Pulse #50

Kwapis named director of CMIND

Janine Kwapis, the Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences at Penn State, has been appointed director of the University's Center for Molecular Investigation of Neurological Disorders (CMIND).

Ecology student wins award from Phycological Society of America

Caleb Butler, a graduate student in the Huck’s Ecology program, was recognized earlier this month with the Harold C. Bold Award from the Phycological Society of America (PSA).

Call for Submissions: Faculty course buyouts for large grant writing

This new Huck initiative aims to provide Penn State’s life sciences faculty with the necessary time and resources to develop competitive grant applications by offering a teaching release.

$3.8M NIH grant funds 3D tissue and organism visualization project

Keith Cheng, distinguished professor of pathology, of pharmacology and of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Penn State College of Medicine, has been awarded a four-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further develop novel methods for 3D tissue imaging.

Biomedical engineer to use $2M NIH grant to improve human tissue repair

A team of Penn State researchers led by Huck Chair in Cell Medicine Yong Wang was awarded a four-year, $2.02 million National Institutes of Health grant to explore how to safely add growth factors to collagen used by doctors for tissue repair.

Research teams receive $1.1 million to study microbiomes in agriculture

Two Penn State-led research teams have received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for projects investigating the ways microbiomes can affect disease dynamics in agriculture.

Memory problems in old age linked to a key enzyme, study in mice finds

The researchers said the findings, which published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, may lead to the development of potential therapeutic targets for improving cognitive flexibility in old age.

Cancer drug could treat early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, study shows

A type of drug developed for treating cancer holds promise as a new treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, according to a recent study by researchers at Penn State, Stanford University, and an international team of collaborators.

Volunteers record bee biodiversity and discover new species in Pennsylvania

A new study, recently published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, evaluated the efficacy of the program, finding that 26 trained program volunteers were more than twice as effective at documenting bee diversity than thousands of users of the photo-based app iNaturalist.