http://ist.ac.at/ Latest news from IST Austria en http://ist.ac.at/fileadmin/images/feedicon.png http://ist.ac.at/ 30 30 Latest news from IST Austria TYPO3 - get.content.right http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Mon, 14 May 2012 11:14:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/herbert-edelsbrunner-becomes-member-of-austrian-academy-of-sciences/ Herbert Edelsbrunner has been elected Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichischen...

Herbert Edelsbrunner has been elected Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ÖAW). At the annual election meeting on May, 7 2012, when the ÖAW accepted 38 scientists from Austria and aboard, IST Austria Professor Herbert Edelsbrunner was appointed Corresponding Member of the mathematical-scientific class in Austria. The decree was bestowed upon him at the festive meeting on May, 9 2012 with Federal President Heinz Fischer and Federal Minister for Science and Research Karl-Heinz Töchterle attending. Herbert Edelsbrunner, born in 1958, studied Mathematics at the Graz University of Technology and received his PhD in 1982. After a three-year employment at the Graz University of Technology, he joined the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he worked as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. At Duke University, Durham, Edelsbrunner became Professor for Computer Science in 1999 and Professor for Mathematics in 2004. Herbert Edelsbrunner, whose research focuses on Computational Geometry and Topology, was appointed Professor at IST Austria in 2009.]]> Mon, 14 May 2012 11:11:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/ist-young-scientist-symposium-on-human-evolution/ On May 7, 2012, the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in Klosterneuburg staged its...

On May 7, 2012, the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in Klosterneuburg staged its first ‘IST Young Scientist Symposium’. The one-day meeting, which was entirely organized by PhD students and post-doctoral fellows from IST, was dedicated to human evolution. The conference in the Raiffeisen Lecture Hall drew more than 100 attendees, bringing together international experts and young scientists to foster discussions on progress and problems in the dynamic field of research. The scientific program consisted of six insightful talks on diverse topics such as genetics, locomotion or the origin of language. Among the keynote speakers from five different countries were geneticist Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen, DK), paleoanthropologist Bence Viola (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, D), theoretical evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry (Eötvös Lorand University Budapest, HU), behavioral scientist Daniel Nettle (University of Newcastle, UK), computational zoologist Bill Sellers (University of Manchester, UK), and theoretical biologist Philipp Mitteröcker (University of Vienna, A). The talks were followed by a lively panel discussion on the future of human evolution before the symposium was concluded with an informal get-together of speakers and audience in the evening.]]> Mon, 07 May 2012 15:28:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/herbert-edelsbrunner-speaks-at-6th-ecm/ Herbert Edelsbrunner has been invited to speak at the 6th European Congress of Mathematics (ECM)...

Herbert Edelsbrunner has been invited to speak at the 6th European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) held in Kraków, July 2-7, 2012. This quadrennial general mathematical meeting is organized by the European Mathematical Society (EMS) in cooperation with local universities. The general character of the program provides attendees with the unique chance to get an overlook of contemporary mathematics beyond their own field of research. The program of the congress comprises lectures giving a broad overview of active mathematical disciplines as well as more specialized talks on recent results, poster sessions and round table discussions. In his plenary lecture Herbert Edelsbrunner will talk about "Persistent Homology and Applications". Herbert Edelsbrunner studied Mathematics at the Graz University of Technology and finished his PhD in 1982. After a three-year employment at the Graz University of Technology he joined the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he worked as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. At Duke University, Durham, he became Professor for Computer Science in 1999 and Professor for Mathematics in 2004. Herbert Edelsbrunner, whose research is a combination of mathematics and computer science, was appointed Professor at IST Austria in 2009.]]> Fri, 04 May 2012 11:09:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/mp-andrea-kuntzl-visits-ist-austria/ Today, IST Austria welcomed Mag. Kuntzl, Member of the Austrian Parliament and... Today, IST Austria welcomed Mag. Kuntzl, Member of the Austrian Parliament and spokesperson for science for the SPÖ, and Dr. August Reschreiter at IST Austria.  President Thomas Henzinger, together with Arnold Schmidt, Vice-chair of the Scientific Board, and Managing Director Gerald Murauer, presented the development and organization of IST Austria. The presentation was followed by a tour of the IST Austria campus during which Mag. Kuntzl met with PhD students and postdocs from IST Austria. Assistant Professor Michael Sixt, a cell biologist, showed the visitors around the laboratory, where he studies cell movement and the forces involved in cell motility. Mag. Kuntzl was particularly impressed by the meeting with the students Magdalena Steinrück and Tom Ellis, as well as the postdocs Verena Ruprecht and Stefan Wieser. ]]> Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:49:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/first-ist-young-scientist-symposium-on-human-evolution/ Scientific conference organized by IST Austria’s students and post-docs on May 7, 2012, at IST...

