Science & Technology

Li Yang, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, leads a team that won a four-year $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help develop new quantum materials called artificial multiferroics.

Kenneth F. Kelton, the Arthur Holly Compton Professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences, won a five-year grant from NASA to study fundamental fluid processes in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station.

Jeffrey Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, received a three-year Department of Energy grant to support research on elements and minerals essential for the production of electric vehicles, cellphones and computers.

Using computer simulations and a simple theoretical model, physicist Mikhail Tikhonov in Arts & Sciences showed how bacteria could adapt to a fluctuating environment by learning its statistical regularities — for example, which nutrients tend to be correlated — and do so faster than evolutionary trial-and-error would normally allow.

New research from physicists in Arts & Sciences reveals that neurons in the visual cortex — the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli — respond differently to the same kind of stimulus over time.

Understanding how a cell commits resources to building new parts — and eventually divides into two cells — is the focus of a new grant for Shankar Mukherji, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences. The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Michael J. Krawczynski, assistant professor in Arts & Sciences, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to research the evolution of super-hydrous magmas in the Earth’s crust. Krawczynski will explore how volcanoes work, especially how water affects the evolution of volcanoes and their behavior.

Li Yang, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, received a three-year $375,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Doping Effects on Excited-State Properties of Two-Dimensional Moiré Crystals.”

The remains of microscopic plankton blooms in near-shore ocean environments slowly sink to the seafloor, setting off processes that forever alter an important record of Earth’s history, according to research from geoscientists, including David Fike in Arts & Sciences.

With NASA’s latest balloon technology, Johanna Nagy in Arts & Sciences is looking 13 billion years into the past, using the oldest light in the universe, to precisely measure the polarization of the microwave sky.