Eleven faculty members at the °®¶ąÉçÇř have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 30 scientists and educators from across the state July 16 as new members. Election recognizes the new member’s “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement and willingness to assist the Academy in providing the best available scientific information and technical understanding to inform complex policy decisions in Washington.”

New WSAS members are selected by current members or by their election to national science academies. All 10 UW faculty members were voted on by current WSAS members: 

, chair and PACCAR Endowed Professor of mechanical engineering and adjunct professor of neurological surgery and of aeronautics and astronautics, for “significant contributions to scientific understanding of multiphase and biomedical flows, including the role of fluid mechanics on arterial disease, heart failure, biomedical devices, and surgical planning for respiratory disease, through work combining rigorous experimentation and analysis that has influenced both engineering and clinical practice.”

, professor of materials science and engineering, for “pioneering research on structure–processing–property relationships and the aging of hard tissues that has shaped modern oral health science, and for influential contributions to advanced manufacturing, biomechanics, and bioinspired materials — coupled with exemplary educational leadership — that have made a lasting impact across disciplines and the STEM community.”

, professor of health economics and Stergachis Family Endowed Director of The CHOICE Institute, for “pioneering health economic methods — including causal estimation of personalized treatment effects, cost-effectiveness frameworks, and value-of-information analysis — that have shaped national drug pricing policies, international discussions on the economics of innovation, and the scientific foundations of the economics of precision medicine.”

, affiliate professor of health services and biostatistics and professor in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, for “pioneering statistical models that transformed cancer early detection and screening policy, reshaping national and global guidelines and advancing equitable public health decision‑making, and for exceptional leadership, cross‑disciplinary collaboration, and mentorship, influencing generations of scientists.”

, Charles O. Cressey Endowed Professor of social work and executive co-director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, for “pioneering research across historical trauma, cultural buffers, and healing; substance use/misuse prevention; indigenous health disparities and family wellness; and youth health interventions.”

, Endowed Professor in Prevention in the School of Social Work and director of the Social Development Research Group, for “contributions to the economic assessment of prevention programs addressing substance abuse and mental health, and for advancing community-engaged research, and effective communication of findings to different audiences.”

, director of and research professor in the UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, for “leadership and contributions in ecosystem-based management, salmon conservation, urban ecology, and pioneering contributions to the development of social-ecological approaches to environmental problem solving.”

, research professor of epidemiology and associate director for public health sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center for “integrating large‑scale genomic, environmental, and tumor data to advance colorectal cancer prevention and reduce population disparities, and for her leadership at Fred Hutch, shaping precision prevention and population health science.”

, affiliate professor of environmental engineering and chief scientist and laboratory fellow emeritus at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for “his seminal leadership and sustained contributions to soil and agricultural science and environmental geosciences, spanning basic and applied research, university-level teaching and mentoring, and exceptional service.”

, professor of bioengineering, the Dr. James B. Bassingthwaighte Endowed Faculty Fellow in Bioengineering, director of the Center for Translational Muscle Research, and  associate chair of research and translation for the Department of Bioengineering, for “internationally recognized leadership in discovering the molecular mechanisms of contractile dysfunction with familial genetic mutations that lead to muscle dysfunction with disease, the design of novel, targeted therapies, and training the next generation of scientists and engineers to have further impact in understanding and treating heart failure and skeletal muscle diseases.”

Dr. , professor and chair of radiology in UW Medicine, for “contributions to the science and clinical practice of radiological imaging and for leadership in national programs and professional and scientific societies that advance academic radiology.”

Additionally, Dr. , professor emerita of global health and of medicine and epidemiology in the UW School of Medicine, was elected to the WSAS Board of Directors. Wassersheit has been a member of WSAS since 2008. An infectious disease physician and epidemiologist, Dr. Wasserheit played a central role in launching the UW Department of Global Health and served as chair from 2014-2022. She also served as co-director for the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness. She was the founding chief of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Research Branch, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s STD/HIV Prevention Program and director of the FHCRC-based HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Her work on epidemiological synergy between HIV and sexually transmitted infections has shaped prevention policy worldwide.

