Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1994 [PAGE 577]

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1996]

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

565

Intestinal Epithelial Interactions with Autochthonous Bacteria." The present research is designed to understand more clearly the molecular basis by which the host immune system tolerates the residence of a foreign and antigenically complex microbiota in the intestine. Defining molecular determinants of epithelial interactions with normal intestinal bacteria will represent an important advance in our understanding of immune tolerance and potentially offer novel possibilities for preventing or treating chronic and debilitating inflammatory bowel disorders. EZEKIEL KALIPENI, Department of Geography, "Environmental Transformation and Demographic Change in Southern Africa and Malawi.*' This research will examine in greater depth demographic and non-demographic responses to environmental transformation in southern Africa in general and Malawi in specific. The central argument is that as land resources become scarce due to a rapidly expanding population and wide-spread environmental degradation, people have begun to reduce fertility rates; migrate to less sparsely populated areas; migrate cyclically to countries with ample wage employment; and to intensify agricultural production. **Yi Lu, Department of Chemistry, "Structural and Mechanistic Characterization of Metal-binding Sites in Ribozymes." Metal-ion-based spectroscopic techniques will be used in combination with RNA-based biochemical techniques to characterize the metal-binding sites in ribozymes. LUTGARDE RASKIN, Department of Civil Engineering, "Molecular Probes for Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment Process Evaluation." This research focuses on "granulation" or the formation of conglomerates of microorganisms, which is a critical but poorly understood phenomenon in anaerobic wastewater treatment systems. New molecular methods to study microbial population dynamics during granule formation and traditional methods to evaluate physical characteristics of granules and reactor performance will be combined to improve anaerobic wastewater treatment start-up and operation. **ALEXANDER SOKOL, Department of Physics, "Many-Body Theory of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance." Novel many-body techniques will be used to improve fundamentally the way nuclear magnetic resonance measurements are analyzed and interpreted. This work will have impact on ongoing and planned experiments on high-temperature super-conductivity, determination of structural properties of materials, and other areas of condensed matter physics. JOSEPH VALENTE, Department of English, "Contested Territory: The Concept of Manhood in (Post) Colonial Ireland." This study aims to contextualize and explain the intense anxieties haunting the idea of manhood in Irish nationalist literature of the Modern period, roughly from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell to the founding of the Irish Free State. This project will seek to demonstrate how this politically minded poetry and prose emerged as a site for shaping the ambivalence of a people divided between certain female-identified attributes and associations, which they regarded as the distinguishing marks of their cultural personality, and a hypermasculinity which they took to be crucial both to decolonization and to a vigorous national restoration. ALEXANDER VARDY, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, "From Hilbert's Eighteenth Problem to Wireless Communications: Constructions and Decoders for Signal Constellations in Euclidean Space." New constructions of sphere packings in Euclidean space that are denser than the best previously known packings will be investigated. This project will seek to develop efficient bounded-distance decoders for Euclidean-space sphere packings, which would make coding with high-dimensional signal constellations, on both wireline and wireless communication channels, finally feasible in practice. SCOTT WILLENBROCK, Department of Physics, "Top-Quark Physics at Hadron Colliders." The recently-discovered top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle, and may hold a clue to the generation of the masses of elementary