News & Updates

With the support of Louisiana Governor, John Bel Edwards, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), scientists at LSU Health Shreveport have established the Emerging Viral Threat (EVT) Laboratory to address the need for faster detection and processing of COVID-19 tests. The EVT Lab at LSUHS is the first in North Louisiana approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to conduct and analyze tests to determine if an individual has COVID-19. The EVT Lab is currently in operation and fully staffed as of March 25, 2020.

NIGMS has published a notice of special interest (NOSI) (NOT-GM-20-025) to address the urgent need for research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They will accept competitive revisions (supplements) in three specific scientific areas:

White House Announces New Partnership to Unleash U.S. Supercomputing Resources to Fight COVID-19

On February 24, 2020, members of the EPSCoR/IDeA community gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the EPSCoR/IDeA Coalition and the EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation. The EPSCoR/IDeA Coalition, created in 1988, is a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) organization that works to address the geographic imbalance of federal research awards and to increase congressional appropriations for the EPSCoR/IDeA programs. The EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation, a 501 (c) (3) non-lobbying organization, supports the goals of the Coalition, working with individual states and federal agencies that oversee EPSCoR/IDeA programs. The Foundation works to ensure accurate, coordinated communications efforts from the states about the effectiveness of the EPSCoR/IDeA programs. The annual meeting serves to launch Coalition and Foundation priorities and initiatives for the year.

Please see below for recent updates from NSF regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19).

A computer scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is the recipient of a more than half-a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at developing new techniques in artificial intelligence (AI). Assistant Professor Travis Mandel, an AI expert, will use the prestigious $549,790 award to enhance research based on human-in-the-loop AI. The techniques are based on how AI and machine learning systems collaborate with humans to solve real-world problems too challenging for either to address alone.

Charles Irvin, Ph.D., professor of medicine and associate dean for faculty affairs at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, has received the inaugural W. Fred Taylor PhD Award in recognition of his significant contributions to enhance the impact of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Program.

As the power of extreme weather events increase with climate change, a team of scientists warn that lakes around the world may dramatically change, threatening ecosystem health and water quality. And the international team reports that our limited understanding of how lakes—especially algae at the base of food webs—may respond to more-extreme storms represents a knowledge gap that increases the risk.

The University of South Dakota hosts DEPSCoR DoD Day, presented by the Department of Defense. Breakfast, lunch and refreshments will be provided. Though it is a free event, please register.

A randomized, controlled clinical trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the investigational antiviral remdesivir in hospitalized adults diagnosed with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has begun at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha. The regulatory sponsor of the trial is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. This is the first clinical trial in the United States to evaluate an experimental treatment for COVID-19, the respiratory disease first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.