Accomplishments: College of Sciences
Jason Steffen (Physics and Astronomy) will be a co-investigator on a $380,000 grant titled Architecture of Kepler's Multiple Planet Systems. He is working with Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center .
The project will study data from the NASA Kepler space mission to characterize the orbital properties of the thousands of…
Helen Wing (Life Sciences) has received a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant worth $445,008. It is a continuation of a research project that now has received nine years of continual NIH funding. The project focuses on virulence gene regulation in the bacterial pathogen Shigella.
Nucleoid structuring proteins…
Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences) recently published a research article titled "Effects of the Biocide Methylisothiazolinone on Xenopus laevis Wound Healing and Tail Regeneration” in Aquatic Toxicology. This study shows that the commonly used preservative, methylisothiazolinone, impairs the natural repair ability of frog tadpoles to regrow tails.…
Scott Abella (Life Sciences) recently gave a talk titled, "National Park Treasures: Celebrating Conservation" at the Lake Mead Visitor Center. He shared the stories of conservation challenges and successes of the National Park Service restoration efforts during the past 100 years. His work as a researcher has supported Lake Mead and…
Frank van Breukelen (Life Science) has received a four-year National Science Foundation research grant totaling $797,810 to study hibernation in tenrecs. Tenrecs are esoteric mammals from Madagascar that have a unique form of hibernation. These animals are able to hibernate or maintain active body temperatures from at least 12-28 °C. His…
Steve Rowland (Geoscience) and a team of undergraduate students from the College of Sciences recently announced the discovery of fossilized reptile footprints northeast of Las Vegas that are 60 million years older than the earliest dinosaurs. Rowland presented the work in October at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate…
Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences) was a speaker at the biennial International Xenopus Conference in Kolymbari, Crete, and at the 2016 Southwest Regional Society for Developmental Biology meeting in Salt Lake City. She presented her laboratory's recent research studies on vertebrate eye regeneration.
Rebecca Martin (Physics & Astronomy) received a three-year, $297,116 grant from the NASA Exoplanets Research Program to study planet formation in binary star systems.
About half of observed exoplanets are estimated to be in binary star systems rather than around a single star like our Sun. Planet formation in binary star systems may be…
Helen Wing (Life Sciences) is serving as a special editor of an issue of the journal Genes that focuses on "Virulence Gene Regulation in Bacteria." As special editor, Wing is responsible for:
Preparing a brief introduction of this special issue.
Making decisions on the manuscripts based on the articles received.…
Allen Gibbs (Life Sciences) published An Experimental Evolution Test of the Melanism-Desiccation Hypothesis in Insects in PLoS One. This study challenges a long-standing idea in insect physiology, that darker insects will survive better in drier conditions. Co-authors included Subhash Rajpurohit, a former post-doctoral researcher in the Gibbs lab…
Daniel Mast and Bradley Childs (Chemistry) won awards in the 2016 Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research Awards sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), office of fuel cycle technologies.
Mast was awarded a first-place prize in the open competition in the category of nuclear science and engineering. His award-winning research paper, “…
Martin Schiller (Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine) and the Schiller Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics, Christy Strong (Life Sciences), Ronald Benjamin, Omoyemwen Igbinedion (both Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine), and peers at other institutions recently published a review article titled “TALEN Gene Editing Takes Aim on HIV”…