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ALUMNI ASSOCIATION HONOREES

The UCLA Alumni Association will honor winners of 2004 UCLA Awards on May 22 at Anderson Plaza. Alumnus of the Year is U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Other honorees: Patricia Ganz, associate director of the Jonsson Cancer Center, and Donna de Varona, sports commentator and vice president of ABC Sports, both for professional achievement; Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, vice chancellor of academic affairs and dean of the Graduate Division, for university service; Wendy Wayne, Kern County Office of Education administrator, and Richard Tapia, advocate for women and minorities in science and math, both for community service; and Janice Rogers Brown, associate justice of the California Supreme Court, for public service. For ticket information, contact Robyn Goldberg at (310) 206-6062 or RGoldberg@UCLAlumni.net.

SHYNESS, INFECTION LINKED

How you react to stress influences how easily you resist or succumb to disease, including viruses like HIV, scientists at the UCLA AIDS Institute discovered recently. Reported in the Dec. 15 issue of Biological Psychiatry, the new findings identify the immune mechanism that makes shy people more susceptible to infection than outgoing people. “During the AIDS epidemic, researchers found that introverted people got sick and died sooner than extroverted people,” said Bruce Naliboff, co-author and clinical professor at NPI and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. “Our study pinpoints the biological mechanism that connects personality and disease.” Principal investigator was Steve Cole, assistant professor of hematology-oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and a member of the AIDS institute.