Success Story: Light Bulbs Turn On

Ennio Tasciotti, Ph.D., right, a postdoctoral
fellow in the laboratory of Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D.,
discusses nanomedicine with Fabion Moffett, Jose
Mendoza, David Alvarado, Patrina Williams and
Cesar Guajardo of the Spring Branch Independent
School District. Photo courtesy of Spring Branch
Independent School District

Projects from the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences are touching the lives of people in the community, as well as the lives of patients. Below is one success story. See http://distinctions.uth.tmc.edu/2007/October/
CCTSsuccess.html and Additional material at http://distinctions.uth.tmc.edu/2007/October/
CCTSextra.html for more.

It was not your typical field trip. A group of Houston teens spent an afternoon with Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., one of the scientists invited by President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics to discuss nanotechnology.

Skeptical at first, the students warmed up when Ferrari escorted them through the machine shop in his laboratory at The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM), where members of his staff create many of their own tools.

“I saw the light bulbs go off, and there were a ton of questions after that,” said Nancy Benedict of The University of Texas School of Public Health, who helped orga-nize the tour. The tour was sponsored in part by the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS) at the UT Health Science Center at Houston. “They also enjoyed hearing about Dr. Ferrari’s early interest in science,” Benedict said.

Ferrari is professor and director of the Center for NanoMedicine at the IMM, chair of the UT Health Science Center at Houston Department of Biomedical Engineering, and a faculty member in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. He also is professor of experimental therapeutics at the UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, professor of bioengineering at Rice University, and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the UT Medical Branch at Galveston.

In keeping with its commitment to train the scientists of tomorrow, CCTS supports projects such as GEAR UP in the Spring Branch Independent School District. Nancy Murray, Dr.P.H., also with the School of Public Health, said, “We’re working with scientists children can identify with and aspire to be like.”

By Rob Cahill, Institutional Advancement