Human evolution is a process of constant changes and adaptations. Likewise, scientific research on this topic is continuously developing as well and news such as the discovery of the Denisovan hominid (2010), or more recently the ‘Red Deer Cave people’ (March 2012) continue to provoke new theories of how our species evolved.

On May 7, 2012, the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in Klosterneuburg will host its first ‘IST Young Scientist Symposium’ on human evolution. The one-day meeting, which is entirely organized by young scientists from IST, will bring together international experts and a broad audience of scientists to foster discussion on progress and problems in this interdisciplinary field of research.

The program encompasses six scientific talks on diverse topics such as genetics or locomotion and concludes with a panel discussion on the future of human evolution. Among the expert speakers from five different countries are Morten Rasmussen from the University of Copenhagen (DK) and Bence Viola from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (DE), who worked together with Eske Willerslev and Svante Pääbo respectively on reconstructing genomes of archaic species of humans. The other keynote speakers are Eörs Szathmáry from Eötvös Lorand University Budapest (HU), Daniel Nettle and Bill Sellers from the Universities of Newcastle and Manchester (UK) and Philipp Mitteröcker from the University of Vienna (AT). 

Attendance of the symposium is free for the 120 registered participants. “Vienna is a hotspot of anthropology research, and as such we felt that there was a great target audience on our doorstep”, says Tom Ellis, the graduate student at IST heading the organising committee. He adds: “Indeed, most of the registrants are young scientists just like ourselves, not just from Vienna, but also from the rest of the country and even from abroad.”

The organizing committee is composed of eleven IST pre-doctoral and post-doctoral young scientists from different disciplines and was formed in spring 2011 to outline and develop the symposium.
 
The speakers and the members of the organizing committee are available for media activities.

For more information visit the symposium website. Download

• Press announcement
• Image of organizing committee

]]> Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:57:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/ist-lecture-hannah-monyer-studying-interneurons-at-the-cellular-and-network-level/ On April 12, 2012 IST Austria had the pleasure to welcome Hannah Monyer for an IST Lecture. Prof.... On April 12, 2012 IST Austria had the pleasure to welcome Hannah Monyer for an IST Lecture. Prof. Monyer is Head of the Department of Clinical Neurobiology and the Interdisciplinary Center of Neurosciences of the University of Heidelberg and has received a series of prestigious awards for her research. In her lecture, Prof. Monyer talked about “Studying Interneurons at the Cellular and Network Level". As her scientific work focuses on GABAergic interneurons in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in spatial representation and memory, she presented her studies on the role of GABAergic neurons in long- and short-term spatial learning by interfering in their recruitment. In her talk she illustrated how her research group study connectivity of GABAergic interneurons using optogenetics, a revolutionary method switching neurons “on” or “off” using light. More than 130 people visited IST Austria to see Prof. Hannah Monyer in the Raiffeisen Lecture Hall. Her interesting lecture was concluded by a lively discussion among the audience. Additional information

• Poster
• ORF Ö1 Dimensionen radio feature
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]]> Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:04:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/micro-infections-promote-social-vaccination-in-ant-societies/ Group of IST Professor Sylvia Cremer uncovers how social contact to sick ants leads to an immune...




In their research article "Social Transfer of Pathogenic Fungus Promotes Active Immunisation in Ant Colonies", published April 3 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, the research team of Prof. Sylvia Cremer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) show how micro-infections promote Social Vaccination in ant societies. Like crowded megacities, ant colonies face a high risk of disease outbreaks. These are kept in check by the ants’ "social immune system"— a set of collective hygienic behaviors and adaptive changes in interaction frequencies that acts in conjunction with the physiological, innate immune system of colony members. Prof. Cremer and colleagues now unravel how taking care of sick ants promotes disease protection in their group members. They also discuss their findings in the latest edition of the PLoS Podcast.

Ants do not avoid sick colony members, but lick them to remove the pathogen from the exposed ant’s body. This social grooming behavior drastically increases the survival chances of exposed individuals, but bares the risk that helper ants contract the disease. By applying fluorescence-labelled fungal spores to some ants and allowing them to interact with healthy colony members, the researchers showed that the labelled spores spread throughout the colony. Interestingly, however, spore transfer occurs at very low levels, causing only sub-lethal micro-infections in the previously healthy colony members. The authors determined that these low-level infections induce the expression of a specific set of immune genes and increase the ants’ capacity to fight the fungal pathogen. Additional mathematical modelling suggests that such social immunisation enables colonies to recover more rapidly from an infection.
 
