Research Highlights

David Mitchell is tackling two of society’s biggest problems with one ambitious project. The New Mexico State University assistant professor is researching technological methods to increase the world’s rapidly increasing need for expanded communications capacity. At the same time, he hopes to inspire the next generation of students to pursue STEM fields and address the world’s emerging technological needs.

Mitchell, assistant professor in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award. The CAREER award is one of the most prestigious NSF awards and aims to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in teaching and research.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers are studying how corn roots adapt to insufficient nitrogen, with an eye toward making genetic tweaks that might increase, or at least maintain, plant growth and yields without excessive application of fertilizer.

The growth and development of corn largely depends on its nutrient uptake through the roots, so studying their growth, response and associated metabolic reprogramming to stress conditions is becoming an important research focus, said Rajib Saha.

The research is funded by a NSF CAREER grant; an NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant that supports the Nebraska EPSCoR Center for Root and Rhizobiome Innovation, awarded to Saha; and the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, a DOE Research Center supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the DOE Office of Science in which one of the collaborators, Penn State’s Costas Maranas, is involved.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers Mars Lopez-Guerrero, Peng Wang, Felicia Phares, Daniel Schachtman, Sophie Alvarez and Karin van Dijk were recently published in Plant Methods, “A glass bead semi-hydroponic system for intact maize root exudate analysis and phenotyping.”

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation EPSCOR to fund The Center for Root and Rhizobiome Innovation (Award OIA-1557417, Nebraska EPSCoR RII Track-1: Center for Root and Rhizobiome Innovation).

With support from the National Science Foundation, roboticist Dan Popa and a team of engineers and nurses at the University of Louisville are developing a new generation of assistive robots designed to help nurses care for patients in a hospital. Adaptive Robotic Nurse Assistants are being designed to help with routine tasks for patients, such as delivering items, taking them for walks, and alerting nurses to emergencies.

Scientists have discovered two new and unusual species of diatoms in the waters off Hawaii, they report in Nature Communications. The NSF-funded researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, University of California Santa Cruz, and California State University San Marcos found that the organisms fix nitrogen, a critical process that supports productivity in the nutrient-poor open ocean they inhabit.

The new diatom species are smaller and belong to a different lineage with an elongated, or "pennate" shape with bilateral symmetry. Their symbionts are also smaller and unicellular, and they do not glow under fluorescent light because they do not contain chlorophyll, making them nearly invisible inside the diatom.

ChristianaCare Gene Editing Institute, a member of the Delaware INBRE network, recently produced a video following DE INBRE researcher Dr. Natalia Rivera-Torres on her journey from being a student and mentee at the Institute to becoming a Principal Investigator.

South Dakota colleges and universities will send 11 outstanding undergraduate student researchers to the State Capitol next week to share their research work with lawmakers and the public. The 2022 Student Research Poster Session, co-sponsored by SD EPSCoR, is open to the public.

These 11 student researchers represent students statewide who conduct research in a variety of disciplines. Now in its 25th year, the event showcases research and creative activities of undergraduate students, as well as highlights successful faculty research and commercialization efforts. The session is organized by the South Dakota Board of Regents and SD EPSCoR (South Dakota’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research).

Nebraska EPSCoR engineer Mathias Schubert added his leading expertise in ellipsometry – measuring the change in polarization as light reflects or transmits from a material structure – to an international team including scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Society, for research that appears in the highly-regarded journal, Nature.

“Hyperbolic shear polaritons in low-symmetry crystals” was published in the February 23, 2022 edition of the publication. The article’s authors believe their “results will motivate new directions for polariton physics in low-symmetry materials, which include geological minerals, many common oxides, and organic crystals, greatly expanding the material base and extending design opportunities for compact photonic devices.”

Vermont EPSCoR Scientist Brian Beckage is part of a team that published a study in the journal Nature suggesting that “the world has moved decisively away from a no-policy, business-as-usual” pathway on greenhouse gas emissions. The team concludes, the planet is likely heading toward temperatures by the end of this century that are substantially lower than the 3.9˚C (about 7˚F) of warming predicted in the absence of climate policy.

Human-caused climate change is just that: human-caused. However, most models of climate change treat the behavior of people — our choices, policies, and perceptions — as a fixed starting point. They develop a range of possible scenarios and policy pathways — and then use those as predetermined and static patterns to run models of the physical system.

Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center researcher John O’Bryan and colleagues have demonstrated a new therapeutic way to block a protein that is frequently mutated in cancers. These proof-of-principle findings were published in Cell Reports. This work, which involves inhibiting the oncogenic protein RAS using small molecules, lays a strong foundation for the development of clinical anti-cancer therapies and provides a framework for other groups to target RAS in more effective ways. “The RAS protein, which was considered undruggable, is in fact able to be targeted by drugs,” said O’Bryan.

The researchers are very hopeful that this discovery can be used more comprehensively in the future. While cancers do adapt and mutate to become resistant to therapeutics, new drugs based on this concept might serve as additional tools in the arsenal to treat cancer.