UWM's WATER Institute Scientist Awarded Shaw Professorship

MILWAUKEE -- Michael Carvan, assistant professor of health sciences and also an assistant scientist at UWM's Great Lakes WATER Institute, has been selected for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Shaw Scientist Award for his work which links zebrafish genetics with human health issues.

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation's James D. and Dorothy Shaw Fund supports the award, which comes with an unrestricted $200,000 grant. It is awarded annually to the best and the brightest young scientists from UWM and UW-Madison.

Carvan is exploring the effects of alcohol exposure on the development of zebrafish. The zebrafish is a model organism used to study vertebrate development genetics. Carvan's research involves looking for the genes that influence human susceptibility and resistance to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder (ARND).

"With fetal alcohol, scientists know what makes an organism less sensitive, but not what makes it more so," he says. "Pinpointing the gene that influences a pathway to disease is the key to developing a cure. If we know what pathways are involved, we could then intervene."

The project will reinforce the use of zebrafish as a model for the study of genetics and environmental toxicology in humans. As laboratory specimens, zebrafish offer some advantages over their mammalian counterparts.

"The organs and circulatory systems are visible, especially in its early stages of life," says Carvan. "You can see blood flowing through their veins after 24 hours. You can see how introducing an environmental change perturbs the organism's development."

But there are other advantages as well. Their life span is short, giving researchers the ability to track the effects of pollutants on development over several generations.

Females produce hundreds of eggs at a time and each egg can easily be removed from its sheath, something not possible with other common experimental animals. And because zebrafish are about the size of a paper clip, labs can keep a lot of them in a little space.

Carvan was one of the few researchers in the nation using zebrafish as a model for human health studies when he came to the WATER Institute in 1999 from the University of Cincinnati Medical School. He started the colony of zebrafish that now fills an entire room at the WATER Institute.

The Wisconsin Aquatic Technology and Environmental Research (WATER) Institute is a UW System facility that is administered and operated by UWM.

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation created the Shaw Scientist Award in 1982 to carry out the terms of a bequest from Dorothy Shaw, widow of James D. Shaw, a prominent Milwaukee attorney. Mrs. Shaw used her will to endow a $4.2 million fund within the Foundation and directed that it be used to advance research in the fields of biochemistry, biological science and cancer research at the two universities.

Shaw Award recipients are selected by a panel of five scientists from major research institutions throughout the U.S. The committee is chaired by Owen W. Griffith, Ph.D., professor and chairman of the Medical College of Wisconsin's Department of Biochemistry.

Since it was established 20 years ago, the Shaw Award has provided over $8 million in awards to 43 scientists at UW-Madison and UWM.

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