Grants

The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture has been awarded a $500,000 grant from USDA to address a common problem faced in Tennessee agriculture: how to effectively transition grain cropping systems to organic systems while decreasing the dependence on intensive tillage.

R. Christian Jones, Professor/Director, Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center (PEREC), Environmental Science and Policy, Amy Fowler, Assistant Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, and Kim de Mutsert, Assistant Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, received $88,866 from the County of Fairfax for a two-part ecological study of Gunston Cove.

Rebecca Sutter, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, received $62,500 from Action in the Community Through Service (ACTS) for: "ACTSPWC - GMU Collaboration of Care."

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, is developing a technique to detect and defend against hardware Trojans (HT) in integrated circuits (ICs) by adapting techniques inspired by the human immune system and vaccination.

Erhai Zhao, Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, is developing numerical algorithms to describe and understand superfluidity and magnetic orders in repulsively interacting Fermi gases of ultracold atoms in optical lattices. He is also employing machine learning techniques to solve quantum spin models of cold atoms.

A new Unibo-led project won the Spring Seed Grant by Telethon Foundation. Researchers will work to develop innovative techniques and cutting-edge computational approaches to fight rare and extremely debilitating diseases such as Friedreich's and spinocerebellar ataxia.

Institut de la recherche scientifique (INRS) announces that Stéphane Lefrançois, a professor at its Centre Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie (AFSB), has received a grant of more than $670,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for his work on Batten's disease. He will be using the funds to continue his research into this rare genetic and degenerative disease, which mainly affects children.

The University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have received a five year, $4.6 million National Institute on Aging award to jointly establish a Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. The USC-Buck Nathan Shock Center will investigate how and why aging processes cause disease in order to advance the translation of basic research on aging into effective preventions and therapies.

Prayag Murawala, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory has received a $332,000 grant to study tendon injury. He is seeking to determine if the same cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for regenerating tendons during limb regeneration in salamanders also come into play during tendon regeneration after injury. The knowledge gained could one day be used to develop therapies to trigger tendon regeneration in adult humans, who for the most part are incapable of regeneration.