Counts to Crow About
FRONTIERS IN RESEARCH
UM hits new highs in latest round of academic rankings
The Flu Fighters
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Computer algorithms
n Parade magazine’s College A-list, the University of Miami has scored some noteworthy numeric victories of late. With more than $100 million in stimulus dollars, it surpassed all other Florida institutions and ranked 14th among U.S. private schools receiving such funding. And then there’s U.S.News & World Report’s 2011 edition of “America’s Best Colleges.” UM rose to the No. 47 spot from No. 50, becoming the highest-ranked school in the state just a year after it cracked the top tier of the prestigious ratings. “It’s very hard to stop momentum,” UM President Donna E. Shalala said. “This recognition is great news.” The rapid ascent of UM, one of the youngest schools on the list, coincides with Shalala’s arrival in 2001, when the University ranked No. 67. “The cumulative and continuous improvement in the U.S.News ranking over the past nine years reflects UM’s commitment to the students and their successful college experience,” said Thomas
J. LeBlanc, executive vice president and provost. UM shares the ranking with Penn State and the University of Illinois, moving ahead of two of its peer institutions: Tulane and Syracuse. U.S.News also ranked UM 48th in its “Great Schools, Great Prices” category. In the U.S.News 2011 list of “America’s Best Graduate Schools,” the Miller School of Medicine climbed to No. 47 from 51, the School of Law rose 11 spots to No. 60, and the clinical psychology graduate department in the College of Arts and Sciences ranked 25th out of 210 programs. Another widely read publication, the Financial Times, ranked the executive M.B.A. program of the School of Business Administration—Florida’s only business school to make the 2010 list—No. 37 in the U.S. in its annual analysis of the world’s top such programs. In the same report, the school ranked No. 26 in the world for research, based on the number of faculty publications in leading academic and practitioner journals.
designed and implemented by University of Miami assistant professor of computer science Dimitris Papamichail and a team of Stony Brook University researchers helped develop Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering (SAVE), a rapid, effective approach for producing flu vaccines using weakened new strains of polio and influenza viruses. The viruses they design could serve as live vaccines that can be synthesized to specification by making synthetic genomes of the viruses through hundreds of changes to their genetic code. The algorithms indicate the best places for the changes. Results of these studies appeared in Science and Nature Biotechnology.
Genes to Look Out For
A team of researchers led by Margaret Pericak-Vance, director of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the Miller School of Medicine, has identified a gene that appears to nearly double a person’s risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of the disease. Abbreviated MTHFD1L, a gene on chromosome six, was identified in a genomewide association study. Details appeared in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.
Red or Blue, Bull or Bear?
Your political party affects your portfolio, reveals a study by Alok Kumar, Cesarano Scholar and professor of finance at the UM School of Business Administration, and colleagues from two other institutions. “When investors’ preferred party was in control, they felt better about the economy and viewed domestic markets as undervalued and more likely to deliver higher returns,” said Kumar. “This drove them to hold more domestic stocks and take more risks.” Their portfolios performed about 2.7 percent better, compared with investors who preferred the minority party. Perceiving greater market uncertainty, the latter held more familiar, local stocks; picked active mutual funds with high fees; and traded more actively.
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