Title
Topic
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Enhancing antenna defense using smart metamaterials: A patent
“Vincent Harris, University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a patent for ‘Magnetodielectric Metamaterials and Articles Including Magnetodielectric Metamaterials.'”
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Maheswaran speaks at ATINER2023 Round Table on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education’
Teaching professor in electrical and computer engineering, Bala Maheswaran presented “at the ATINER2023 Round Table Discussion on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education.’ This event took place on July 17-18 at the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) in Athens, Greece. During the roundtable discussion, Maheswaran spoke on the topic of ‘Sustainability in Engineering Education’ and shared the stage with presenters from various countries. The event fostered a diverse and dynamic exchange of ideas, shaping the future trajectory of science and engineering education.”
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Ratilal-Makris selected to serve on Ocean Research Advisory Panel
“Electrical and computer engineering professor Purnima Ratilal-Makris is one of eighteen members selected for the newly formed Ocean Research Advisory Panel, who will serve as advisors to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the interagency Ocean Policy Committee. It is expected that the Panel will help carry out the administration’s goals regarding the Blue economy, resilience, ecosystem health and renewable ocean energy.”
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More efficient deep neural networks for edge devices
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Yanzhi Wang, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, was awarded a $600,000 NSF grant for ‘Expediting Continual Online Learning on Edge Platforms Through Software-Hardware Co-designs.'”
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Developing secure next generation cellular networks
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia, William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia, and Khoury College of Computer science associate professor Alina Oprea were awarded a $900,000 NSF grant for ‘Resilient-by-Design Data-Driven NextG Open Radio Access Networks.'”
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‘TikTok as Algorithmically Mediated Biographical Illumination: Autism, Self-Discovery and Platformed Diagnosis on #Autisktok’
“Scholarship in the sociology of medicine has tended to characterize diagnosis as disruptive to one’s self-concept. This categorization, though, requires reconsideration in light of public conversations about mental health and community building around neurocognitive conditions, particularly among youth online. … We explored the shifting nature of [‘biographical illumination’] through the case of TikTok. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that TikTok serves as a space to discuss diagnosis and refine one’s sense of self as a result of diagnosis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at New Media & Society.
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Ries receives NOAA grant to study future effects of CO2 climate change in the ocean
“Professor Justin Ries was funded to collect and analyze sediments from the western Atlantic shelf (Maine to Maryland) as part NOAA’s third East Coast Ocean Acidification (ECOA-3) cruise aboard the NOAAS Ronald H. Brown — NOAA’s only scientific ship for global scale oceanographic survey. The objective of Ries’ specific project is to characterize the distribution and composition of calcium carbonate sediments deposited within shelf sediments of the western Atlantic shelf. Characterizing the distribution and composition of shelf carbonates will improve our understanding of future CO2-induced climate and ocean change.”
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Sherbo receives Catalyst Grant to study coral reef resilience
“This work, in collaboration with a biophysicist, will explore the resilience of soft corals to rising ocean temperatures by understanding two main adaptations: the coral microbiota, and the morphology and growth patterns.”
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NIH funds Shansky research studying pain processing centers between the sexes
“Traumatic experiences create powerful memories by linking information about the trauma itself with environmental cues associated with the event. Our lab has found evidence that males and females may form these memories using different brain regions, and this grant will allow us to probe this question more deeply by recording neural activity in real time as animals are learning.”
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Lee-Parsons receives NSF grant to enhance drug production from the periwinkle plant
“Plants produce a wide array of valuable, biologically active natural products we use as medicines. This grant will enable engineering for enhanced drug production from the medical plant, C. roseus,” also called periwinkle. The full project title is, “PlantSynBio: A Novel CRISPR SynBio Tool for Investigating and Reprogramming the Regulation of Alkaloid Biosynthesis in Catharanthus roseus.”
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Department of Energy grant to fund center for solar energy harvesting
“The mission of the BioLEC Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) is to combine light harvesting and advances in solar photochemistry to enable more powerful editing, building, and transforming of abundant materials to produce energy-rich feedstock chemicals. As part of the BioLEC EFRC, we will develop new supercharged light-powered catalysts and reactions an deepen our understanding of existing ones, through which valuable products can be generated from plentiful molecules such as those extracted from waste and renewal resources.”
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NIH grant to support research of chemotherapy alternative, ‘photomedicine’
“Photomedicine avoids traditional side effects of systemic chemotherapy, yet effective outcomes are dependent on direct irradiation from an external light source that limits the scope and the types of cancers that may be treated. This proposal develops a precision photomedicine platform that exploits natural disease-homing properties of the immune system to mediate bioluminescence-activated phototherapy in combination with established technology to deliver photoactive therapeutic agents selectively to tumor cells. Successful, proof-of-concept studies will establish a new paradigm of systemic, whole-body phototherapy by enabling immune cell-based light delivery to deep and diffuse metastatic disease.”
