Research Wire

Ying (Maggie) Chen, MD, PhD, at the School of Medicine, has received a match grant of $30,000 from the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University. The grant will help fund proof of concept and related research directed toward targeting a novel receptor to treat uromodulin-associated chronic kidney disease.

Matt Gabel, a professor of political science in Arts & Sciences, received a two-year $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study ways to protect minority voting rights and representation.

Natalie M. Niemi, an assistant professor at the School of Medicine, received a five-year $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research on mitchondrial function.

Alex Chen and Yajie Yuan, both assistant professors of physics in Arts & Sciences, have received a $447,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create a unified model of pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars that release mysterious pulses of electromagnetic radiation.

Researchers led by Fuzhong Zhang at the McKelvey School of Engineering developed a synthetic biology tool to comprehensively reveal gene regulatory networks in E. coli.

Martha Precup, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, has won a prestigious National Science Foundation award for a project uncovering patterns in complex data.

Yajie Yuan, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will lead a study of plasmas in neutron star magnetospheres, as part of a new collaboration funded by the Simons Foundation.

The Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis has received a two-year $475,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation. The funding supports research to understand the impact of short-term credentials on various aspects of individuals’ lives.

Fred Ssewamala, the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor, and Byron Powell, co-director of the Center for Mental Health Services Research, both at the Brown School, have won a five-year $3.5 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH, for a new study in Uganda.

Jake Rosenfeld, in Arts & Sciences, and Stephen Roll, at the Brown School, received grants from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth to study how inequality affects economic growth and well-being in the United States.