Social low-level spread of infectious particles therefore constitutes the underlying mechanism of social immunisation against fungal infections in ant societies. This is nature’s counterpart to the first human efforts in inducing immunity against deadly diseases like smallpox. At a time when vaccination with dead or attenuated strains was not yet invented, immunity was induced in people by actively transferring low-level infections through so-called variolation. The extent of any human implications is not yet clear, but this study allows for informed inferrences to be made for a wider context.

As Simon Babyan from Edinburgh University and David Schneider from Stanford note in an accompanying primer article also published in PLoS Biology, "The authors used a combination of approaches to identify the mechanisms underlying social immunisation in ant colonies: mathematical modelling, behavioural, microbiological, immunological and molecular techniques, which, taken together, offer an exciting proof-of-concept that group-level immunity may be experimentally manipulated and modelled (…) By studying social immunity at a system level in insects perhaps we can find emergent properties that we have been missing in another important social animal—the human." The entire research article can be found on the PLoS Biology website. Information for download

• Press announcement
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]]> Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:04:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/prestigious-hfsp-awards-for-ist-austria-professors/ Two new HFSP grants for Gašper Tkačik and Harald Janovjak • Four IST Professors now funded by... http://www.hfsp.org/). HFSP grants are regarded as especially prestigious in the field of life sciences, placing an emphasis on cutting-edge, risky projects pursued by internationally collaborating, interdisciplinary teams. Gašper Tkačik, a neuroscientist and biophysicist, received a Program Grant for his project on "Information processing and computation in fish groups". Tkačik will share his Program Grant award with Iain Couzin of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, USA, and Elad Schneidman of the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Harald Janovjak, a molecular and cellular biophysicist, was awarded a Young Investigator Grant together with Colin Jackson of the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra and Christian Henneberger of the Institute of Cellular Neuroscience at the University of Bonn. Together, they will pursue research on "In situ real-time imaging of neurotransmitter signaling using designer optical sensors". In the 2012 round, eight Young Investigator Grants and 25 Program Grants were chosen from almost 800 letters of intent, and 96 subsequently invited full applications. Teams receive up to US-$ 450,000 per year for the whole team to support their research.

In 2011, IST Assistant Professors Călin Guet and Michael Sixt were both awarded HFSP grants. With the current awards, the number of IST Austria Professors holding grants from the HFSP was raised to four, underlining the strong international ties and collaborations of researchers working at IST Austria.

IST President Thomas Henzinger commented on the news: "I congratulate Gašper Tkačik and Harald Janovjak. These two new awards prove IST’s capability to attract young outstanding scientists and that IST can offer them an excellent environment to implement their talent." Information for download

• Press announcement
• Image of Gašper Tkačik
• Image of Harald Janovjak

]]> Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:54:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/new-insight-in-dendritic-computation/ Group of IST Professor Peter Jonas analyzes dendritic function of CA3 pyramidal neurons in the... The human brain is comprised of approx. 10 billion neurons with a vast array of different functions. Communication between neurons occurs at specialized sites of contact, so called synapses, at which electrical signals are transformed into chemical signals and transmitted from the axon of one neuron to the dendrite of another neuron.  Signals impinging on neurons from different synaptic partners are integrated and lead to an appropriate output, such as the transmission of the signal to another neuron or an effector such as a muscle. CA3 pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus are critical for the processing of spatial information and memory formation. Their dendrites receive input from three different groups of neurons through glutamatergic synapses. The undoubtedly complex information processing by the CA3 dendrites is currently not well understood, for there is a need to first characterize the properties of CA3 dendrites. However, this has been prevented so far by experimental difficulties, as in vitro preparations – the “workhorses” of cellular neuroscience – are difficult to maintain and CA3 dendrites are particularly small. In their Nature Neuroscience Advance Online Publication from March 4, the Jonas group presents the first analysis of dendritic function of CA3 pyramidal neurons by subcellular patch-clamp recording, giving insights in how these dendrites provide computational power in the hippocampus. Additional material for download:

• Press announcement
• Nature Neuroscience paper
  
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]]> Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:51:00 +0100 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/future-of-ist-austria-secured/ Agreement between Federal Republic of Austria and Province of Lower Austria for financing 2017-2026...

Today, Federal Minister of Finance, Dr. Maria Fekter, Federal Minister of Science and Research, Dr. Karlheinz Töchterle, and the Governor of Lower Austria, Dr. Erwin Pröll, announced the agreement on the further development of the top research institution Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria. In the period 2017-2026, the development ensues through an agreement as per Art. 15a Bundesverfassungsgesetz (Federal Constitutional Law) between the Federal Republic of Austria and the Province of Lower Austria. Subsequent to the report’s presentation to the federal government, it will be submitted to the federal and state parliaments for approval. Additional material for download:

• Press announcement
• Masterplan 2026
• Photos of press conference

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