Research Month: Biomedical Research
This October has been designated Research Month at Ohio State, although research is built into the fabric of our Top-10 public research institution, yearlong. A research focus in October is a natural fit — it coincides with National Research Month; the university’s Office of Research State of Research Address; and the national ScienceWriters2014 conference, which is in Columbus this year.
Typically, we equate research with science; but research is not restricted to one area — research creates new knowledge; solves myriad problems large and small; drives creativity, innovation — and our economy; and keeps us moving forward as human beings.
Each week, Arts and Sciences will focus on a different area of research, inquiry and investigation and share discoveries, news and events of note.
RESEARCH
NIH Grant Funds Earth Scientist’s Work on Medical Implants
Earth Sciences Professor Steven Lower’s new five-year grant of just over $3 million dollars ($3,002,203) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allows him to continue his innovative, decade-long, cross-disciplinary research on the potentially deadly blood infection caused by bacterial cells that attach to implanted cardiac devices. This affects approximately four percent of the one million patients receiving these implants each year.
Unique NSF/NIH Grant Funds Work at Interface of Biological and Mathematical Sciences
Helen Chamberlin, professor, molecular genetics; and Adriana Dawes, assistant professor, mathematics, and molecular genetics; are co-PI’s on a unique, new, four-year $1,280,030 NSF/NIH (DMS/NIGMS) grant that supports their collaboration, "Phenotype engineering by a signaling network modification.” Their goal: to see more clearly what goes wrong during cell division that can cause such things as cancer and strategies for prevention. Their work could have important future implications for personalized medicine.
Zamon Sawyer: Killing Cancer One Mile at a Time
This year, 22 ASC undergraduate students were among the 28 Ohio State Pelotonia Undergraduate Research Fellowships winners. Their majors ranged from the expected: biology, microbiology and molecular genetics, to the not-so: philosophy, economics, speech and hearing science. Like their majors, their paths to research may vary, but many share what motivated senior biology major Zamon Sawyer. “I became interested in research purely out of curiosity.”
NEW MAJORS
Data Analytics
Our new, interdisciplinary undergraduate major in data analytics, the first of its kind offered by a major research institution, was designed to address the growing need for data analytics professionals with the skills to build and query large data sets, understand how to ask the right questions and extract useable knowledge. This expertise will be in demand in virtually all areas of human enterprise — social sciences to engineering, biomedical sciences to cyber-security.
