Remarks delivered by James P. Evans

Remarks delivered by James P. Evans, president and chief executive officer, Best Western International Inc., April 14, 1999, AH&MA Leadership Keynote Addres

Commonsense Leadership for Uncommon Times

An article discussing the merits of commonsense leadership

Modeling Virus-Host Networks

Virus-host interactions are being cataloged at an increasing rate using protein interaction assays and small interfering RNA screens for host factors necessary for infection. These interactions can be viewed as a network, where genes or proteins are nodes, and edges correspond to associations between them. Virus-host interac- tion networks will eventually support the study and treatment of infection, but first require more data and better analysis techniques. This dissertation targets these goals with three aims. The first aim tackles the lack of data by providing a method for the computational prediction of virus-host protein interactions. We show that HIV-human protein interactions can be predicted using documented human peptide motifs found to be conserved on HIV proteins from different subtypes. We find that human proteins predicted to bind to HIV proteins are enriched in both documented HIV targeted proteins and pathways known to be utilized by HIV. The second aim seeks to improve peptide motif annotation on virus proteins, starting with the dock- ing site for protein kinases ERK1 and ERK2, which phosphorylate HIV proteins during infection. We find that the docking site motif, in spite of being suggestive of phosphorylation, is not present on all HIV subtypes for some HIV proteins, and we provide evidence that two variations of the docking site motif could explain phos- phorylation. In the third aim, we analyze virus-host networks and build on the observation that viruses target host hub proteins. We show that of the two hub types, date and party, HIV and influenza virus proteins prefer to interact with the latter. The methods presented here for prediction and motif refinement, as well as the analysis of virus targeted hubs, provide a useful set of tools and hypotheses for the study of virus-host interactions

Which Ant Are You?

An article discussion the need for vision in leadership

Jim Evans on Commonsense Leadership

A short article by James Evans listing qualities commonsense leaders have

I\u27ve Got Vision and the Rest of the World Wears Blinders . . .

An article discussing the need for vision in leadership

Cultivating the Habits of Commonsense Leadership

An article discussing strategies for cultivating good leadership habits

Discrete brittle to distributed shearing; Results from analysis of the deep portions of the Cajon Pass Drill Hole

We performed systematic structural and geochemical analyses on a suite of cored rocks from the vertical Cajon Pass, California drill hole to characterize the deformation and alteration of fault-related rocks. The drill hole lies 4 km northeast of the San Andreas Fault (SAF), and observations of deformed crystalline rock in core and outcrop provide a sample of a 5-km vertical column adjacent to the steeply dipping Cleghorn fault and span the brittle to semi-brittle deformational regime at hydrothermal conditions. The rocks in the upper 500 m of the borehole are composed of sandstones and granitoid augen gneiss, with narrow fault and fracture zones coated with thin seams of laumontite. Below 500 m depth in the core, tonalite gneiss and migmatite contain well-developed discrete brittle faults and fracture zones. Thirty-seven faults are recognized in the core and borehole data; eleven are newly identified here, eight were previously identified in the core, and the remainder are interpreted from borehole image log data. The size of the fault zones intersected by the core controls the extent and nature of deformation. Distribution of faults in the core increase with depth, and fracture densities are greater around fault zones. In the upper 2600 m of the hole, the faults and fractures are typically narrow with thin coatings of alteration products. Prominent fault zones at 2100 - 2300 and 2500 - 2600 m measured depth dip moderately to steeply, and within this fault distributed shearing and alteration textures are common. Microstructures in these fault zones primarily include shear fractures containing a matrix of laumontite with angular to sub-angular clasts within the matrix and record multiple cycles of deformation and alteration. Laumontite mineralization indicates moderate- to high-temperature fluids interacting with the rocks throughout most of the column. The most significant fault observed in the core is an indurated, steep-dipping zone at 3,402 m depth that exhibits evidence of a mixture of brittle and semi-brittle deformation and abundant mineralization and alteration of potassium feldspar and epidote. This fault correlates well with the left-lateral steeply dipping Cleghorn fault, and reflects the interaction between hydrothermal metasomatic alteration and brittle fracture, cataclastic flow, to incipient plastic deformation processes at depth. The interpretation that the fault zone at the bottom of the hole is the Cleghorn fault agrees with stress orientation measurements made there by M D. Zoback and coworkers and indicates that the faults in the drill hole reflect active deformation and alteration associated with northeast-oriented maximum horizontal stress that may drive the left-lateral oblique motion on the Cleghorn fault. The data also show that damage zones associated with faults are present here, and may consist of mixed mode deformation, indicating a long-lived presence of the deformed and altered zones of reduced elastic moduli associated with faults. Simple modeling of the thermodynamics of syntectonic reactions in the fault zones indicate that earthquakes can be the source of heat to drive the reactions, and thus earthquake energy may be consumed in the fault core and damage zone by focused alteration