ScienceWatch.com from
Clarivate
takes you behind the scenes of highly cited research in these
interviews, essays, and rankings featuring researchers in a variety of
fields. Author commentaries come from all areas of
ScienceWatch.com. There are also interviews with authors
featured within every Special Topic
and corresponding Research Front Map. In addition, there are comments
from authors who have papers featured in
Emerging Research Fronts,
Fast-Moving Fronts,
New Hot Papers,
Fast-Breaking Papers,
Current Classics, and
Top Topics. Search for an author by
year,
month, or
alphabetically.
Many interviews and comments include images of the
authors’ work featured in their papers.
April
2009
Michael Barnett; "Senior physicist and
educator Michael Barnett is Head of the Particle Data Group
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA.
Here he discussed the "Review of Particle
Physics," biennially published book outlining the
critical issues in physics that help to shape our..."
Podcast. Listen:
MP3|WMA
April
2009
Roland Brosch; "Tuberculosis has had a
huge impact on human history, and continues to claim
millions of lives at the beginning of this 21st century.
The emergence and spread of multi- or extensively drug
resistant (MDR, XDR) strains of M. tuberculosis
represent an additional threat..."
Special Topic of
Tuberculosis
April
2009
Joseph L. Evans; "Our paper offers a concise,
complete, synthesis of large body of work authored by many
of the leading experts in the field. The paper presents a
unifying hypothesis that ties together data from several
diverse areas. Both the early and late stages of type 2
diabetes are worsened and most likely caused by..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
Daniel G. Gibson; "This paper demonstrates,
for the first time, the construction of a synthetic
bacterial genome, a critical step in our ambition to create
a synthetic cell. The only completely synthetic genomes
reported, prior to this work, have been from viruses; the
5.4 kb phiX genome, and the 7.5 kb poliovirus
genome..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Joachim Holtz; "It introduces novel solutions
to a topic of current research, and combines this with an
in-depth, state-of-the-art analysis. I know from many
inquiries that the subject is of interest both to
industries and academic researchers..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
M. Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez; "...recent
debate about the long-term fate of increasing carbon
dioxide (CO2) in the oceans and its effect:
ocean acidification, has prompted questions about how
marine organisms, particularly those that calcify, will
adapt to these changes. While most studies..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Mario Juric; "This paper is a the first in a
series that describes our findings about the structure of
our galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS). It describes the measurements of Galactic
structural parameters (in essence, how the stars are
distributed in our Galaxy) from..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Eugenia Kumacheva & Zhihong Nie;
"Patterned polymer surfaces have an extremely broad range
of applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review
of the current state-of-the-art in the area of surface
patterning of functional polymers. It also offers a
critical comparison of existing patterning
methods..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Serafim Opricovic & Gwo-Hshiung Tzeng;
"The new VIKOR method for conflict resolution determines a
compromise solution, providing a maximum "group utility"
for the "majority" and a minimum of individual regret from
the "opponent." Compromise is a democratic
methodology..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
Geoffrey Alan Ozin; "Our work paved the way
for other researchers to reliably prepare high-quality
colloidal crystal films for various applications in diverse
research areas. We have demonstrated major advances in
preparation of colloidal crystal films in two important
directions: quality of microspheres..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
Jonathon Phillips; "One major advance in face
recognition has been the development of graphics techniques
for manipulating images of faces. These techniques include
morphable models that allow a non-frontal image of a face
to be transformed to a frontal image. A second area of
progress is automatic..."
Special Topic of Face
Recognition
April
2009
Gail Prins; "The major obstacle over the years
has been convincing people that events during development
could have an impact on prostate health over a lifetime. In
particular, people have been skeptical that estrogen, a
"female" steroid, could have an effect on the male prostate
gland..."
Special Topic of
Epigenetics
April
2009
François Rousset; "it describes the
successor of the software Genepop, already widely used in
several branches of genetics. Part of Genepop's success
derives from its well-established methods, thoroughly
tested algorithms, and its convenient input file format
which has been endorsed by several other
softwares..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
David M. Smith; "The new things we discovered
about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) were 1) the
extremely high energies to which electrons are accelerated
(over 20 MeV, or nearly a thousand times higher in energy
than the x-rays used for medical imaging) and 2) the
frequency with which they occur..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
Stevo Stevic; "Working on Bloch-type spaces I have realized
that sometimes it is useful to use the norm on the
space by taking radial derivatives, but in some other
cases to use the norm containing the gradient of the
functions in the space (as in my paper). In calculating
operator norms..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Nir Tessler; "In our group we have been
working on extending the functionality of polymer-based
devices from the visible to the NIR part of the spectrum by
adding nanocrystals to the semiconducting polymer matrix.
One of the obstacles was that the energy level alignment
between conjugated polymers...."
Featured Scientist Interview
April
2009
Claes Thelander; "The paper demonstrates that
vertical nanowires can be a promising alternative for
future transistors. The transistor itself is based on a
relatively uncommon and expensive material (InAs). However,
research by our group and others has recently shown that
nanowires of this material can be grown..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Barry Wanner & Kirill Datsenko; "...one of
the key ways in which we do our work is basically to break
a pathway—break something in a cell—and see
what’s broken and how that affects the physiology or
growth of the cell. This method was a way to target
particular genes for interruption. Thirty years ago, when I
started..."
Featured Paper Interview
April
2009
Emil Wolf; "The discovery reported in the
paper provides a synthesis of two branches of optics, known
as the theory of coherence and the theory of polarization
of light. Until the publication of my paper, these two
subjects had always been treated independently of each
other. Prior to the invention of the laser, almost 50 years
ago..." Emerging
Research Front, April 2009
April
2009
Jeff Wood; "...is a review paper and gives an
overview of published work on fatty acid composition. The
fatty acid composition of meat is a major factor in
nutritional value as well as in the quality (taste and
keeping quality) of meat. Ways to change fatty acid
composition, improving nutritional value..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Koji Yamanaka & Don W. Cleveland; "Glial
cells have long been regarded as a supporting player of
neurodegenerative diseases, which are characterized by a
progressive, selective death of a certain group of neurons.
However, our research identified a specific glial cell
type, the astrocyte..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
April
2009
Taesang Yoo; "Our paper has both theoretical
and practical significance. In communications and
information theory community, multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) systems and multiuser diversity have
been among major research topics that have drawn lots of
attention and been extensively developed..." Fast Breaking
Paper, April 2009
(Additional
interviews/commentaries may be added during April
2009.)