Electrical Engineering Professor Tulin Mangir received a $598,000 grant in collaboration with USC ($298,000 awarded to CSULB) from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Computer and Network Security and Information Assurance.”

The project will develop degree emphasis programs in network security and information assurance, a growing topic of interest for researchers, e-commerce businesses and the general public.

Through the development of a cross-disciplinary curriculum for engineering and non-engineering students, teacher training and an introductory general education course for non-majors, Mangir and her colleagues will implement several courses and experiments. These will involve newer networking and communications security technologies, applications and techniques; integration of technologies for development of designs for hardware and software security; and dependable infrastructure for security and information assurance.

As any gardener knows, it’s not a good idea to put a sun-loving plant in a shady place or vice versa.

The process of photosynthesis, in which plants turn light into energy, is well known, but how plants genetically adapt to different light levels is still not fully understood. With a $452,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Judy Brusslan, professor of biological sciences, is looking at how genes within the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or mouse ear cress, enable the plant to react to different light intensities, a process called photoacclimation.

She and her students are examining the genes of normal versions of Arabidopsis, as well as mutants that cannot efficiently harvest light, under different light levels. She is working with a particular type of gene, a protease called dipeptidyl aminopeptidase (DAP). By creating and studying mutant plants that lack DAP, she hopes to better understand how plants gather photons of light and convert them to energy.

Efforts to help children develop literacy skills, as well as studies of how they learn to read, are under way at CSULB’s Center for Education Technology and Learning, supported by a $248,000 grant from the United States Department of Education.

The funding will help the center further develop online multimedia reading material.

The center also acquired a camera that tracks young readers’ eye movements to help faculty understand when children are reading individual words or taking time to assemble words into larger meanings, said center director Robert H. Berdan, professor of educational psychology, administration and counseling.

Dessie Underwood, professor of biological sciences, is studying chromosomal abnormalities in butterfly sperm that could lead to a greater understanding of chromosome-based health disorders such as Down Syndrome in humans.

In the Physics and Astronomy Department, Professor Chuhee Kwon is working with superconducting thin films that have potential applications in a variety of technology areas.

Their research, as well as studies by other CSULB faculty and students, is advancing even further with a new state-of-the-art microscope with laser attachments that can capture or cut out structures within individual tissues and cells or tiny segments only a few molecules wide of other materials.

Underwood and Kwon recently received a $205,587 grant from the National Science Foundation to purchase a Cell Robotics laser microscopy workstation fitted with what the company calls “LaserScissors.” The device is one of the few of its type at a Southern California university.

The S. Mark Taper Foundation awarded a $50,000 grant to CSULB’s Readiness and Early Activities for Children from the Heart (REACH) project, a five-year community collaborative designed to enhance the education and retention of early childhood professionals in eight child care centers within Long Beach’s 90806 ZIP code.

CSULB is the lead institution, and its primary partners are the Long Beach Unified School District’s Head Start Centers and Child Development Center and the child care agency Young Horizons.

“The overall goal of the REACH Project is to improve children’s school readiness,” noted Sue Stanley, chair of the CSULB Family and Consumer Sciences Department and project director.

A chance encounter with Pectinaria californiensis, a marine worm found in west coast ocean sediments, has led to the discovery of an unusual feeding method by its larvae.

While on a research leave at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories last fall, Biological Sciences Professor Bruno Pernet accompanied another researcher who was dredging for sea urchins.

They also caught a number of the worms, which Pernet took back to the lab for study.

Those results, published last December in the journal Science, showed that P. californiensis’ tiny larvae construct mucus “houses,” essentially bubble-like structures that nearly surround the larva and are used as filters to collect food particles. Minute hairs called cilia pump seawater containing the particles toward the larva’s mouth.

“We don’t know of any other larva that does anything like this, so it broadens the field of things we have to explain and understand in evolutionary terms,” he said.