Research Wire

Young-Shin Jun, a professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and her team are extracting valuable rare earth elements from coal fly ash, a fine, powdery waste product from the combustion of coal. The process is ultimately a path toward reducing and remediating waste products.

New research from the School of Medicine’s Guoyan Zhao and colleagues provides guidance for future study to understand the role of glia in disease pathogenesis using mouse models. The work is published in Nature Aging.

Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, an associate professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, recently won a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use artificial intelligence to improve game-theory analysis methods to tackle increasingly complex problems.

Jian Wang, a professor and director of the Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, won a $766,552 grant from NASA for new research on Arctic aerosols. Wang aims to understand how aerosols impact Arctic climate change.

David Cunningham and Geoff Ward, both in Arts & Sciences, received a $500,000 three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, along with collaborators from other universities, for the project “The Virality of Racial Terror in US Newspapers, 1863-1921.”

Michael Vahey, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, received an NSF CAREER award to establish the factors that drive the assembly of viral immune complexes and to study how they interact with immune cell receptors.

Cells migrate to different tissues for a variety of reasons, including organ development, tissue repair and the spread of cancer. Researchers led by Amit Pathak at the McKelvey School of Engineering have found unexpected activity in the nucleus of healthy cells that provides new insight into cell mechanics.

Outcomes of a two-year STEM learning pilot program that the Institute for School Partnership at Washington University in St. Louis completed in partnership with St. Louis Public Schools and The Little Bit Foundation are encouraging. 

Chien-Ju Ho, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik and William Yeoh, all from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, have received research awards from J.P. Morgan Chase to support their work in artificial intelligence.

A team of researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering has developed an energy-efficient way to consolidate long-term memories on a tiny chip. Shantanu Chakrabartty and members of his lab developed a device that mimics the dynamics of the brain’s synapses.