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KU research award recipients working toward treatments for Parkinson’s disease, development of new antibacterial agents
LAWRENCE — Three projects were selected to receive a 2021 J.R. and Inez Jay Fund research award. One project has the potential to help patients with Parkinson’s disease, and two projects are addressing the fight against bacteria that cause illness. Researchers from the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry are among this year’s honorees.
Author documents latest twists in music video revolution
LAWRENCE — A technological tipping point has been reached, in terms of how Americans consume music, said Brad Osborn, associate professor of music. His book “Interpreting Music Video: Popular Music in the Post-MTV Era” exists to document that tipping point and its implications. “Today, 55% of all music listened to is consumed through YouTube,” Osborn said, “meaning that the dominant music format is no longer audio – it’s video. When you pull up anything on YouTube, even if it’s just showing a picture of the album cover on screen, that’s an mp4 file, and that is a video format.”
Full stories below.
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Contact: Nicole Suchy, 785-864-3572, [email protected]
KU research award recipients working toward treatments for Parkinson’s disease, development of new antibacterial agents
LAWRENCE — LAWRENCE — Three projects were selected to receive a 2021 J.R. and Inez Jay Fund research award. One project has the potential to help patients with Parkinson’s disease, and two projects are addressing the fight against bacteria that cause illness. Researchers from the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry are among this year’s honorees.
Michael Johnson, associate professor of chemistry, received an award for a proposal titled “Light-Initiated Zinc Signaling in Parkinson’s disease.” The project aims to understand how rapid fluctuations in metal levels influence the release/uptake of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. This will assist in the identification of alternate therapeutic pathways for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Johnson will collaborate with Eduardo Rosa-Molinar, professor of pharmacology and toxicology and director of KU’s Microscopy & Analytical Imaging Laboratory, and Shawn Burdette, associate professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
William Picking, Foundation Distinguished Professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and director of the Kansas Vaccine Institute, submitted another of the selected projects: “Applying Novel Approaches to Obtain the Molecular Structures of Difficult T3SS Proteins.” In collaboration with Scott Lovell, director of KU’s Protein Structure & X-ray Crystallography Laboratory, Picking will investigate a technically innovative approach. T3SS is a specialized nanomachine that allows bacteria to subvert normal cellular functions and help establish infections. The project aims to acquire preliminary structural data for T3SS to understand this complex secretion system, which could in turn fuel future drug design studies targeting T3SS.
Shyam Sathyamoorthi, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry, received an award to conduct the project titled “Development of New Antibacterial Agents: A Synthesis of the Antibiotic Enacyloxin IIa for the Generation of Therapeutic Analogues.” He will collaborate with Josephine Chandler, associate professor of molecular biosciences; Michael Hageman, Valentino J. Stella Distinguished Professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and director of KU’s Biopharmaceutical Innovation & Optimization Center; and David K. Johnson, director of KU’s Computational Chemical Biology Core Laboratory. The project aims to complete several important steps toward the development of new antibacterial agents effective against bacterial strains that are currently impervious to antibiotics.
The J.R. and Inez Jay Research Fund was established in 1977 through an estate gift to KU Endowment from Inez Jay. Her late husband, John Jay, was a pharmacist in Wichita.
The purpose of the Jay Fund is to stimulate collaborative, interdisciplinary, biomedical research activities in pursuit of large external grants, such as multi-investigator National Institutes of Health project grants, program projects and center grants awarded under the tutelage of the Higuchi Biosciences Center. All biomedical scientists holding principal investigator status at KU are eligible to apply for the awards. Recipients are selected by members of the Higuchi Biosciences Center internal advisory committee.
KU Endowment is the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
Author documents latest twists in music video revolution
LAWRENCE — By teaching a course analyzing music videos, some have questioned whether University of Kansas Associate Professor of Music Brad Osborn is preparing his students for life after graduation, i.e., the job market.
After all, it’s not like there’s any way to monetize the skills they learn in class, is there?
Then again, in his new book, “Interpreting Music Video: Popular Music in the Post-MTV Era” (Routledge), Osborn notes the massive cultural, financial and critical success achieved from scratch by one of the creators he features, Lil Nas X.
Osborn writes that in 2019, Lil Nas X “self-released ‘Old Town Road’ on various internet channels, a viral campaign took over TikTok, in which users performed a choreographed dance to the track. A later remix of the track went on to break a number of records, including the most number of streams in a single week (143 million), and longest run at #1 (17 weeks) on the Billboard Hot 100. … with ‘Old Town Road’ Lil Nas X became the first openly LGBTQ+ musician to win a CMA (Country Music Association) award.”
“Seems to me a thorough knowledge of pop culture could be one of the best things to prepare you for the kinds of jobs people are getting right now,” Osborn said.
A technological tipping point has been reached, in terms of how Americans consume music, Osborn said, and his book exists to document that tipping point and its implications. The book is styled as a resource for teachers who wish to use it in a music-appreciation class.
“Today, 55% of all music listened to is consumed through YouTube,” Osborn said, “meaning that the dominant music format is no longer audio – it’s video. When you pull up anything on YouTube, even if it’s just showing a picture of the album cover on screen, that’s an mp4 file, and that is a video format.
“So for the first time in music history, the dominant musical medium is video, which is remarkable. If you think about the change from the wax cylinder to the 45 to the LP to the 8-track to the cassette tape to the CD, all of those have one thing in common: They are audio media. But now, for the first time in 100 years, that has changed.”
Osborn said his class on music video analysis is popular, even moreso as an online offering than in person. He thinks the material lends itself well to asynchronous consumption and discussion.
“It felt weird to sit in a big lecture hall, turn the lights off and play music videos, and then try to talk about it,” Osborn said. “It felt like watching the video once wasn’t enough.
“I like the course being online now because students can watch the videos several times and then read a concise paragraph of what I have to say about it. I think it leaves more room for the students to do their own thinking, their own interpreting, which is kind of what my entire point is.”
The new book is divided into three units — Interpreting Music, Interpreting Visuals and Interpreting Sociology. As a teacher of music theory, the first section was easy for Osborn. The second section is much like a film criticism class, training students what to look for and what it means. In the final section, Osborn delves into such hot-button issues as sexuality, race, politics and censorship in the music video world.
Osborn tried to avoid what he considers a pitfall of too many survey courses on pop music — that is, focusing too heavily on white male composers and performers to the exclusion of their African American progenitors. Discussing the selection of videos featured in the book, Osborn writes that he was trying “to overthrow the exclusionary canon of popular music from the past century by focusing on recent, extremely popular music videos by women, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) musicians, and the LGBTQ+ community that have billions of views on YouTube.
“When illustrating a particular concept, and given the choice between videos by white, cisgendered, heterosexual men and those by more marginalized groups, I have actively privileged the latter. Of the resulting examples chosen for this book, 83.6% are by a woman and/or BIPOC musician.”
Not only is it the right thing to do, Osborn said, but it helps maintain students’ interest.
But if the guitar rock featured on early MTV has been down in recent years, it’s not yet out, Osborn said.
“I do hear it coming back in the last couple years,” he said, “especially rock music by women. You’ve got people like Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, their supergroup called boygenius, which is bringing back the sorts of grungy guitar sounds we heard in the ’90s.
“This year I see more of a slacker/grunge visual culture as well. My students are wearing baggy jeans with holes in them. They’re wearing loose-fitting flannels and tie-dye, too. You see kids wearing Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and even Ice Cube T-shirts walking down the street.”
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