ballroom labs The J. Bennett Johnston Health and Environmental Research Building on Tulane Avenue in downtown New Orleans underwent a sweeping $13.5 million renovation that transformed traditional, compartmentalized lab space on three floors—roughly 37,500 square feet—into five large, open areas capable of accommodating multiple researchers working on interdisciplinary projects. The renovation was made possible through a National Institutes of Health grant.
N E W S
paula burch-celentano
Deep roots
Sheldon Cooper has roots at Tulane. OK, maybe not the hilarious fictional physicist from TV’s “The Big Bang Theory,” but the Emmy-winning actor who plays him, Jim Parsons, was on the Tulane campus this summer filming a segment of TLC’s reality series “Who Do You Think You Are?” The documentary-style series pairs celebrities with history experts to go on a cross-country journey to discover their ancestral roots through historical records. In 1842, Parsons’ great-great-great-grandfather Dr. Jean Baptiste Hacker graduated from the Medical College of Louisiana, the precursor to Tulane University School of Medicine. Parsons spent a July afternoon at Joseph Merrick Jones Hall delving into archives to learn more about Hacker’s life at Tulane and as a doctor in Iberville Parish. Hacker was an expert in yellow fever and published an article on the topic in 1854 in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. Hacker’s life was tragically cut short just a few months later when a steamboat on which he was traveling caught fire and sank. “Jim Parsons came to New Orleans looking for a French connection in his family’s past,” said David Gardner, a producer for the series. “Period newspapers kept in Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection shed more light on Hacker’s life and career, including the very dramatic catastrophe that unfolded in December 1854.” Parsons, who is from Houston, enjoyed his time on campus and even left with a Tulane T-shirt. “All of us on the production could see that Jim was particularly engaged by his family’s Louisiana heritage, and he genuinely enjoyed the research he carried out at Tulane,” Gardner said. “The production crew also had a fantastic experience working with everyone at Tulane, and we’re grateful to the Special Collections team for their help in researching and filming Jim’s episode.” The episode aired in September.—Keith Brannon
Special Collections Emmy-winning actor Jim Parsons of “The Big Bang Theory” discovers his ancestral roots during filming of TLC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” in Jones Hall at Tulane this summer.
Under the Skin Living in a violence-plagued neighborhood can cause such great stress that a person’s gene expression may be altered. These are the findings of Katherine Theall, Stacy Drury and an interdisciplinary team of Tulane researchers. Theall is associate professor of global community health and behavioral sciences at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and Drury is assistant professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine. In their recently conducted study, the co-investigators found that in a group of children, ages 4–15, more than 50 percent had experienced at least one life adversity, including witnessing some form of violence. While psychological distress among the children would be expected, Theall says, “The exposure to violence also was associated with physiologic, internal stress.” Theall refers to this stress as that which gets “under the skin.” The researchers took saliva samples of the children to gather data on the length of the children’s telomeres. Telomere length is a cellular marker of aging and a potential marker of stress exposure. In kids who had experienced more violence and lived in more disordered neighborhoods, telomere length was shorter than in children who lived in more stable environments. Theall is leading researchers from public health, medicine, science and engineering and social work in the Tulane Stress and Environment Research Collaborative for Health Disparities (SERCH). The collaborative has lab space in the newly renovated J. Bennett Johnston Building on the health sciences campus in downtown New Orleans. In a variety of projects, the researchers are looking at stress at critical periods—in utero, early infancy, childhood and adolescence—when exposure to stressors may matter most.—Mary Ann Travis
T U L A N E MAGA Z I N E d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3
9