Physics lab courses are vital to science education, providing hands-on experience and technical skills that lectures can’t offer. Yet, it’s challenging for those in Physics Education Research (PER) to compare course to course, especially since these courses vary wildly worldwide. 

To better understand these differences, JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Heather Lewandowski and a group of international collaborators are working towards creating a global taxonomy, a classification system that could create a more equitable way to compare these courses. Their findings were recently published in Physical Review Physics Education Research.

The full spectrum of gene expression regulation associated with many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, is still not well understood. To further uncover mechanisms that regulate gene expression in Alzheimer’s disease, the National Institutes of Health-National Institute on Aging recently awarded a two-year grant to Petar Grozdanov, Ph.D., from the TTUHSC School of Medicine to investigate how perturbed gene expression in the brain can contribute to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

An undergraduate student in physics at The University of Texas at Arlington earned a top award from the Texas Section of the American Physical Society (APS) for his research using positrons—the antiparticle of the electron—to study the electronic properties of graphene. Notable for being extraordinarily thin and strong, graphene is being researched for a wide range of applications, from solar cells and battery storage to cancer treatments and bone growth.