Posts tagged science
Director of Public Works for Utilities Ned Williams announces retirement
Jun 13th
The City of Boulder’s Director of Public Works for Utilities Ned Williams announced that he will retire as of Oct. 28, 2011. The City of Boulder will initiate a hiring process to fill this key position in the organization.
Williams joined the city organization in 1980. From 1980 to 1990, Williams worked as the coordinator of projects and as a project manager with the Transportation and Utilities divisions of the Public Works Department. He was an assistant director from 1990 to 2001 and has been the Director of Public Works for Utilities since 2001.
Prior to working for the City of Boulder, Williams was a project engineer at Shive-Hattery & Associates in Davenport, Iowa, and a design/project engineer at HNTB in Kansas City, Mo.
Williams has a bachelor’s of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a licensed professional engineer and is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Public Works Association, the American Water Works Association and the Water Environment Federation. Williams is also a past officer in local chapters and professional societies. Williams has authored, published and presented technical papers for regional and national conferences.
”I’ve been fortunate to work with many knowledgeable and experienced members of the public and city staff during my time with the city,” said Williams. “Together, we’ve been able to develop, implement and advance several key programs that are very important to the health and safety of the community; rebuild major components of our infrastructure, secure a healthy and positive financial status in each utility, implement a conservation-focused billing system using water budgets, and achieve significant results in water conservation.”
“The city’s water, wastewater and stormwater and flood management utilities are well managed and I thank Ned for all he has done for the city,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “The director of Public Works for Utilities is a challenging position and we will proceed with a national hiring search. Executive Director of Public Works Maureen Rait will be working with me to hire the next director. I value inclusive hiring processes and will appreciate the involvement of key stakeholders, including the Water Resources Advisory Board and staff.”
“I’ve enjoyed working with Ned and will continue to rely on his expertise during this transition,” said Rait. “In addition to filling this key position, over the next four months, Ned and I will work with City Council, the Water Resources Advisory Board and staff on several flood studies, the consideration of a critical facilities ordinance, and a water utility master plan.”
A hiring decision involving the city’s next director of Public Works for Utilities is anticipated to be made during September.
GUT MICROBES IN HUMANS AND OTHER MAMMALS HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY DIET, SAYS NEW STUDY C U Boulder
May 20th
You are what you eat whether you’re a lion, a giraffe or a human — at least in terms of the bacteria in your gut.
A new study led by the Washington University School of Medicine and involving the University of Colorado Boulder shows gut microbial communities in humans and in a wildly diverse collection of mammals carry out core physiological functions that are heavily influenced by whether they are carnivores, herbivores or omnivores.
The researchers sequenced intestinal microbes in stool samples from 33 mammalian species living in the wild or in zoos in St. Louis and San Diego. In addition to identifying the bacterial species living in the mammalian intestines, they characterized the pool of genes present in each microbial community and their related functions, said senior study author Dr. Jeffrey Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
CU-Boulder professor and study co-author Rob Knight said despite the wide variation of mammals selected for the study, the different gut microbial communities share a set of standard metabolic functions common to all species that play a key role in digestion and immune health. Understanding the variation in human microbial intestine communities holds promise for future clinical research, said Knight, a faculty member in the chemistry and biochemistry department and the computer science department.
A paper on the subject was published in the May 20 issue of Science. Other co-authors on the study included CU-Boulder’s Justin Kuczynski, Dan Knights, Jose Clemente and Antonio Gonzalez, Washington University School of Medicine’s Brian Muegge and Luigi Fontana, and Bernard Henrissat of the Archictecture et Fonction des Macromolecules Biologiques in Marseille, France.
“This was the first time we were able to relate the microbial community members to the specific metabolic functions that were being performed,” said Knight, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist. “This is surprising because even members of the same bacterial species can have genomes that are up to 40 percent different in terms of gene content.”
The team extracted DNA from the mammals and humans and used powerful computer methods to sort gene fragments and match them to the DNA of known organisms.
While there was considerable variation of bacterial gut communities between animals, the study showed many of the same microbial genes were found in all of the digestive tracts, with differences in their relative abundance dependent on whether they were meat-eaters, vegetarians or omnivores. Among the mammals whose fecal material was used to sequence gut bacteria microbes included giraffe, bighorn sheep, gazelle, kangaroo, hyena, lion, polar bear, elephant, gorilla, baboon, black bear and squirrel.
The team also showed how diet influences microbial communities in the human gut by sampling 18 lean people who purposely had cut their caloric intake by 25 percent or more using many different dietary strategies. The researchers found that the functions of gut microbes varied according to how much protein the individuals ate, and the bacterial species varied according to how much fiber was consumed.
In a related 2009 study led by CU-Boulder’s Knight, researchers developed the first atlas of microbial diversity across the human body, charting wide variations in microbe populations from the forehead and feet to noses and navels of individuals. One goal of human bacterial studies is to find out what is normal for healthy people, which should provide a baseline for studies looking at human disease states, said Knight, who also is a fellow at CU’s Colorado Initiative for Molecular Biotechnology.
“If we can better understand this microbial variation, we may be able to begin searching for genetic biomarkers for disease,” said Knight. It might someday be possible to identify sites on the human body, including the gut, that would be amenable to microbial community transplants with either natural or engineered microbial systems that would be beneficial to the health of the host, he said.
“Because the human microbiome is much more variable than the human genome, and because it also is much easier to modify, it provides a much more logical starting point for personalized medicine,” he said.
The latest findings emphasize the need to sample humans across the globe with a variety of extreme lifestyles and diets, including hunter-gatherer groups, said the researchers. Such studies could provide insight into the limits of gut bacteria variation and the possibility that human microbes co-evolved with human bodies and cultures, shaping our physiological differences and environmental adaptations.
Members of Knight’s lab and their many collaborators are studying how the human microbiome — all of a person’s hereditary information — is assembled in different people and how it varies in conditions such as obesity, malnutrition and Crohn’s disease. In addition to financial support from HHMI, Knight also has been supported by National Institutes of Health funds to develop new computational tools to better understand the composition and dynamics of microbial communities.
The Science magazine study was supported by the NIH and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.
-CU-
