Pulse #4

Huck Institutes News | December 2019

December 19, 2019

Andrew's Angle

Nearing the end of my first year as Huck Director, I find myself pondering failure.
 
In a previous life, I did a lot of climbing in the New Zealand mountains. Among the climbing fraternity, well-intentioned failure was seen as the flip side of ‘no guts, no glory’. Failing was okay (so long as you stayed away from stupid). Indeed, the epic retreats, the disasters and the rescues, those became the folklore; the successes were just lines on a vitae. The folk really pushing the boundaries – the new routes, the winter routes – failed more often than they succeeded, but they changed what the rest of us did, aspired to, and even thought possible.

Rule Breakers of the Plant World

In this episode, Cole and his guests discuss Penn State’s launch of the world’s first Center for Parasitic and Carnivorous Plants. These fascinatingly strange organisms have much to teach us about the outrageous diversity of life — especially now that we have the capacity to study them at every scale, from the molecular to the ecological.

T  R  A  I  L  B  L  A  Z  E  R  S

Deb Kelly Takes Cancer Fight to the Molecular Level

Deb Kelly, professor of biomedical engineering and director of Penn State’s new Center for Structural Oncology, examines cancer causing processes at the atomic level. Her innovative approaches use a combination of structural and functional tools to investigate how cells communicate with each other.

O N T H E R I S E

David Kennedy Develops New Disease Ecology System

In 2011, in a pile of rotting fruit in the Parisian suburb of Orsay, scientists observed a population of millimeter-long worms having stomach issues. These worms, nematodes of the species Caenorhabditis elegans, were among the best understood animals in scientific literature.

K U D O S

“All systems go!” thanks to AJ Settlemyer 

Congratulations to Aaron “AJ” Settlemyer, the recipient of this month’s Huck Kudos award. AJ is a systems administrator with the Huck Institutes’ Technology and Data Systems group (TDS – formerly IT), and has been working at the Huck since 2011.