Science & Technology

To figure out how to best support two endangered species — black-and-white ruffed lemurs and diademed sifakas — scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are joining up with researchers at the Saint Louis Zoo, Missouri Botanical Garden and Madagascar-based collaborators for an innovative research effort under the Living Earth Collaborative.

Jessica Wagenseil, associate professor and vice dean for faculty advancement at the McKelvey School of Engineering, has received a two-year $100,000 grant from the Marfan Foundation for a project titled “Targeting elastic fiber degradation in thoracic aortic aneurysms.”

Tidestrom’s lupine is a delicate flowering plant that is part of a dune ecosystem along the west coast of the United States. Biologist Eleanor Pardini in Arts & Sciences has tracked Tidestrom’s lupine at the Point Reyes National Seashore in central California for more than 14 years.

More species are blooming at the same time than in the past. Matthew Austin, biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative, is studying how changes in flower timing affect ecological and evolutionary dynamics of pollination systems.

The lab of Quing Zhu at the McKelvey School of Engineering has developed an imaging system that helps differentiate residual cancerous tissue from recovered healthy tissue after treatment in patients with rectal cancer, the third-most common cancer type in the U.S.

Palghat (P.A.) Ramachandran, professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, died in his sleep March 18 of natural causes. He was 75.

New research from the lab of Hong Chen shows that the lab’s FUSIN technique enhances intranasal drug delivery to the brainstem.

Jeffrey M. Zacks, professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, and of radiology at the School of Medicine, explains why we have such a difficult time with exponential growth and how to make its presentation easier to understand.

At the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, the situation and the fallout that followed — the rolling or lasting blackouts, national attention, the termination of the energy group’s CEO — prompted Richard Axelbaum, Stifel & & Quinette Jens Professor of Environmental Engineering Science, and Phillip Irace, PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Student Fellow, to take a closer look.

Steven Frankel, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his project “Universal Circles Between Dynamics and Geometry.”