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Fernandez receives NOAA grant to study relation between oyster growing methods and their parasites
“We will be collaborating with local oyster farmers to investigate how growing methods (on the bottom vs. Floating) and water quality affect the prevalence and intensity of common oyster parasites. The knowledge developed through this work will be shared with various stakeholders through workshops and aquaculture professional associations.”
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Whitfield-Gabrieli receives NIH grant to study adolescent depression with ‘real-time fMRI neurofeedback’
“Adolescents experience alarmingly high rates of major depressive disorder (MDD), and these episodes are highly recurrent and increase suicide risk. … Rumination (i.e., repetitive, negative patterns of thinking typically focused on the self) contributes to MDD onset, maintenance, and recurrence as well as predicts treatment non-response and relapse. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to suppress the default mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions that are overactive in depression. … We are launching a large scale, clinical trial to do a mindfulness based real-time fMRI neurofeedback intervention in adolescents with MDD in order to quiet the DMN and mitigate…
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Eskew awarded NSF grant to study response time in human vision
“The project will use variations on a classic method called response time (RT) measurement, which has human participants respond as quickly as possible to the presentation of carefully-controlled visual patterns. One goal is to demonstrate that the fastest RTs are triggered by the very early responses in the photoreceptors of the retina of the eye. Two parallel pathways in the visual system called ON and OFF pathways, generate opposite-polarity responses. A second goal is to test the hypothesis that these two pathways can be measured and studied separately using these speeded behavioral responses.”
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Brown receives DOD grant for nanoformulated delivery of ovarian cancer treatment
“Aggressive metastatic ovarian cancer patients have limited therapy options and clinical trials to evaluate promising alternative combinations have been limited due to the high toxicity. Here we propose a bio/nanoformulation approach to delivery PARPi directly into the peritoneal cavity for sustained release and limited toxicity in combination with innate and adaptive immune modulating nanoparticles of ADU-S100 and anti-PDL1.”
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Champion receives NSF grant to study the interrelation of biology and quantum mechanics
“This work will enhance understanding of how biology integrates quantum behavior into macromolecular function. Proteins and macromolecules have evolved to rely, at least to some degree, on underlying quantum phenomena such as tunneling and spin coherence. The biological outcomes depend on the interplay between the scaffold of the protein (which is often treated classically) and the quantum behavior found within more localized regions of the protein. Investigators within this collaboration will draw upon both experimental and theoretical efforts that focus on hydrogen tunneling and vibrational energy transport in lipoxygenase catalysis as well as on optically excited radical pair formation, spin…
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Tilly uses NSF grant to apply ‘mitochondrial lineage tracing’ to the development of in-vivo mammals
“This project combines our technological advancements in mitochondrial analysis and nanosorting with an in-vivo mitochondrial lineage tracing approach, which will enable us able to map the developmental fate of specific mitochondrial subtypes in mammalian eggs through post-fertilization to the point in early embryogenesis when the inner cell mass and trophectoderm are specified at the first cell-fate decision. This project will also explore the novel concept that subtypes of mitochondria, [differing] in their biochemical properties, proteomic landscapes and segregation patterns during asymmetric cell divisions, serve as transcription factor shuttles that then guide stem cell fate decisions and lineage commitment during development.”
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NIH grant supports data modeling platform for ‘real-time… forecasts of disease activity’
“The objective of this grant is to leverage a wealth of information from a diverse array of data sources to build a modeling platform capable of combining information to produce real-time estimates and forecasts of disease activity (Dengue and Influenza) at multiple geographic scales — nation, state and city — using Brazil as a test case. Additionally, we will use machine learning and mechanistic models to understand disease dynamics at multiple spatial scales, across a heterogeneous country such as Brazil.”
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NSF grant supports study of marsh plant detritus in Merrimack River estuary
“Understanding salt marsh ecosystems is crucial because marsh plants create unique and productive wetland habitat in temperate estuaries for a variety of economically valuable and ecologically important fishes, birds and invertebrates. … In the Merrimack River-Plum Island estuarine system just north of Boston, some salt marshes can receive copious amounts of allochthonous inputs in the form of marsh plant detritus (i.e., large mats of “wrack”), while other salt marshes do not. This project will use aerial imagery, drones and AI to quantify whether wrack accumulates into hierarchically organized hot spots according to predictions based on the oceanography of the system.”
