By subject Science and Technology Two UNC faculty members named Sloan fellows
| Two UNC faculty members named Sloan fellows |
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| Tuesday, April 08, 2008 | |
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assistant mathematics professor Dmytro “Dima” Arinkin, and assistant professor of molecular biology Zefang Wang have been named 2008 Sloan Research Fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Arinkin has been teaching at Carolina since 2007. His research focuses on the Langlands Program, a mathematical program that has been pivotal to the development of many fields, such as number theory, representation theory and algebraic geometry. “It is an exciting area,” said Arinkin, who will use the Sloan Fellowship to further his research with mathematicians around the country. “The Langlands Program originated as a conjecture about numbers, then it was translated into a geometric language, and now there are new insights from theoretical physics.” Most human genes contain both protein coding regions and the intervening regions that do not encode protein. To correctly express a gene, cells have to undergo a process called splicing in which the introns are removed and the exons are joined together to generate a mature mRNA. “This term of ‘splicing’ is borrowed film making, where different parts of a film are cut and pasted together to make a final movies,” said Wang, who came to UNC in 2003 as a postdoctoral fellow. “Just like the film splicing, the different parts of a gene can be cut and pasted in different ways to generate different versions of genes.” This is a critical regulatory step in gene expression, and the mis-regulation of splicing is a very common cause of various human diseases. College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it School of Pharmacy contact: David Etchison, (919) 966-7744, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |