In This Section:
A refrain for music appreciation - Alain Frogley, music
Microscopic search for viral cures - Sandra Weller, biology

Frogley studies link between British and American sounds

Successful musicians keep an open mind about finding new sounds, no matter that the music involved may be at a polar opposite to a genre where they might have found an initial interest.

Alain Frogley’s interest in music began with the rock pioneers David Bowie and Peter Gabriel. He took up the flute after hearing it played by the Genesis-era Gabriel.

Music professor Alain Frogley in his office in the School of Fine Arts.

Photo by Peter Morenus

“I thought about becoming a professional flautist, but I had become so interested in music history that I decided to study music in a more academic way,” says Frogley, professor of music in the School of Fine Arts.

He completed his undergraduate work at Oxford University, earned a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley and returned to Oxford for his doctoral degree as well.

In addition to teaching music history and music appreciation classes, Frogley is one of UConn’s most prolific researchers, and an authority on the 20th-century British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, a figure who in England casts an influential shadow much like that of Aaron Copland in the United States.

More recently he has explored interconnections between British and American music, particularly the issue of racial discourses in American 20th- century music and the Anglo-Saxonist movements in art and folk music.

“There were quite a few critics in the 1920s and ’30s of the direction American music was taking,” he says.

“They were concerned about the influx of Jewish immigrants and the influences of black music that were giving America a musical identity that went against what they thought was the historic context of Anglo-Saxon music. History, on the whole, sort of passed them by . . . Today’s fears about hip-hop are in many respects the same as those surrounding early jazz.”

Frogley’s most recent research, supported last year by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and on which he has been invited to teach as Visiting Professor at Yale next year, involves the relationship between music, empire, and post-colonialism, especially in the emerging modern metropolis circa 1910.

Frogley says the challenge in teaching music is that unlike many other classroom subjects, students enter a class with some musical experience and an opinion about what they may like.

He introduces contemporary popular music into his discussions of music history or music appreciation classes, a method that is driven by his view that academics should try to bridge the gap between the university and the wider world of music.

“This is increasingly the only exposure to classical music that many students will ever have,” he explains.

“That’s something I take as a real opportunity — a mission to some degree — for them to think critically about the context of the music.”

To that end, he is working with Eric Rice, assistant professor of music, to retool music appreciation classes to include more contemporary readings around music that address issues such as race and gender.

They are also developing software with UConn’s Institute for Teaching and Learning to provide students with the experience of composing music.

— Kenneth Best

Weller leads researchers to discover herpes virus drug treatment

Researcher Sandra Weller discusses her work on herpes viruses with graduate students.

Photo by Peter Morenus

Herpes is a recurring virus.

Once you have it, you have it forever.

UConn researcher Sandra Weller and her team have been studying herpes viruses, including herpes simplex 1, which causes cold sores and occasionally life-threatening encephalitis, and herpes simplex 2, which causes genital herpes.

Herpes is especially problematic for organ transplant patients, who have reduced immune systems, to allow the transplanted organ to function.

Weller, professor and chair of molecular, microbial and structural biology at the UConn Health Center, was recently named a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, the University’s highest honor for faculty who achieve exceptional distinction in scholarship, teaching, and service.

“The best outcome of our work would lead to new anti-viral drugs that would be effective against all viruses in the herpes family,” Weller says.

“It is possible to get infections resistant to drugs currently available; that’s why it’s important to keep studying herpes viruses.”

Weller and her research team are learning about the structure and function of viral proteins in order to develop a drug that would inhibit the virus and not be toxic to the whole cell.

Just as researchers determined the protein structure of the HIV protease, a protein molecule, and created protease inhibitors — the medicine used to treat viruses such as AIDS — Weller believes that using structural biology is a realistic approach to finding the key to curbing the herpes virus.

Weller received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, then went  to the University of Wisconsin for her doctorate, which she earned under the guidance of Nobel laureate Howard Temin.

As a graduate student, Weller published a study of a retrovirus that caused cancer in chickens and found such viruses killed cells by an unusual mechanism that causes fragmentation of the cellular DNA.

At the time this was not well understood; however, 16 years later, it became clear that this was one of the first demonstrations of programmed cell death in the infected cells.

Weller and her colleagues continue to study how viruses interact with host cells.

Last year, Weller’s lab discovered virus-induced, chaperone-enriched domains in cells, known as VICE, which is one of the research team’s most significant achievements.

In her typical user-friendly fashion, Weller explains that a virus can induce an accumulation of viral and cellular proteins as a way of sequestering them to avoid sending danger signals.

“Imagine you have company showing up on your doorstep unexpectedly and you are afraid they’ll call the health department because you live in abject squalor, so you take all the garbage lying around your house and shove it in the closet. This will avoid sending that danger signal,” Weller says.

“This is what we think the virus does. It gathers up the proteins that would send a damage signal and might induce the cell to undergo programmed cell death.”

If the cell killed itself too soon, it would not be alive long enough to make more viruses.

In addition to conducting her research and supervising graduate students, Weller serves on several University committees, including the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, which oversees the ethics of stem cell research.

— Alix Boyle