Web site.”

The site features weekly game ticket giveaways, autographed photos, a Livestrong bracelet and T-shirt designed by the coach. Proceeds go to charities sponsored by Carroll. Online content includes weekly chats with the coach, columns by Carroll and his assistant coaches, and regularly updated features.

Tikhman sees his company, Interactive Athlete (www.interactveathlete.com) as providing a cyberspace home for sports fans.

“I’m lucky to be able to put the knowledge gained from my USC classes to use in the real world before I’ve even graduated,” says Tikhman, a senior in the USC Marshall School of Business.

Interactive Athlete started up last year when Tikhman acquired the rights to former USC wide receiver Mike Williams’s personal Web site, www.bigmikewilliams.com. Tikhman employs USC students to provide everything from content to marketing to Web design. “Since the Interactive Athlete team is made up of the exact target market we are trying to reach, we are able to create Web sites on the cutting edge,” he notes.

Business is humming. In September, Tikhman launched his third major project: an interactive site for Baltimore Ravens’ running back Jamal Lewis. Meanwhile the Pete Carroll site receives more than 10,000 hits a day.

– Diane Krieger

Milestones

Industrialist Ratan Tata, chairman of one of India’s oldest and largest business conglomerates, has been elected to the USC Board of Trustees. Comprised of 93 operating companies, including 32 publicly listed enterprises, the 131-year-old Tata Group employs nearly 215,000 people. Its better-known subsidiaries include Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Tea. The Tata Group operates across six continents and exports products and services to 140 nations.

Jack H. Knott is the new dean of the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. He succeeds Daniel Mazmanian, who served a five-year term. Previously a professor of public policy and management at the University of Illinois, Knott directed UI’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, a master’s in economics and comparative politics from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s in history from Calvin College.

Randall L. “Pete” Vanderveen has been named dean of the USC School of Pharmacy, succeeding Timothy Chan, who served since 1995. Coming from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where he was a professor of pharmacy practice and dean for the last seven years, Vanderveen is a board-certified psychiatric pharmacist. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in pharmacy from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in university administration from Michigan State University. In 1998, he completed the AACP Leadership Development Program at Duke University.