Personal Mention

Neuroscientist Alison Barth has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study synapses in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The findings could provide a clue to what happens in the brain during Alzheimer’s before symptoms begin to appear. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. Two of the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s are the appearance of beta-amyloid plaques that build up between neurons and tau tangles that accumulate inside of neurons. People with Alzheimer’s normally don’t experience symptoms until the disease has significantly progressed in the brain and these plaques and tangles become pervasive. This has made it difficult for researchers to determine how Alzheimer’s begins and to follow its early progression. “For as widespread as Alzheimer’s disease is, we still don’t know what causes it and there is no cure,” said Barth, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and member of the joint Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “Understanding what happens to neurons during the earliest days of Alzheimer’s will help us figure out what initiates disease progression and how we can intervene to cure this disease.” Find out more.

Matt Denes, assistant professor of finance at the Tepper School of Business, has received a grant for nearly $220,000 from the Kaufman Foundation to support his study on the effects of industry concentration on entrepreneurship. The grant is part of the Kaufman Foundation’s "Knowledge Challenge: Insight to Impact" program, which seeks varied, innovative approaches to address the biggest problems facing entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders. Denes’ research interests are empirical corporate finance, political economy and venture capital. He joined the Tepper School in 2018.

Ambassador Sarah Mendelson and Dan Nagin of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy will participate in a panel discussion on how to put peace at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The panel discussion, scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 5 at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., is being co-hosted by Heinz College in Washington, NYU’s Center on International Cooperation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Mendelson is the Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and head of Heinz College in Washington. She joined CMU in January 2018 after serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations under President Barack Obama. Nagin is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics. Learn more about the panel discussion.

Karen Lightman, executive director of CMU’s Metro21 Smart Cities Institute, will be a panelist alongside city officials and development experts who will discuss adapting Sustainable Development Goals for U.S. cities as a blueprint for progress. This afternoon, Thursday, Nov. 29, Heinz College and the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings Institute are co-hosting “US cities in pursuit of viable futures: Taking on the Sustainable Development Goals” at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. Lightman and experts will explore how the 17 SDGs can help cities tackle local economic, political and environmental challenges vital to the health and wellbeing of their residents. They will debate how U.S. cities can lead and reach the global goals by 2030. Find out more. 

Mary Sickles has joined the Environmental Health and Safety Department as a training and communications specialist. Her responsibilities will include developing and implementing safety training sessions for EH&S programs, providing training to the CMU community, ensuring training compliance, updating training materials, and developing communication strategies and plans. Sickles comes to CMU with more than 15 years of experience in the environmental health and safety field, in which she frequently developed new and innovative ways to promote safety through training and one-on-one interactions. She most recently severed as the content and quality manager for Multimedia Training Systems, where she researched, developed and edited training-program content for quality, impactful material.