News Archives: June, 2020

In power plants fired by fossil fuels alone, 67 percent of the electricity generated is released unproductively into the environment in the form of heat, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By rethinking the design of thermoelectric materials, which have the ability to convert heat to electricity, Xueyan Song, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, is working to develop a method to recover the wasted heat energy from the air, resulting in improved sustainability and efficiency of the energy infrastructure in the U.S.

NASA has selected five teams led by university faculty and students to examine a range of technical areas in support of the agency’s aeronautics research goals.

The University of South Carolina Office of the Vice President for Research created an internal funding initiative to support research and scholarship related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Funds have been awarded to 42 projects involving 82 faculty members from five campuses, eight colleges/schools and 29 different departments across the University of South Carolina.

Dave Berkowitz, whose work at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln sits at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry and enzymatic chemistry, will take the helm of the chemistry division at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds about one-quarter of all federally supported basic research conducted at American universities.

The University of Kentucky College of Medicine and UK HealthCare have launched a new clinical trial designed to assess the prevalence of COVID-19 in central and eastern Kentucky. Known as Serologic Testing to Accelerate Recovery and Transition (START), the study focuses on antibody testing to begin understanding how many people in the region may have already contracted and recovered from COVID-19. The trial is a partnership between the UK College of Medicine, UK HealthCare Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC), the UK Markey Cancer Center, and University Health Service, and is co-led by IPAC Medical Director Dr. Derek Forster and Precision Medicine Clinic Director Jill Kolesar, Pharm.D.

The UH-Hilo Computer Science Department is working to print prototype reusable face shields to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 3-D printed frames are compatible with transparent sheet protectors that are used as the actual shields. An elastic band is used to secure the frame and shield to one’s head.

A team of undergraduate students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Department of Computer Science and UH Mānoa College of Engineering was awarded Best Visualization Showcase Award for the upcoming Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2020 Conference (PEARC20). The team’s project integrated three-dimensional models of Hawaiian coral reefs into an immersive virtual reality platform.

As mountain watersheds store and release water, the Earth’s shape changes ever so subtly. The University of Montana Department of Geosciences now can track those changes by GPS, thanks to a $1.4 million cut of a multi-institutional collaborative award from the National Science Foundation. The total value of the award, part of the NSF’s Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program, is $2.43 million.

Dr. Irene Andreu manages the Rhode Island Consortium for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, a core facility supported by RI NSF EPSCoR that houses high-tech microscopes capable of examining the composition of materials at the smallest of scales. Prior to the pandemic, for example, Andreu was helping students research how aquatic bacteria adheres to microplastics. Now, she’s using the microscopes to better understand the effectiveness of certain filter materials for masks that hinder spread of the COVID-19 virus.