Research Wire

St. Louis shows the strongest correlation between biodiversity and income of the 20 major U.S. cities included in a recent study. Solny Adalsteinsson, staff scientist at Tyson Research Center and a lecturer in the environmental studies program in Arts & Sciences, is a co-author of the new research published in Global Change Biology.

Bo Zhang, at the School of Medicine, received a five-year $1.89 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a research project involving the human genome.

The McKelvey School of Engineering’s Nathaniel Huebsch will use a nearly $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the most common cause of sudden death in young people.

Sheretta Butler-Barnes, associate professor at the Brown School, has received a nearly $700,000 three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Black Parents’ Racial Socialization Competencies and Youth Outcomes in Response to Racial Violence.”

Sarah Anderson, a postdoctoral research associate in Petra Levin’s biology lab in Arts & Sciences, won a three-year $200,946 award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences’ Biomedical Research and Research Training Program for a project titled “Modulation of Bacterial Cell Division by (p)ppGpp.”

Joy Jiang, assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the School of Medicine, received a four-year $1.35 million MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her project “Dynamic prediction incorporating time-varying covariates for the onset of breast cancer.”

Yong Wang, associate professor at the School of Medicine and the McKelvey School of Engineering, has received a 2021 Next Gen Pregnancy research grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for development of noninvasive imaging of uterine contractions.

Tae Seok Moon, an environmental engineer at the McKelvey School of Engineering, plans to address the global plastic waste problem with a bacterium that would upcycle the plastic into a value-added chemical. His work got a boost from a three-year $861,571 U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Jonathan Myers, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and William Farfan-Rios, a postdoctoral research fellow of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University, are co-authors of a study that found that trees’ fecundity — or physical potential to reproduce — peaked or plateaued as they reached an intermediate size.

The EPA visited Washington University to award $744,262 to Tae Seok Moon, associate professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, for cutting-edge biotechnology research.