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Yan receives Department of Energy grant to design semiconductor compounds for ‘energy conversion applications’
This project will “develop the data-driven approach based on structure motifs and orbital symmetries to discover and design inorganic semiconductor compounds with optimal electronic structures for energy conversion applications. Objectives are: (i) to develop a framework toward the universal description of structure motifs [and] crystal/orbital symmetries in inorganic compounds; (ii) to accelerate the motif and symmetry based discovery and design of oxide and layered semiconductor compounds with optimal electronic properties for energy conversion applications; iii) to enable the effective learning of structure motifs and orbital symmetries through the combined use of national language processing, graph theory and deep learning.”
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Hughes receives Ramboll US grant to study genetic variation in restored salt marshes
“Genetic variation can be critical for population performance and resilience, yet it is seldom accounted for in habitat restoration efforts. This project will assess the genetic diversity of the dominant salt marsh plants Spartina alterniflora and Spartina patens in natural marshes in and around Belle Isle Marsh, MA. We will also produce local stocks of each of these species from seed and compare their genetic and phenotypic diversity in a common greenhouse environment. This work will inform ongoing and future marsh restoration efforts in Belle Isle and the surrounding region.”
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Manetsch receives NIH grant to research new candidate to treat Chagas disease
“Chagas disease, caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, is endemic in the Americas, but has also globalized due to human migration. Despite being one of the major causes of infection-induced heart disease worldwide, current therapies for Chagas disease have inconsistent efficacy and frequent side effects. A major contributor to treatment failure is thought to be the transiently dormant intracellular forms of T. cruzi. … The newly discovered benzoxaborole AN15368 represents the first extensively validated and safe clinical candidate for the treatment of Chagas disease. … This proposal aims to gain additional understanding of this processing step for AN15368 as…
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Wanunu receives NIH grant to develop ‘next-generation single-molecule protein sequencer’
“In this multi-PI project between the Wanunu Lab (Northeastern), Chen Lab (UMass Amherst), Aksimentiev Lab (Urbana Champaign), and Niederweis Lab (U Alabama), we will develop a next-generation single-molecule protein sequencer based on engineered high-resolution nanopores.”
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Photomedical group receives $2.7M grant for ovarian cancer research
“The Spring research group, in collaboration with the Enderling Lab at Moffit Cancer Center, has been awarded a Physical Sciences Oncology Network grant (NCI U01 CA280849; ~$2.7M) titled ‘Fractionated Photoimmunotherapy To Harness Low-Dose Immunostimulation in Ovarian Cancer.’ The project will harness an integrated experimental-mathematical oncology approach to decipher how to best harness immune sparing and immune stimulation of fractionated photoimmunotherapy to personalize treatments for advanced or recurrent ovarian cancer patients with presently dismal survival rates.”
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Levine receives NSF grant to study ‘cell-fate trajectories’
“We propose a joint theoretical/experimental research program to address cell-fate trajectories that occur during induction of EMT, the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Specifically, recent efforts have indicated that epithelial cells can either undergo direct reprogramming to mesenchymal states or alternatively become more stem-like and exhibit hybrid E/M properties. Based on our preliminary investigations, we will use state-of-the-art single cell measurement technology together with advanced mathematical modelling frameworks to understand how cells choose specific fates and to quantitatively unravel the genetic and epigenetic dynamics that leads these cells along their particular trajectories.”
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How will the ecology of the Baltic Sea be affected by changing ocean conditions?
Katie Lotterhos, professor of marine and environmental sciences, has received funding from the University of Gothenburg for a project titled, “A Seascape of Adaptations: Testing Models That Predict Performance in Multivariate Environments.” The researchers wrote that, “We are studying the adaptation of eelgrass to future ocean conditions in the Baltic Sea.”
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Dong receives NSF funding for ‘Enzyme-Mimicking Catalysts for Cellulose Processing’
“Lignocellulosic biomass from plants is a renewable, carbon-neutral material produced at a scale of 170-200 billion tons per year. The depolymerization of cellulose is a key step in biomass conversion, but it is challenged by the stability and crystalline nature of the cellulose fibers. We will develop synthetic catalysts based on molecularly imprinted nanoparticles that mimic endocellulase, exocellulase and beta-glucosidase for the efficient hydrolysis of cellulose.” The title of the project is “Collaborative Research: Enzyme-Mimicking Catalysts for Cellulose Processing.”
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Brown receives DFCI funding for drug delivery in ‘metastatic, resistant breast cancer’ cases
“The objective of this work is to generate clinically relevant data to support the use of PARPi in combination with local and systemic drug delivery platforms of STING agonists in order to treat metastatic, resistant breast cancer.”