News
Jul 08, 2021
Penn State research teams awarded seed grants to advance biodevices
Interdisciplinary research teams from across Penn State recently received seed grants from the Penn State Biodevices Seed Grant program and the Grace Woodward Collaborative Research in Engineering and Medicine Grant program to fund their work in advancing biodevices.
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Jul 07, 2021
Two honored with 2021 Eberly College of Science Distinguished Service Awards
The Eberly College of Science has honored James Marden, professor of biology and associate director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, with one of two Distinguished Service Awards in 2021. The award was established in 1978 to recognize faculty and staff who have made significant and outstanding leadership and service contributions to the Eberly College of Science over a sustained period of time.
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Jul 07, 2021
Fighting COVID with COVID
What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus’ growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.
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Jul 01, 2021
Scientists resurrect 'forgotten' genus of algae living in marine animals
In the late 1800s, scientists were stumped by the “yellow cells” they were observing within the tissues of certain temperate marine animals, including sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish. Were these cells part of the animal or separate organisms? If separate, were they parasites, or did they confer a benefit to the host?
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Jul 01, 2021
National Institutes of Health funds neural engineering graduate training program
Penn State has a new cross-disciplinary program to train graduate students interested in the complex landscape of the human brain, supported by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Jul 01, 2021
How does a regulatory protein know where to bind to modulate insulin production?
Some proteins in the body ensure that genes are turned on and off at the correct times. Understanding where speckle-type POZ protein (SPOP) binds may help researchers predict what predisposes individuals to develop diabetes and clarify how SPOP regulates other important proteins. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Penn State and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital imaged the proteins and determined just how this important interaction occurs.
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Jun 30, 2021
Claude dePamphilis named Huck Chair in Plant Biology and Evolutionary Genomics
Claude dePamphilis, Penn State Professor of Biology, has been named the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Distinguished Chair in Plant Biology and Evolutionary Genomics by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
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Jun 29, 2021
International team develops predictive tool to help mitigate COVID-19 in Africa
The virus that gives rise to COVID-19 is the third coronavirus to threaten humanity in the past two decades. It also happens to move more efficiently from person to person than either SARS or MERS did. An international collaboration led by Penn State developed a surveillance modeling tool that provides a weekly projection of expected COVID-19 cases in all African countries, based on publicly available information.
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Jun 29, 2021
David Hughes named Chair in Global Food Security
David Hughes, professor of entomology and biology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and creator of PlantVillage, a knowledge platform that helps farmers combat pests and adapt to climate change, has been named the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security in the University’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
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Jun 28, 2021
Weird warbler reveals genetics of its mismatched colors
An incredibly rare hybrid warbler with mismatched color patterns has allowed researchers to disentangle the genetic drivers of two traits that usually come as a package deal — the black face mask and the black throat patch in blue-winged and golden-winged warblers.
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