Research Stories

by Skip Derra

When he was eight years old, Rogier Windhorst and his father built a small telescope in their backyard. They packed the completed scope, hopped on a moped, and sped away for a close-up look at the stars and constellations. For the best look, father and son had to get away from the lights of Dordrecht, a city of about 100,000 located south of Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

That trip was a gateway for Windhorst, today a Regents' professor of physics and astronomy in ASU's new School of Earth and Space Exploration. He says that it led to his decision to become an astrophysicist.

It is a memory the ASU scientist holds fondly. He remembers it as an example of Dr. Jurriaan Windhorst's nurturing behavior and of how a father's wish can eventually be realized.

While very supportive of Rogier's natural interest in science and in fostering his inquisitiveness, the elder Windhorst also had the feeling that something was missing as his son grew to love astrophysics.

"My father always wanted me to become a medical doctor," Windhorst says. "He was one himself. He worked very hard and had a practice of 6,000 people. I just found astrophysics to be much more interesting."

During his career to date, the ASU scientist has made significant contributions to astrophysics. He has advanced the field through his discoveries on how the universe first lit up and with new explanations about the strange behavior of black holes.

But it is his latest research conducted with a medical scientist that would arguably make his father most proud. Windhorst works with Dr. Richard Herman, director of the Clinical Neurobiology & Bioengineering Research Center at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix.

The work is focused on the refinement of a specialized computer program. Physicians use the software to accurately locate and count C-fibers in skin biopsies. The results help them to detect the early onset of type II diabetes. As a result of early successes, the ASU astrophysicist is now writing scientific papers for medical journals. The twist of fate is not lost on Windhorst.

"As it turns out, I am doing medical research anyway," he says with a laugh and a smile for his father, who passed away in 1978.

The work with Herman has led to seed grant funding. The researchers have successfully tested the method in clinical trials. They now are preparing the paperwork to patent the technique, Windhorst reports. He also is exploring other possible disease detection applications for the software.

"We are using similar software to find cancer cells in bladder and brain tumors," Windhorst says. "We have worked on the diabetes application the longest because it is the hardest problem. It turns out that finding cancer cells and measuring their growth rate is a lot easier. There are similarities between cancer clusters and galaxy clusters."

The cancer research is being conducted in collaboration with scientists at TGen, the Translational Genomic Research Institute located in downtown Phoenix.

"We've found that the only real trick to modifying the technique for the cancer work is letting the software know what type of image it is actually scanning," Windhorst explains.

"You have to tell the software that it isn't detecting photon emissions falling to a telescope. Instead, it is a scan in transmission media that represents the amount of photons the skin tissue or cancer tissue does not absorb," Windhorst says. "We are getting useful answers."

Read more about Rogier Windhorst's research in "Fate and stars."