Research Wire

A team of Washington University in St. Louis researchers — including experts in political science, sociology, mathematics and medicine — are among the first to receive an Arts & Sciences Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures grant to study how historical border instability influences contemporary public trust and vaccine hesitancy.

A new research project at Washington University will study the history of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in St. Louis. The project, “Asia in St. Louis: A Story Map Dedicated to the Greater Saint Louis Community,” won a $10,000 grant from the Missouri Humanities council.

In a newly published study, poverty was closely associated with higher rates of dementia among older adults in Afghanistan. Jean-Francois Trani, an associate professor at the Brown School, led the research.

Three School of Medicine researchers — Enmanuel Perez, Ibrahim Saliu and Steffen Storck — have received funding from the Alzheimer’s Association for projects that aim to study and make progress against the disease.

Shantanu Chakrabartty’s lab at the McKelvey School of Engineering developed a method to better secure communications and transactions involving the Internet of Things.

Young-Shin Jun, a professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and her team are extracting valuable rare earth elements from coal fly ash, a fine, powdery waste product from the combustion of coal. The process is ultimately a path toward reducing and remediating waste products.

New research from the School of Medicine’s Guoyan Zhao and colleagues provides guidance for future study to understand the role of glia in disease pathogenesis using mouse models. The work is published in Nature Aging.

Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, an associate professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, recently won a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use artificial intelligence to improve game-theory analysis methods to tackle increasingly complex problems.

Jian Wang, a professor and director of the Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, won a $766,552 grant from NASA for new research on Arctic aerosols. Wang aims to understand how aerosols impact Arctic climate change.

David Cunningham and Geoff Ward, both in Arts & Sciences, received a $500,000 three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, along with collaborators from other universities, for the project “The Virality of Racial Terror in US Newspapers, 1863-1921.”