UTRGV departments address Brownsville commission

During its meeting Tuesday, the Brownsville City Commission heard about the work of the UTRGV Athletics and the Human Genetics departments.

Veronica Gonzales, vice president for Governmental and Community Relations, gave brief introductions of the speakers.

Chasse Conque, vice president and director of Athletics, spoke about athletics as a unifier for the community, university campuses and students.

Conque, who started working at UTRGV on Aug. 26, told The Rider his experience on the job so far has been phenomenal.

“The last seven weeks, everybody’s been so welcoming, so gracious and very hospitable and I couldn’t be more appreciative of the staff, our coaches. And the people have … welcomed us with open arms,” he said.

The director said that he is trying to “Rally the Valley” and it starts with students.

“It starts with our students in Brownsville, our students in Edinburg and then from there it will have a ripple effect [in] the community,” Conque said. “I’ve said this several times, you know, for us to have a big-time college athletics we need to have big-time community support and we’re so fortunate that our community is the Rio Grande Valley.”

He said they are not just one community’s team; they are the Rio Grande Valley’s team.

Asked how athletics is a unifier for the community, Conque replied with an example of a ballgame.

 “I think you can just look at a ballgame,” he said. “When you pack [2,000] or 3,000 people into a venue and you’re elbow to elbow, you’ve got fanatics in the gym. … That’s the energy that athletics can bring. When you’re all unified behind one team, one mission, it’s a quest to either win the game or win a championship or build a dynasty, and so I think just this specific example of the pride that you can have in your local team, that is a unifier for our citizens.”

Conque said that being a student athlete requires a high level of discipline.

“Their work is very regimented, whether it’s their sleep schedule, it’s their workouts, practices, obviously, games and travel, and it’s not anything that a normal student has to face,” he said. “It’s very similar to our entire student body. Our student athletes just have to be very disciplined. … So, it makes them focused and they understand the importance of winning, but they also understand that they’re students first. … The more success they have both on the court and the field and the classroom makes them highly employable graduates of UTRGV.”

Sarah Williams-Blangero, director of the South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, and John Blangero, director of the institute’s genomics computer center, established the institute in 2014. It is the “largest research cluster of researchers at UTRGV,” according to Gonzales.

They lead research on diabetes, obesity, heart disease, ocular health, psychiatric disease, osteoporosis and infectious disease of border health relevance.

Their overall approach is to conduct large family studies of the determinants of risks for disease. To do this, Williams-Blangero said they “collect data from many family members of large extended pedigrees and then do an in-depth analysis to determine what genes are influencing risk for disease.”

Once the genes that are influencing diseases are determined, the information can be used to develop new drugs, treatments and preventions for disease.

The center in Brownsville has more capacity for human genome sequencing than in San Antonio, according to John Blangero. He said the first human genome took about 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce.

“Right now, here in Brownsville, we can generate about one in a day for roughly about $600,” Blangero said. “Times have changed and we are at the very forefront of this technology here in Brownsville.”

They use a supercomputer cluster in the UTRGV campus that is the largest in the world dedicated to human genomics.

“These aspects bring lots of new opportunities for students,” Blangero said. “We’re developing a Ph.D. program in human genetics. It’s going to be the first of its kind in the UT System and we expect generations of students to be able to benefit from the aspects, the infrastructure that we’re laying down today.”

He said the Brownsville campus also has a large stem cell biology program.

Blangero said it is a particularly interesting kind of stem cell usage in that they are making human tissues out of blood cells.

“We can take a blood cell from any individual and generate liver tissue, cardiac tissue, pancreatic tissue and this gives us a wonderful way to study lots of aspects of the pathogenesis and genetics of risk diseases of relevance,” he said.

Blangero said Brownsville is on the map scientifically and they are delighted to have the opportunity to base their research in the city.

In other business, the commission:

–tabled the decision of renaming McNair Family Drive to East Fronton Street due to the application being filed late on Friday and there not being enough time to hand out public notices. The name of the street was East Fronton Street and the decision to rename it to McNair Family Drive was originally approved by the City Commission on May 21, according to the agenda binder documents; 

–took no action to consider the Ad Hoc Committee for street naming policy. City Attorney Rene De Coss said the Ad Hoc Committee is created as needed; and

–authorized a partnership between the City of Brownsville-Multimodal Transportation and H-E-B grocery chain to offer free passenger rides to the annual H-E-B Feast of Sharing event. The event will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Nov. 6 at the Jacob Brown Auditorium. The free rides will be available from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.