Research Wire

A team that includes Lee Sobotka and Robert Charity, both in Arts & Sciences, concluded that the role that neutrons play in the creation of carbon, considered the definitive building block of life, is much smaller than previously thought.

Stephen T. Oh, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine and of pathology and immunology at the School of Medicine, received a five-year $2.46 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for molecular hematology training.

Matthew Bersi, assistant professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, will use tools from engineering and biology to investigate blood vessel stiffening from high blood pressure with a three-year $231,000 Career Development Award from the American Heart Association.

Biomedical engineer Jianmin Cui at the McKelvey School of Engineering is going deep into the basic mechanisms that lead to arrhythmia to ultimately find potential new drug candidates with an NIH grant.

Mark A. Rutherford at the School of Medicine received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health to study therapies for noise-induced hearing loss.

Alex Holehouse at the School of Medicine, along with collaborators at Wageningen University and Research and the University of Toronto, received a three-year $1.1 million grant from Human Frontier Science Program to study disordered proteins.

Laura Escobar Vega, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, won a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation for her project “Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry: Flag Varieties, Toric Geometry and Applications.”

The McKelvey School of Engineering’s Philip Bayly and a team of collaborators will study the mechanical causes behind traumatic brain injury using models and images.

WashU’s Deana Barch will use a $753,181 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to better understand healthy neurodevelopment.

Alvitta Ottley, assistant professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, will use a $528,223 National Science Foundation CAREER award to develop personalized visual analytic tools.