Webber Plaza construction to commence

The long-anticipated Webber Plaza berm re-do is scheduled to begin any day now. The plaza will be under construction until June to correct an engineering error – the wrong sized drainage force main pipe was specified and subsequently installed more than two years ago.

Work to install the right sized pipe is being undertaken at the expense of the engineering company.  While the plaza is under construction, the Medical School facilities team is electing to add features to the berm’s multi pumping system to improve its efficiency and to ensure that the plaza will not flood in the future.

Pedestrian access through the plaza will be available and will be directed by signage.

Once the construction begins, the entrance to Webber Plaza will be closed for the duration of the project, which involves replacing about 300 feet of pipe, leading to the Harris Gully.

“We will have the Ross Sterling side entrance as the Medical School’s main entrance,” said Judson Lloyd, senior project manager, Facilities Operations.


The stairwell to Webber Plaza near the fountain also will be closed to traffic.


One improvement to the plaza has been completed – extending the sidewalk toward Ross Sterling. The material of the soft surface sidewalks will be replaced with black star granite, Lloyd added.

-D. Brown

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Researchers Demonstrate That Populations of Nerve Cells Adapt To Changing Images

Dr. Valentin Dragoi

Medical School scientists have completed the first empirical study to demonstrate, using animal models, how populations of nerve cells in visual cortex adapt to changing images. Their findings, which appear in the March 13 issue of Nature, could lead to sight-improving therapies for people following trauma or stroke.


 “Our perception of the environment relies on the capacity of neural networks to adapt rapidly to changes in incoming stimuli,” wrote senior author Dr. Valentin Dragoi, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. “It is increasingly being realized that the neural code is adaptive, that is, sensory neurons change their responses and selectivity in a dynamic manner to match the changes in input stimuli.”


The neural code is the set of rules that transforms electrical impulses in the brain into thoughts, memories. and decisions.


In the study, Dragoi and co-author Diego Gutnisky, a graduate research assistant at the GSBS, measured the effects of visual stimulation on the responses of multiple neurons whose electrical activity was measured simultaneously in animals. They carefully examined the responses of a population of cells in visual cortex to dynamic stimuli, which consisted of movie sequences displayed on a video monitor.


“We provide empirical evidence that brief exposure, or adaptation, to a fixed stimulus causes pronounced changes in the degree of cooperation between individual neurons and an improvement in the efficiency with which the population of cells encodes information,” Dragoi and Gutnisky reported. “These results are consistent with the ‘efficient coding hypothesis’ - that is, sensory neurons are adapted to the statistical properties of the stimuli that they are exposed to and with changes in human discrimination performance after adaptation.”


This information may be helpful in the fight against brain illness.


“Right now, we don’t know the causes of brain illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease or disorders caused by trauma,” Dragoi said. “However, it is our belief that understanding not only how individual neurons work, but how they cooperate with their neighbors to impact the functions of the brain involved in diseases may help develop better diagnostic tools and therapies to improve visual function following trauma, stroke or disease, or even prevent brain disorder.” 


While their study focused on how neuronal populations adapt to visual stimulation, the same could hold true for other senses - hearing, smell, taste, and touch, Dragoi said.
The brain is the control center of the central nervous system and is responsible for behavior. It contains more than 100 billion neurons or nerve cells, each linked to as many as 10,000 other neurons or nerve cells.

“One dream of neuroscientists is to crack the neural code and through our study we have made steps in understanding how populations of neurons encode information,” Dragoi said.

The study in Nature is titled “Adaptive coding of visual information in neural populations” and was supported by the Pew Scholars Program, the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the National Eye Institute.

-R. Cahill

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COL Holcomb to join faculty, lead trauma research center

Col. John Holcomb, M.D.

Col. John Holcomb, M.D., will be joining the Department of Surgery this summer as a professor and as the leader of the newly formed Center for Translational Injury Research, an interdisciplinary center of the UT Health Science Center dedicated to the development of new programs in the area of trauma research.

Holcomb is a renowned surgeon who has spent the last 27 years in the U.S. Army. He is presently the commander of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, located at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and the trauma consultant for the Surgeon General. He leads the Department of Defense’s only Surgical Research Laboratory and directs the Combat Casualty Care Research for the Army.
 
“I am very happy to have someone of Colonel Holcomb’s stature and breadth of experience joining our faculty and leading the new Center for Translational Injury Research,” said Dean Giuseppe Colasurdo. “He will bring great strengths to our clinical and academic programs.”

Holcomb is retiring from the Army July 23. After taking some time off with his family — wife, Dr. Kelly Wirfel, and their two sons  Ian, 7, and Ryan, 5 -- he will be returning to UT-Houston, where he did his surgical critical care fellowship in 2001-2002, and his wife completed her endocrinology fellowship.

Also when in Houston, Holcomb served on the faculty at Ben Taub General Hospital and as the director of the Joint Trauma Training Center in Houston from 1999-2001. While there, he initiated a Trauma Simulation Center, using the human patient mannequin to document improvement in team performance. 

“I’m looking forward to coming back to familiar places and with the new center hope to move concepts, products, and devices out of the labs and into the clinical arena with a goal of changing practice and improving outcomes for injured patients,” he said.

Holcomb said the multidisciplinary center will work with researchers from across all of the UT Health Science Center schools and UT System institutions, as well as with the military. The relationship with Memorial Hermann – Texas Medical Center, especially its LifeFlight program and Level 1 Trauma Center, are critical to the success of the center, he added.

“The trauma problems in the military and civilian world, while caused by different agents, have similar physiological outcomes. So, the interventions we can study in the civilian world will be applicable to both the military and civilian world,” he said. “Just because I’m changing my uniform doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with taking care of patients on the battlefield. As my son said, the big difference will be that I won’t have to go to Iraq again.”

Holcomb has held a volunteer clinical assistant professor of surgery position since 2001 at the Medical School and previously was on the surgery faculty at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD.

He serves as Military Committee co-chair for the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and on the board of directors for the National Trauma Institute. He also is a member of the Multi-Institutional Trials Committee, Western Trauma Association. He serves on the editorial boards of Trauma and World Journal of Emergency Surgery.

Holcomb received his medical degree from the University of Arkansas Medical School, Little Rock.

-D. Brown

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