Source

Teeth are essential for helping people break down the food they eat, and are protected by enamel, which helps them withstand the large amount of stress they experience as people chew away. Unlike other materials in the body, enamel has no way to repair damage, which means that as we age, it risks becoming weaker with time.

Researchers are interested in understanding how enamel changes with age so that they can start to develop methods that can keep teeth happier and healthier for longer.

A research team at the °®¶ąÉçÇř and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined the atomic composition of enamel samples from two human teeth — one from a 22-year-old and one from a 56-year-old. The sample from the older person contained higher levels of the ion fluoride, which is often found in drinking water and toothpaste, where it’s added as a way to help protect enamel (though its addition to drinking water has recently been a ).

The team Dec. 19 in Communications Materials. While this is a proof-of-concept study, these results have implications for how fluoride is taken up and integrated into enamel as people age, the researchers said.

“We know that teeth get more brittle as people age, especially near the very outer surface, which is where cracks start,” said lead author , UW doctoral student in materials science and engineering and a doctoral intern at PNNL. “There are a number of factors behind this — one of which is the composition of the mineral content. We’re interested in understanding exactly how the mineral content is changing. And if you want to see that, you have to look at the scale of atoms.”

Enamel is composed mostly of minerals that are arranged in repetitive structures that are ten thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

“In the past, everything that we’ve done in my lab is on a much larger scale — maybe a tenth the size of a human hair,” said co-senior author , UW professor of materials science and engineering. “On that scale, it’s impossible to see the distribution of the relative mineral and organic portions of the enamel crystalline structure.”

To examine the atomic composition of these structures, Grimm worked with , a materials scientist at PNNL, to use a technique called “atom probe tomography,” which allows researchers to get a 3D map of each atom in space in a sample.

The team made three samples from each of the two teeth in the study and then compared differences in element composition in three different areas of the tiny, repetitive structures: the core of a structure, a “shell” coating the core, and the space between the shells.

In the samples from the older tooth, fluoride levels were higher across most of the regions. But they were especially high in the shell regions.

“We are getting exposed to fluoride through our toothpaste and drinking water and no one has been able to track that in an actual tooth at this scale. Is that fluoride actually being incorporated over time? Now we’re starting to be able to paint that picture,” said co-author , a postdoctoral researcher in both the oral health sciences and the materials science and engineering departments at the UW. “Of course, the ideal sample would be a tooth from someone who had documented every time they drank fluoridated versus non-fluoridated water, as well as how much acidic food and drink they consumed, but that’s not really feasible. So this is a starting point.”

The key to this research, the team said, is the interdisciplinary nature of the work.

“I am a metallurgist by training and didn’t start to study biomaterials until 2015 when I met Dwayne. We started to talk about the potential synergy between our areas of expertise — how we can look at these small scales to start to understand how biomaterials behave,” Devaraj said. “And then in 2019 Jack joined the group as a doctoral student and helped us look at this problem in depth. Interdisciplinary science can facilitate innovation, and hopefully we’ll continue to address really interesting questions surrounding what happens to teeth as we age.”

One thing the researchers are interested in studying is how protein composition of enamel changes over time.

“We set out trying to identify the distribution of the organic content in enamel, and whether the tiny amount of protein present in enamel actually goes away as we age. But when we looked at these results, one of the things that was most obvious was actually this distribution of fluoride around the crystalline structure,” Arola said. “I don’t think we have a public service announcement yet about how aging affects teeth in general. The jury is still out on that. The message from dentistry is pretty strong: You should try to utilize fluoride or fluoridated products to be able to fight the potential for tooth decay.”

, a postdoctoral researcher at PNNL, is also a co-author on this paper. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Colgate-Palmolive Company and a distinguished graduate research program between PNNL and UW.

For more information, contact Grimm at jckgrmm@uw.edu, Arola at darola@uw.edu and Renteria at crentb@uw.edu. For questions specifically for Arun Devaraj please contact Karyn Hede at karyn.hede@pnnl.gov.

Source