Research Highlights

Discovered in 2015, KELT-10 is a little younger, slightly hotter and 40 percent brighter than our sun. But KELT-10b, the only planet orbiting the star, is a gas giant like Jupiter that orbits its star ten times closer than Mercury’s path around the sun. A year lasts merely four days on KELT-10b.

At UND’s Department of Space Studies, observations of this “Hot Jupiter” planet are being used to better understand the formation and characteristics of exoplanets – planets and planetary systems beyond our own.

NASA ND Space Grant’s Sean McCloat, PhD student, and Dr. Sherry Fieber-Beyer, Assistant Professor, have made an amazing development using transit spectroscopy – how we tell what other objects in the universe are composed of, using light.

Nebraska EPSCoR researcher Dr. Daniel Schachtman is one of the faculty leads for one of the three campus teams who joined the Nebraska 2021 NSF I-Corps program, NUtech Ventures: Nebraska Introduction to Customer Discovery.

“The support and network I’ve gained has really blown me away. We have a pretty clear plan for the next steps to start this business.” Daniel Schachtman, who participated in NUtech’s spring 2021 entrepreneurship program.

A Mississippi State University research team’s patent-pending method for rapidly detecting COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies is being recognized this week at a leading global technology conference.

A team of researchers led by Keun Seok Seo, associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences, was recognized with an Innovation Award at the TechConnect World Innovation Conference and Expo in Washington, DC. The group developed a novel method to rapidly test for COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies, providing an affordable and fast method for testing that differentiates between neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies.

Bowdoin College professor Hadley Horch, PhD, has collaborated with the Maine INBRE Bioinformatics Core to advance her research and provide cutting-edge student training opportunities in computational biology.

Horch, her neurobiology students, and core bioinformaticians, with the support of Bowdoin’s high-performance computer cluster, took on the project of creating the largest existing transcriptome of the field cricket, an animal that has the remarkable ability to neurologically compensate for the loss of a sensory organ.

Heike Muenzberg-Gruening, professor at Louisiana State Pennington Biomedical Research Center, is leading a new study to investigate how the brain and body fat communicate to control the production and release of leptin, a feedback hormone that helps regulate appetite and the number of calories burned.

The new project is one of seven awards involving interoception, a new research focus for the NIH. Interoception is not well understood, but if the process is not working properly, a person may not sense whether they are hungry, full, cold, hot or thirsty.

KY NSF EPSCoR Co-PI Dr. Czarena Crofcheck and EPSCoR researcher Rosemary Fama, both of University of Kentucky, were recognized with awards from Million Women Mentors.

Crofcheck received a States of the States Award for her exceptional commitment to advancing opportunities for girls and women in STEM across Kentucky.

Fama’s award was for her dedicated work with in supporting KY NF EPSCoR’s outreach, education, and broader impact programs.

Dr. Paul Hohenlohe with Idaho EPSCoR was featured in Frontline Genomic’s “Down the Rabbit Hole: Conservation Genetics and the Tasmanian Devil.” Hohenlohe’s research focus is on the genomic architecture of evolving populations. He uses the power of modern genomics tools to address basic questions on evolution, conservation and cancer.

An article written by Delaware Tech, DE-INBRE Site PI, John McDowell and his colleagues examines the long-term education and career outcomes for alumni who participated in a URE (Undergrad Research Experience)-infused program over a five-year period in the Bioscience / Biotechnology Program at Delaware Technical Community College (DTCC). "Overwhelmingly, alumni realized they were confident and well-prepared for the next career challenge." The article appears in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research published by the Council on Undergraduate Research.

SD EPSCoR is celebrating year-two results from its NSF RII Track-1 project, 2D Best. The project year has brought many successes within science and technology research in the state. Participating in SD EPSCoR research are 69 faculty, 81 undergraduate students and 80 postdocs and graduate students. Project participants submitted 97 proposals and received 24 awards, totaling $5.1M. Research results have been described in 73 articles submitted for publication.

Results from research conducted in the lab of Maine INBRE project leader Dr. Sally Molloy provide evidence that prophage (integrated viral genomes) alter expression of important mycobacterial antibiotic resistance genes, as reported in the journal BMC Microbiology.

Co-authors include a graduate student at UMaine’s GSBSE and four undergraduates, including UMaine Honors College alumna Emma Freeman, who is now an MD student at Tufts Medical School.

Research reported in this project was supported by a University of Maine Faculty Development Grant and by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103423.